Various - Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885

The men went into the kitchen of the farmhouse. There was no fire upon the hearth. The turf had burnt to ashes under a great black pot of potatoes that hung upon the crook, and two children sat disconsolately leaning against each other beside the cold hearth.

Buckley explored the “room,” and Green the loft; there was no trace of human being to be found; the children were the only inmates of the place.

The eldest child, a little girl of about four years old, with pretty blue eyes and curly hair, looked up curiously, but did not move. Her tiny brother was too languid to raise his head from her shoulder.

“Are you alone in the house?” asked Green.

“Ay,” replied the child.

“Where are your father and mother?”

“They are sleeping in the garden; they ha’ been there this good wee while,” answered the little one, fixing her serious eyes upon them. “Come, an’ I’ll show you where they are.”

She got up, gave her hand confidingly to the man, and led him to the garden, the other soldier following; and behind the cabbages they found a man and woman lying in a heap, stiff and cold, having evidently been piked to death.

“Come back to the house, my little dear,” cried Green, drawing the poor innocent away from the cruel sight. Her little brother still sat where they had left him, leaning his sick head against the wall. He was very faint and weak.

“Have you nothing to eat?” asked the men.

“My mammy has bread an’ butter in the kist, but she has the key in her pocket,” replied the little girl. They broke open the chest and found the food; but they had arrived too late to save the boy: he died in Buckley’s arms before they reached Maghera. Green carried the girl and presented her to his company. Each soldier subscribed toward her maintenance, and she grew up among them, the pet and plaything of all. She accompanied the regiment to England at the close of the rebellion, and nothing further was known of her by her old neighbors.

Wildest of all the wild Donegal coast is the region lying between Fannet Lighthouse and Knockalla Fort. There are impassable bogs and mountain fastnesses which strangers cannot explore, but that are safe resorts for illicit distillers, the blue wreaths of smoke from whose stills may be seen curling against a dark background. In the years ’97 and ’98 these fastnesses were favorite haunts of the United Irishmen.

Fannet had a particularly bad name in those unsettled times. The Church Protestants were, of course, loyal, but they formed only a handful of the population; and the Presbyterians were, many of them, banded with the rebels. The Fannet landlords raised a company of yeomen, consisting of the Protestants aforesaid, and placed themselves at their head.

Help was at hand. Lord Cavan was sent over from England in command of soldiers; Knockalla Fort was garrisoned; and the yeomanry were called up to receive their arms and ammunition.

“You needna be giving the like of us arms, my lord,” said old Anthony Gallagher, “for the Catholics will take them from us.”

Lord Cavan was amused at the fellow’s outspokenness, and replied that he had come over to make Fannet so quiet that not one of the rebels would venture so much as to speak. The yeomen got their guns and bayonets, and the soldiers were ready to support them. Lord Cavan, a stern and fierce soldier, kept his word; he quieted Fannet so that the Catholics did not dare to speak. The Protestants had been reduced to an abject state of terror before his arrival by the horrible murder of Dr. Hamilton their rector, a zealous magistrate, who was followed to the house of a neighboring clergyman and shot. He went to spend the night with a brother-rector at some distance from Fannet, and the rectory was surrounded by United Irishmen, who clamored that the Doctor should be given up to them.

“Those are Fannet men; I know their voices,” said he. The door was soon burst open; the attacking party rushed in, found the family in the garrets, and dragged their captive downstairs. He clung with both hands to the banisters, and one of the women servants took a candle and held the flame to his fingers till he was forced to let go his hold. He was taken to the lawn and his brains were blown out.

This atrocity had determined the Government to send troops to Fannet.

It was soon after this that Anthony Gallagher and the troop he served in were at Kerrykeel fair and were attacked by a party of the rebels. The yeomen were commanded to draw their bayonets and beat them off, and all the United Men retreated and got away except a man called Micky O’Donnel from Ballywhoriskey, at the Bottom of Fannet. He was found dead on the street, pierced through the heart. Lord Cavan rode up at that moment, followed by men from the Fort. “Take that corpse with you, boys,” said he, “an’ hang it in chains from the walls of Knockalla Fort. It will be a warning to the rest of the villains.” Anthony and two soldiers were left in charge of the corpse, but the villagers assembling in force, there was a rescue, and Micky O’Donnel was carried off before the yeomen got back, attracted by the noise of shouting, to protect their comrades. Lord Cavan was in a rage when he heard what had happened, and swore a round oath that that corpse should yet hang in chains from Knockalla Fort as a warning to the rest of Fannet; and he despatched a party to recover it.

It was known that Micky O’Donnel belonged to the Bottom of Fannet, so the party set out along the banks of Mulroy, where they fell in with the yeomen, and all went on together. But every house along the road was empty, and there were no men at work in the fields; it was like a country of the dead.

Along the wild Atlantic shore; among the bent-covered sand hills; up to the miserable row of hovels called the town of Shanna, went the soldiers; but still not a human being was to be seen. The whole population had taken to the mountains.

At length they reached the last cabin in the village of Ballywhoriskey, and there they discovered the dead man laid out on the wretched bed, with two tallow candles burning at his head.

“Feen a crathur” (we quote the words of Anton Gallagher, our informant, son of the Anthony who was present at the scene) – “feen a crathur was in the house but the corpse on the bed an’ two ould women waking it. The women cried an’ lamented, an’ went on their knees to the officer to lave the poor corpse where it was to get Christian burial; an’ the gentleman thought it a pity o’ them, an’ left the wake wantin’ Micky after all. It was my father tould me the story.”

“Have you got your father’s gun and bayonet?”

“Ay, ma’am, in troth I have! If you ladyship honors me wi’ a visit you’ll see them hanging up over the chimney. I wouldna part wi’ them for goold. There’s many a winter’s night the Catholics coming home frae the market will stop at we’er door an’ cry, “King William’s men, come out!” an’ then it’s all the mother an’ me can do to keep the boys from taking down their grandfather’s gun, an’ going out to meet them.” — Belgravia.

It is exactly one hundred years ago since Dr. Johnson wrote his last letter to Lucy Porter, in which he announced to her that he was very ill, and that he desired her prayers. Less than a fortnight later, on the 13th of December, 1784, he was dead. All through the year his condition had given his friends more than anxiety. The winter of 1783 had been marked by collapse of the constitution; to the ceaseless misery of his skin was now added an asthma that would not suffer him to recline in bed, a dropsy that made his legs and feet useless through half of the weary day. It is somewhat marvellous that he got through this terrible winter, the sufferings of which are painfully recorded in his sad correspondence. It is difficult to understand why, just when he wanted companionship most, his friends seem all to have happened to desert him. Of the quaint group of invalids in mind and body to whom his house had been a hospital, all were gone except Mrs. Desmoulins, who was bedridden; and we may believe that their wrangling company had never been so distasteful to himself as to his friends. Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, as we know, had more or less valid reasons for absence, and Boswell, at least, was solicitous in inquiry. We must, however, from whatever cause, think of Johnson, who dreaded solitude, as now almost always alone, mortified by spiritual pains no less acute than his physical ones, torturing his wretched nights with Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted , and with laborious and repeated diagnosis of his own bodily symptoms. It is strange to think that, although he was the leading man of letters in England, and the centre of a whole society, his absence from the meetings of his associates seems scarcely to have been noticed. It was not until in February he was relieved that he allowed himself to speak of the danger he had passed through. Then he confessed his terror to Lucy Porter, in the famous words, “Pray for me; death, my dear, is very dreadful; let us think nothing worth our care but how to prepare for it;” and asked Boswell to consult the venerable physician, Sir Alexander Dick, as to the best way of avoiding a relapse.