Anne Devlin was not the only woman of those times who bore to the day of her death on her tender skin the cicatrized marks of the wounds inflicted by the bayonets of the soldiers in the design of extorting from her information. Some of the atrocities suffered by women had not even the excuse of any purpose—save that of satisfying a monstrous lust of cruelty. A dreadful case is that of Mrs. O’Neill, whose son, a clerical student, had been taken up and confined in New Geneva barracks, preparatory to being shipped off to work in the salt-mines of the King of Prussia. The poor woman had come all the way from Antrim, a distance of one hundred and fifty miles, to take a last farewell of him. When she reached her destination she was refused access to him, and only succeeded in seeing him after she had bribed his guards. Unfortunately, she yielded to the violence of her grief when the time to leave him came, and the anguished cries of the poor mother betrayed her forbidden presence in her boy’s cell. She was torn from his arms, hurried into the presence of the colonel, and by him delivered to the tender mercies of the soldiers, who dragged her into the courtyard, and proceeded to toss her in a blanket. When the savage pastime of the soldiers ceased, a few rags were thrown to the unfortunate woman; she crawled to a neighbouring cabin, and there she died. Those who are best entitled to speak of the causes of the Rising of ’Ninety-Eight are singularly unanimous in their exposition of them. During Thomas Addis Emmet’s examination before the Secret Committee of the House of Lords (August 10th, 1798) he stated in reply to Lord Clare’s query as to what caused the late insurrection: “the free quarters, the house-burnings, the tortures, the military executions in the counties of Kildare, Carlow and Wicklow.” Mary McCracken used to quote her brother, Henry Joy’s opinion that “if it had not been for the free quarters and the flogging, there would have been no rebellion after all, for it is not easy to get the people to turn out of their comfortable homes, if they _have_ any comfort in them.” It was the sight of his burning chapel and the blazing homesteads of his flock which turned Father John Murphy from a man of peace into the intrepid leader of fighting men. When his people fled to him in the woods from the flames of their farmhouses and the outrages of the yeomanry, he told them that “they had better die courageously in the field than be butchered in their houses; that, for his own part, if he had any brave men to join him, he was resolved to sell his life dearly and prove to these cruel monsters that they should not continue their murders and devastations with impunity.”