Think of what Mary Anne Holmes had to endure during those terrible weeks. One brother was in exile, another in the prison from which the only egress was up the steps to the scaffold; her husband a prisoner with an uncertain fate. Truly “the strong mind” had heavy drains on it when she followed her mother’s coffin to the churchyard of St. Peter’s in Aungier Street, whither Dr. Emmet’s had only a little time preceded it. Small wonder that the end of her sad story came with tragic swiftness, and in tragic circumstances. Mr. Holmes was kept for a whole year a prisoner in Dublin Castle, and then suddenly released. He walked directly home. “In response to his ring his wife unfortunately opened the door, only to drop dead into his arms from the suddenness of the shock and the excess of her joy at seeing him. It is said that Mr. Holmes never recovered from the shock he thus received, and to the day of his death he was seldom seen to smile.”[91] He lived to be a very old man—to see the men of ’48 stand in the same dock as the men of ’98 and ’03—and for the same crime. In his eightieth year he acted as counsel for Duffy in the _Nation_ prosecution of 1846; in his eighty-second year he defended John Mitchel. “We thought we heard the blood of Emmet crying aloud from the ground,” said Mitchel, of the great speech made by Holmes on the former occasion. But in the ears of the old man, himself, as he made his immortal indictment of England, there was ringing the voice of his dead love—the woman whom England’s cruelty had murdered in his very arms two-and-forty years before! Footnote 91: “The Emmet Family,” p. 54. The circumstances of Mary Anne Holmes’s death were communicated to Dr. T. A. Emmet by Sir Bernard Burke. MARY TONE Of Mary Tone, the sister of Theobald Wolfe Tone, we have already spoken at some length in the Memoir of her sister-in-law. Her brother has described her for us in his _Autobiography_: “My sister, whose name is Mary, is a fine young woman; she has all the peculiarity of our disposition with all the delicacy of her own sex. If she were a man, she would be exactly like one of us [_i.e._ her brothers, whose ‘portraits’ he has just sketched], and, as it is, being brought up amongst boys, for we never had but one more sister, who died a child, she has contracted a masculine habit of thinking, without, however, in any degree, derogating from that feminine softness of manner which is suited to her sex and age.”