The finding
took no one by surprise, and did not seem to trouble the prisoner in the
faintest degree. During the former trial some shades of anxiety might
have been detected on his features; the charge of "murder" was grievous
to him, but when that was happily disposed of, the world seemed to
brighten before him, and he took his treason-felony trial cheerily. He
knew what the verdict on the evidence would be, and he was conscious
that the penalty to be imposed on him would be no trivial one; he felt
that it was hard to part from faithful comrades, and dear friends, and,
above all, from the young wife whom he had married only a few short
months before; but then it was in Ireland's cause he was about to
suffer, and for that he could endure all.
And yet, Ireland was not his native land. He was born in Cincinnatti,
Ohio, in the year 1841. But his parents, who were natives of
Castle-Lyons, near Fermoy, in the County Cork, were true children of
Erin, and they taught their son to love, even as they did themselves,
that green isle far away, from which a hard fate had compelled them to
roam. Patriotism, indeed, was hereditary in the family. The
great-grandfather of our hero suffered death for his fidelity to the
cause of Ireland in the memorable year 1798; and a still-more remarkable
fact is that Captain Mackay--or William Francis Lomasney, to call him by
his real name--in leaving America for Ireland in 1865 to take part in
the contemplated rising, merely took the place which his father wished
and intended to occupy.
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