When Fenian times came on, O’Driscoll was put in prison; he lost his school-mastership; came to America, and got married in Rutland, Vermont. The last day I spent with him was the day of John Boyle O’Reilly’s funeral in Boston. He died shortly after that. God be good to him! he was a proud, manly Irishman—too manly to live long and prosper in this world.

In chapter xiii., I took myself, a Phœnix prisoner into Cork Jail in 1858.

The readers of the United Irishman in which I am printing these “Recollections” do not seem satisfied that I should make such a skip as that in my life, by leaping from 1853 to 1858 without saying anything particular in those four or five years.

There is nothing very particular to say about Ireland’s cause those years—for that cause was apparently dead.

It was dead during the Crimean war, ’54-’55, and during the war of the Indian Mutiny, ’56-’57. But as many writers have written books and pamphlets about the origin of the movement that is now called Fenianism—writers, too, who evidently knew little or nothing about its origin, it may be no harm for me to put on record what I am able to say on the subject. Any historical pith that may be in it may be picked from the rest of this chapter.

The Crimean war was going on ’54. There was not a red-coat soldier left in Ireland; there was not a stir in Ireland against English rule. Charles Gavan Duffy left Ireland, telling the people the Irish national cause was like the cause of a corpse on a dissecting table. The Crimean war ended, and then came on the English war of the Indian mutiny, ’56-’57. There was not a red-coat soldier left in Ireland. Some of the young men in Skibbereen came together and started the Phœnix Society. The phœnix is some fabled bird that dies, and from its ashes rises into life again. We had some forty or fifty members in that Phœnix Society. Our first meetings were in the rooms at the back of the drug store of Doctor Jerrie Crowley.

We read in the newspapers one day in the year 1857 that some Tipperary rebel had drawn on a wooden gate in the town of Carrick-on-Suir the picture of an English soldier with an Irish pike through his body, and that the Town Commissioners of Carrick had offered a reward for the capture of the artist, and had called for subscriptions to increase the reward. We got a “rasper” farthing, and we sent it with a tearful letter to the Carrick Commissioners. Some days after, we had a letter from Doctor O’Ryan (Doctor Anthony O’Ryan I think) telling us that there was a rumor that we had sent such a subscription to the Commissioners; but that the flunkeys had concealed it from those who were not flunkeys, and asking us to send him a copy of our communication. We sent it to him.

Doctor Jeremiah Crowley! I have spoken of him; I will speak more of him. He was one of these Irish doctors of the “famine” times—one of these Irish doctors who never grow rich at any time in Ireland; for always in Ireland there is distress—and ever will be while England is in it. And where there was distress and sickness and death, Doctor Jerrie was there, without fee or money reward. He died shortly after giving us his rooms for the Phœnix Society meetings. I was at his wake. About midnight, twelve young girls dressed in white came into the room and cried around his coffin. The women cried, and the men in the room and in the house cried—and cried loudly. A more touching picture of Irish life and Irish death is not in my recollection. I wrote some lines about it at the time: they were published in the Cork Herald; I will try and remember them here:

DOCTOR JERRIE CROWLEY.

With sorrowing heart my feelings tend