Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/59

 leaders for their local journal, founded by a Protestant patriot, the once famous John Morgan. The Catholics of Belfast, who amounted to fifty thousand, and included several men of opulence, determined to have a journal of their own, and they sent a deputation to Dublin to find an editor with the help of O'Connell. O'Connell recommended T. M. Hughes, but Hughes declined to live in Belfast, and finally I was chosen; and, as the new journal was to be a bi-weekly one, I was relieved for ever from the exhausting slavery of a daily paper.

The leaders of the Monaghan Liberal Club, who knew me from birth, entertained me at a public dinner in my native town to launch me in my career with a parting hurrah. In the half century that followed I sat at many feasts, but the exquisite flavour and intoxicating odour of the first never returned. I was then twenty-three years of age, in impaired health, but devoured with ambition to do something memorable for Ireland. My apprenticeship to journalism was short, not exceeding three years, and henceforth I was called on to exercise authority instead of obeying it.