Reader,—­not many months elapsed ere I saw the bodies of this Captain, whose name was Patrick Devann, and all those who were actively concerned in the perpetration of this deed of horror, withering in the wind, where they hung gibbeted, near the scene of their nefarious villany; and while I inwardly thanked Heaven for my own narrow and almost undeserved escape, I thought in my heart how seldom, even in this world, justice fails to overtake the murder, and to enforce the righteous judgment of God—­that “whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”

*****

This tale of terror is, unfortunately, too true.  The scene of hellish murder detailed in it lies at Wildgoose Lodge, in the county of Louth, within about four miles of Carrickmacross, and nine of Dundalk.  No such multitudinous murder has occurred, under similar circumstances, except the burning of the Sheas, in the county of Tipperary.  The name of the family burned in Wildgoose Lodge was Lynch.  One of them had, shortly before this fatal night, prosecuted and convicted some of the neighboring Ribbonmen, who visited him with severe marks of their displeasure, in consequence of his having refused to enrol himself as a member of their body.  The language of the story is partly fictitious; but the facts are pretty closely such as were developed during the trial of the murderers.  Both parties were Roman Catholics, and either twenty-five or twenty-eight of those who took an active part in the burning, were hanged and gibbeted in different parts of the county of Louth.  Devann, the ringleader, hung for some months in chains, within about a hundred yards of his own house, and about half a mile from Wildgoose Lodge.  His mother could neither go into nor out of her cabin without seeing his body swinging from the gibbet.  Her usual exclamation on looking at him was—­“God be good to the sowl of my poor marthyr!” The peasantry, too, frequently exclaimed, on seeing him, “Poor Paddy!” A gloomy fact that speaks volumes!

TUBBER DERG; Or, THE RED WELL.

The following story owes nothing to any coloring or invention of mine; it is unhappily a true one, and to me possesses a peculiar and melancholy interest, arising from my intimate knowledge of the man whose fate it holds up as a moral lesson to Irish landlords.  I knew him well, and many a day and hour have I played about his knee, and ran, in my boyhood, round his path, when, as he said to himself, the world was no trouble to him.

On the south side of a sloping tract of light ground, lively, warm, and productive, stood a white, moderate-sized farm-house, which, in consequence of its conspicuous situation, was a prominent and, we may add, a graceful object in the landscape of which it formed a part.  The spot whereon it stood was a swelling natural terrace, the soil of which was heavier and richer than that of the adjoining lands.  On each side of the house stood a clump of old beeches, the only survivors of