the alarm was spread in all directions. The gentry of the disturbed
districts rushed into the nearest towns for protection; police from the
outlying barracks were called in to reinforce the threatened stations,
and troops were hastily summoned from Dublin and the neighbouring
garrisons. Meanwhile parties of the insurgents began to move about. One
proceeded to the police station at the Slate-quarries, and finding it
deserted--the policemen having retired on Piltown--burned it to the
ground. Another attempted the destruction of Grany bridge, to delay the
advance of the soldiery. A third proceeded to attack the Glenbower
station. The defenders of the barracks were in a rather critical
position when another party of police, on their way from the
Nine-Mile-House station to Carrick, came upon the spot, and the combined
force speedily put their half-armed assailants to flight, with a loss to
the latter of one man severely wounded and one killed. An attack was
made on the barrack at Portlaw, but with a like result; two men were
stricken dead by the bullets of the police. The people soon afterwards
scattered to their homes, and the soldiery and police had nothing to do
but hunt up for the leaders and other parties implicated in the
movement. John O'Mahony narrowly escaped capture on three or four
occasions. He lingered in the country, however, until after the
conviction of the state prisoners at Clonmel, when it became clear to
him that the cause was lost for a time; and he then took his way to
Paris, whither several of his fellow outlaws, for whose arrest the
government had offered large rewards, had gone before him.

In that famous centre of intellect and of intrigue, the focus of
political thought, the fountain-head of great ideas, John O'Mahony and
James Stephens pondered long over the defeat that had come upon the
Irish cause, and in their ponderings bethought them that the reason of
the failure which they deplored was to be found in the want of that
quiet, earnest, secret preparation, by means of which the Continental
revolutionists were able to produce from time to time such volcanic
effects in European politics, and cause the most firmly-rooted dynasties
to tremble for their positions. The system of secret conspiracy--that
ancient system, "old as the universe, yet not outworn"--a system not
unknown in Ireland from the days of the Attacots to those of the
Whiteboys--the system of Sir Phelim O'Neill and of Theobald Wolfe
T