do so and he in
the meantime went to prepare his friends.

I returned to my confidants of the first conference and "reported
progress." It was rather difficult to find a trusty messenger. I
volunteered to go myself, but they would not hear of it. At last a man
who could be depended on was obtained, and, armed with certain passwords
(unintelligible except to those for whom they were intended) he left to
go through Roscommon and Westmeath into Tipperary by Borrisokane and
Nenagh.

Simultaneously with this, agents went abroad in the country, and I, by
the advice of the local leaders, went to lodge under Benbulben in the
character of a Dublin student in search of health and exercise during
the summer vacation. Within a week we expected to be openly arrayed
against the authorities, and no man that I saw shrank from the prospect.

From my lodgings under Benbulben I made a visit to Bundoran to meet some
friends from Donegal who were anxious to consult me as to the state of
the county. By an odd chance I lodged in the same house with the
stipendiary magistrate, Sir Thomas Blake, and had to go through his
bedroom to my own. We met frequently but he was quite unsuspicious. He
has, I find since, been dismissed from his office, after an ineffectual
search for me through the county, a month from the time we had lived
under the same roof.

While our messenger had gone south there arrived one from our friends in
Scotland. Him I sent back the same night to expedite affairs there. In
the meanwhile, on such maps as we had, my friends and I studied the
roads and the formation of the country. There is in this part of Ireland
a plateau of about twenty-five miles square of broken or mountainous
ground. Of this district Ballinamore in Leitrim might be considered the
centre; there are but three main roads leading through it--the Boyle
road, the Red Lion road, and the Ballysodare road--which could all be
easily rendered impassable, passing as they do over rapid streams,
through narrow defiles or across extensive marshes. There is no great
military depot within the district--Enniskillen, Athlone, and even
Castlebar being within the spurs of the mountains. Sligo, its chief town
was, as we saw, poorly garrisoned, and yet as a seaport of the second
class it contained many things of the greatest use in a military
movement--as lead, arms, canvas, tools, money, ships' stores,
breadstuffs, types for proclamations and even some small cannon. From