Anne Bryson was born in Belfast in 1763. Her father, William Bryson, was a wealthy and highly esteemed merchant of that town, and his daughter had all the educational and social advantages which an assured position, a refined home and considerable means could give her. In 1785, when she had reached her twenty-second year, she married Samuel Neilson, the son of a dissenting minister, of Ballyroney in Co. Down. Neilson had been resident in Belfast for some time, having been at an early age apprenticed to his brother John, a woollen-draper—and doubtless the young people had often met at the social functions which enlivened Belfast at this period, and of which Mrs. McTier’s letters to her brother, Dr. Drennan, give us the most delightful glimpses.[77] Footnote 77: Published in Young’s “Historical Notices of Old Belfast,” p. 169, _et seq._ After their marriage the young couple set up in business for themselves, and Samuel Neilson’s great ability commanded an immediate success. His establishment, called “The Irish Woollen Warehouse,” became, we are informed, “the most extensive and respectable house in that line in Belfast.” Before he had been seven years in business he had amassed a considerable fortune, being reckoned in 1792 as worth about £8,000—which would be equivalent to nearly £20,000 in our days. Not with worldly prosperity alone did a kind Providence bless Anne Neilson and her husband. Five fair children, four girls and a boy, came to grace their fireside. The girls were Anne, Sophia, Jane, and Mary. Very dear were they to their father, and very touching the letters he was to address to them from prison when the “hard service” of the Poor Old Woman was to sever him from them during sorrowful years. Anne and Sophia were old enough to bear their heroic part among the “Women of ’Ninety-Eight,” and many of the most thrilling and interesting incidents which Dr. Madden gathered into his precious books were actually witnessed, and related to him by them. They spent much time during the troubled period with the wife of Oliver Bond in Dublin, and were by that means right in the centre of things, so to speak. Dr. Madden was deeply touched by the passionate devotion they showed to their father’s memory, when about half a century after his death, he sought from them the materials for his memoir. But dear as the girls were, the boy was the light of his life. William Bryson Neilson, the only son of Samuel and Anne Neilson, was born in 1794 and, by all accounts, was an extraordinarily gifted boy. We shall hear much of him in the following pages, and find no little interest in the story of the days he spent with his father in the stern old northern fortress of Fort George, which his presence made for poor Sam Neilson almost a place of delight.