Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/1033

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History of Woman Suffrage.

dark, drizzly October day, intensifying all the gloomy memories of the place. She sat in the old church pew where those shivering girls endured such discomforts through the fearful services, with their benumbed feet on the very stone slab that from time to time was taken up to deposit in the earth beneath their loved dead! She was shown through the house, paused at the place under the stairs where the imperial Shirley had her fierce encounter with that almost human dog, Keeper; she stood in the drawing-room where the sainted three sisters, arm-in-arm, paced up and down plotting their weird stories. She walked through the same old gate, on the same single stone pavement and over the same stile out into the same heather fields, gazing on the same dreary sky above and the same desolate earth on every side. She dined in the same old "Black Bull"; sat in poor Branwell's chair and was served by the same person who dealt out the drinks to that poor unfortunate—then a young bar-maid, now the aged proprietor. .

Miss Anthony crossed from Barrow to Belfast, where she was given a most cordial reception at the house of one of Ireland's distinguished orators, Miss Isabella M. Tod, who took her to one of her Ulster temperance meetings at Garvah, where they were the guests of Rev. Thomas Medill, a cousin of the distinguished Chicago editor. There, as Miss Anthony listened to the prayers and exhortations of the Presbyterian ministers and to the arguments of Miss Tod, and heard no appeals to the audience to join in the work of suppressing the traffic, a realizing sense of the utter powerlessness of the queen's subjects in Ireland dawned upon her for the first time. In all that crowd there was not one who had any voice in the decision of that question. The entire control of the matter rested with three magistrates appointed by the queen, who are in nowise responsible to the tax-paying people to whom they administer the laws. Had Miss Tod been addressing an American audience, she would have appealed to every man to vote only for candidates pledged to no-license. From Garvah they made a pilgrimage to the Giant's Causeway. Miss Anthony had, when at Oban, visited Fingal's Cave, and the two wonders that always fix themselves upon the imagination of the youthful student of the world's geography fully matched her expectations.

At Dublin she visited the Castle, the old parliament building, now a bank; Kings and Queens College, that gives diplomas to