et in, and
demoralization is the child of impatience. At last the head centre
appeared; he had five guns for the whole party. Then the men saw that
their hopes were betrayed. Most of them quietly dispersed towards their
homes. That night Mat was seized in his bed, and within a few minutes
afterwards was in goal. He felt that the game was up, that all his
bright hopes, like those of many another noble Irish heart before him,
had ended in farcical nothingness. Disaster followed upon disaster. When
he made his appearance in court he saw upon the witness table one of his
most trusted friends, who was about to give the evidence that would
ensure his conviction.

A final outrage was in store for him. The Government had resolved, when
once it had entered upon the campaign against the conspiracy, to pursue
it with vigor, and judges were selected who might be relied upon to show
the accused no justice during the trial, and no mercy after the
conviction. Crowe, who had been made a judge shortly after his last
election for Ballybay, was naturally chosen as the chief and most useful
actor in this drama. During all the years that had elapsed since his
treason he had distinguished himself, even above all the other judges of
the country, in the unscrupulous violence of his hostility to all
popular movements. Trial before him came to be regarded as certainty of
conviction. The fearlessness of the man made him inaccessible to the
threats that were everywhere hurled against him, and his rage became the
fiercer and his violence the more relentless on the day after he found a
threatening letter under a plate on his own table. He brought to his
task all the ferocity of the apostate. Under all his apparent
independence, his quick vanity and his hot temper made him sensitive to
attack, and the Fenian Press had made him the chief target of its most
vehement and most constant invective.

Mat Blake was known as one of the bitterest writers and speakers of the
movement, and some of the writings in which he had attacked Crowe
displayed a familiarity with the incidents of Ballybay elections which
could only have come from the pen of one who had been intimately
associated with those struggles.

The two men now stood face to face--the one on the bench and the other
in the dock. Crowe did not allow himself to betray any sign of previous
acquaintance with the prisoner before him. The jury was selected; every
man who might be supposed to have the lea