Page:A Memorial of John Boyle O'Reilly from the City of Boston.djvu/68

62 constitutional agitation, and was unquestionably the greatest factor in making the American people a unit for Parnell and Irish Home Rule.

In 1863 he returned to Ireland, and enlisted in the 10th Hussars, where he spent three years, furthering the revolutionary cause and learning the art of war for future use.

In 1866 he was arrested in Dublin on the secret evidence of an informer, tried before a special military commission, with Color-Sergeant McCarthy and the late Corporal Thomas Chambers, and on June 27, the eve of his twenty-second birthday, was convicted on five capital charges, and sentenced to death. Later the sentence was commuted, first to imprisonment for life, then to twenty years' penal servitude. He was imprisoned successively in the English prisons at Chatham, Portsmouth, Portland, and Dartmoor. At this last he and his comrades reverently gathered and buried the bones of the French and American prisoners of the War of 1812, which the English authorities had left uncovered, after they had been uprooted from their shallow graves by the prison pigs. Over the grave they raised a humble slab bearing the motto: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"

In October, 1867, he was transported to the penal colony of Western Australia with sixty other political prisoners, among them Denis B. Cashman, now of Boston. In February, 1869, he escaped from the penal colony in a boat, assisted by the Rev. Patrick