“What has this Inquisitor done to you?” queried Father Tom.

“Cauterised me with chloroform.”

“Oh! that’s a modern improvement!  Let me see—­” and, scrutinising the results, he said, with a merry twinkle in his deep, dark eyes—­“I see how it is!  They brought you a veterinary!”

This was in 1878.  On that too brief, delightful morning, we talked of all things—­supralunar, lunar, and sublunary.  Much of Wales, I remember, where he had been making a visit.  “A glorious country,” he said, “and the Welsh would have been Irish, only they lost the faith.”  Full of love for Ireland as he was, he was beginning then to be troubled by symptoms in the Nationalist movement, which could not be regarded with composure by one who, in his youth at Rome, had seen, with me, the devil of extremes drive Italy down a steep place into the sea.

Five years afterwards I landed at Queenstown, in July 1883, intending to visit him at Tallaght.  But when the letter which I sent to announce my coming reached the monastery, the staunchest Soldier of the Church in Ireland lay there literally “dead on the field of honour.”  Chatham, in the House of Lords, John Quincy Adams, in the House of Representatives, fell in harness, but neither death so speaks to the heart as the simple and sublime self-sacrifice of the great Dominican, dragging himself from his dying bed into Dublin to spend the last splendour of his genius and his life for the starving children of the poor in Donegal.

What would I not give for an hour with him now!

After breakfast I went out to find Mr. Davitt, hoping he might suggest some way of seeing the Nationalist meeting on Wednesday night without undergoing the dismal penance of sitting out all the speeches.  I wished also to ask him why at Rathkeale he talked about the Dunravens as “absentees.”  He was born in Lord Lucan’s country, and may know little of Limerick, but he surely ought to know that Adare Manor was built of Irish materials, and by Irish workmen, under the eye of Lord Dunraven, all the finest ornamental work, both in wood and in stone, of the mansion, being done by local mechanics; and also that the present owners of Adare spend a large part of every year in the country, and are deservedly popular.  He was not to be found at the National League headquarters, nor yet at the Imperial Hotel, which is his usual resort, as Morrison’s is the resort of Mr. Parnell.  So I sent him a note through the Post-Office.

“You had better seal it with wax,” said a friend, in whose chambers I wrote it.

“Pray, why?”

“Oh! all the letters to well-known people that are not opened by the police are opened by the Nationalist clerks in the Post-Offices.  ’Tis a way we’ve always had with us in Ireland!”