Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/52

 being the most familiar. Meetings of the Council were ordered to be held successively in different parts of the country, each to be followed by a county meeting, which should be invited to adopt the principles of the League. The feeling of the country at these proceedings was divided between satisfaction at the cordial union of the provinces and alarm at the startling programme. But satisfaction greatly predominated. The journals friendly to tenant-right were jubilant. The Fermanagh Mail, a strictly Protestant journal, circulating in one of the most Orange districts in the North, broke into poetic prose, which represented characteristically the delirium of the hour:—

"'It was a grand, an ennobling sight to see the children of the Covenant from the far North, the Elizabethan settlers from the Ards of Ulster, the Cromwellians of the centre, the Normans of the Pale, the Milesians of Connaught, the Danes of Kerry, the sons of Ith from Corea's southern valleys, the followers of Strongbow from Waterford and Wexford, and the Williamites from Fermanagh and Meath all, all uniting in harmonious concert to struggle for this dear old land.'"

And a young poet of the Nation sang the event in authentic verse, of which one couplet passed from mouth to mouth:

The reception of the League by the country was something as unprecedented as the union from which it sprang. In the first week county meetings were held in Wexford and Kilkenny, where Dr. M'Knight, Rev. John Rogers, Rev. David Bell, and other leading ministers of the Presbyterian Church had a cordial reception, and were overwhelmed with private hospitalities. Sergeant Shee, a leader of the Common Law Bar in London, presided at the Kilkenny meetings and justified the principles of the League, a fact of great significance. In the second week a deputation of Catholic laymen crossed the Boyne, and met a great assembly of tenant farmers at Ballibay, the noted headquarters of the Orangemen of three counties. Resolutions were proposed by Masters of Orange Lodges, and seconded by Catholic priests, and the Reverend Mr Godkin, my old friend in