Kildare men, whom Emmet meant to head in person, actually reached the city, and left it again. They had met and talked with him, and were not satisfied with the number and quality of the weapons, chiefly primitive inventions of his own; and because Dublin confederates were not produced for inspection (such was Emmet’s caution where others were concerned), the canny farmers returned homewards, spreading the ill word along the roads that Dublin had refused to act. Each imaginable prospect grew darker than its alternative. But the curtain had to rise now, let results be what they might. About nine o’clock, Emmet being in such a state of speechless agitation as may be conceived, one Quigley rushed in with the false report that the Government soldiery were upon them. There was nothing to do but sally forth in the hope of augmented numbers, once the move was made. The poor “General,” in his green-and-white-and-gold uniform, at the head of some eighty insubordinates, took in the bitter situation at a glance: he foresaw how his holy insurrection would dwindle to a three-hours’ riot, how his dream, with all its costly architecture, was ending like snow in the gutter. Hardly had he set out on foot, with drawn sword, through the town, accompanied by the faithful Stafford and two or three associates, followed confusedly by the uncontrollable crowd, when an uproar rose from the rear; there was a sudden commotion which ended in wounds and death to a citizen and an officer; then the spirit of rowdyism, private pillage, and indiscriminate slaughter took the lead. While it ran high, Arthur Wolfe, Lord Kilwarden, Lord Chief-Justice, the one unfailingly humane and deservedly beloved judge in all Ireland, was killed. He was driving in from the country with his daughter and his nephew, the Rev. Richard Wolfe; finding the carriage stopped in Thomas Street, he put his grey head out at the window in the pleasant evening light, announcing the honoured name which, as he thought he knew, would be his passport through the maddest mob ever gathered. A muddle-brained creature, quite mistaken as to facts, and acting in revenge for a wrong never inflicted, unmercifully piked him: a fate paralleled only by the unpremeditated assassination in our own time of that other kindest heart, Lord Frederick Cavendish. It is significant that some in the ranks afterwards made separately in court the unasked declaration that had they been near enough, Lord Kilwarden’s life should have been saved at the expense of their own. Such, indeed, was the general feeling. It has been carelessly stated that Emmet was not far from the scene of the outrage, and arrived, in a fury, just too late to prevent the second horror, the stabbing to death of Mr. Wolfe; and that it was he who took the unfortunate Miss Wolfe, to whom no violence was offered, from the carriage. But records now show conclusively that (as he once said) he had withdrawn from that part of Dublin before the murders came to pass.