So you wish to know why Smithers resigned his position as head constable of Kilmacswiggin? Well, as the night’s young, and I’m not particularly busy, I don’t mind spending half an hour or so in telling you the story.
You see, during the time of the Land League troubles, some of the landlords round here, knowing that they had little reason to expect any overwhelming affection from their tenants, and finding their sources of income, if not castles in the air, at least rents in the clouds, for bad luck to the penny they could collect, began to get uneasy and scared, and thought it would be a wise thing to have a dozen or so more police in the parish, though it’s too many of the same streelers were quartered on us to begin with. The district, barring that the farmers kept their money in their own pockets and used strong language when the rent collector called on them, was quiet, and peaceable, and could have been easily managed without a peeler at all, but the landlords wanted bad to force their rents out of the poor peasantry or take their land from them, as they used to do in the cruel times before the League stepped in and put an extinguisher on their proceedings.
So, as the people couldn’t be tempted to make fools of themselves by playing into the land-grabbers’ hands by such frolics as popping at their agents with old blunderbusses from the back of a hedge, or setting fire to process servers’ hayricks, the landlords began to manufacture outrages on their own account. They wrote threatening letters to each other by the bushel, with skulls, and crossbones, and coffins for date lines, and blood, and blasphemy, and murder reeking in every sentence, and pikes, and guns, and pistols below the signature of “Captain Moonlight” or “Rory of the Hills,” to show how terribly in earnest they were. Oh, they constructed those epistles in the orthodox manner recognized by Mr. Trench in his “Recollections of an Irish Landlord,” and made familiar to the world by the regiments of English special correspondents that were then roaming and perambulating Ireland like journalistic ghouls or body-snatchers looking for corpses to be dissected in the columns of their respective organs. They wrote, too, blood-curdling, gruesome, harrowing narratives of the horrors of life in Kilmacswiggin for the London papers, till one of the Orange members from the North drew attention in the House to what he called the terrible state of affairs in that parish, and, though Healy and Biggar contradicted his assertions, and laughed at his lugubrious forebodings of massacre, rapine, blood, and flame if a whole _corps d’armee_ and a part of the channel squadron wasn’t immediately sent to occupy the bogs and ditches there, the then chief secretary, Buckshot Forster, promised to see into the matter, and he wrote to the head inspector in Dublin, Col. Hillier, and Hillier sent a letter down to Smithers that made that head constable’s ears tingle. He as much as told Smithers that if he didn’t arrest somebody for something or other he might take out his walking papers. Of course Smithers was in a quandary. He’d willingly have arrested the whole parish, man, woman, and child, if he could have found the shadow of an excuse, but he couldn’t, poor fellow.