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 Ireland lay there literally "dead on the field of honour." Chatham, in the House of Lords, John Quincy Adams, in the House of Representatives, fell in harness, but neither death so speaks to the heart as the simple and sublime self-sacrifice of the great Dominican, dragging himself from his dying bed into Dublin to spend the last splendour of his genius and his life for the starving children of the poor in Donegal.
What would I not give for an hour with him now! After breakfast I went out to find Mr.Davitt, hoping he might suggest some way of seeing the Nationalist meeting on Wednesday night without undergoing the dismal penance of sitting out all the speeches.