and used to get up early and set off from our house in Baggot Street to watch the drills in the mornings at the Biggar's Bush Barracks. I used to get cartridges from the soldiers, which caused my people much annoyance. Yet not so much as they did the old watchman in his box at the corner of Baggot Street. We found him asleep one night, discharged a shot or two inside, and pitched him and his box over into the canal. He escaped, but we did not, for we caught it severely, and deserved it When the Spanish Legion was raised I made frantic appeals to join—officer, private, anything—and was only prevented from running away with De Lacy Evans' heroes by the strong arm of authority.
"I entered Trinity College in 1838 at seventeen. Only the other day I was present at the tercentenary, and found myself in the identical place I used to occupy at examinations when a student. There I again met an on old class-fellow—Rawdon Macnamara, President of the College of Physicians, Dublin. There were glorious doings during election times, when the Trinity College students—who were mostly Orangemen—met the Roman Catholics and engaged them in battle; but, alas! they were tyrannous and strong. "The coal porters were there—'the descendants of the Irish Kings from the coal quay,' as Dan O'Connell called them, and sometimes we had to seek safety at the college gates. Sometimes we had it all our own way, and made the most of it. Away we would go to King William's statue on College Green, shouting, 'Down with the Pope! Down with the Pope!' During one election there was an exhibition in the Arcade of the 'wonderful spotted lady' and 'the Hungarian giant.' We made a charge, overturned the pay box, dismissed the proprietor, made 'the Hungarian giant' run for his life, to say nothing of seeing 'the spotted lady' going off into hysterics. The Dublin coal porters used to be called in to disperse us. We frequently parted with broken heads. We were often triumphant, though."
Dr. Russell left college for a couple of years, during part of which he was mathematical master at Kensington Grammar School. He returned to Trinity, and with the elections of 1841 came his first real literary effort, though he is very proud of a sketch and account of an alauda cristata, or crested lark, which appeared in the Dublin Penny Journal when he was fifteen years of age—the bird was of his own shooting. A cousin, Mr. R. Russell, employed on the Times, came over to "do" the elections, and suggested the earning of a few guineas to the young collegian by going to the Longford election and writing an account of it. He accepted the suggestion, and not only penned a vivid description of the scene in the hospital where the wounded voters lay with bruised bodies and cracked craniums, but entered heartily into the political campaign, and spoke and fought in it con amore. His description delighted the Times people. He received bank-notes and praise, both acceptable and novel; he continued to write more descriptive accounts of the meetings of the day, and Delane, the editor, told him to expect constant employment.
O'Connell? Dr. Russell knew him well, No orator has impressed him more, before or since.
"O'Connell was really an uncrowned king," he said. "He wore a green velvet cap with a gold band round it, and a green coat with brass buttons. Still, we had a crossing of swords occasionally. The Times commissioner, Campbell Foster, characterized a village on O'Connell's estate, at Derryname, in a letter on the state of Ireland, as a squalid, miserable settlement of cabins, not possessing a pane of glass in any of the houses. O'Connell declared this to be a lie. I was requested by the Times to repair to the spot with Maurice O'Connell to see for myself, and to deny or corroborate Foster's assertion. I could not but corroborate it. On entering a crowded meeting one night at Conciliation Hall, O'Connell rose up and shouted: 'So this contemptible Russell says there is not a pane of glass in Derrynane? I wish he had as many pains in his stomach!'
"Yet O'Connell was always personally kind to me. Once my carriage broke down on the road to Dublin from a monster meeting. O'Connell's was passing at the time. He turned out poor Tom Steele, gave me his place, and a good dinner into the bargain. 'Honest Tom Steele,' as they all called him. He was devoted to O'Connell, and after his death became disconsolate, and eventually threw himself off Waterloo Bridge."
It was just before the arrest of O'Connell that Dr. Russell saw Lord Cardigan for the first time. He was with his regiment of hussars, near Clontarf, where there was a great display of the military who had been sent to prevent the great agitator from holding a meeting, which had been declared illegal by
