Some Gossip about Chapelizod

Ghosts in Chapelizod, my good sir! "Why who knows not so? " A place that is itself a shadow of things past, the living spectre of old times. Chapelizod is all a ghost. If anyone desires to see a suburban village of the once proud city of Dublin reduced to a marrowless skeleton, without a single speculation in its eye by which it can ever hope to rise again, let him go to Chapelizod. Dead walls; dead trees overhanging them; dead lights instead of windows in the houses; the men grave, the women lifeless, the little spirits squeaking and gibbering in the muddy streets! A veritable caput mortuum is Chapelizod. No wonder that Bob Martin should fancy he saw a ghost, for he was always looking at one.

It is just fifty years since Chapelizod was marked for the silent tomb, and condemned to perish by a lingering death. The cold hand of Centralisation, long before the insatiable monster was known by that name, clutched its first victim in Chapelizod. I barely remember the event. A heavy storm came down from the west; great rains had previously descended, and the angry spirit of the river screeched. I heard it myself running under the skew arch of the old bridge. There was lightning in the sky, and the clouds flew across the face of the moon like mad things. As yet the air was calm on the surface of the earth, but towards midnight the gale arose and tore up a number of trees in the Park. Before twenty-four hours we all perceived how easy it would have been to foresee what was coming, for in the course of the forenoon the order arrived for disbanding the Royal Irish Artillery. It was now no longer a mystery why it had blown great guns all the night.