At this moment the position of the insurgents was by no means a despicable one, despite the weakness of their leaders. The failure at New Ross had compelled them for the time to abandon their attack on Waterford. But they held Enniscorthy and its river, and Wexford with its noble harbour; while, for a base of operations, nothing could have been better than Vinegar Hill. To the north, too, they held Gorey, which was almost, from their point of view, the key of the capital itself. The hedges along the Dublin road were alive with disaffected peasants, who were longing for an opportunity of joining the advancing host. Arklow was half garrisoned, Wicklow scarcely garrisoned at all. If the rebel host had, ignoring whisky, marched straight northward, the march would have been an exultant progress of heroes, swelled as it proceeded by a torrent of exhilarated patriots. But now the mice had played enough. They had nibbled the cheese and made unpleasant holes in it. It was time for the cat to pounce, and to pounce with a will. How dared these arrogant mice make holes in his Majesty's cheese? Arklow would be the next point--of course it would--so soon as the victors of Gorey could tear themselves away from alcohol. Five days of constant intoxication is trying to the most vigorous frame. Five days of cessation of hostilities is eminently convenient to an enemy who desires to act unflurried. Dublin was frightened out of its wits; the heads of the Catholic clergy were indignant and ashamed. Those lords and gentlemen who did not happen to be slaves of Lord Clare, or pensioners of England, shut themselves up in their country mansions to brood over their grief. Erin was in the convulsions which precede dissolution. The Executive--calculating spectators of the agony--deemed it time to come to her succour, provided she would swear an oath to behave herself for ever and ever more. The Executive shook its wig and declared that to stop so awful a scandal any means were permissible. Instead of dribbling reinforcements by two or three hundred at a time, and so feeding the hopes of the rebels with sham victories, the Privy Council promised that the whole military strength at their command should be put in motion to punish the iniquitous with a severe and righteous sternness. Lord Clare assumed a picturesque attitude, in which sorrow was elegantly blended with anger--like that aggressive angel who never sinned, and who, glorying in the fact, postured with his waving sword at the gates of Eden. Lord Camden mumbled, as usual, that the whole affair was 'really too awful;' that he was glad her ladyship was safe; that he ought to be elevated to at least a dukedom as a reward for his prodigious services. The Protestant inhabitants of Wexford, whose lives for the last week or so had resembled those of the chosen people by the waters of Babylon, must instantly be relieved, he gurgled. Enniscorthy must be retaken; the camp at Vinegar Hill, and the hill