independence in her citizens, restore to her people the protection of the law, so that they may speak without fear of arrest, and beg them to plainly and boldly state their grievances.  Let a commission of the best and wisest amongst Irishmen, with some of our highest English judges added, sit solemnly to hear all complaints, and then let us honestly legislate, not for the punishment of the discontented, but to remove the causes of the discontent.  It is not the Fenians who have depopulated Ireland’s strength and increased her misery.  It is not the Fenians who have evicted tenants by the score.  It is not the Fenians who have checked cultivation.  Those who have caused the wrong at least should frame the remedy.”

VI.

In December, 1867, I was married at St. Leonards, and after a brief trip to Paris and Southsea, we went to Cheltenham where Mr. Besant had obtained a mastership.  We lived at first in lodgings, and as I was very much alone, my love for reading had full swing.  Quietly to myself I fretted intensely for my mother, and for the daily sympathy and comradeship that had made my life so fair.  In a strange town, among strangers, with a number of ladies visiting me who talked only of servants and babies—­troubles of which I knew nothing—­who were profoundly uninterested in everything that had formed my previous life, in theology, in politics, in questions of social reform, and who looked on me as “strange” because I cared more for the great struggles outside than for the discussions of a housemaid’s young man, or the amount of “butter when dripping would have done perfectly well, my dear,” used by the cook—­under such circumstances it will not seem marvellous that I felt somewhat forlorn.  I found refuge, however, in books, and energetically carried on my favorite studies; next, I thought I would try writing, and took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, “The Lives of the Black Letter Saints”.  For the sake of the unecclesiastically trained it may be well to mention that in the Calendar of the Church of England there are a number of Saints’ Days; some of these are printed in red, and are Red Letter Days, for which services are appointed by the Church; others are printed in black, and are Black Letter Days, and have no special services fixed for them.  It seemed to me that it would be interesting to take each of these days and write a sketch of the life of the saint belonging to it, and accordingly I set to work to do so, and gathered various books of history and legend wherefrom to collect my “facts”.  I don’t in the least know what became of that valuable book; I tried Macmillans with it, and it was sent on by them to someone who was preparing a series of church books for the young; later I had a letter from a Church brotherhood offering to publish it, if I would give it as an “act of piety” to their order; its ultimate fate is to me unknown.