That afternoon, her functionaries bore to three grave-pits in the
prison-yard three lumps of lifeless clay, that a few short hours
before had been three of God's noblest creatures. Like carrion, they
were flung into those unconsecrated pits, and strewed with quicklime.
For this was British law. The wolf and the tiger leave some vestiges
of their victims; but a special ordinance of English law required even
the corpses of those martyred Irishmen to be calcined.
They had purposed addressing the crowd from the scaffold, but were
prevented from so doing by order of the government! They had each one,
however, committed to writing, as already mentioned, a last solemn
message to the world. These declarations of the dying men were
entrusted to the care of their confessor, who eventually gave them up
for publication. They created the most intense and painful sensation
in Ireland. They made more and more clear the, dreadful fact that
the hapless men had been cruelly sacrificed. Standing, as it might
be said, in the presence of their God and Judge, they one and all
protested their innocence, and declared the falseness of the evidence
on which they had been convicted. But not in querulous repining or
denunciation were these truths proclaimed, but in language and with
sentiments worthy of men who professed the faith preached by the
Crucified on Calvary.
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