servitude--for a term of years. Considerable astonishment was excited,
some days subsequently to Maguire's pardon, by a statement that, in
the case of the other prisoners included in the verdict, "the law
should take its course." No one credited this declaration for an
instant, and most persons felt that the Crown officials were indulging
in an indecent piece of mockery. Amidst this universal incredulity,
however--this disdainful and indignant disbelief--the prisoners'
solicitor, Mr. Roberts, vigilant and untiring to the last, took the
necessary steps to pray arrest of execution pending decision of the
serious law points raised on the trial. Some of the most eminent
counsel in England certified solemnly that these points were of the
gravest nature, and would, in their opinion, be fully established on
argument before the judges; in which event the conviction would be
legally quashed, independently of the substantial abandonment of it as
false and untenable by the Crown in Maguire's case.

The first idea of the merest possibility--the faintest chance--of
the remaining four men being executed on the vitiated verdict, arose
when it became known that the judges, or some of them, had informally
declared to the government (without waiting to hear any argument on
the subject) that the points raised by the prisoners' counsel were
not tenable, or were not of force. Mr. Roberts was officially informed
that the sentence would infallibly be carried out. By this time barely
a few days remained of the interval previous to the date fixed for
the execution, and the strangest sensations swayed the public mind in
Ireland. Even still, no one would seriously credit that men would be
put to death on a verdict notoriously false. Some persons who proposed
memorials to the Queen were met on all hands with the answer that it
was all "acting" on the part of the government; that, even though it
should be at the foot of the scaffold, the men would be reprieved;