As I came up on the tram from the station, we ran into a mob of people, marching along in the middle of the street and yelling at the tops of their voices, and we had to wait until they had passed. I asked a fellow-passenger what was going on, and he answered with a little smile that the Orange societies had all been given new banners that night and were flinging them to the breeze for the first time. I asked him who had given the banners, and he said he didn't know.

At the hotel, I found that Betty had sought the sanctuary of our room, and was watching the tumult from the window. She said it reminded her of the French Revolution, and the comparison was natural enough. The especial scene she had in mind, I think, was that draggled procession of shrieking fishwives which escorted the king and his family in from Versailles.

I do not know how many Orange societies there are at Belfast, but we saw at least a dozen march past that night, each of them headed by a band or drum-corps, and each with a bright new Orange banner flaunting proudly in the breeze. Each banner bore a painted representation of some Orange victory; King Billy on his white horse fording the Boyne being a favourite subject; and the banners were very large and fringed with gold lace and most expensive-looking; and before them and beside them and behind them trailed a mob of shrieking girls and women and ragamuffin boys, locked arm and arm half across the street, breaking into a clumsy dance now and then, or shouting the lines of some Orange ditty. There were many men in line, marching along more or less soberly; but these bacchantes outnumbered them two to one. They blocked the street from side to side, stopped traffic, and conducted themselves as though they had suddenly gone mad.

Presently all the societies, which had been collecting at some rendezvous, marched back together, with the mob augmented a hundred-fold, so that, looking down from our window, we could see nothing but a mass of heads filling the street from side to side—thousands and thousands of women and girls and boys, all vociferous with a frenzied intoxication—and in the midst of them the thin stream of Orangemen trudging along behind their banners.

I went down into the street to view this demonstration more closely, for it was evident that here at last was the spirit of Ulster unveiled for all to see; but at close quarters much of its impressiveness vanished, for the mob was composed largely of boys and girls out for a good time, and rejoicing in the unaccustomed privilege of yelling and hooting to their hearts' content. A few policemen would have been quite capable of dealing with that portion of it. But the men marching grimly along behind their banners were of different stuff; they were ready, apparently, for any emergency, ready for a holy war; and I wondered if their leaders, who had sown the wind so blithely as part of the game of politics, were quite prepared to reap the whirlwind which might follow.

A man with whom I fell into talk said there would be a procession like this every evening until the twelfth; but I should think the drummers would be exhausted long before that. I have described the contortions of the Dublin drummers, but they are nowhere as compared with the drummers of Belfast. And, though about a fourth of Belfast's population is Catholic, you would never have suspected it that night, for there was no disorder of any kind, except the wild disorder of the Orangemen and their adherents. I suspect that, in Belfast, wise Catholics spend the early evenings of July at home.

We went out, next morning, to Ardoyne village, to see one of the few establishments where linen is still woven by hand. A beautiful old factory it is, with the work-rooms grouped around an open court which reminded us of the Plantin-Moretus at Antwerp; and the Scotchman in charge of it took us through from top to bottom. I have forgotten how many looms there are—some thirty or forty; and it was most interesting to watch the weavers as they shot the shuttle swiftly back and forth with one hand and worked the heavy beam with the other, while with their feet they controlled the pattern. Nearly all the weavers were old men, and our guide told us it was growing more and more difficult to replace them, because hand-weaving had been so largely displaced by machine-work that it was rapidly becoming a lost art. Few young men were willing to undertake the long apprenticeship which was necessary before they could become expert weavers, and he foresaw the time when hand-weaving would cease altogether.

Then we went upstairs, where the pattern mechanism is mounted above each loom; and though I understood it, in a way, after long and careful explanation, I am quite incapable of explaining it to anybody else, except to say that the threads which run down to the loom below are governed by a lot of stiff cards laced together into a long roll, and cut with many perforations, so that the roll looks something like the music-rolls used in mechanical piano-players.

Last of all we were shown some of the finished product, and very beautiful it was, strong as iron—far stronger than machine-woven linen, for the shuttle can be thrown by hand more often to the inch than is possible by machine; and some of the patterns, too, were very lovely; one, in especial, from the Book of Kells, the interwoven Celtic ornamentation, the symbol of eternity.

Of course we talked about Home Rule, and our Scotch host, who was evidently a devoted Orangeman, was very certain Ulster would fight before she would acquiesce. If the fight went against her, he prophesied that no Protestant industry which could get out of Ireland would stay to be taxed out of existence by a Dublin Parliament, and he said that many of the great factories had already secured options on English sites, and were prepared to move at any time.

I remarked that it seemed to me the wiser plan would be to wait and see how Home Rule worked before plunging into revolution; then, if it was found that Ulster was really oppressed, it would be time enough for her army to take the field. And I told him something of what I had seen and heard in the south and west of Ireland—that, among all the people I had talked with, not one had expressed himself with any bitterness toward Ulster, and that many had said frankly that the leaders of the Irish people would be largely Protestant in the future, just as they had been in the past. But he was unconvinced, and very gloomy over the outlook.

We came away finally, and took a last look about Belfast—at the busy streets, the bright shops, the humming factories, the clattering foundries; and then the hour of departure came. The jarvey who drove us to the boat was a jovial, loquacious son of the Church, with good-natured laughter for Orange excesses.

"Why should we Catholics interfere wid them?" he asked. "We'd only be gettin' our heads broke, and all the papers would be full of the riots in Ulster. Sure, haven't I seen them before this treatin' a small fight at the corner as though it was a revolution? No, no; we'll just stay quiet and let them have their fun. It does good to them and no harm to us. They'll settle down again when the Home Rule bill is passed, and then we'll be Irishmen all, please God!"

From the bottom of my heart I said I hoped so. Indeed, I can think of no better watch-word to replace "No Surrender!" and curses on King Billy and the Pope than "Irishmen All!"

There are few busier ports than Belfast, and we made our way down to the quay through a tangle of drays that would have done no discredit to the New York water-front; and at last we found our boat and got aboard. And presently the ropes were cast off, and we steamed slowly down the river, between long lines of lofty scaffolding shrouding the hulls of scores of mighty ships, one day to play their part in the commerce of the world.

And then we were in Belfast Lough, with the grim keep of Carrickfergus looming on the western shore; and then the bay widened, the shores dropped away, and we headed out across the white-capped waters of the Irish Sea. For long and long in the distance, we could see the purple masses of the Antrim hills, growing fainter and ever fainter, until at last they merged into the purple of the western sky. And so we looked our last upon the Island of the Saints.