In proportion as it nerved our purpose and urged us to desperation, did that fatal information scatter the agencies on which we were to depend. The most desperate hazards would be readily undertaken in that hour of gloom. One more effort we decided on, and the experiment was to be tried the next night. We heard Mr. Meagher also was arrested, and we resolved, in order to satisfy ourselves of the correctness of this and other reports, to put ourselves in direct communication with some person in the town of Clonmel. We accordingly proceeded to the neighbourhood of that town, within a mile of which, at the Waterford side, we established ourselves, and remained two days. Each day we sent in a messenger who brought us correct intelligence of what occurred; and satisfied us not alone that Mr. O'Brien was then in gaol, but that he was allowed to be torn from the midst of a people for whom he had perilled his life, without a hand being raised in his defence. We then returned to the scene of our former meetings, and met, for the last time, beside a little brook near the Waterford slate-quarries. My ambassadress had also returned, and there were present three or four others. The reunion was gloomy. But one question remained for discussion: Was there any hope left? The message I received as to the means of escape was dark and discouraging. Nothing remained but the hazards of some desperate enterprise. What had chiefly animated our hopes for the few days was the knowledge that disaffection and conspiracy existed in the ranks of the British army. But among other intelligence of evil omen that reached us was this, that the conspiracy had been discovered. Whether this were true or not, our means of communication were suspended; and, unable to learn what had occurred, we naturally concluded it was the worst. It is not quite correct to say, _we_, as far as the proceedings of these days in that neighbourhood were concerned. Neither Stephens nor myself was in communication with more than the one friend, to whose honour and heroism we would commit the liberty of the world. Never yet lived a man of more sanguine hope or intense patriotism. All the vigour of a gigantic intellect, aided by the endurance of great physical strength was tasked to the uttermost in attempting to rouse the broken energies of the country. He generally spent his nights in interviews with the chief men of the surrounding districts, while his duty by day was to communicate the result to us, and secure a place of safety for the ensuing night. Our last conference was of course the longest and most anxious. There was no chance within the range of possibility we did not discuss. Of the intensity of our feelings, some idea may be formed by the fact, that the one woman who was of the party, whose sole stay on this earth I was, as well as the sole stay of her sister and a most helpless little family, never uttered one word of remonstrance against any project, however desperate, which was proposed.