Excerpt from Benedict Kavanagh The Church of Ireland Gazette and the United Irishman, the Northern Whig and the Irish Peasant, are miles apart from each other in policy. The writers of their reviews and articles were all of them out of sympathy with much that I wrote. But they and many others admitted frankly the prin ciple that an author should have freedom to express his opinions Private letters - many of them from people whom I do not know - convinced me still more of the respect for liberty that there is among us. Two of these correspondents pointed out to me that a small number of young men were actually enlisted in Dublin for the Boer service, and went from Dublin straight to the Transvaal that these were honourable men, not forgers like the Captain Quin in my Hyacinth, nor deserters like his follower. I knew, of course, that there was an Irish brigade in the Boer army. Of it or its leaders I wrote nothing either good or bad. I did not know that any Irish men were enlisted in Dublin, and went from Dublin to fight for the Boers. I am sincerely sorry that the description of my purely imaginary Captain Quin should have seemed to cast a slur on the character and motives of these young men. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.