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k for many weeks, though their heads, light as they clearly
were, did not suffer seriously. But," he added, with a sigh, as he
finished the story, "I _couldn't_ do it now."

A further experience of a really tragic and terrible kind I will relate
in my father's own words, for in these he most movingly describes a
scene he himself witnessed, and a drama in which he took an unwilling
part.

 "Those of you who are Irishmen," he begins,[10] "will want no
 description of that beautiful valley of the Lee which winds between
 the hills from Cork, and in summer seems like a very Paradise, green
 grass growing to the water side, and burnished with gold in the
 morning, and ruddy to very crimson in the evening sunset. I went there
 on a November day. I was one of a troop to protect the law officers,
 who had come with the agent from Dublin to make an eviction a few
 miles from Inniscarra, where the river Bride joins the Lee. It was a
 miserable day--rain freezing into sleet as it fell--and the men beat
 down wretched dwelling after wretched dwelling, some thirty or forty
 perhaps. They did not take much beating down; there was no flooring
 to take up; the walls were more mud than aught else; and there was
 but little trouble in the levelling of them to the ground. We had got
 our work about three parts done, when out of one of them a woman ran,
 and flung herself on the ground, wet as it was, before the Captain
 of the troop, and she asked that her house might be spared--not for
 long, but for a little while. She said her husband had been born in
 it; he was ill of the fever, but could not live long, and she asked
 that he might be permitted to die in it in peace. Our Captain had
 no power; the law agent from Dublin wanted to get back to Dublin;
 his time was of importance, and he would not wait; and that man was
 carried out while we were there--in front of us, while the sleet was
 coming down--carried out on a wretched thing (you could not call
 it a bed), and he died there while we were there; and three nights
 afterwards, while I was sentry on the front gate at Ballincollig
 Barracks, we heard a cry, and when the guard was turned out, we found
 this poor woman there a raving maniac, with one dead babe in one arm,
 and another in the other clinging to the cold nipple of her lifeless
 breast. And," asked my father, in righteous indignation, "if you had
 been brothers to such a woman, sons of such a woman, fathers of such
 a woman, would not rebellion have seemed the holiest gospel you could
 hear preached?"

[Footnote 10: _National Reformer_, November 16, 1873. A speech on the
Irish Question delivered in New York; reprinted from the _New York
Tribune_ of October 7th.]

CHAPTER V.

ARMY LIFE CONCLUDED.

When his father died in 1852 Private Charles Bradlaugh came home on
furlough to attend the funeral. He was by this time heartily sick of
soldiering, and under the circumstances was specially anxious to get
home to help in the support of his family. (This, one writer, without
the slightest endeavour to be accurate even on the simplest matters,
says is nonsense, because his family only numbered _two_, his mother
and his brother!) His great-aunt, Elizabeth Trimby, promised to buy
him out, and he went back to his regiment buoyed up by her promise.
In September he was in hospital, ill with rheumatic fever, and after
that he seems to have had more or less rheumatism during the remainder
of his stay in Ireland; for in June 1853, in writing to his sister,
apologising for having passed over her birthday without a letter,
he says: "I was, unfortunately, on my bed from another attack of
the rheumatism, which seized my right knee in a manner anything but
pleasant, but it is a mere nothing to the dose I had last September,
and I am now about again."

The letters I have by me of my father's, written home at this time,
instead of teeming with fiery fury and magniloquent phrases as to
shooting his officers,[11] are just a lad's letters; the sentences
for the most part a little formal and empty, with perhaps the most
interesting item reserved for the postscript; now and again crude
verses addressed to his sister, and winding up almost invariably with
"write soon." After the father's death Mr Lepard, a member of the firm
in which he had been confidential clerk for upwards of twenty-one
years, used his influence to get the two youngest children, Robert and
Harriet, into Orphan Asylums. While the matter was yet in abeyance
Elizabeth seems to have written her brother asking if any of the
officers could do anything to help in the matter, and on March 14th he
answers her from Ballincollig:--

[Footnote 11: Whether rightly or wrongly, my father thought he was
treated with exceptional severity by his Captain during the first part
of the time he was in the army; and this has been exaggerated into a
story of how in his letters to his mother during the latter part of
his army life he was "_constantly_ informing her" that "unless she
obtained his discharge he would put a bullet through this officer."
The story, I need hardly say, is quite untrue, and to any one who knew
my father must seem almost too absurd to need refutation. During Mr
Bradlaugh's illness in 1889 Captain Walker, then General Sir Beauchamp
Walker, called twice to inquire at Circus Road. My father was very dull
and depressed one day as he lay in bed, and, thinking to cheer him. I
mentioned the names of persons who I knew he would like to hear had
inquired; and when I read the name from the card, and said that General
Walker had told the maid to "tell Mr Bradlaugh that his old Captain
had called," he was delighted beyond measure, and was for the moment
the boy private again, with the private's feelings for his superior
officer. The visit gratified him almost as much as if it had been one
from Mr Gladstone himself.]

 "I am very sorry to say that you have a great deal more to learn of
 the world yet, my dear Elizabeth, or you would not expect to find
 an officer of the army a subscriber to an Orphan Asylum. There may
 be a few, but the most part of them spend all the money they have
 in hunting, racing, boating, horses, dogs, gambling, and drinking,
 besides other follies of a graver kind, and have little to give to the
 poor, and less inclination to give it even than their means."

My father's great-aunt, Miss Elizabeth Trimby, died in June 1853, at
the age of eighty-five. She died without having fulfilled her promise
of buying her nephew's discharge; but as the little money she left,
some £70, came to the Bradlaugh family, they had now the opportunity
of themselves carrying out her intention, or, to be exact, her precise
written wishes.[12]

[Footnote 12: _National Reformer_, Feb. 10, 1884.]

The mother, in her heart, wanted her son home: she needed the comfort
of his presence, and the help of his labour, to add to their scanty
women's earnings; but she was a woman slow to forgive, and her son had
set his parents' commands at defiance, and 

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