"He is called, your Highness, the Sieur O'Byrne."
"O'Byrne! O'Byrne! an Irishman!" exclaimed the Prince.
"But you told me there were no Irishmen in Brissach."
"Only one!" The Prince arrested his thumb as he was lifting up a pinch of snuff. He made a gesture of dismissal and the Governor retired.
"Only one," the Prince repeated when he was alone. "If there had been a hundred it is more than probable the Governor of Freiburg would never have found his way back from Brissach."
The Prince made up for his interrupted pinch, and dabbed at both nostrils as he moved to the window. The cannonade, which had been going on for some hours, had ceased, but a puff of smoke from the trenches, followed by a report, showed that the firing was kept up in a desultory fashion. The Prince's eyes rested for a second on the portrait of the Emperor on his snuff-box. "The loss of Brissach," he said half aloud, "was a severe blow to the Emperor. I had recovered it for him if it were not for that infernal Irishman with his blackthorn. Pardieu, but it is worse than Cremona!" And the Prince, of whom it has been written that his "passion was for glory and his appetite for snuff," flicking up the lid of the precious box, scooped up between finger and thumb what was left, and as he sniffed the fragrant but strong powder, "I must get more snuff," he said.
During the year of the '98 Centennial celebrations, it chanced that I was staying on a short visit with a friend in the county of ----, whose residence was not far from one of the battlefields of the rebellion. Our talk turned one day upon '98, and I asked him if he knew if any stories of the period were still current in the neighbourhood. He said he was not himself familiar with any. He was not belonging to the county, and had been residing in it only a few years. But he promised to find out if any of the servants or workpeople could give me any information. That evening he informed me there was an old man helping in the garden, now almost past his work, who was at one time a schoolmaster, and had originally come from the county of Antrim, and who had some stories of the rising in the North. The next day I made the old man's acquaintance, and from him took down the story of Maurya na Gleanna:--