One half suspects, from the way Miles Byrne speaks of Miss Palmer, that he was in love with her. Having mentioned Emmet’s “implicit confidence” in her, he adds, “and indeed no one was ever more worthy of such trust than this young lady, who had suffered severely in 1798 by her father’s imprisonment and the ruin of his affairs, her brother’s exile and death on the Continent. Still she bore up under all her misfortunes like a heroine of the olden times, and was a comfort and a consolation to her family and friends.” On the eve of Miles Byrne’s romantic escape to France he called to take farewell of Miss Palmer and her father, and she gave him a present of some French money for his _viaticum_. Poor Biddy Palmer had a sad old age. Dr. Madden discovered her (she was then a Mrs. Horan) “in very reduced circumstances, far advanced in years, in the neighbourhood of Finsbury Square, London, earning a miserable livelihood by keeping a little school for the female children of the poor, in a neighbourhood where indigence and want abounds.” For some reason (perhaps it was in part the long life and faithful heart of Mary McCracken and the influence she radiated around her) the North has kept a richer record of the sufferings and heroism of its obscurer women in ’98 and ’03, than other parts of the country. Some very precious _reliques_ have been gathered up in the pages of the _Shan Van Vocht_, and make of them a most valuable repository of patriotic memories. One of these tells of a sister, whose brother, with another lad, had undertaken the dangerous office of posting up Robert Emmet’s proclamation around Carnmoney, a few miles to the north of Belfast. For this they were subsequently hanged, drawn and quartered on the Gallow’s Green at Carrickfergus. At dead of night the sister, who had walked all the way from Carnmoney, was led by pitying friends to the spot where the poor mangled bodies lay. “She knelt down and with stifled sobs and much difficulty removed the clay that had been hastily piled above them. Her hand first came upon a head which by the feel of the features she thought was that of her brother. She wrapped it in her apron and carried it back to her home, so absorbed in her grief that she felt not the miles her speeding feet covered. When she arrived home, she discovered that the head she had borne on that sorrowful journey was not her brother’s, but that of the other poor lad. She retraced her steps, running between the hedgerows in her anxiety to reach the Gallow’s Green before the people should be afoot, stumbling on the uneven stones, and praying with all her tortured heart that her strength might last until her purpose should be accomplished.... She arrived at the grave, reverentially deposited the head back in its place, and taking up the one she had come to seek departed again for Carnmoney.”