There followed a list of twenty names. Four of them belonged to men of the Roman Catholic faith, six of them were the names of Presbyterians, ten were of those who accepted the teaching of that other Church which, trammelled for centuries by connection with the State, hampered with riches secured to her by the bayonets of a foreign power, dragged down very often by officials placed over her by Englishmen, has yet in spite of all won glory. Out of her womb have come the men whose names shine brightest on the melancholy roll of the Irish patriots of the last two centuries. She has not cared to boast of them. She has hidden their names from her children as if they were a shame to her, but they are hers. Thus far off in a desolate Scottish fortress, after the total failure of every plan, in the hour of Ireland’s most hopeless degradation, the great dream which had fired the imagination of Tone and Neilson and the others, the dream of all Irishmen uniting in a common love of their country, a love which should transcend the differences of rival creeds, found a realisation. The witness, written in crabbed characters on the fly-leaf of a lexicon, lay on the knees of a broken old man in the cottage of a widow within earshot of the perpetual clamour of the bleak northern sea. “Well, father,” said Neal, “here I am back again. And here’s Jemmy Hope, whom I picked up on the road. He’s come to see you. He’s going to persuade you to cross the sea with me. You and I and he together, and Hannah Macaulay, who’s coming, too. Una will make you all welcome on her sturdy ship. It’s her ship now. All that I have is her’s.” Micah Ward looked at his son with a gentle, sad smile on his face. Then he turned to welcome his visitor. “So you have come to see me, James Hope. It was good of you. Ah, man, there’s not so many of us left now. Orr, they hanged him; M’Cracken, they hanged him; Monro, they hanged him; Porter, they hanged him. And many another, many another. And the rest are gone across the sea. You and I are left, with one here and there besides--a very small remnant, a cottage in a vineyard, a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, a besieged city.” “It’s hard to tell,” said Hope, “why they did not hang me, too. There were times when, only for my wife, who would have grieved after me, I could have found it in my heart to wish they would.” “Father,” said Neal, “Hope is coming to America with me.” “Nay, lad, nay. I was born in Ireland, I’ve lived my life in Ireland, I’ll die in Ireland when my time comes. Maybe before the end I’ll find a chance to strike another blow for her.”