f the
released prisoners--Sergeant McCarthy, Corporal Chambers, and John
O'Brien. To the consternation of his friends, McCarthy died suddenly at
Morrison's Hotel, on January 15th, the cause, it was believed, being
heart disease. This caused such a shock to Chambers that his life, too,
was put in danger. I was pleased to see him restored to health after
this when he called on me in Liverpool with his brother, with whom I was
well acquainted. The shock of the sudden death of his friend McCarthy
must have affected Michael Davitt too, as we found from the report of
our friend, Dr. Bligh, in what a precarious state of health he must have
been at the time. It will be remembered that Rickard Burke became
insane, it was thought, and stated in Parliament, owing to his treatment
while in Chatham Prison.

Following our Liverpool gathering, we had on Sunday, May 5th, a meeting
in the St. Helens Theatre for the same object. At this Parnell as well
as Davitt was present. Speaking that day by desire of our St. Helens
friends, I called attention to the appropriateness of our addressing the
assembly from the boards of a theatre on which there had been the mimic
representation of many a stirring drama. But no play the audience had
ever witnessed on those boards could exceed in dramatic interest the
life of the released convict, Michael Davitt. Nay, more, the grudging
terms on which he had been released enabled him to appear that day in
the real living character of a "Ticket-of-Leave-Man," which, no doubt,
they had seen impersonated on those boards by some clever actor in the
play of the same name.

I am reminded of that St. Helens meeting by a passage in Michael
Davitt's book "The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland." I travelled from
Liverpool to St. Helens to attend the meeting in the same carriage with
Mr. Parnell. As I could always speak unreservedly to him I knew that
though he would not actually join the advanced organisation, he regarded
it as a useful force behind the constitutional movement. In the
carriage, which it so happened we had to ourselves, we discussed the
probabilities of the result of a resort to physical force for securing
Irish freedom, should circumstances justify such a course, for Parnell
would not have shrunk from taking the field if there had been a
reasonable hope of success. Singularly enough, I find in Michael
Davitt's book that he himself, on the day of that same St. Helens
meeting, made an advance to Parnell w