by my mother’s entreaties.  Turning aside to brush away a furtive and not unmanly tear, he would suddenly tear the death-warrant to shreds, and taking up another huge placard headed reprieve, he would quickly fill it in and sign it.  He would then hand it to the Private Secretary, who would instantly start post-haste for Cork.  As the condemned man was being actually conducted to the scaffold, the Private Secretary would appear, brandishing the liberating document.  All then would be joy, except for the executioner, who would grind his teeth at being baulked of his prey at the last minute.

That is, at all events, the way it would have happened in a book.  As it was, the Private Secretary came in just as usual, carrying an ordinary official paper, precisely similar to dozens of other official papers lying about the room.

“It is the Cork murder case, sir,” he said in his everyday voice.  “The sentence has to be confirmed by you.”

“A bad business, Dillon,” said my father.  “I have seen the Chief Justice about it twice, and I have consulted the Judge who tried the case, and the Solicitor and the Attorney-General.  I am afraid that there are no mitigating circumstances whatever.  I shall certainly confirm it,” and he wrote across the official paper, “Let the law take its course,” and appended his signature, and that was all!

Could anything be more prosaic?  What a waste of an unrivalled dramatic situation.

When I returned home for the Christmas holidays in 1866, the Fenian rebellion had already broken out.  The authorities had reason to believe that the Vice-regal Lodge would be attacked, and various precautions had been taken.  Both guards and sentries were doubled; four light field-guns stood in the garden, and a row of gas-lamps had been installed there.  Stands of arms made their appearance in the passages upstairs, which were patrolled all night by constables in rubber-soled boots, but the culminating joy to my brother and me lay in the four loopholes with which the walls of the bed-room we jointly occupied were pierced.  The room projected beyond the front of the main building, and was accordingly a strategic point, but to have four real loopholes, closed with wooden shutters, in the walls of our own bedroom was to the two small urchins a source of immense pride.  The boys at school were hideously jealous of our loopholes when they heard of them, though they affected to despise any one who, enjoying such undreamed-of opportunities, had, on his own confession, failed to take advantage of them, and had never even fired through the loopholes, nor attempted to kill any one through them.

The Fenians were supposed to have the secret of a mysterious combustible known as “Greek Fire” which was unquenchable by water.  I think that “Greek Fire” was nothing more or less than ordinary petroleum, which was practically unknown in Europe in 1866, though from personal experience I can say that it was well known in 1868, in which year my mother, three sisters, two brothers and myself narrowly escaped being burnt to death, when the Irish mail, in which we were travelling, collided with a goods train loaded with petroleum at Abergele, North Wales, an accident which resulted in thirty-four deaths.