[Footnote 5:  sang froid—­(French) coolness in a trying situation,
lack of excitability]

Every day’s proceedings gave rise to new hopes and fears.  The evidence rested chiefly on the reports of certain short-hand writers, who had been employed to attend Repeal meetings, and their examinations and cross-examinations were read, re-read, and scanned with the minutest care.  Then, the various and long speeches of the different counsel, who, day after day, continued to address the jury; the heat of one, the weary legal technicalities of another, the perspicuity of a third, and the splendid forensic eloquence of a fourth, were criticised, depreciated and admired.  It seemed as though the chief lawyers of the day were standing an examination, and were candidates for some high honour, which each was striving to secure.

The Dublin papers were full of the trial; no other subject, could, at the time, either interest or amuse.  I doubt whether any affair of the kind was ever, to use the phrase of the trade, so well and perfectly reported.  The speeches appeared word for word the same in the columns of newspapers of different politics.  For four-fifths of the contents of the paper it would have been the same to you whether you were reading the Evening Mail, or the Freeman.  Every word that was uttered in the Court was of importance to every one in Dublin; and half-an-hour’s delay in ascertaining, to the minutest shade, what had taken place in Court during any period, was accounted a sad misfortune.

The press round the Four Courts [6], every morning before the doors were open, was very great:  and except by the favoured few who were able to obtain seats, it was only with extreme difficulty and perseverance, that an entrance into the body of the Court could be obtained.

[Footnote 6:  The Four Courts was a landmark courthouse in Dublin
named for the four divisions of the Irish judicial
system:  Common Pleas, Chancery, Exchequer, and King’s
Bench.]

It was on the eleventh morning of the proceedings, on the day on which the defence of the traversers was to be commenced, that two young men, who had been standing for a couple of hours in front of the doors of the Court, were still waiting there, with what patience was left to them, after having been pressed and jostled for so long a time.  Richard Lalor Sheil, however, was to address the jury on behalf of Mr John O’Connell—­and every one in Dublin knew that that was a treat not to be lost.  The two young men, too, were violent Repealers.  The elder of them was a three-year-old denizen of Dublin, who knew the names of the contributors to the “Nation”, who had constantly listened to the indignation and enthusiasm of O’Connell, Smith O’Brien, and O’Neill Daunt, in their addresses from the rostrum of the Conciliation Hall [7]; who had drank much porter at Jude’s, who had eaten many oysters at Burton Bindon’s, who had seen and contributed to many rows in the Abbey