PAGE INTRODUCTION ix THE MOTHERS OF ’NINETY-EIGHT 3 _The Mother of the Emmets_ 6 _The Mother of Lord Edward Fitzgerald_ 28 _The Mother of the Sheareses_ 53 _The Mother of the Teelings_ 68 THE WIVES OF ’NINETY-EIGHT: _The Wife of Theobald Wolfe Tone_ 103 _The Wife of Thomas Addis Emmet_ 146 _The Wife of Samuel Neilson_ 165 _The Wife of Lord Edward Fitzgerald_ 186 THE SISTER OF HENRY JOY MCCRACKEN 215 SOME OTHER SISTERS OF ’NINETY-EIGHT: _Mary Anne Emmet_ 243 _Mary Tone_ 247 _Lady Lucy Fitzgerald_ 249 _Julia Sheares_ 253 _Miss Byrne_ 257 _Miss Teeling_ 259 _Miss Hazlett_ 259 SARAH CURRAN AND ANNE DEVLIN 267 SOME OTHER ROMANCES OF ’NINETY-EIGHT 297 SOME OBSCURE HEROINES OF ’NINETY-EIGHT 311 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ INTRODUCTION Alas! how sad by Shannon’s flood, The blush of morning sun appears! To men who gave for us their blood, Ah! what can women give but tears! —DRENNAN: _Lament of the Women after the Battle_. “THEY tell a beautiful and poetical story about the croppies’ graves in Wexford. Many of them carried in their coat pockets wheat seed gathered in the fields to satisfy their hunger. When they were buried in their shallow graves the seed sprouted and pushed its way up to the light, and the peasants, seeing the patches of waving grain here and there by field or wayside, knew that there a poor croppy slumbered. Was not the waving grain an emblem that the blood they shed for Ireland would yet nurture the harvest of Freedom?” Twenty years ago, when in the pages of the _Shan Van Vocht_, that moving and lovely tale was told to the faithful few whom the centenary of ’Ninety-Eight had rallied around the croppies’ graves, it needed a poet’s vision, a patriot’s heart, to see in “The grain that was fed on the dust of the dead” a promise of the mighty harvest of freedom. To-day, we look around us, and, lo!—even to the blindest and coldest of us—the fields are white.