unnecessary to enter into any arrangements to induce me to be present at your trial. Neither time nor distance of place are of any importance to me when I have even a remote prospect of being of the slightest service to you.
"I shall, please God, be in Dublin before the end of this month, and shall be happy to receive any communication from you at the Imperial Hotel.
"It would be well if you could procure for me a copy of the Belfast Vindicator and Newry Examiner containing the report of that memorable party, the Newry Soirée. Believe me, with highest respect, your ever grateful and affectionate friend,
"Theobald Mathew."
The curious and instructive story still remains to be told how the foul strokes of the Irish Executive, like the fiends' bullets in the German opera, struck not the victim but his assailants. While all the facts were fresh in the public memory, in the memory of my enemies as well as of my friends. I narrated them in a letter to Lord Clarendon in the Nation, I can never tell the tale more briefly or more feelingly, and I reprint the letter in the next chapter, that no one who cares to know shall be ignorant how justice was administered in Ireland fifty years ago, and how malignant animosity "may o'erleap its selle and fall on t'other side."
