John Boyle O'Reilly was born in Dowth Castle, county Meath, Ireland, June 28, 1844. His father, William David O'Reilly, was a scholar and an antiquarian, and his mother, Eliza Boyle, was a woman of an extremely rare and beautiful nature. John Boyle O'Reilly became a journalist in early manhood, and at twenty-one years of age was a revolutionist, arrested, tried for high treason, and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment in an English penal colony. At twenty-five he escaped from West Australia, and came to America. He has lived in Boston since 1869. He is the editor and part proprietor of The Pilot, perhaps the most widely known Irish-American newspaper. He has published five books: — “Songs from the Southern Seas,” “Songs, Legends and Ballads,” “Moondyne,” “The Statues in the Block,” “In Bohemia,” and in union with three other authors, “The King's Men: a Tale of To-morrow”