that made every hatch-mouth a vent of hell, can imagine the horrors of the hold of a convict ship."
Strapped to the foremast was the black gaff with its horrid apparatus for tricing unruly men up for flogging, and above, tied around the foremast, ever before their eyes, was a new hempen halter, "which swung mutineers and murderers out over the hissing sea to eternity."
Every night the exiles, Catholic and Protestant, joined in a prayer which ran as follows:—
"God, who art the arbiter of the destiny of nations and who rulest the world in thy great wisdom, look down, we beseech thee, from thy holy place on the sufferings of our poor country. Scatter her enemies, Lord, and confound their evil projects. Hear us, God, hear the earnest cry of our people, and give them strength and fortitude to dare and suffer in their holy cause. Send her help, Lord, from thy holy place. And from Zion protect her. Amen."
The Hougoumont reached Freemantle, after a dreary voyage, at three o'clock on the morning of January 10, 1868. "Her passengers could see," writes James Jeffrey Roche in his "Life of O'Reilly," "high above the little town and the woodland about it, the great white stone prison which represents Freemantle's reason for existence. It was 'The Establishment;' that is to say the government; that is to say, the advanced guard of Christian civilization in the wild bush. The native beauty of the place is marred by the straggling irreg-
