or of the loss of property, deemed inevitable at the hands of the infuriated foe, who, but the previous day, had in a great degree rifled, and partly burnt down, the adjacent town of Enniscorthy, and piked, without mercy, every obnoxious person that fell into their power. And recollecting the feelings formerly noticed in Sir William, with reference to the question of the probable success of the insurgents in an attack upon the town, his newly-acquired hopes, derived even from his general conclusions of the position of affairs, may easily be imagined by the reader.

The progress of events, which he could not follow, we are obliged to trace for him.

Few of the inhabitants of Wexford retired to repose upon the night of his arrest. The whole garrison remained under arms; but as the watchword of continued safety passed from sentinel to sentinel, it often changed, notwithstanding its literal import, into a cadence which well might seem to argue the approach of the enemy.

Yet hope had not yet quite fled the breasts of the military and citizens. An express, promising succour to Wexford, arrived during the evening, from a general officer, who, at the first intelligence of the sudden cry to war in the County of Wexford, had set off from the Fort of Duncannon, in the contiguous County of Waterford: and it was not till daybreak that the friends to whom he had pledged his services, learned how incompetent to redeem this pledge this commander proved to be.

Either insensible of the now formidable foe he had to encounter, or incapable of judicious measures, he had left Duncannon almost alone, purposing to meet, at a village eight miles distant from the threatened town, some militia and cannon, while his main force was to follow in his route. Upon the night previous to the attack of Wexford, he gained the point of rendezvous; the militia had not come up, and he retired to rest. But while he enjoyed his sleep, they arrived; and unconscious of his presence in the hamlet, and supposing him in advance, pushed on. Some time after day-dawn, they were espied by the insurgents winding down a hilly road to the left of their position; overwhelming numbers poured down from the rocky eminence; one officer and a score of privates of the military became prisoners; the rest were slain almost before they could be aware of their danger; the ammunition they guarded accidently blew up during the contest; but, besides the arms of the killed and the captive, the shouting victors now dragged up to their high encampment two small pieces of cannon.

The general, thus taken napping, learned, when he awoke, the fate of this detachment; his main force had, however, come up, and in time perhaps to revenge. their comrades, and still assist Wexford; but, ordering them to retreat, he left Wexford to assist itself, and fled precipitately the way he had advanced.

A force destined to co-operate with this injudicious or unhappy commander, supposed to be still advancing, marched out of Wexford to make a diversion in his favour. One of its officers, pushing on to reconnoitre, was shot at a long distance by a shelmalier, and upon his death ensued the rapid retreat into garrison of the body he had in part commanded.

It was resolved to evacuate Wexford. Two fresh negotiators were sent out to make terms with the dreaded foe. Full and unmolested possession of the town was tendered, provided the insurgents would stipulate to spare life and property. This condition the leaders haughtily refused, unless, after the departure of the garrison, their arms, ammunition, and accoutrements, should be found in the barracks by the besiegers; and while the ambassadors went back with this answer, the insurgents hotly followed in their footsteps.

In about an hour afterwards, Sir William Judkin, listening, along with his brother captives, to every sound, great and little, that could reach them from abroad, heard a shout, so faint it must have come from a distance, and yet its character was that of one emitted continuously by thousands of human throats. Appalled silence only at first answered it in the town; but anon, shrieks, shrill and despairing, mixed with all the gradually rising clamour of precipitate flight and confusion, responded to its repeated challenge. As the invaders came near, the two previously distinct uproars merged into one; then, by degrees, intense cheers of mad exultation began to rise over every other sound-gained at length sole and tremendous mastery, rang nearer and nearer to Sir William's prison-walls, burst around them and above them, like-if it could be-shrill thunder; and amid the clang of shivered bolt and bar, of answering shouts under the same roof with him, of stamping and rushing, and roaring along vaulted passages and through echoing dungeons-Sir William, his own lungs almost frantically adding to the terrible diapase, and his own rush and bound not less uncontrolled than that of any ecstatic insurgent or liberated captive around him-Sir William was again free!

CHAPTER VII.

WHILE Some of the meaner of the enlarged captives flung up their hats and mingled with their liberators, and while others of more consideration were hailed with frantic greetings, and clamorously appointed to the dignity of leaders, Sir William, after the first effusion of his own wild joy, seemed to become equally insensible to the yells that still pealed around him, and to the furious action by which, exuberant at all times as is the impassioned gesticulation of the Irish peasant, the victors manifested their sense of continued success.

Having crossed the threshold of his prison, he stood aside, his back leaning against its wall, a moody and uninterested man amidst the exultation of thousands, and solely self-occupied in endeavouring to shape out some course by which his enfranchisement might be made serviceable to his private views. Hasty accounts, interchanged between his late fellow-prisoners and their liberators, of yesterday's proceedings; rapid allusions to the state of the town, to the sudden flight of its garrison, and some of its inhabitants, towards Ross, and of others towards the ships in the harbour; all this was lost upon his ear. One only sentence, uttered by a friendly citizen, raised his attention. The man spoke of Sir Thomas Hartley's death, and went on to mention that, in the course of the day, his carriage had arrived in Wexford, strongly guarded by a body of yeomen, and that, at the door of a particular house, a lady, closely veiled and cloaked, had descended from it. Sir William sprang to the speaker, seized his arm, pulled him to himself, learned the name of the proprietor of the house spoken of, and then, no longer inactive, he pushed through the throng, one sole object engaging his mind.

To the wild confusion around he still remained indifferent. If, during his furious progress through the obstructed streets, a door was battered in, and a faint shriek succeeded to the crash, he heard or regarded it not. Nay, when a miserable fugitive, winged by the fear of a shocking death, had gained some advance of his pursuers, flung himself at Sir William's feet, and with upturned features of supplicating despair, and burning, starting eyes, piteously claimed his protection-he but stopped to unloose from his knees the wretch's grasping hands-to hurl him to his executioners, muttering "Talbot, were it you?"-and then he pursued his way.

But a more serious incident, in which, merely to break down

impediments to his own business, he was obliged to bear a part, caused farther interruption to his career.

The Insurgents had stipulated that life and property should be spared, provided the arms, ammunition, and accoutrements of the garrison, were left behind. But the garrison abandoned the town so precipitately as, in many instances, to abandon, at the same time, their wives and children-before even the return, from the besiegers, of their own envoys; and consequently they did not comply with terms which they would not tarry to learn. The invading throng, disappointed of the expected spoils, which, above all others, they valued, pronounced, as impetuously as their foes had fled before them, that faith was broken towards the Wexford army of liberty; and the black passions of the multitude, that in a degree had been tamed by the pride of conscious predominance, and by exhortations from the leaders to uphold, in its dignity, the high character of conquerors, began, like the first tossing of the waters beneath the scourge of the tempest, to lash each other with a fury which threatened fearful retaliation.

A street, through which Sir William must neccssarily pass, was densely blocked up by the greater number of the wrathful concourse; and, as he joined their outskirts, they had just evinced omens of this dangerous mood, when three or four leaders, headed by Father General Rourke, springing into laudable energy, called on him to assist in allaying the rising gust, that they well knew, if once fully let loose, it would be as difficult to conciliate as the matured violence of the ocean-rage, to which we have likened its symptoms.

Chiefly for the purpose of scattering the throng, through whose wedged array he could not hope to penetrate, Sir William answered the claim made upon him, and followed Rourke into the midst of the howling people, exerting himself, as all the other leaders did, to produce the much-desired result; but by none of their commanders were the multitude so effectually swayed as by the clerical captain, as, with the accost of rude, authoritative intrepidity, he rode boldly amongst them-sparing, when advice and explanation failed, neither spiritual anathema, nor more substantial blows; all quailed beneath his voice or arm: and Wexford, on the point of destruction, was saved. Afterwards, indeed, some houses, deserted, closed up, and therefore showing a face of inhospitality, were broken open and pillaged; and also some belonging to persons who had been marked down as notorious enemies to the Insurgent cause. A few lives were sacrificed too to individual hate or ferocity, which nothing could control; but, although upon every side reigned utter turbulence, injury to property or life was partial, and by no means ensued to the extent that might be feared from a host of revengeful men, masters over all, and armed with the full power to do mischief. And here, let us add a fact, which,

in the estimation of every candid inquirer into human nature, must throw a redeeming ray of grace around the blackest crimes perpetrated in hasty vengeance by the Irish Insurgents of 1798. During their moments of maddest licentiousness, neither in the town or county of Wexford, nor in any other town or county over which insurrection spread its blaze, occasionally destroying as it listed, was female honour once outraged; or, excepting a single peculiar and fearful instance, female blood shed!

But, after Sir William's escape through the dispersing throng, the house to which he forced his way, proved to be one of those inarked out for destruction, as belonging to a yeoman captain, who had been distinguished for “activity," as it was called, "previous to the rising." And, to add to his fears at this intelligence, he farther learned, ere he could scramble past the threshold, that, surely anticipating the fate which awaited him, its proprietor, like the innkeeper at Enniscorthy, had fled from Wexford before the arrival of the Insurgents, and left all the females of his family to the mercy of those he most dreaded.

"An' they're before you, in the house, if you want 'em, Ginerel," added his informant.

Through an astounding jumble of crash and vociferation in the lower part of the house, Sir William sprang up-stairs, and burst his way into the principal room. Here was but a continuation of the scene he had escaped from below. Windows were shattered,* and furniture was dashed to pieces and flung out through them into the street; and mingled with the shout of fury came the shout of merriment: the wildest act of destruction, in accordance with the hidden character of the Irish peasant, often producing the heartiest laugh:-hidden we have called that character, and it is so;-its minor traits, indeed, such as appear, or are put forward, in every-day intercourse, any one may catch; but owing to a long habit of abstraction, or rather banishment from all interchange of social thought or feeling with those ranking above him, the real moral elements that form every kind of character-the springings of the heart, and the mental combinations, no matter how rude, which end in impulse-those secrets of his inner heart, the Irish peasant keeps concealed to the present hour, as well from the oppressors he hates, as from the friends who, if they knew him better, could better serve him.

Sir William's eye lighted on a man he had before seen in almost a similar situation. It was no other than the individual who had sold him his own miniature and his bride's gloves and weddingring, in the inn at Enniscorthy; and still this person seemed to be the presiding genius of discovery in the work of pillage. With a heavy hammer he battered at a chest of drawers; and ere, one by one, he tossed out the contents of each drawer to his crowding followers, he might be observed to run his own hand, with much