No credit need be given to the tale that as Emmet went forth to his death through the Dublin streets, a young lady, believed to be Miss Curran, was seen in a carriage despairingly taking leave of him, and fluttering a handkerchief until he was out of sight, when she sank in a swoon. It is not the fashion of persons of deep feeling, save on the stage, to have recourse at solemn moments to fluttering handkerchiefs. If any young lady interested in Robert Emmet were abroad in a carriage on that autumn morning, it would be his only sister, Mrs. Holmes, fated to outlive him but one melancholy year. As for poor lovely Sarah, she had disappeared like an underground stream during his last weeks and days, ever since her letters were seized as spoils of war. Major Sirr is believed to have destroyed them all, in due course, not without a flow of tears! The sweet lady was indeed an object of pity; and Emmet, putting in never a stroke of conscious work, had a most unaccountable faculty for melting hearts. The reign of Sensibility was not over; able-bodied persons in 1803 were only beginning to be carried out of the pit, more dead than alive, when Mrs. Siddons played. But something in Emmet’s uncomplaining presence overcame stern men habituated to political offenders. The honest turnkey at Kilmainham fell fainting at his feet, only to hear the affectionately-proffered good-bye; and it was generally noticed that Lord Norbury, facing him, could with difficulty steady his voice, though he was popularly believed to revel in pronouncing capital sentence. Emmet busied himself with letters in his cell. He slept and ate as usual; and his firm handwriting witnessed the unshaken soul within. Several of his last letters have been recovered; two or three have been published, in Mr. W. H. Curran’s _Life_ of his illustrious father, in Dr. Madden’s moving but chaotic _Memoirs of the United Irishmen_, and elsewhere. On the day set for his execution Robert Emmet wrote to his old friend Richard Curran:—