Carey’s Grave.

Evening Star, Issue 8773, 14 March 1892, Page 3

Carey’s Grave.

Sir Thomas Gratton Esmonds, M.P., baa compiled into a neat volume the letters he wrote “home" describing his trip to Australia in the cause of Home Rule, He thus describes the grave of Carey, the informer: —James Carey lies near Port Elizabeth. We visited the spot. A more awful lesson was never read, nor in more awful eloquence, than the moral of that far-off grave. It would even seem as if the very earth refused to harbor his wretched clay; and as if Nature herself were imbued with the sentiment of his countrymen towards this poor, weak, desperate, and dishonored tool and victim of Dublin Castle officialism. It wcxdd tax the power of a Dante’s pen to record the horrors of that grave. Mine is miserably inadequate to the task. Upon the bare, leafless, lifeless breast of a sandhill, where the whirlwinds eddy round like evil genii, and where the scorching, seering, noisome desert blast sweeps across to the sea with the wail and shriek of a banshee, lies a heap of blood-red stones. Upon one of these stones some passer-by has scratched with a rusty nail “ Carey, the informer! ” Nothing more. Such is the tomb, and each the epitaph. Aronnd lies the bones of negro convicts who have suffered the extreme penalty of the law, while the only shade that ever stays over that grave comes as the setting sun sinks to his fiery couch

behind the prim and ghastly etruoture o! the adjoining gaol. In that company, amid ■noh eui roundings, the body of the Irishman who lured hie countrymen to crime and sold them to a barbarous death for English gold awaits the last trumpet’s sound. Was ever awful lesson read in more awful way—an epitome of English rule in Ireland? The Informer’s deadliest foe could wish him no worso fate. Let us hope that his poor soul has found more mercy and less justice at Mercy’s fountain head.