the same Providence which
had so often, as it were, miraculously preserved us would not desert
us now."

Inspired by the fortitude of this noble woman, Tone went forth on his
perilous mission, and similarly the Young Ireland leaders, Mitchel
and Smith O'Brien, were sustained by the courage of their nearest and
dearest. "Eva," the poetess of the _Nation_, gave her troth-plight to
one who had prison and exile to face ere he could claim her hand.
Other names recur to me--"Speranza", with her lyric fire; Ellen
O'Leary, fervent and still patient and wise; Fanny Parnell and her
sister.

And what of the women of Ireland today? Shall they come short of the
high ideal of the past, falter and fail, if devotion and sacrifice
are required of them? Never: whilst they keep in memory and honor the
illustrious ones of whom I have written. The name of Irishwoman today
stands for steadfast virtue, for hospitality, for simple piety, for
cheerful endurance, and in a changing world let us trust it is the
will of God that in this there will be no change.

REFERENCES:

On Ethne, mother of St. Columcille: The Visions, Miracles, and
Prophecies of St. Columba (Clarendon Press Series). On Ronnat: S. Mac
an Bhaird, Life (in Irish) of Adamnan (Letterkenny); Reeves, St.
Adamnan's Life of St. Columba; The Mother of St. Adamnan, an old
Gaelic text, ed. by Kuno Meyer (Berlin). On Gormlai: Thomas
Concannon, Gormflath (in Irish; The Gaelic League, Dublin). On
Granuaile: Elizabethan State Papers (Record Office Series); William
O'Brien, A Queen of Men. On Ineen-Dubh: O'Clery's Life of Red Hugh
(contemporary), ed. by Denis Murphy, S. J. (Dublin, 1894); Standish
O'Grady, The Flight of the Eagle, or Red Hugh's Captivity. On Rose,
wife of Owen Roe O'Neill, see references in Father Meehan's The
Flight of the Earls, and in Sir John Gilbert's History of the
Confederate War (Dublin, 1885). On the wife of Wolfe Tone, see Wolfe
Tone's Autobiography, ed. by R. Barry O'Brien (London, 1894). The
American edition has a fuller account of Tone's wife, her courage and
devotion in educating her son, and her interviews with Napoleon, and
life in America. The women of the United Irish period are fully dealt
with in K. R. Madden's Lives and Times of the United Irishmen. On
Mary McCracken, see Mrs. Milligan Fox, The Annals of the Irish
Harpers. On the women of the Young Ireland period, see C. Gavan
Duffy's Young Ireland (Dublin), and John O'Leary's Fenians and
Fenianis