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 and ought to do. I might set my character fairly before all whom it concerned to understand it, and I might expose the base devices employed in the trials already held. Whispers continued to come to me of the peculiar enmity with which Lord Clarendon regarded me, and, meditating on the probable consequences I had to encounter, I suddenly determined to enlarge my design from a vindication of my character to a defence of my liberty and future life. Mr. Mitchel had warned the Viceroy that one of the two must be overthrown, and the stroke unhappily had fallen on the wrong one. The Confederates had frankly staked their lives in an attempt which the people did not support, and they necessarily failed. But was it not possible for me to do something rarer, to baffle and perhaps beat them in their dens of law, where juries were unblushingly packed and justice shamelessly parodied? I had been called the organiser of the party, and I resolved to strain every faculty to compass this work.

The story of my imprisonment and of the numerous indictments and trials which followed it, the protracted struggle and final defeat of the Government, have been told elsewhere in detail, and I shall not repeat it here. But to preserve the continuity of the present narrative, I must fly through the principal events of that era, and fix their chronological relation to the story still untold. In the end I was the only prisoner not convicted (except Williams, let off by the connivance of the Crown Solicitor), and I now propose to make the reader understand how this marvellous result was brought about.

A consultation with my counsel was held in prison. The leader, Mr. Butt, to great rhetorical powers added a close familiarity with the law of State prosecutions, and a lively sympathy with the National- party, which now for the first time he avowed. The juniors were my friends, Sir Colman O'Loghlen and John O'Hagan, who bent their whole powers to second the leader. The skill and assiduity of my counsel would count for much, but I felt that something more was