parents from the old country, but in addition to this, and to the severity of the punishments which their apostasy occasioned Eugene, these consummate miscreants seduced the two sisters of Mr. Gulvert, one of them an old maid, whom they imposed upon by their lying representations and profane discourses.  Here was a little more of the natural fruit of Mr. Gulvert’s great zeal for his sect.  His two hired men were gone, without having served one eighth of the two years they had agreed to work for the money advanced to them; both his sisters, pious things, yielding to temptation, were in a fair road to disgrace; and, to cap the climax of the unfortunate man’s guilt and remorse, Eugene O’Clery, neglected in his prison in the old house, on the morning of All Saints’ day, first of November, was found dead on its damp floor!  Yes, this spotless, innocent, and almost infant but heroic confessor of Christ, after a course of worse than pagan persecution continued for more than two years, in the midst of legions of blessed spirits passed out of this world, to add to the joy and glory of heaven by his heroic virtues.  O ye mock philanthropists, ye lovers, on the lip, of freedom of conscience, where was your voice, where your sympathy, where your indignation, where your meetings, speeches, and resolutions, when this Catholic child, this destitute orphan, this noble son of Catholic Ireland, this spotless confessor and glorious martyr of Christ, was being sacrificed, like his divine Master, to the demon of cruel sectarianism?  O, the blood of this innocent Abel, of this infant martyr, shed by the cruel Herod of Presbyterianism, will cry to Heaven for vengeance on your heads, and bring a curse on your hypocrisy and dissimulation.

The news of Eugene’s death, communicated by the servant maid, created a sudden fear, but very little sympathy, in the brutal family of Mr. Gulvert.  Overwhelmed by the loss of their “darling team,” and confounded by the loss of the money which the mock converts succeeded in cheating them of, they had neither tears nor sympathy to spare for such a trifle as the death of a “little Papist child.”

The servant girl, however, who was a Scotch lassie, called Jane McHardy, cried bitterly over the death of the “poor orphan laddie,” and, in company with two neighboring workmen, or cotters, who passed for Protestant Irishmen, watched around the corpse all night, and on the day of its interment in the pagan cemetery, situated in a barren corner of Gulvert’s farm, they lingered for a considerable time around the spot, to the scandal of the religious people who assembled to take a look at the “face of the dead,” and who began to suspect that those two pretended Protestants were Catholics in disguise.  Their suspicions were well founded, as their subsequent conduct proved; for the two cotters, on the Sunday following Eugene’s death, went to the meeting house for the last time, where they, in giving their experience, boldly professed themselves Catholics, asked pardon of the people for having deceived and imposed on the public, inveighing, at the same time, against the system of persecution and underhand proselytism that prevailed, and which produced the death of Eugene O’Clery.