Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/31

MacManus was at that time serving his apprenticeship to a woollen draper. He was a good-looking, strapping young fellow, full of life and gaiety; and as his people were understood to be a junior branch of the Bellews of Barmeath, he stood apart from his class even his master at times designated him "the sprig of aristocracy." Our Sunday afternoons (his only free time) were spent in long rambles, occupied chiefly with speculations and visions of what might be accomplished to reinstate our dethroned people in their rightful position. We did not know much of history, but we got what in recent times would be called "object lessons," to keep it alive in our memory. The Orange drum was heard on every hill from June till August to celebrate the Boyne and Aughrim; Orange flags and arches adorned the town on party festivals; every office of authority in the province was held by Orangemen or their patrons and protégés, and to be a Protestant of any sort was a diploma of merit and a title to social rank not to be disputed. My comrade and I felt our present wrongs keenly, but we knew little of the remote causes from which they sprang. I had never seen a history of Ireland at that time. A few years earlier I had walked half a dozen miles to borrow a quasi history, Moore's "Captain Rock," in a country parish which had the rare good fortune to possess a parish library. The Orange processions forbade us to forget the past, and there was a history transacted under our eyes of which it was impossible to be ignorant. The bench of magistrates who administered what was called justice was exclusively Protestant; the Grand Jury, who expended the rates paid by the whole population were exclusively Protestant, and took care, it was alleged, that the improvements they projected should benefit only loyal citizens, themselves first of all. There had been a Corporation endowed out of confiscated lands, but the body had long ceased to exist, and its endowment had fallen to the local landlord, Lord Rossmore, who, to keep up the pretence of a Corporation, still named a town sergeant and other subordinate officials at his sole pleasure. There was a corps of Yeomanry receiving arms and uniforms from the State, which was called out occasionally for inspection, and as the arms were left with the corps permanently,