'Were you asking where you could get blind drunk comfortably, sir?
because if so--'

And out came the hint with a wink.

Wilde was fond of that tale at one time.

The affair of ''48' was a farce. Stimulated by the French Revolution,
John Mitchel wrote rabid sedition, but received short shrift at the
hands of the Government, who arrested him, sentenced him to fourteen
years' transportation, and almost from the dock he was taken manacled in
a police van, escorted by cavalry, and put on board a steamer, which at
once put out to sea.

Smith O'Brien was the leader of this feeble insurrection. He had boasted
he would be at the head of fifty thousand Tipperary men. Instead his
army consisted of a few hundred half-clad ragamuffins, which attacked a
squad of police who took refuge in a farmhouse, and easily routed the
rabble.

Smith O'Brien proved himself an arrant coward. He hid in a cabbage
garden, and is still believed to have made his temporary escape from the
police in the habit of an Anglican sisterhood, of which his sister, Hon.
Mrs. Monsell, was Mother Superior.

The bigger outbreak was not a bit more serious. It was all trumped up by
the Irish in America, and their reliance upon help from American
soldiers was destroyed after the war. This agitation was the one known
as the work of the Phoenix Society, and the object was the separation of