With respect to Connor himself it is only necessary to say that a short but well-spent life, and a heart naturally firm, deprived death of its greatest terrors.  Still he felt it, in some depressed moods, a terrible thing indeed to reflect, that he, in the very fullness of strength and youth, should be cut down from among his fellows—­a victim without a crime, and laid with shame in the grave of a felon.  But he had witnessed neither his mother’s piety nor her example in vain, and it was in the gloom of his dungeon that he felt the light of both upon his spirit.

“Surely,” said he, “as I am to die, is it not better that I should die innocent than guilty?  Instead of fretting that I suffer, a guiltless man, surely I ought to thank God that I am so; an’ that my soul hasn’t to meet the sin of such a revengeful act as I’m now condemned for.  I’ll die, then, like a Christian man, putting my hope and trust in the mercy of my Redeemer—­ever an’ always hoping that by His assistance I will be enabled to do it.”

Different, indeed, were the moral state and position of these two young men; the one, though lying in his prison cell, was sustained by the force of conscious innocence, and that reliance upon the mercy of God, which constitutes the highest order of piety, and the noblest basis of fortitude; the other, on the contrary, disturbed by the tumultuous and gloomy associations of guilt, and writhing under the conviction, that, although he had revenge, he had not satisfaction.  The terror of crime was upon him, and he felt himself deprived of that best and only security, which sets all vain apprehensions at defiance, the consciousness of inward integrity.  Who, after all, would barter an honest heart for the danger arising from secret villany, when such an apparently triumphant villain as Bartle Flanagan felt a deadly fear, of Connor O’Donovan in his very dungeon?  Such, however, is guilt, and such are the terrors that accompany it.

The circumstances which, in Ireland, usually follow the conviction of a criminal, are so similar to each other, that we feel it, even in this case, unnecessary to do more than give a mere sketch of Connor’s brief life as a culprit.  We have just observed that the only clause in the judge’s charge which smote the heart of the traitor, Flanagan, with a presentiment of evil, was that containing the words in which something like a, hope of having his sentence mitigated was held out to him, in consequence of the recommendation to mercy by which the jury accompanied their verdict.  It is very strange, on the other hand, that, at the present stage of our story, neither his father nor mother knew anything whatsoever of the judge having given expression to such a hope.  The old man, distracted as he was at the time, heard nothing, or at least remembered nothing, but the awful appearance of the black cap, or, as they term it in the country, the barradh dhu, and the paralyzing words in which the sentence of death was pronounced upon his son.  It consequently happened that the same clause in the charge actually, although in a different sense, occasioned the misery of Bartle Flanagan on the one hand, and of Connor’s parents on the other.