“At the latter end of her confinement, some gentlemen belonging to the Castle had come to the gaol and seen her in her cell. She told them her sad story, and it was told by them to the lord lieutenant. From that time her treatment was altogether different; she was not only allowed the range of the woman’s ward, but was permitted to go outside the prison, and three or four times, accompanied by her sister and Mrs. Dwyer and one of the turnkeys, was taken to the Spa at Lucan for the benefit of her health; for she was then crippled in her limbs, more dead than alive, hardly able to move hand or foot. “At length Mr. Pitt died; it was a joyful day for Ireland. The prisons were thrown open where many an honest person had lain since the month of July, 1803.” * * * * * Anne Devlin’s narrative to Dr. Madden did not exhaust the full tale of her sufferings. There is no mention in it of the fact that the whole of her family, except one sister and a brother who were mere children, had been thrown into prison, and their property ruined. As there was no place for the little brother to go he found refuge in his father’s cell in gaol. But the consolation of his boy’s company was not left long to old Brian Devlin. Some communication having been discovered between him and his daughter, the latter was removed from the new to the old gaol. Some time after, the boy, then sick of a fever, was taken in the night from his father’s cell and made to walk the mile which separated the new from the old gaol. Here he died in circumstances which were looked on as very suspicious. So atrocious was the treatment meted out to Anne Devlin by Dr. Trevor that the other prisoners made special mention of it in a Memorial they presented to Lord Hardwicke: “His treatment,” they stated, “of all, but especially of one unfortunate State prisoner, a female, is shocking to humanity, and exceeds credibility. He drives, through exasperation, the mind to madness, of which instances have already occurred.” Of what befel Anne Devlin when, broken in health and crippled in limb, she was at length liberated from Kilmainham we have no record. We must fill in for ourselves the main features of the forty years that elapsed before Dr. Madden discovered her in the old washerwoman, married to a poor labourer in “a stable yard” off John’s Lane. Poverty, sickness, grinding toil, hunger often, and want of every kind: these were her portion through those long years of misery.