ch suited the taste of the day, and served
at once for a passport and a sentiment.

But Colonel John knew that many a word was said over the claret which
meant less than nothing next morning; and that many a fair hand passed
the wine across the water-bowl--the very movement did honour to a
shapely arm--without its owner having the least intention of
endangering those she loved for the sake of the King across the Water.
He knew that a fallen cause has ever two sets of devotees--those who
talk and those who act: the many, in other words, who sing the songs
and drink the toasts, and delight in the badges of treason--in the
sucked orange, the sprig of oak, the knot of white ribbon, the
fir-planting; and the few who mean more than they say, who mean, and
sternly, to be presently the Spoke on Top.

Consequently he knew that he might be wrong in dotting the i's and
crossing the t's of the scene which he had witnessed. Such a scene
might mean no more than a burst of high spirits: in nine cases out of
ten it would not be followed by action, nor import more than that
singing of "'Twas a' for our rightful King!" which had startled him on
his arrival. In that house, in the wilds of Kerry, sheer loyalty could
not be expected. The wrongs of the nation were too recent, the high
seas were too near, the wild geese came and went too freely--wild geese
of another feather than his. Such outbursts as he had witnessed were no
more than the safety-valves of outraged pride. The ease with which
England had put down the Scotch rising a few years before--to say
nothing of the fate of those who had taken part in it--must deter all
reasonable men, whatever their race or creed, from entering on an
undertaking beyond doubt more hopeless.

For Ireland was not as Scotland. Scarcely a generation had passed since
she had felt the full weight of the conqueror's hand; and if she
possessed, in place of the Highland mountains, vast stretches of
uncharted bog and lake, to say nothing of a thousand obscure inlets,
she had neither the unbroken clan-feeling nor the unbroken national
spirit of the sister country. Scotland was still homogeneous, she still
counted for a kingdom, her soil was still owned by her own lords and
worked by her own peasants. She had suffered no massacre of Drogheda or
of Wexford; no Boyne, no Aghrim, no vast and repeated confiscations.
Whereas Ireland, a partitioned and subject land, which had suffered
during the last two centuries hor