Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/33

 was a Protestant, originally an Orangeman, and his training furnished a notable illustration of the policy and method of English rule in Ireland. His father was a Catholic soldier who died with his regiment, whereupon the paternal Government laid hold of his little boy, and reared him a Protestant in the Soldiers' Hospital in Phoenix Park. But all this I came to know only in after life. He was several years my senior, and at the time when our intimacy commenced was an artist engaged in the impossible task of living by his profession in an Irish country town. We rarely spoke of politics at the beginning of our intimacy; but he was a passionate lover of art, familiar with the lives of great artists and with many great works of art, and he introduced me to an unknown region full of wonder and delight.

My first decisive impulse towards practical politics came from without. Our next door neighbour, John Sloan, generally regarded as a Quaker, but belonging in fact to a more limited church, of which he was himself the patriarch, took an early interest in me, and undertook, as he declared, to open my mind. He had been a United Irishman a generation earlier, and was one of a little club of shopkeepers and tradesmen, generally belonging to his own peculiar faith, who met once a week over pipes and punch to discuss the affairs of the nation. He was a tall, gaunt man, with only one eye, which gave his face an alarming but not at all a sinister expression. His only daughter, a young woman of charming manner and striking beauty, was a mantua-maker. All day long he sat behind pier counter, with a shelf of dingy books at his elbow, most of them, as I soon came to know, beyond the sympathy or intelligence of a boy. He had published a little tract himself, called "The Naked Truth," the scope of which I can surmise from the naked truths he was in the habit of disclosing to me from time to time. His daughter one day, when I was a schoolboy, called me playfully " Royal Charlie." "No, no," cried the old democrat, "he sha'n't be 'Royal Charlie,' he shall be 'Anti-Royal Charlie.' I hope before his head is grey he will see the last of royalty here and everywhere." From that time he spoke to me habitually of politics, and some of his axioms and homilies still remain in my memory. "Mind