Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/81

 farmers, likely some day to break out with the suddenness and force of an earthquake.

I visited Dublin shortly after these conversations and went over the same ground with Dillon. I found that, as the aims of all three were identical, there would be no difficulty in harmonising our methods.

With Dillon I met a youngster, in whom I was greatly interested. Like myself he was a Northern, and a law student who had trained himself in a provincial town chiefly by the aid of books. John O'Hagan was still under twenty, but proved surprisingly well informed on whatever subject turned up in conversation, and with this intellectual agility he united the repose and authority of more mature years. When you are interested in a man it commonly happens that you hear of him in unexpected places, and every one who knew O'Hagan had something pleasant to tell of him. One of my kinsmen, living in the Argentine Republic, who had been his schoolfellow, wrote to me a little later: "I owe my love of books to John O'Hagan. When we were boys together in Newry, not above ten years of. age I should think, we read Shakespeare together day after day in a hayloft, and I got a taste for reading which I trust will never leave me. I shall probably never meet him on earth, but he is fitted to go to heaven, and I trust to meet him there some day." John O'Hagan became my fast friend from that time to his dying day. Starting from a memorable youth, he constantly developed unexpected powers. The tranquil, sagacious talker surprised his friends by passionate poetry, and the poet amazed them by proving a profound dialectician. Such a man was an invaluable recruit, and naturally became one of the cabinet council of the new journal as soon as it got organised.

The story of the sudden rise and amazing growth of the Nation has been told elsewhere. In a few weeks it was read everywhere in Ireland, and read with a sympathy and confidence which had not been given to a newspaper within the