The Wild Geese

Under the sky the pale softness of dawn had yielded place to the sun in his strength--in more poetical words, Aurora had given way to Phoebus--but within, the passages were stil...

A little before sunset on that same day--almost precisely indeed at the moment at which Flavia's shadow darkened the splayed flank of the window in the Tower--two men stood besi...

Beyond doubt Colonel John had got himself off the scene with a certain amount of dignity. But with all that he had done and suffered in the lands beyond the Baltic and the Vistu...

James McMurrough was young, but he was a slave to as few of the generous ambitions of youth as any man of his years. At heart he cared little for his country, and nothing for hi...

The meal had been eaten, stolidly by some, by others with a poor appetite, by Colonel John with a thoughtful face. Two men of family, but broken fortunes, old Sir Donny McCarthy...

Colonel Sullivan had returned from Tralee in high spirits. He had succeeded beyond his hopes in the task he had set himself to perform, and he counted with confidence on gaining...

The Irish of that day, with all their wit and all their courage, had the bad habit of looking abroad for leaders. Colonel John had run little risk of being wrong in taking for g...

If there was one man more sorry than another that the Morristown rising had been nipped in the bud it was Luke Asgill. It stood to his credit that, though he had never dared to...

Luke Asgill rode slowly from the gates, not without a backward glance that raked the house. The McMurrough walked by his stirrup, talking rapidly--he, too, with furtive backward...

For many minutes, fifteen, twenty perhaps, Colonel John sat motionless in the chair into which he had sunk, his eyes fixed on the flames of the candles that, so still was the ni...

Passive courage--courage in circumstances in which a man cannot help himself, but must abide with bound hands whatever a frowning fortune and his enemy's spite threaten--is so m...

Colonel John rose and walked unsteadily to the window. He rested a hand on either jamb and looked through it, peering to right and left with wistful eyes. He detected no one, no...

Easiness, the failing of the old-world Irishman, had been Uncle Ulick's bane through life. It was easiness which had induced him to condone a baseness in his nephew which he wou...

If, after that, Colonel Sullivan's life had depended on his courage or the vigilance of his servant, it is certain that, tried as was the one and unwinking as was the other, Fla...

Father O'Hara looked at the two prisoners, and the tears ran down his face. He was the man whom Colonel Sullivan and Bale had overtaken on their way to Tralee. In spite of his l...

Flavia McMurrough enjoyed one advantage over her partners in conspiracy. She could rise on the morning after the night of the bonfires with a clear head and an appetite undimini...

The family at Morristown had been half an hour at table, and in the interval a man of more hasty judgment than Colonel Sullivan might have made up his mind on many points. Wheth...

Midway in that period of Ireland's history during which, according to historians, the distressful country had none--to be more precise, on a spring morning early in the eighteen...

If England had made of Ireland a desert and called it peace, she had not marred its beauty. That was the thought in Colonel Sullivan's mind as he rode eastward under Slieve Mish...

Asgill saw himself in the position of a commander whose force has been outflanked, and who has to decide on the instant how he may best re-form it on a new front. Flavia and Col...

A candid Englishman must own, and deplore the fact, that Flavia McMurrough's tears were due to the wrongs of her country. Broken by three great wars waged by three successive ge...

The melancholy which underlies the Celtic temperament finds something congenial in the shadows that at close of day fall about an old ruin. On fine summer evenings, and sometime...

It was not until the Colonel had passed over the shoulder above the stone-walled house that he escaped from the jabber of the crowd and the jeers of the younger members of this...

The surgeon of that day was better skilled in letting blood than in staunching it, in cupping than in curing. It was well for Luke Asgill, therefore, that none lived nearer than...

Uncle Ulick, with the mud of the road still undried on his boots, and the curls still stiff in the wig which the town barber at Mallow had dressed for him, rubbed his chin with...