r's shame! "--said D'Esmonde,
reading aloud from the volume in his hand.

Hipsley almost started at the solemnity with which these awful words
were uttered, and stood for a few seconds gazing on the pale and
thoughtful face which was still bent over the book.

"My mission has then failed!" said the lawyer, regretfully. "I am sorry
it should be so."

A cold bow was the only reply Cahill returned to this speech, and the
other slowly withdrew, and took his way back to Kilkenny, the solemn and
terrible denunciation still ringing in his ears as he went.

CHAPTER XXXIX. THE COURT-HOUSE OF KILKENNY.

The character of crime in Ireland has preserved for some years back a
most terrible consistency. The story of every murder is the same.
The same secret vengeance; the same imputed wrong; the same dreadful
sentence issued from a dark and bloody tribunal; the victim alone is
changed, but all the rest is unaltered; and we read, over and over
again, of the last agonies on the high-road and in the noonday, till,
sated and wearied, we grow into a terrible indifference as to guilt, and
talk of the "wild justice of the people" as though amongst the natural
causes which shorten human life. If this be so, and to its truth we
call to witness those who in every neighborhood have seen some fearful
event--happening, as it were, at their very doors--deplored today,
almost forgotten to-morrow; and while such is the case, the public mind
is painfully sensitive as to the details of any guilt attended with
new and unaccustomed agencies. In fact, with all the terrible catalogue
before us,' we should be far from inferring a great degree of guiltiness
to a people in whom we see infinitely more of misguided energies and
depraved passions than of that nature whose sordid incentives to
crime constitute the bad of other countries. We are not, in this, the
apologist for murder. God forbid that we should ever be supposed to
palliate, by even a word, those brutal assassinations which make every
man blush to call himself an Irishman! We would only be understood as
saying that these crimes, dark, fearful, and frequent as they are, do
not argue the same hopeless debasement of our population as the less
organized guilt of other countries; and inasmuch as the vengeance even
of the savage is a nobler instinct than the highwayman's passion for
gain, so we cherish a hope that the time is not distant when the peasant
shall tear out of his heart the damnable