"Well, you see, Sir," said my Old Jewry friend to me, "the week as Barrett wos hung wos a busy week with us. Up all night sometimes and all day, searching the holes and corners and dark places of the city for Fenians. We got information that they wos going to blow up St. Pauls, one day--another day we hears that they had a plot to bust hup the Bank of Hingland--then they were to burn down the Tower and the 'Oss Guards, and then somebody told us that they meant to send Westminster Habbey and Buckingham Palace sky high--and this way and that way we wos worrited to death with hinformation. One night I was detailed to St. Paul's to watch the crypts or vaults under the Cathedral, where the Fenians intended to put a lot of gunpowder to blow it hup. I staid there all night with some more of the men detailed, and a precious cold job it wos, we hiding among the vaults snapping our fingers and shivering like geese in a pond, and not a Fenian within three miles of us. That wos a lark, and the newspapers laughed at us, and had comic picters of us standing in the cold, for their hedification." "Another night we hexpected them to set fire to the 'Ouses of Parlyment, and a blessed shame it would have been to have destroyed sich a fine hedifice, and there I wos night after night, a-playing hide and seek among the galleries and Towers of the 'Ouse, watching for Fenians and hexpecting to get a stab in the back, and all the time I wos wishing as how I could get relief, so as to get a pot o' beer in the King's Arms in Parlyment street." [Sidenote: DYING FOR AN IDEA.] "Well, Sir, at last came the busting and blowing up of Clerkenwell Prison, and a nice row that made all through England--and while the fellows as did it walked off quite cooly--Barrett and a few more who wos suspected, and who wos as I believe really hinnocent--of the Clerkenwell affair--wos taken and tried right over here in the Sessions Court (pointing with his hand over the wall of the Old Bailey Court), and he stood up in the dock that day as he wos found guilty, and I must say he was as brave a man as I ever saw--and defied the big wigs and all on them, and said he was not afraid to die, and then he told them that if it was twenty lives he would give it for "dear Ireland,"--thems just the words he said, and although I don't like Fenians or Fenianism, I must say for him that he was no more afraid than I was, that is if you can judge from a man's face at such a hawful minute. "The night afore his execution I was in his cell; I was let in by a friend of mine the turnkey, and I spoke to him kindly, cos you see I didn't feel exactly like as if he wos a man who had committed a common murder or robbed for a living, cos why, you see, a lawyer told me as how he was dying for an idea, like Russell or Hampden or some others of them Big Guns. "I sez to him: "How do you feel Mr. Barrett?"