as the authority best qualified to supply the desired. information as to the military organisation and resources of the Society of which he was by this time one of the recognised and accredited chiefs.

The information he had to impart, coloured by his sanguine spirit, must have been encouraging enough, so far as numbers were concerned. So extensive were the military preparations that it was computed that in Ulster alone no less than one hundred thousand men were enrolled and regimented. Such was the eagerness of these northern recruits to precipitate an appeal to arms that it was only by the authority of the leaders of the whole Society that they were prevailed upon to delay taking action till the arrival of the expected succours from France, which it was hoped would supply the experience and skill in which the Irish were, in spite of their ardour, lamentably lacking. In all parts of the country, too, as Lord Moira bore witness, the people, rendered desperate by their sufferings, were swelling the ranks of the Union. Had it been possible, at this time, when the enthusiasm of the people was at fever height and England embarrassed by foreign foes and mutinies at home-had it been possible to strike then, the history of the rebellion might have been a different one. But it was not to be; and in the summer an opportunity was allowed to slip which was not likely again to present itself.

A plan of insurrection had been prepared, mainly by the Ulster leaders, to which several hundred of the troops quartered in Dublin were ready to lend

their co-operation; while a deputation from the militias of Clare, Kilkenny, and Kildare had made, in the name of their respective regiments, the offer already mentioned, to seize the barracks and the Castle. It was a bold scheme, and, carried out, might have wholly changed the face of affairs; but, in spite of Lord Edward's advocacy, the Dublin Executive decided against its adoption, and the enterprise was relinquished, to the bitter regret of those who had seen in it Ireland's best chance of success. "It seems to me," said Tone, writing at Paris, "to have been such an occasion missed as we can hardly ever see return."

He might well say so. It never did return. Meantime, the year 1797 drew towards its close, and no blow had been struck. But before the beginning of 1798 Lord Edward had made a new and disastrous acquaintance.

CHAPTER XV

Irish Informers—“Battalion of Testimony "-Leonard McNally
-Thomas Reynolds-Meeting between Reynolds and Lord
Edward-Reynolds and Neilson-Curran's Invective.

IT

T was an evil day for Lord Edward--an evil day for his party as well-when, some time in the November of 1797, he met, on the steps of the Four Courts, a gentleman named Thomas Reynolds, a United Irishman little known at the time, but who quickly rose to an unenviable notoriety, and will long live in the memory of his countrymen as the betrayer of his party and his chief.

The figure of the informer is one which, like a shabby and sordid Mephistopheles, is never long absent from the scene of Irish politics. His trade was sedulously fostered and encouraged by the English system of Government, and to it may be traced much of the alleged sympathy with crime and genuine reluctance to lend a hand in bringing the criminal to justice which has been so often used as a reproach against the Irish people. "The police are paid to catch you, and well paid," a priest is said to have told a member of his flock who, weary of the life of a

hunted man, was contemplating the surrender of himself into the hands of the law. "The informer is bribed to track you down, and well bribed," he might have added with equal truth. It is not surprising that a people noted for its instincts of generosity should have preferred to leave the work of Government to be performed by its paid instruments, and should have shrunk from so much as the semblance of participation in the traffic.

The indiscriminate horror entertained with regard to those, whether innocent or guilty, who were convicted of co-operation with the natural enemies of their race-unfortunately identified in the eyes of the people with the administration that went by he name of justice-is curiously and signally illustrated by an incident which took place about this time. Two sisters named Kennedy, mere children of fourteen and fifteen years old, and supposed to be heiresses, were carried off from their home by a gang of ruffians, to two of whom they were forcibly married. When, some weeks later, the men were made prisoners and brought to trial, the unfortunate girls were induced to consent to bear witness against them, chiefly, as it appears, in revenge for a brutal blow bestowed upon one of them by her captor. The result of the trial was the hanging of the men and the pensioning of their victims. But so passionately opposed was public sentiment, even in such an instance as this, to the conduct of the approver, that demonstrations of hostility greeted the unhappy sisters wherever they ventured

to show their faces; that when they subsequently married, the misfortunes of the one were regarded by the people in the light of a judgment upon her; and, stranger still, the husband of the other was infected to such a degree by the popular superstition that he imagined himself haunted by the spectre of his dead rival, and never dared to sleep without a light in his room.

Of the brutality engendered by the loathing, wholesome in its origin, of the trade, an example is given in a story told by an aged lady, Mrs. O'Byrne, who remembered throughout life—as well she might-— being taken as a child, by the servant to whose care she had been entrusted, to the Anatomical Museum of Trinity College, where she witnessed a performance consisting of a dance, executed by means of a system of pulleys, by the skeleton of the informer "Jemmy O'Brien." The husband of the woman who took her little charge to this ghastly entertainment had, it subsequently transpired, been done to to death by O'Brien, afterwards himself hanged for murder, and she took a grim pleasure in the show.

Another, and even more singular, instance of the feeling with which the class was regarded, lasting down almost to our own day and shared by the servants of their employers, is furnished by the fact that it was found necessary at the "Informers' Home," as it was popularly called-an institution kept up by Government, and said to be a relic of the "Battalion of Testimony"-to lodge the police in charge of the