The home of such a man cannot have been a very happy one for his children; and the sufferings imposed on his family by Curran’s attacks of _melancholia_ must have been aggravated in the case of his youngest daughter Sarah, who inherited, with her father’s genius and her father’s artistic and musical sensibility, more than her share of her father’s disposition to sadness. In the large dark mournful eyes of her, which had also come to her from her father, was mirrored the hereditary sadness of her soul. This hereditary sadness, fostered by an unhappy home-life, was further strengthened by two events which darkened her childhood. The one was the death of her favourite sister, Gertrude, who died at the age of twelve, when Sarah herself was a girl of eleven. Gertrude was a musical prodigy, and the whole family, and especially Sarah and her father, who were passionately fond of music, worshipped her. Curran insisted on the dead girl being buried in the Priory grounds, and she was laid to rest under a large tree on the lawn, directly opposite the window of the children’s nursery. “Under its shade they [_i.e._ Gertrude and Sarah] had often sat together, pulled the first primroses at its roots, and watched in its leaves the earliest verdure of the spring. Many an hour, for many a year, did the sorrowful survivor take her silent stand at the melancholy window, gazing on the well-known spot, which constituted all her little world of joys and sorrows. To this circumstance she attributed the tendency to melancholy which formed so marked a feature of her character through life.”[97] Footnote 97: Quoted by Madden from article entitled “Some Passages in the History of Sarah Curran,” in “Literary Souvenir” of 1831. The writer is believed to have been a lady of the Crawford family, who were intimate friends of Sarah and her people. Two years after Gertrude’s death, a grief even more intolerable befel our poor Sarah. She lost her mother, whose favourite daughter she was—and it was worse than death which caused the separation. Sarah was fourteen at the time—old enough to feel the shame, and to suffer the agony of it in every fibre of her pure and noble nature. So overwhelmed was she with grief that it was thought advisable for her to leave the Priory for some time. She therefore accepted the offer of hospitality made her by an early college friend of her father, Rev. Thomas Crawford, of Lismore, and remained with his family “until better thoughts at home led to her return to it.”