Of this trip Tone kept for his wife’s amusement a diary, a practice which he continued, when he was absent from her, to the end of his life. He and she were diligent readers of Swift, and he invokes the memory of Swift and Stella when he writes to tell her of all the news he has “journalised” for her, and which he looks forward to reading over with her when he gets home. He has christened his friend, Russell, “P.P. or Clerk of this Parish”—another reminiscence of Swift,[62] and he promises his wife she will be much amused by said P.P.’s “exploits in my journal, which is a thousand times wittier than Swift’s, as in justice it ought, for it is written for the amusement of one a thousand times more amiable than Stella.” Footnote 62: In the “Memoirs of the Clerk of the Parish,” Swift parodied Bishop Burton’s “History of His Own Times.” Little, perhaps, did this dear lady, “a thousand times more amiable than Stella,” think, as her charming face dimpled over her husband’s ludicrous account of his own and his friend’s adventures, that she was reading one of the most important chapters in Irish history. For the business afoot in Belfast—the aim and object of Tone’s and Russell’s embassy was nothing less than the establishment of the United Irishmen—the union of Irish Catholics, Irish Protestants and Irish Dissenters under the common name of Irish _men_ against the common enemy. But perhaps she did, for nobody can have known better than she what a serious aim, what strength of will and tenacity of purpose, what a steel-like grip of principles and logical fidelity to their consequences lay under the light surface of her husband’s wit and drollery. The best minds in Ireland were the quickest to grasp Tone’s greatness and genius: Thomas Addis Emmet, John Keogh, Plunkett—to take three, out of three very different types. The best minds in France showed, afterwards, a like readiness of appreciation: Carnot, the Organiser of Victory, and General Hoche. One thing, however, it is certain, Matilda Tone never dreamed of: the way in which the Journal’s family jokes—bad, if you like, as family jokes always are, except to the “family” itself, to whom they seem irresistibly funny—were to be interpreted against the diarist and his friend. It was one of the favourite jests of the merry little party of holiday-makers at Irishtown to represent “Tom” Russell, who was dignity and solemnity itself, something like a Spanish Don, in his courtesy and punctilio,[63] as a desperate character, a regular Jonah Barrington type of “Irishman.” It tickled their sense of the ludicrous, something in the same way as when they found Tone setting his dignified friend to cook the dinner in his “fine suit of laced regimentals.” “If you do not know who P.P. was, the joke will be lost on you,” writes Tone _à propos_ to the incidents in which solemn “P.P.” is made to figure as a regular “hell of a fellow.” Footnote 63: