One morning in 1882 I saw in the morning papers a cable message announcing the death of Miss Fanny Parnell. Mr. Parnell was at my house at the time, but asleep. After an all-night sitting I would never allow him to be roused until four in the afternoon, when he would have breakfast and chat with me until it was time to go to the House. On seeing the newspaper cable from America about his sister I thought it better to wake him and tell him of it, lest he should read it while I was away with my aunt. I knew that Fanny Parnell was his favourite sister, and he had told me that she was the cleverest and most beautiful woman in his family. This I knew was high praise, as Willie had met Mrs. Thomson--another of Parnell's sisters--and had told me that she was the most strikingly beautiful woman he had ever met. I woke him and told him of his sister's death as gently as I could, but he was terribly shocked, and I could not leave him at all that day. For a time he utterly broke down, but presently a cable arrived for him--sent on from London--saying that his sister's body was to be embalmed and brought to Ireland, and his horror and indignation {205} were extreme. He immediately wrote out a message for me to cable from London on his behalf, absolutely forbidding the embalmment of his sister's body, and saying that she was to be buried in America. The idea of death was at all times very painful to him, but that anyone should be embalmed and taken from one place to another after death was to him unspeakably awful. For this, amongst other reasons, I could not bear to have him taken to Ireland--to Glasnevin Cemetery--after his death. My desire was to have him near me and, as he would have wished, to have taken care of his grave myself. But I gave way to the longing of the Ireland he had lived for, and to the clamour of those who had helped to kill him. How they dealt with him alive is history now, but how they dealt with him in death is not so well known; and I give an extract from the message of a friend, who had gone to see his grave a few short years after his death: "Your husband's grave is the most desolate and neglected spot in the whole cemetery, and I grieve to tell you of the painful impression it made upon me." I then sent over a servant, with some flowers, and his report was even worse. Fragments of glass from the broken artificial wreaths, placed there years before; trampled, neglected grass, and little of that but weeds; and the bare untidy backings and wires of the wreaths I had been sending for the greeting of so many days marked only in the calendar of our love. Poor Ireland--a child in her asking, a child in her receiving, and so much a child in her forgetting.