Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/43

 ' you have been writing. I think not. Do you remember when you wrote the sketch of Carleton for the Boston Pilot, how vehemently I warned you against N.P. Willis-ing? It is an American vice which European literature abhors. Then the sketch of Mangan was in shocking taste, and a mere romance. ' He never borrowed more than 2s. 6d., forsooth! I lent him nearly a hundred pounds, and never gave him, but once, a sum smaller than £1—sometimes £5 or £10. The public have nothing to do with facts of this nature, pro or con, even if they are true, but you put him into a light at once mean and false to nature.

"John M'Keon, the Honourable John of your New York Irish Directory, has been here lately, and brought me an introduction from Dillon, and I learned from him the history of that ambitious experiment. I recognise now how fatally too late had been our appeal to America postponed by one of the whimsies which the people accepted from Mr. Mitchel as an oracle, that they had no need of assistance of any sort.

"Remember me to honest Michael Crean. The burr of his Clare brogue in the Council sounded sweetly in my ears, for it sounded always on the right side. Tell him I hope to shake his honest hand some day before I die."

Of my exiled comrades I got elaborate reports from Meagher, and short practical ones from MacManus. The first letter from the latter covers all the necessary ground with a rapidity like the seven-leagued boots of fiction:—

"A friend going to England affords me an opportunity of writing you a hurried line about ourselves. We had on the whole rather an agreeable passage—a small cabin to ourselves with separate sleeping berths. We were rather badly off for provisions, and water was scarce and bad. Our health was good all through. We were not allowed to converse with either officers or men. Since we came here we are separated, but O'Doherty's, Meagher's and Martin's districts meet at a certain point, and once a week they can