It reads like a chapter of the _Fioretti_—the record of the early days of Catherine Plunkett’s foundation in Drogheda. The first home of the nuns was a little mud cabin on the Meath side of the Boyne. Long before day broke over the shining sands and thin line of Eastern sea, the Dominican Father who ministered to their spiritual wants, used to row himself over in a little boat to say Mass and give them holy Communion. Dressed in secular garb, with their real character known only to a few discreet friends, the ladies from Brussels obtained, without much difficulty, leave from the Protestant Primate to open a school, and the Drogheda merchants were very glad to send their daughters to them. Later, they moved to a house in Dyer Street, and opened a boarding school, and an establishment for lady boarders. All the _noblesse_ of the Pale, the Plunketts, the Bellews, the Balfes, the Dillons, the O’Reillys, the Drakes, the Fortescues, the Taaffes are represented among the first pupils—and it is not at all unlikely that our heroine, Mary Taaffe, received her education in this Dyer Street Convent, which welcomed so many of her kinswomen. The nuns of Sienna very kindly searched their old account books for her name, but unfortunately the books were missing for the years 1762 to 1765, which are the very years when we might expect to find her there—if we are right in assuming that she was born about 1753.[41] Footnote 41: The date has only been arrived at by inference. She was married in 1771, and we know from her grandson’s narrative that she was considered to have married early, say about eighteen. Her mother died in 1753, which set a posterior limit to her conjectured birth year. So while it is not improbable that Catherine Plunkett’s Convent in Drogheda had the credit of the education which produced so charming a result, we cannot attain any certainty in the matter. Nor do we know much about Mary Taaffe’s childhood. Her father, Mr. George Taaffe, representative of that branch of the Taaffes who held the Earldom of Carlingford under the Stuarts, lived in Ardee on the remnant of the ancestral estates which was all the family’s devotion to the “Lost Cause” of the Stuarts had left them, and within sight of the ancestral castle of Smarmore, which his son was to purchase back for the family. His young wife, Elizabeth Keappock, died in 1753 at the early age of thirty, leaving him with one son, John, and four daughters. Of these, one married Terence Kiernan; another, a member of the Scurly family, a third, Alice, James Lynch of Drogheda. John, the only son, was twice married, first to Anne Plunkett of Portmarnock, and after her death in 1786 to Catherine Taaffe.