Extract from “Memoir of Bartholomew Teeling,” by his nephew, and namesake, in Madden’s “United Irishmen,” Third Series, Vol. I. (First Edition, 1846). Is it true, as men say, that the woman by whose cradle the kind, gift-bearing fairies have laid that most rare and precious gift called “charm,” is immortally dowered? Mary Teeling was an old woman, and one who had drained to its dregs the cup of life’s bitterest sorrows—when (knowing it not) she sat for the portrait which her grandson has left us of her; and she had been many years in her grave, when it was finished and hung in its place in the gallery of portraits collected by Dr. Madden of the men and women who gave their all for Ireland in ’98. But from the canvas there comes forth, stealing into the heart of each of us, the same charm which, in her radiant girlhood, won the devotion of her stately young lover, and in her beautiful old age made captive his little grandson. Neither age had power to wither, nor death to destroy, the gift which was hers to draw all hearts under her sweet sway. We would fain know something of the training and education which, fostering her innate charm, made the mother of Bartholomew and Charles Teeling such an exquisite type of the Irish Catholic gentlewoman. “A nation is what its women make its men”; and if we want boys in the Ireland of the future like the gallant boy, who on his noble grey charger galloped alone against the cannon of Park’s Hill, and saved the fortunes of the day at Carricknagat, or like that other gallant boy, his younger brother, who rode forth—a lad of seventeen—on a yet more perilous quest: to slay unaided the dragon of Orangeism, we must take care to provide “mothers of men” like her who bore these young heroes. And not alone for the men they will make, will Ireland need such women. She will want them for their own dear selves; and she will want them, whatever be her destiny—whether she is to enter at last on the reward of her long sorrows, or whether she must tread the roadway of thorns yet a little longer. If the future of our land is to be one of peace and prosperity she will need in her homes women to “look well to the paths of their house,” as Mary Teeling did in the days of her prosperity amid the elegance and comforts of the home in Lisburn which her husband’s wealth had enabled him to provide for his family, exercising the sweet and lovely rule of the mistress of a Catholic home, training her children to the noblest ideals of life and conduct, directing her servants with gentle authority, practising a gracious hospitality, “opening her hands to the needy, and stretching out her hands to the poor.” And if, on the other hand, the whole price is not paid yet, and the era of persecution is to open again—ah! then it is that Ireland will need her Mary Teelings to stand by their husbands’ side while “they suffer persecution for justice’ sake,” as she did by Luke Teeling’s