Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/283

 that St. Patrick's Day, a date only a month after the explosion in Paris, was fixed for a rising in Dublin. Under this impression he occupied all the strategic points in the capital with soldiers, and kept the students of Trinity College, the officers of the Bank of Ireland, the clerks and tide waiters at the Custom House, under arms during the night. It was not a surprising inference from the language of the United Irishman, but it was an altogether mistaken one. The little group of fanatics who were proclaiming immediate war à l'outrance had not provided so much as a basket of cartridge or a barrel of pike heads to begin the fight. I soon came to learn that Lord Clarendon honoured me with peculiar attention, which gradually grew more active and intense. I may notice one or two of the earlier incidents; the later ones will be dealt with hereafter. Among notable men in Dublin at this time there were three brothers named Kennedy, descendants of the old sept of O' Kennedy, but whose ancestors had reconciled themselves to the dominant Church and Government. Tristram was principal of a school of law and agent of the Marquis of Bath's estate in the county Monaghan, an office which he performed so humanely and discreetly that he was sent to Parliament in the popular interest a few years later than the period we have now reached. Colonel Pitt, the eldest, was a soldier who had served with distinction in India; and when he came home was so disgusted with the agrarian system he found in operation in Ireland that he relieved his heart by a pamphlet, whose purpose may be discerned from its title, "Instruct, Employ; Don't Hang 'Em"; but in this year it was whispered, and the whisper proved to be well founded, that he had become an agent to the Castle to furnish arms to the Northern Orangemen to be used against the Nationalists. The third brother was Dr. Evory, a fashionable accoucheur and a Court physician. The doctor was announced in the editor's room one afternoon, and called, he said, to have a little talk on current events. He had no intelligible business