itself, if necessary, must be blown into smithereens. Small men had been good enough for small work. Now General Lake himself, Commander of the Forces _pro tem_., must head the Royal troops; the loyal Lords and Commons had no need to knock their knees together, their precious, honourable lives were in no real danger--never had been. General Lake and his men would set matters straight in a trice. Having torn them at last from the whisky-bottle of Capua, Father Murphy led his forces against Arklow. His men were dispirited, unnerved by excessive carousing. Their heads ached; they felt unwell. Murphy and some other warrior-priests said mass for them as they stood bareheaded in the June sunlight, with nature smiling around. 'It was a holy war,' Murphy said. 'They had been guilty of backsliding; but man is weak and temptation is great; he would pray to the Holy Mother for them, that the cause might not suffer through their sin. He who addressed them, was, as they knew, invulnerable. These myriad bullets which he held in his hand had passed through his coat' ('See, boys, the holes!'), 'but could not hurt his skin. 'Twas the Holy Mother who watched over him and them. He would lead the van. Sure they would follow their priest--their pastor--their friend--their gineral!' With howls of ecstatic and repentant fervour they cried out that they would. He had always led them to victory, their doughty priest! One more, two more successes, and Dublin would be theirs; then the whole country would unite; the Sassenagh would be driven into the sea; the object of the crusade would be accomplished--and through them, miserable sinners though they were. They marched against Arklow on the 9th, and were repulsed thence with awful slaughter. The Royalists lost sixty men, the rebels left a thousand corpses stark upon the grass--amongst them, Murphy the invulnerable. With dismay and despair they beheld his body roasted by the enlightened foe; in the gloaming they saw devils, in the guise of yeomen, dancing round the steaming corpse; fiends cleaning their boots with the fat that dripped from it. With howls of superstitious horror now they scurried away in the darkness, over field and hedge and fosse, through dyke and brake, in an agony of desperate fear quite different from a battle-panic, and arrived at length at the rendezvous like madmen, panting, incoherent, to tell their fearsome story.