She was a young wife, with two little children, when the “word” came which called her husband to the fight. As their home in Grey Abbey near Kildare was attacked by the soldiers, she and her babies took refuge at her parents’ house near the River Barrow. The day before that fixed for the surrender of the insurgents, it was said that Lord Roden’s “Fencibles” (or “Fox-Hunters”) paraded the streets of Kildare, mad with drink, and carrying articles of apparel on the end of their bayonets, shouted “we are the boys who will slaughter the croppies to-morrow at the Curragh.” On this account a great many of the insurgents wisely stayed away. Unfortunately Denis Downey was not one of them. Mounted on a fine horse he presented himself with his comrades. When the massacre began he leaped on his horse, and in all probability would have made good his escape, had he not stopped to take up a relative. A bullet found him, and he fell dead from the saddle. His riderless horse, which had been stabled at his father-in-law’s place, galloped thither, mad with terror. That night his wife, who had felt all day the most harrowing presentiment of impending woe, had a dream of her husband lying weltering in his blood. Her wild cries roused the household, and her father, finding his efforts at comfort unavailing, finally determined to go out and seek for news. At the end of the lane leading from his house to the highway he met his son-in-law’s riderless horse, saddled and bridled and covered with foam—and the early June dawn discovered groups of country people passing along the highway with faces and gestures and voices, all eloquent of some dreadful tragedy. “What news from the Curragh?” he asked a group which passed. “Bad news, bad news,” came the answer like some tragic chorus, “our friends were all slaughtered on the Curragh, to-day.” When her father came home with his tidings, Mrs. Downey insisted on getting out one of the carts, and proceeding to the place of the slaughter to search for her husband’s body—for she was quite convinced that her dream was true, and she would find him among the slain. She came at last to the bloody plain, and found it littered with corpses. She turned over two hundred dead bodies before she discovered her husband’s. She laid him in the cart, covered him with straw and a quilt, and proceeded to the house of a relative to wake him. But the word had gone round that wherever a rebel corpse should be found the house sheltering it would be burned by the “yeos.” Without waiting even for a coffin, the broken-hearted young widow had to wrap her man in a sheet, and so see him laid in the hastily made grave. When quieter days came and she was able to return to the home he had made for her, she found it a wreck. She sold her farm and went to live in Monasterevan.