from my sister in half-an-hour, and rode off in the direction of Carrick-on-Suir, where I was certain Mr. O’Brien would direct his way, whether he came alone or followed by his countrymen in arms.  ’Mid the lone silence of that journey, while there was leisure to revolve all the difficulties and hazards of the future, the idea never once occurred to me that, supposing my information correct, the step was rashly taken.  On such occasions, when centuries gather into moments, some one overmastering feeling, hope or passion absorbs and controls the whole understanding.  That which was then present to my mind, and occupied all its faculties, was the hope of satisfaction, or vengeance, if you will, for so many ages of guilty tyranny.  The tears, the burning and blood of nearly one thousand years seemed to letter the eastern sky, as day dawned upon my way.  Apprehension, I had none.  From earliest childhood to that hour, I never met one Irishman whose hope of hope it was not to deliver the country forever from English thrall.  I had lived amidst all ranks (at least in their characters of politicians), had known the sentiments of all, from the most ignorant peasant to the very highest official of government; and then or now, I would find it difficult to say where hatred to English domination—­English power in Ireland is neither government nor dominion—­reigned the most intensely.  Some men there are by nature cowards, and they would shrink from the perils of national deliverance; but if any sentiment could be said to live in natures so grovelling, the grudge against England, even though too craven to make itself audible, constitutes the essence of their mental vitality.  Some there are, too, so selfish as to sell their own and their families’ honour for gold; but as they count their sordid gains, if they fall short by a scruple, whether in fact or in anticipation, the deficiency becomes a heap of hoarded spite against England.  One man of that class, whom I had known, will furnish a conclusive example.  Trusted and paid by the Whigs, he was a supreme West Briton, who saw in his country but a prey for meaner cormorants; distrusted and dismissed by the Tories, he would storm the Castle, even with the baton of the English office from which, he had been discarded.  Others, also, of a loftier stamp, were reined in, in the path of allegiance[B], by considerations more justifiable, yet more or less cowardly in character.

[Illustration:  Ballingarry, Slievenamon in the distance, 1848]

Some doubted the ability of their country to effect her redemption.  Some doubted the capacity, and perhaps the sincerity, of the chiefs.  Some were schooled in duplicity, and under the ermine, or under the privy councillor’s robe, carried fierce hearts, benumbed by mendicancy and seared by shame.  But the first flash of their country’s liberty would see them ranged at that country’s side, repaying with the fiercest hate the beggar crumbs which England had flung from the fragments of her