John Purcel, after making some inquiry as to the cause of this singular procession, was enabled, from several of the by-standers, to ascertain the following affecting and melancholy particulars.  The reader cannot forget the conversation between the proctor and his sons, concerning the murder of a certain farmer named Murray, in the early part of this narrative.  The poor youth who had been appointed, under the diabolical system of Whiteboyism, to perpetrate that awful crime, was the very young man who, during the journey of the Whiteboys to the mountains, had held a kind of sotto voce conversation with the mysterious person who proved himself to be so sincere a friend to Frank M’Carthy.  A misunderstanding for several years, or rather a feeling of ill-will, had subsisted between his father and Murray, and as this circumstance was known, the malignant and cowardly miscreants availed themselves of it to give a color of revenge to the murder, in order to screen themselves.  At all events, the poor misguided youth, who had been stimulated with liquor, and goaded on to the commission of the crime, from fear of a violent death if he refused it, was tried, found guilty, and executed, leaving his childless father and mother, whose affections were centred in him, in a state of the most indescribable despair and misery.  By the intercession and influence of friends, his body was restored to them, and interred in the churchyard, from which the procession just mentioned had issued.  The heart, however—­or to come nearer the truth—­the reason of the mother—­that loving mother—­could not bear the blow that deprived her of her innocent boy—­her pride, her only one.  In about a week after his interment she proceeded one morning to his grave, bearing with her the breakfast which the poor youth had been accustomed to take.  This, in fact, became her daily habit, and here she usually sat for hours, until in most cases her woe-stricken husband, on missing her, was obliged, by some pardonable fiction, to lure her home under the expectation of seeing him.  This continued during spring, summer, autumn, and the greater portion of winter—­up in fact until the preceding night.  She had, some time during the course of that night, escaped from her poor, husband while he slept, and having entered the grave-yard by stone steps that were in a part of the wall—­for a passage went through it—­she reached her boy’s grave, where it was supposed, after having for some time, probably until lassitude and sorrow, and a frame worn down by her peculiar calamity, had induced sleep—­she was found dead in the course of the morning—­an afflicting but beautiful instance of that undying love of a mother’s heart, which survives the wreck of all the other faculties that compose her being.

Her miserable husband and friends were then bearing her body home, in order that it might be waked decently and with due respect, ere it should mingle with the ashes of him whom she had loved so well.  So much for the consequences of being concerned in those secret and criminal confederacies, that commit such fatal ravages, not only in society, but in domestic life, and stand so strongly opposed to the laws of both God and man.