In the intervening time between the failure of O'Neill's rising and the advent of the society of United Irish Brothers, the Clan-na-gael, in 1873, Le Caron spent his time studying medicine. As a practitioner he claims to have had successes. His taste for spying seems nevertheless to have exceeded his love for medicine, for in 1873, with the coming of the Clan, we find him laying his plans to deal with that important body, which, it may be said, differed from all other Irish-American societies in the technical excellence of its organisation. Its primary object was to unite throughout America and the world all Irishmen who loved their country. Naturally the Major, although supposedly French, presented himself as a candidate for membership in the new organisation, and having improvised an Irish grandmother to fortify his candidacy, was in due course admitted to the Brotherhood on his sworn oath to be loyal to its covenants. From the very first, however, he became an object of suspicion to several prominent leaders of the movement, and it was only after a pressing fight for recognition that he was eventually appointed to such a position as should enable him to penetrate the arcana of the society's inner shrines. As with the Fenian body, he became in the Clan a member of the Military Board. Every document of value which afforded evidence of the Brotherhood's dynamite propaganda directed against English cities was, as in the F.B. days, transmitted to the British Home Office, the correspondence being actually carried on between Le Caron's wife and another member of her sex in London. Accordingly, one may readily believe the spy's own statement that while he was a member of the military councils of the Clan, he was also shaking hands with danger and discovery at every turn and only saved his skin by a miracle. In the course of his association with the Brotherhood Le Caron of course made the acquaintance of some of the most prominent Irishmen in America's anti-British movements of the past generation, among them Messrs Egan, O'Donovan Rossa and the late Patrick Ford. The last of this trio was never, he says, a member of the Clan nor any other secret society, however much he may have supported in his early days the physical-force views which were advocated by extremists of all kinds. Mr Ford owed his prominence, says the Major, to the wide influence of his paper, _The Irish World_, in the conduct of which was also associated his brother, Mr Austin Brendan Ford, as a business director. It was undoubtedly the force which kept together the various elements of the Irish community in the States; edited with great ability, it had a vast circulation, which went well into the hundreds of thousands and had its readers among Irishmen in every quarter of the globe. Mr Ford, though not a member of the Brotherhood, allowed himself, says Le Caron, to voice its policies through his paper.