will not refuse you that justice which your fellow-men withheld from you. A melancholy death was yours, but your soul has, I trust, found favor before God, for you were, indeed, free from guile."

All, however, was not yet over. The body of the martyred priest was cut down, and taken away to undergo the remainder of the sentence. Hanging was not enough for the brutal spirit of the Protestant ascendancy; the poor, lifeless frame was to be drawn and quartered, and, while the task was being accomplished, Edward Meehan was brought out on the platform. He, too, declared his innocence in the most positive terms, and offered up an affecting prayer for those who had sworn away his life, for the jury who had condemned him on their false testimony, and for the judge who had passed sentence upon him. He also repeated his solemn declaration of Father Sheehy's innocence.

"Though I know," said he, "that he is already gone where I am soon to follow, but still it is right to speak the truth to the very last. That good priest has been put to death wrongfully; and when they did it to him, that was God's own servant, they may well do it to me, poor sinful man that I am, though, thanks to the great God, I am as innocent of this murder as the child unborn. That is all I have to say, only that I freely forgive all my enemies, and pray God to have mercy on my soul, and the Blessed Virgin and all the saints to pray for me, and for them I leave behind."

He was launched into eternity almost before the words were uttered: no, not quite so soon, for his sufferings were somewhat longer than those of the priest; for two or three minutes he struggled in the agony of his violent death, and then all was still.

The Catholics who had occasion to pass that way about an hour before sunset, hurried on with a shudder, and murmured, "Lord, have mercy on him!" as they

glanced at the strange and ghastly spectacle over the arched porch of the old jail, where was hoisted, on a pole, the severed head of the ill-fated priest, the wellknown features little changed, were it not for the unnatural purple hue diffused over all: the natural effect of the fearful death which had parted soul and body.

The murder of Father Sheehy did not appease the Orange landlords. In the following month his cousin, Ned Sheehy; a respectable farmer, James Buxton, and James Farrell, were also tried for the murder of Bridge, for swearing Toohey to be true to Shaun Meskill (a name given to the Whiteboys, after one of their leaders) and his children, and other charges. The swearing against them was reckless and savage, being the same as hung the priest. They were, of course, sentenced to death, and executed at Clogheen. When their heads were chopped off, a young girl, named Ann Mary Butler, snatched up the head of Ned Sheehy, and made off with it.

The sympathizing soldiers made way for her and closed upon the hangman, who pursued her. The head was decently interred with the body, while the other two were spiked at Clonmel. These men declared, just before their execution, that they were offered their liberty by the Rev. Lawrence Broderick, Rev. John Hewitson, Sir William Barker's son, Matthew Bumbury, Bagnell, Toler, and Bagnall, if they would swear against Bishop Creagh, Lord Dunboyne's brother, Robert Keating, several other gentlemen, and some priests, charging them. with being engaged in a conspiracy with the French government to raise an insurrection in Ireland; but, above all, if they would declare that Father Sheehy was guilty, and that he "had died with a lie in his mouth." These brave men withstood all, and died with remarkable fortitude, declaring their innocence to the last. Ned Sheehy was the grandfather of the celebrated Countess of Blessington, one of his daughters.

being married to Edmund Power of Curragheen. Just twenty years afterward, in 1786, Father Sheehy's sister was allowed to take away his head, and inter it with his body in Shandraghan graveyard.

Beside the ruins of the old church repose the remains of Father Sheehy. A beaten path leads to the grave, for many a pilgrim has trod over it. The white headstone that marks this hallowed spot bears the following inscription:

"Here lieth the remains of the Rev. Nicholas Sheehy, parish priest of Shandraghan, Ballysheehan and Templeheny. He died March 15th, 1766, aged 38 years. Erected by his sister, Catherine Burke, alias Sheehy."

FATHER FLORENCE O'MOELCHONRY.*

A. D. 1629.

Most Rev. Florence O'Moelchonry, or Conroy, Archbishop of Tuam, and Founder of the College of St. Anthony of Padua, at Louvain.-Father Donatus Mooney. Provincial of Ireland, and first Guardian of St. Anthony's.Father Bonaventure Hussey.

IRELAND Owes no small debt of gratitude to those self-sacrificing men who, during the first half of the seventeenth century, devoted their lives to illustrate her annals, and gather together the scattered fragments of her early history. Throughout Elizabeth's reign, ruin and desolation had fallen upon that king. dom; its monasteries were destroyed, its schools proscribed, its clergy persecuted, its most fertile districts reduced to a desert waste, and nothing was left undone to seize upon or destroy every monument of its ancient glory. Some of the agents of this reckless vandalism were impelled by irreligious fury, for thus they imagined they might turn away our devoted people from the long-cherished faith of their fathers; others were led on by the delusive hope that the national spirit of Ireland would cease when the monuments of her early fame were obliterated and forgotten. "It seemed to you" (thus writes Michael O'Clery, the chief of the Four Masters, when dedicating his work to the O'Gara of Coolavin, in 1636),-" it seemed to you a cause of pity and regret, grief and sorrow, for the glory of God and the honor of Ireland, how much the race of Gaedhal

"Irish Ecclesiastical Record."

have gone under a cloud and darkness, without a knowledge of the death of saint or virgin, archbishop, bishop, abbot, or other noble dignitary of the Church; of king or prince, lord or chieftain, and of the synchronism or connection of the one with the other. I explained to you that I thought I could get the assistance of the chroniclers for whom I had most esteem, for writing a book of annals, in which the aforesaid matters might be put on record; and that, should the writing of them be neglected at present, they would not again be found to be put on record, or commemorated to the end and termination of the world." Dr. Petrie, the great restorer of Celtic archæological studies in our own time, having cited these words in an address before the Royal Irish Academy, adds: "How prophetic were the just apprehensions of that chief compiler that, if the work were then neglected or consigned to a future time, a risk might be run that the materials for it should never again be brought together. Such, indeed, would have been the sad result. . . . In that unhappy period nearly all the original materials of this compilation probably perished, for one or two of them only have survived to our times. . . . Had this compilation been neglected, or had it, as was supposed, shared the fate of its predecessors, what a large portion of our history would have been lost to the world forever!"

There was also another reason why it was particularly important, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, to guard the few surviving monuments of our country. The traditions of the past were then rapidly fading away from the memory of our people.

The newly-imported settlers from England and Scotland had no interest in cherishing such traditions. Novel names of districts and towns were everywhere springing up, and gradually supplanting the old Irish designations; the system of clans and tribes, each with its respective chronicler or bard, handing down from father to son the