I remember seeing him and speaking to him once, after he had received a free pardon, and become a member of parliament. No one could have looked on the great, capacious head, and the handsome, benevolent face, without questioning the system that had no better use for such a man than sending him to rot in penal servitude. Lord Palmerston beheld the ex-convict with profound admiration, and expressed deep sympathy with him as the victim of a bad system. John Martin preached and suffered for the very doctrines that Hugh Bronte enunciated with such passionate conviction. Where did he get those doctrines? I have a profound belief, though I have no positive proofs, that John Martin's beliefs and principles grew from seeds sown by Hugh Bronte, the servant boy. In this belief the Reverend W. McAllister and the Reverend David McKee shared, or, rather, my faith has grown from their convictions. Jane Harshaw, however she got them, carried the doctrines into the Martin family. They mingled with and strengthened her strong sense of duty, and they added passion to her lust after justice and the thing that was right. With her son John, the feeling of obligation to break the ban of Ireland's curse became irresistible. He was dowered with an inexhaustible grace of pity for all sufferers, and the impulse to redress the wrongs of the oppressed overpowered him and led him to acts of impatience and imprudence, which gave his cool-headed enemies the opportunity they were ready enough to embrace. But the revolutionary doctrines for which John Martin suffered came from the same seed that produced Charlotte Bronte's radical sentiments, and it is interesting to note that in both cases the seed produced its fruit about the same period (1847-1848). I must now leave these historical speculations, however plausible and probable they may be, and return to the direct narration of known facts. Hugh Bronte had disappeared forever from the Mount Pleasant kilns. Those who had plotted his dismissal exaggerated every foible of his life, and invented others, after he was gone, until, by a spiteful blending of fact and fancy, they made him into a monster. The farmers' sons and servants who carted lime from Mount Pleasant to County Down brought with them wonderful tales of his misdeeds and disgrace. And Alice McClory's guardians believed that he had disappeared forever into the distant South, from whence he had emerged. They never suspected that he was actually living in their neighborhood, and that he and Alice had met at Warrenpoint, Newcastle, and elsewhere. [1] As we shall see, the parish records of Hugh's marriage and Patrick's baptism are both lost, and though Patrick was schoolmaster in Glascar Presbyterian school, and in Drumgooland Episcopalian school, he has left no permanent record behind him in either place. Records in those days were ill-kept. IV. THE ELOPEMENT.