ble to appear before a magistrate and
establish my claim as a French citizen, they replied that the moment
was an unfavourable one: the lenity of the Government had latterly been
abused, their gracious intentions misstated and perverted--that, in
fact, a reaction towards severity had occurred, and military law and
courts-martial were summarily disposing of cases that a short time back
would have received the mildest sentences of civil tribunals. It was
clear, from all they said, that if the rebellion was suppressed, the
insurrectionary feeling was not extinguished, and that England was the
very reverse of tranquil on the subject of Ireland.

It was to no purpose that I repeated my personal indifference to all
these measures of severity, that in my capacity as a Frenchman and an
officer I stood exempt from all the consequences they alluded to. Their
reply was, that in times of trouble and alarm things were done which
quieter periods would never have sanctioned, and that indiscreet and
over-zealous men would venture on acts that neither law nor justice
could substantiate. In fact, they gave me to believe, that such was the
excitement of the moment, such the embittered vengeance of those whose
families or fortunes had suffered by the rebellion, that no reprisals
would be thought too heavy, nor any harshness too great, for those who
aided the movement.

Whatever I might have said against the injustice of this proceeding, in
my secret heart I had to confess that it was only what might have been
expected; and coming from a country where it was enough to call a man an
aristocrat, and then cry _a la lanterne!_ I saw nothing unreasonable in
it all.

My friends advised me, therefore, instead of preferring any formal claim
to immunity, to take the first occasion of escaping to America, whence I
could not fail, later on, of returning to France. At first, the counsel
only irritated me, but by degrees, as I came to think more calmly and
seriously of the difficulties, I began to regard it in a different
light; and at last I fully concurred in the wisdom of the advice, and
resolved on adopting it.

To sit on the cliffs, and watch the ocean for hours, became now the
practice of my life--to gaze from daybreak almost to the falling of
night oyer the wide expanse of sea, straining my eyes at each sail, and
conjecturing to what distant shore they were tending. The hopes which at
first sustained at last deserted me, as week after week pa