But a competent General was exactly what the insurgents lacked; for Cluseret, having surveyed the whole situation with eyes trained by a lifelong experience of war, decided that the scheme was hopeless, and returned to Paris. Such were some--for I have only mentioned a few--of the incidents which made 1867 a memorable year. On my own memory it is stamped with a peculiar clearness. On Wednesday morning, the 2nd of October, 1867, as we were going up to First School at Harrow, a rumour flew from mouth to mouth that the drill-shed had been attacked by Fenians. Sure enough it had. The caretaker (as I said before) lived some way from the building, and when he went to open it in the morning he found that the door had been forced and the place swept clean of arms and ammunition. Here was a real sensation, and we felt for a few hours "the joy of eventful living"; but later in the day the evening papers, coming down from London, quenched our excitement with a greater. It appeared that during the night of the 1st of October, drill-sheds and armouries belonging to the Volunteer regiments had been simultaneously raided north, south, east, and west of London, and all munitions of war spirited away, for a purpose which was not hard to guess. Commenting on this startling occurrence, the papers said: "We have reason to believe that one of the ablest of the Fenian agents has been for some time operating secretly in the United Kingdom. He has been traced to Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London. It is believed at Scotland Yard that he organized these attacks on Volunteer headquarters, arranged for the arms and ammunition to be transferred by a sure hand to Ireland, and has himself returned to Paris." A friend of mine who had gone up to London to see a dentist brought back a _Globe_ with him, and, as he handed it to me, he pointed out the passage which I have just cited. As I read it, my heart gave a jump--a sudden thrill of delicious excitement. My friend Mr. Aulif must be the Fenian agent who had organized these raids, and I, who had always dreamed romance, had now been brought into actual contact with it. The idea of communicating my suspicions to anyone never crossed my mind. I felt instinctively that this was a case where silence was golden. Fortunately, none of my school-fellows had seen Mr. Aulif or heard of his visit; and the old caretaker of the drill-shed had been too much gratified by talk and tip to entertain an unworthy thought of "that pleasant-spoken gentleman." Soon the story of these raids had been forgotten in the far more exhilarating occurrences at Manchester and Clerkenwell which closed the year; and the execution of Michael Barrett on the 26th of May, 1868 (the last public execution, by the way), brought the history of Fenianism in England to an end.