IT was where a man should always find the Ladye of his Dreams that Theobald Wolfe Tone found his sky-woman—above the crowded ways of life, and yet not so far above them but that a man might, by raising his eyes, see her leaning towards him, bending upon his path the star-like radiance of her beauty, or that by climbing to her, a man might reach her side. On a certain day, early in the year 1785, young Tone, then in his twenty-second year, and a scholar of the University of Dublin, went out, as his custom was after commons, with a fellow student for a stroll in Grafton Street. They were on the way to Byrne’s, the bookseller’s—a favourite _rendezvous_ of intellectual and political Dublin—when, happening to glance up, they saw leaning from the window of a house near Byrne’s, as once “the Blessed Damozel leaned out from the gold bar of Heaven”—an exquisite young girl. It was a case of mutual love “at first sight.” The passionate adoration which the romantic young student of Trinity—with his head full of love poetry from his rehearsals for private theatricals, and dreams of military glory from his constant attendances at parades and field days in Phoenix Park—brought to the young loveliness of sixteen-year-old Matilda Witherington, was fully returned. Every day he passed her window and every day he found her there watching for his coming; and so it fell out that these two, who were to endure so much together, whose love-story was to be remembered, as long as Ireland keeps a place in her faithful heart for the constancy, and heroism and gallantry of her sons and daughters, had given their hearts irrevocably to each other before ever they knew the sound of each other’s voices.