These poor mothers of our Irish martyrs! These poor Rachels! There is something in their grief which makes it a thing apart. Wives, and sisters, and sweethearts, who have given their dear ones to Ireland have felt, even in their most anguished hour, something of that exaltation which makes “the hard service _they_ take, who help the Poor Old Woman,” a yoke more sweet and precious than any liberty. Like the men, of whose sufferings it was their splendid privilege to partake, the women who have shared their husband’s prison cell, like Jane Emmet, or who have walked with their brothers, even to the foot of the scaffold, like Mary Anne McCracken, or who have found death by their lover’s side on the battlefield, like Betsy Gray, “think themselves well paid.” But not even Ireland could pay the mother of the Emmets, or the mother of the Shearses, or heal the hidden wound that bled until her death-night in the heart of Bartholomew Teeling’s mother, or comfort Lord Edward’s poor mother when the roses of each recurring June were redly tragic with the memory of his blood-stained prison deathbed, and its sunshine was darkened by the memory of her boy’s agony. For the greatness of their sorrow, then, shall we not place them first, these broken-hearted mothers, in our tale of the “Women of ’Ninety-Eight”? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Mother of the Emmets ELIZABETH MASON EMMET—(1740-1803)[2] “My life was he, My death his taking.” —_Lament of Mothers of Bethlehem._ Footnote 2: Authorities: Madden’s “United Irishmen,” Third Series, Second Ed. (London and Dublin, 1860); Dr. Thos. Addis Emmet’s “The Emmet Family” (New York, 1898); J. J. Reynolds’s “Footprints of Emmet” (Dublin, 1903); Smith’s “County and City of Cork,” edited by Day and Copinger (Cork, 1893).