Although he scorned the worldly-wise advice of Arthur Wolfe, Mr. Curran was careful, when he could, to check open expressions of sedition at his table. On this very day he found it necessary several times to change the current of talk before the cloth was removed, when Sara, nodding pleasantly to Terence and to her undergraduate, rose and withdrew to her chamber. But there was a special reason on this particular day for an extra amount of wrath on the part of the young men, his guests, which did not fail to produce its answering growl from their host. That fresh arbitrary arrests should have taken place surprised him not at all--such proceedings were of daily occurrence. That Sirr, the town-major, should be enlarging his paid army of false-witnesses, who were becoming notorious as 'the band of testimony,' was also, alas, no new thing. That a man's life could be sworn away by one witness who had never seen him before was an awful fact; but then he, Mr. Curran, was at hand to protest, and the recognised forms of law still permitted an accused sometimes to baffle the paid malice of the informer. It was an open question, all admitted, how far a government might go in espionage. In moments of peril to the public weal it is certain that ministers must draw their information from any quarter, however foul; but to offer a premium to rascality is surely criminal. To gain information of facts from detectives is quite a different matter from the employment of secret agents to tempt people into sin and then hound them down. Robert Emmett brought news with him this day that seemed to foreshadow a change of tactics on the part of the executive--ominous news the discussion of which had made the party late upon the road, and which caused the young men, so soon as their hostess had retired, to abandon social gossip for more grave communion. 'Friends,' Robert said, 'they intend to exasperate us. There can be no more doubt about it, though I am in the dark as to their motives. Please God, Theobald's mission will be accomplished ere 'tis too late; the French will come to our succour before we are goaded to despair.' Cassidy, who had such a blundering tendency to do the wrong thing in the wrong place, here broke out into a new ditty which was beginning to be popular, trolling forth in his mellow voice: 'The French are on the say, says the Shan van Vocht; And will be here without delay, says the Shan van Vocht;' but he was sternly bidden to fill his glass and pass the round-bottomed bottle without making himself noisily objectionable; and, whatever other peccadillo he might think proper to commit, above all things to drink fair.