apartments, than could enter through its primitive loop-holes to half show its tapestried or wainscoted pride, in those times when safety was considered in preference to light or ventilation.

And this, the Castle of Enniscorthy, as it is called, was the district prison upon the day of the arrest of Sir Thomas Hartley and Sir William Judkin: and the court-martial by which the former was tried, held its sitting in the ground apartment or hall of the edifice, gained after entering the low arched doorway.

The reader is aware that the ordinary tribunals of justice were now suspended, and that, according to the form of military procedure alone, was the crime of disloyalty to King and State investigated and punished. And before such a court, hastily summoned together, Sir Thomas Hartley, late in the afternoon of the day of his arrest, appeared to take his chance for life or death.

His arbitrary judges assembled under circumstances unfavourable to cool inquiry or scrupulous discussion. But a few miles distant

from the place where they sat, the insurgents, in all the fiery impetus that enraged passions can supply, were wreaking vengeance on their

enemies, or upon their supposed enemies; and hourly accounts of slaughter and conflagration marking the separate routes of separate throngs who hurried to join a main body, or committed by that main body itself, reached Enniscorthy from trembling fugitives just escaping alive, and no more, out of the flaming house, or the fatal mêlée. It was also expected that the town would be attacked; and, in their feelings of mixed abhorrence and fear, little consideration, or even protracted inquiry, could be expected from the court-martial, by any person standing accused of a connexion with the authors of such appalling acts and plans.

It will, we hope, be recollected, that at a certain review of the troops of the County of Wexford, Sir Thomas Hartley had attended for the purpose of arraigning before the inspecting General, a certain officer of dragoons. And when Sir Thomas entered the gloomy hall of the castle of Enniscorthy, the same revengeful eye rested upon his, which that day, after the rebuke of the General, plainly told the Baronet he might expect a requital in kind, if ever it came to the turn of the Dragoon Major to afford it to him. In fact, this very man sat as president of

the military court; and his glance towards the prisoner, the moment they confronted each ́other, derived part of its expression from a still vivid sense of the humiliation Sir Thomas had caused him to endure, and part from the no less substantial sense of injury impressed upon such a mind as his was, by the recollection that, out of his own pocket, he had been obliged to make good the losses sustained, at the hands of him and his men, amongst the Baronet's tenants.

A few yeoman officers, formerly of the prisoner's acquaintance, stood or sat around; but the averted looks, or the cool and formal nod, which, while it vouchsafes recognition, proclaims an end to friendship or kindly intercourse, told him he had no friends even in their group. And indeed not a single eye in the hall beamed hope upon him, not a single tongue whispered good wishes or commiseration, as he took his prescribed seat at one end of the rude table round which were seated the informal arbiters of his destiny.

The charges against him were announced, and without counsel or agent to advise, or friend to assist, Sir Thomas prepared his mind for his defence.

The first evidence on the part of the King was Rattling Bill Nale.

This man deposed, that an agent from the directors of the United Irish conspiracy, in Dublin, had visited the neighbourhood of Hartley Court, in the month of February, for the purpose of organizing the present insurrection. That the prisoner had accompanied him to a treasonable assemblage, held in the house of John Delouchery, the smith. And farther the witness deposed, that Sir Thomas Hartley had been chosen General by the people of Shawn-a-Gow's village-the same body of insurgents who had just burnt and plundered Captain Whaley's house; and that, on their way to perpetrate the outrage, food and spirits were supplied to them on the lawn in front of Sir Thomas's mansion.

The prisoner spent some time in cross-examining this ruffian.

Did he not know, as all knew, that such agents as he had spoken of, never admitted their agency to any but assured friends? The witness knew it very well. Was he not also aware, that, even to assured friends, such agents did not disclose their names? Yes; and that the witness had a notion of, too.

How then--not having been presented to him as an assured friend-the witness's own admission-could he pretend to call the supposed person an emissary from the directors in Dublin? or how identify him, when he did not know his name?

The witness coolly produced a paper, which he alleged to have once been in the possession of the individual in question, and which, in instructions addressed to him by name, prescribed the route of his inspecting tour through the South of Ireland, and directed his attention to Sir Thomas Hartley, amongst others, as a true friend to Ireland-construed to mean, beyond dispute, a sworn conspirator and rebel.

How had the paper got into witness's hand? if, indeed, formerly the property of the agent, to whom witness had never been introduced, how could it come into his hands?

The witness would tell Sir Thomas, then; because he was in a humour to be civil, when civility "broke no bones betwixt 'em." Didn't he see the agent reading it, when he peeped in at the rebelly meeting in Shawn-a-Gow's private room? and soon after that, when his honour's man was seeing the stranger safe back to Hart