I had telegraphed to him from London that I should halt in Dublin for a
day, on my way to America, to see him. He came betimes, to find me
almost as badly-off as St. Lawrence upon his gridiron. The surgeon whom
the hotel people had hastily summoned to relieve me from a sudden attack
of that endemic Irish ecstasy, the lumbago, had applied what he called
the "heroic treatment" on my telling him that I had no time to be ill,
but must spend that day with Father Burke, dine that night with Mr.
Irving and Mr. Toole, and go on the next day to America.

"What has this Inquisitor done to you?" queried Father Tom.

"Cauterised me with chloroform."

"Oh! that's a modern improvement! Let me see--" and, scrutinising the
results, he said, with a merry twinkle in his deep, dark eyes--"I see
how it is! They brought you a veterinary!"

This was in 1878. On that too brief, delightful morning, we talked of
all things--supralunar, lunar, and sublunary. Much of Wales, I remember,
where he had been making a visit. "A glorious country," he said, "and
the Welsh would have been Irish, only they lost the faith." Full of love
for Ireland as he was, he was beginning then to be troubled by symptoms
in the Nationalist movement, which could not be regarded with composure
by one who, in his youth at Rome, had seen, with me, the devil of
extremes drive Italy down a steep place into the sea.

Five years afterwards I landed at Queenstown, in July 1883, intending to
visit him at Tallaght. But when the letter which I sent to announce my
coming reached the monastery, the staunchest Soldier of the Church in