Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/342

 public till I was a free man again. And so your Birches and Balfes had the field to themselves.

On the 23rd of October O'Brien, Meagher, and their comrades were sentenced to death at Clonmel. On the 26th the Commission opened in Green Street, and I was brought up the second time for trial. How did I escape? By the sharp practice of the illustrious Earl of Clarendon. Once again, had you been content with the ordinary course of English law, you had me safe enough. But you charged your blunderbuss to the muzzle and it burst. Up to the night before the sitting of the Commission my solicitor could not ascertain for what offence, or on what indictment, I was to be tried. When the Court opened we found you had transferred me from the city to the county. I had lived ten years in Dublin—it was feared perhaps that the citizens knew me too well to be misled by your hired Press; for a sure stroke you carried me among men to whom I was unknown, except through the blood-red portraits of the Evening Post. Mitchel and Martin, who were tried before me, were tried in the city—O'Doherty and Williams, who remained to be tried after me, were tried in the city; but " my equals and neighbours, indifferently chosen," were to be found only in an Orange squirearchy, the débris of the Old Corporation, and superannuated Castle officials, gone into country quarters from Finglas to Glasthule.

But I had skilful and generous counsel, impatient to thwart you. They demonstrated that your practice had been too sharp, and was contrary to the express provisions of the law. When the venue is changed from one district to another, the removal of the prisoner by habeas corpus to the prison of the new district must take place ten days before the trial, in order to give him due notice and adequate time for preparation. You had not given me the legal notice nor half of it. Justice Crampton and Justice Torrens were compelled to pronounce, with lugubrious faces, that the trial could not take place in the new venue at that Commission. Thus a second Commission was lost by your sharp practice.