CHAPTER III
THE IRISH POLITICAL PRISONERS
The man who watched the ship to the line where the sea and the sky met was John Devoy.
Some time before there had come to him a voice, crying from the prisons of Western Australia, the land of slaves and bondmen, the penal colony of Great Britain. In the penal gangs were six of the comrades of John Boyle O'Reilly. Forlorn but not quite forgotten, they worked on the roads, "the weary work that has no wages, no promotion, no incitement, no variation for good or bad, except stripes for the laggard." O'Reilly had escaped from it, but he remembered the men who still toiled in the convict's garb on the government road.
"They were cutting their patient way into a forest only traversed before by the aborigine and the absconder," quoting from O'Reilly's "Moondyne."
"Before them in the bush, as in their lives, all was dark and unknown,—tangled underbrush, gloomy shadows, and noxious things. Behind them, clear and open, lay the straight road they had made—leading to and from the prison."
These men had been soldiers like O'Reilly, and like him had joined the Fenian conspiracy of 1866
