But just as he had made merry music with his clarinet at Stonyhurst while under suspension, as he had grinned his way through readings of verse while awaiting execution at his cell in Clonmel, as he had “laughed till the woods rang around” in a shepherd’s hut reunion in Tasmania, Meagher always found a way to find scraps of joy in a cellar of despair. He needed those moments, needed to mark them in memory in order to call on them later in melancholy, to keep himself from giving up.
