If my mother had been an early Christian or a socialist, she could not have shown herself a more inveterate enemy of personal property. Never through infancy, youth, or middle age has she permitted any of her offspring to preserve relics, gifts, or souvenirs. Treasures of every kind she pounced upon, and either destroyed or gave away,--partly from a love of inflicting pain, partly from an iconoclastic temper, but more than anything from a despotic ferocity of self-assertion. The preserving of relics, of the thousand and one little absurdities sentiment and fancy ever cling to, implied something beyond her power, something she could not hope to touch or destroy, implied above all an inner life existing independent of her harsh authority. The outward signs of this mental independence she ever ruthlessly effaced. And my desolation was great when I found the old wooden box I had brought up from Kildare empty of all my beloved little relics of a fugitive happiness and of yearned-for friends. Gone the mug with somebody else's name upon it, gone the plate with the little white knobs and the painted black dog, gone my book about cocks and hens, the gift of that vision of romance, my godfather, swallowed up radiantly in Chinese yellow. Gone, alas! Stevie's "Robinson Crusoe" and his knife, and every tiny possession of a tiny sentimentalist, whose heart was so famished for love and kind words and kisses, and clung the more eagerly for this to these poor trifles. I sat on the floor beside my empty box, and refused to be comforted. These things were to have softened the rigours of exile, might have gone with me to the scaffold as sustainment and benediction, if I had the misfortune to rouse the ire of that mysterious being, the Queen, whom Mary Jane depicted as sitting on a high throne, with a crown on her head and a knife in her hand for the necks of the unruly Irish. But I had nothing now to take to bed with me, nothing to hug and weep over, nothing to tell my sorrows to when the society and persecution of big people become intolerable. I stood, or rather sat, alone in a desolate universe, with the violated coffin of my regrets in front of me. Being worn out with all I had gone through that day, I probably fell asleep sobbing against the empty box, and night robbed me of any further sense of misfortune. Chapter XII. AN EXILE FROM ERIN. The next day I was too fully conscious of being the heroine of a sensational drama, to shed tears over my lonely and miserable self. The boat left the North Wall early in the morning, so that toilet, breakfast, farewells were a hurry, a scare, the suspension of feeling in stunned senses. I scarcely tasted tea, but I looked forlornly at the lovely red-and-white cups as big as bowls, which I still remember as a comforting joy to the eye.