“It happened that the barony of Carbery, in the county of Kildare, was proclaimed under the Insurrection Act, and a camp established in it, which was occupied by the Fraser Fencibles. One evening the commanding officer, a Captain Fraser, returning to camp from Maynooth, where he had dined and drank freely, passed through a district belonging to my father, which was very peaceable and had not been included in the proclamation. As Captain Fraser rode through the village of Cloncurry attended by an orderly dragoon, just as the summer sun was setting, he saw an old man, named Christopher Dixon, upon the roadside, engaged in mending his cart. The Captain challenged him for being out after sunset in contravention of the terms of the proclamation. Dixon replied that he was not in a proclaimed district, and that he was engaged in his lawful business, preparing his cart to take a load to Dublin the following day. The Captain immediately made him prisoner, and placed him on horseback behind his orderly. The party proceeded about half a mile in this manner to a turnpike, where the officer got into a quarrel with the gatekeeper, and some delay took place, of which Dixon took advantage to beg of the turnpike man to explain that the district in which he was taken was not proclaimed, and that, therefore, there was no just ground for his arrest. While the altercation was proceeding, the poor old man (he was about eighty years of age) slipped off from the dragoon’s horse and was proceeding homewards when the officer and soldier followed him, and having despatched him with sixteen dirk and sabre wounds, of which nine were declared to be mortal, they rode off to the camp. A coroner’s inquest was held on the body, and a verdict of wilful murder returned; whereupon Mr. Thomas Ryan, a magistrate and the immediate landlord of Dixon under my father, proceeded to the camp, with a warrant for the apprehension of Captain Fraser, who, however, was protected by his men, and Mr. Ryan was driven off. Mr. Ryan applied to my father, who sent me with him to Lord Carhampton, then commander-in-chief in Ireland. We were accompanied by Colonel (afterwards General Sir George) Cockburn; and Mr. Ryan having produced the warrant, and Colonel Cockburn having pointed out the provision of the Mutiny Act bearing upon the case, we formally demanded the body of Fraser, which his lordship refused to surrender. At the next assizes Captain Fraser marched into Athy, with a band playing before him, and gave himself up for trial. The facts were clearly proved; but the sitting judge, Mr. Toler[1] (afterwards Lord Norbury), instructed the jury that ‘Fraser was a gallant officer, who had only made a mistake; that if Dixon were as good a man as he was represented to be, it was well for him to be out of this wicked world; but if he were as bad as many others in the neighbourhood (looking at me, who sat beside him on the bench), it was well for the country to be quit of him.’ The Captain