The girls in some instances shared the lessons of their brothers. Dr. Costello of Tuam tells me that his great-grandmother was taught Latin by a man working on her father’s farm—a disguised friar. The scribes put aside their copying for a time to form the little maidens’ hands to the delicate Italian script which was the admiration of the time. The wandering harper, who honoured their father’s house with a visit, could sometimes be induced to give the daughters of the family a course of lessons on his sweet instrument. Arthur O’Neill tells us of teaching the harp to two young ladies in Longford, Miss Farrell and Miss Plunkett. “Miss Farrell played handsomely; Miss Plunkett middling.”[37] Most of the old Catholic families had members settled abroad, and intercourse with the Continent was therefore so close and intimate that the outlook of the Irish at home was far less insular than it is at present. Occasionally uncles and cousins, who had won fame as soldiers in foreign services, came home to visit their people, and as they liked to have their nephews and nieces able to converse with them in French, or Spanish, or German, as the case might be, the little ones were stimulated to learn as much as they could in expectation of their kinsmen’s coming. Little Mary Ann McCracken had to learn her French from an old weaver, but little Mary Taaffe and her sisters had all around them priests, who had studied abroad, and were only too anxious to keep up their practice of foreign languages by speaking them with their little parishioners. And so when the Taaffe uncle who had fought at Fontenoy, or his son, who witnessed the dispersal of the Brigade, came home to Ireland, their fastidious ears were not tortured by the halting French or vile accents of their young kinswomen. In many a country house, as in that of the O’Connors of Belanagare, were living ladies, like Madame O’Rorke, Charles O’Connor’s grandmother, widows of distinguished Irish officers in the French, or Spanish or Imperial service, who had spent their youth in the most brilliant circle in Europe, had been the friends and _confidantes_ of Queens, and who now took delight in forming their little grandchildren and nieces to the exquisite manners and gracious bearing which, in their own case, had won the admiration of the most polished society on the Continent. In other houses were other ladies who under the secular garb which the necessities of the time imposed on them, carried out as well as they could, in their kinsmen’s homes, the religious rule of life to which they had bound themselves in their suppressed convents. When the convents were closed, and the nuns scattered, those who, instead of going abroad, found refuge with their relatives and friends, devoted themselves largely to the education of the little girls of the household. They trained them to their own exquisite skill in needlework, they taught them something of the art of healing, and above all they