guns. They were prisoners exactly fifteen
minutes, and during all that time the French
officers kept cursing the United Irishmen for
having deceived and disappointed them. The
fencibles advancing in angry search for their
colonel, the seven hundred and forty-eight
French and ninety-six officers surrendered, or
they would have been instantly cut to pieces.
The French, since their landing at Killala, had
lost two hundred and eighty-eight men.

The revenge taken on the wretched Irish
rebels was savagely cruel. About five hundred
were cut down, shot, or hanged during the
pursuit round Ballynamuck. They were found
by dozens in the fields, drunk or worn-out with
fatigue. Wherever they were met, the sabre
fell upon them. At Carrick-on-Shannon seventeen
rebels were hanged at one time at the
door of the court-house, the prisoners being
compelled to draw lots from the adjutant's hat—one
hundred lots, with death written on seventeen, of
them.

On the 25th, the sound of cannon and the
flame of blazing cabins announced the advance
of the royalists upon Killala. The town became
rapidly filled with frightened fugitives from
Balliua. The rebels made a stand behind
some stone walls on the high ground outside
the town. Their fire was ineffective, and they
were at once routed and pursued by the
Roxburgh cavalry. Four hundred of them were
cut down in the streets or mown down by the
cannon on the sea-shore. One Protestant
gentleman was shot in his own hall by a bullet
intended for a rebel he was trying to exclude,
and Colonel Charost narrowly escaped death
from the gun of a maddened Highlander who
wanted to give no quarter.

So ended an irrational and useless insurrection,
with the usual horrible results of more
bloodshed and less liberty. General Trench
instantly pushed detachments into the wild
districts of Laggan and Erris, where the rebels'
cabins were burnt by dozens. For years after,
however, the mountain borders of Sligo
and Galway were infested by deserters and
outlaws, who lived by cattle-stealing, and who
houghed the cattle and burnt the corn-stacks
of their enemies. Two of the most notorious
of these robbers, Gibbons and M'Greal (Red
James), were at last seized; the former was
hanged and the latter pardoned.

On the 27th of October, in this same year 1798,
two French frigates again entered Killala Bay
with two thousand men: intending to commence
operations by burning the town and carrying
the bishop off to France—as they said, for
betraying them. Some English cruisers, however,
appearing, the frigates stood out to sea, and
came no more. They were already too late, for
the Brest squadron had been struck to pieces
after a long and gallant fight, on the 11th of
October, off Tory Island, by Sir John Borlase
Warren, and there were captured one seventy-
four, three vessels of thirty-six guns, and two of
forty; three others escaped. Wolf Tone,
captured in one of the French vessels, was tried and
condemned to death, but he killed himself in
prison.

NOTE—WAGER OF BATTLE—At page 498 of
the volume just issued, the author of Old Stories
Re-told attributes to the REV. MR, BEDFORD an
injudicious visit to the prisoner Thornton. It
has been since ascertained that the anecdote must
have applied to someone else, for Mr Bedford had
not taken orders at the time that Abraham Thornton
was charged with the murder of Mary Ashford.
This correction is made in justice to the memory of
a much-respected clergyman.

FERN COLLECTING.

I FORGET how I came to take to ferns. I
think it was through a conversation with a lady
who talked of giving them to her cottager-
friends to cultivate in their window-gardens.

"In their windows fully exposed to the
light!" I sceptically exclaimed.

"Yes," was the quiet, self-possessed reply.
She knew more about the matter than I did
then. Moreover, she kindly followed up the
lesson by sending me sundry bits of fern to try
my 'prentice hand upon. From that day, ferns
have grown upon my affections, and on those
of people whom I have bitten with the mania.

One of these subjects on which to experiment
was a frond of a pretty hen-and-chicken fern,
Asplenium odontites, a stranger from New
Zealand and Tasmania. To display my
knowledge, the part which in ferns answers to
the leaf in other plants is called a frond (from
the Latin frons, frondis, a leaf, or a leafy branch,
of a tree), to distinguish it from the leaf of a
flowering plant. Fronds do really differ from
leaves proper, by bearing the reproductive
organs ot the plaut (called spores) on their under
surface, or sometimes on their margin. This
graceful, drooping, light-green Asplenium is one
of the viviparous, proliferous, or young-bearing
species. On the surface of the fronds there grow
little plants, duly furnished eventually both with
green tops and with rootlets, which, as soon
they are big enough to be conveniently handled,
may be detached from the mother frond and
planted out in pots, separately or in company,
and kept shaded, moist, and warm, perhaps
under a bell-glass, until established.

These buds, or bulbil plants, first appear in
the shape of tiny dots on the parent frond, like
fly-spots, or as if some insect had laid its eggs
there. From this dot there protrudes a little
green tail, which is, in fact, the infant frond.
The development then continues gradually until
you have a perfect plantling being old enough
to wean. This mode of reproduction is a very
curious substitute for the usual course of
increase by spores or seeds. I was very proud
of my chicken ferns on discovering that they
could go alone. I distributed them liberally, and
several of them are already mothers.

The second was a bit of Hare's-foot fern,
Davallia canariensis, whose creeping, fur-clad
stems protrude over the edge of the pot, exactly