which they knew was needed for the efficient direction of an insurrectionary movement in Ireland, and, who were now burning for the time and opportunity to turn that knowledge to account.  It was known that many of these men were, as quietly and secretly as might be, dropping into Queenstown as steamer after steamer arrived from the Land of the West, and were moving about through the Southern counties, inspiriting the hearts of the Brotherhood by their presence and their promises, and imparting to them as much military instruction as was possible under the circumstances.  To hunt down these “foreign emissaries” as the crown lawyers and the loyal prints were pleased to call them, and to deter others from following in their footsteps, was naturally a great object with the government, and when they placed Charles Underwood O’Connell and John M’Afferty in the dock they felt they had made a good beginning.  And these were representative men in their way.  “It was a strange fate,” says the writer from whom we have already quoted, “which had brought these men together in a felon’s dock.  They had been born in different lands—­they had been reared thousands of miles apart—­and they had fought and won distinction under different flags, and on opposing sides in the American war.  M’Afferty, born of Irish parents in Ohio, won his spurs in the Confederate army.  O’Connell, who emigrated from Cork little more than two years ago, after the ruin of his family by a cruel act of confiscation and eviction, fought under the Stars and Stripes, and, like M’Afferty, obtained a captain’s commission as the reward of his services.  Had they crossed each others path two years ago they would probably have fought a la mort, but the old traditions which linger in spite of every circumstance in the hearts of Irishmen were strong in both, and the cause of Ireland united them, only alas, that they might each of them pay the cost of their honest, if imprudent enthusiasm, by sharing the same prison in Ireland, and falling within the grasp of the government which they looked on as the oppressor of their fatherland.”

M’Afferty however was not fated to suffer on that occasion.  Proof of his foreign birth having been adduced, the court held that his arrest on board the steamer in Queenstown harbour, when he had committed no overt act evidencing a treasonable intent, was illegal, and his trial was abandoned.  The trial of Underwood O’Connell was then postponed for a few days, and two men reputed to be “centres” of the organization in Cork, were brought to the bar.

They were Bryan Dillon and John Lynch.  Physically, they presented a contrast to the firm-built and wiry soldiers who had just quitted the dock.  Dillon was afflicted with curvature of the spine, the result of an accident in early life, and his companion was far gone in that blighting and fatal disease, consumption.  But though they were not men for the toils of campaigning, for the mountain march, and the bivouac, and the thundering charge of battle, they had hearts full of enthusiasm for the cause in which they were engaged, and heads that could think, and plot, and plan, for its advancement.