The defenders of the barracks were in a rather critical position when another party of police, on their way from the Nine-Mile-House station to Carrick, came upon the spot, and the combined force speedily put their half-armed assailants to flight, with a loss to the latter of one man severely wounded and one killed.  An attack was made on the barrack at Portlaw, but with a like result; two men were stricken dead by the bullets of the police.  The people soon afterwards scattered to their homes, and the soldiery and police had nothing to do but hunt up for the leaders and other parties implicated in the movement.  John O’Mahony narrowly escaped capture on three or four occasions.  He lingered in the country, however, until after the conviction of the state prisoners at Clonmel, when it became clear to him that the cause was lost for a time; and he then took his way to Paris, whither several of his fellow outlaws, for whose arrest the government had offered large rewards, had gone before him.

In that famous centre of intellect and of intrigue, the focus of political thought, the fountain-head of great ideas, John O’Mahony and James Stephens pondered long over the defeat that had come upon the Irish cause, and in their ponderings bethought them that the reason of the failure which they deplored was to be found in the want of that quiet, earnest, secret preparation, by means of which the Continental revolutionists were able to produce from time to time such volcanic effects in European politics, and cause the most firmly-rooted dynasties to tremble for their positions.  The system of secret conspiracy—­that ancient system, “old as the universe, yet not outworn”—­a system not unknown in Ireland from the days of the Attacots to those of the Whiteboys—­the system of Sir Phelim O’Neill and of Theobald Wolfe Tone—­that system, as developed, refined, and elaborated by the most subtle intellects of modern times, those two men proposed to propagate among the Irish race at home and abroad.  They divided the labour between them.  O’Mahony took the United States of America for his field of action, and Stephens took the Old Country.

It was in the year 1858 that the first symptoms indicative of the work to which James Stephens had set himself made their appearance in the extreme south-west of Ireland.  Whispers went about that some of the young men of Kenmare, Bantry, and Skibbereen were enrolled in a secret sworn organization, and were in the habit of meeting for the purpose of training and drilling.  Indeed the members of the new society took little pains to conceal its existence; they seemed rather to find a pride in the knowledge which their neighbours had of the fact, and relied for their legal safety on certain precautions adopted in the manner of their initiation as members.  When informed firstly by well known nationalists in a private manner, and subsequently by public remonstrances addressed to them by Catholic clergymen and the national journals, that the government