[Illustration:  Horoscope of Annie Besant.]

It has always been somewhat of a grievance to me that I was born in London, “within the sound of Bow Bells,” when three-quarters of my blood and all my heart are Irish.  My dear mother was of purest Irish descent, and my father was Irish on his mother’s side, though belonging to the Devonshire Woods on his father’s.  The Woods were yeomen of the sturdy English type, farming their own land in honest, independent fashion.  Of late years they seem to have developed more in the direction of brains, from the time, in fact, that Matthew Wood became Mayor of London town, fought Queen Caroline’s battles against her most religious and gracious royal husband, aided the Duke of Kent with no niggard hand, and received a baronetcy for his services from the Duke of Kent’s royal daughter.  Since then they have given England a Lord Chancellor in the person of the gentle-hearted and pure-living Lord Hatherley, while others have distinguished themselves in various ways in the service of their country.  But I feel playfully inclined to grudge the English blood they put into my father’s veins, with his Irish mother, his Galway birth, and his Trinity College, Dublin, education.  For the Irish tongue is musical in my ear, and the Irish nature dear to my heart.  Only in Ireland is it that if you stop to ask a worn-out ragged woman the way to some old monument, she will say:  “Sure, then, my darlin’, it’s just up the hill and round the corner, and then any one will tell you the way.  And it’s there you’ll see the place where the blessed Saint Patrick set his foot, and his blessing be on yer.”  Old women as poor as she in other nations would never be as bright and as friendly and as garrulous.  And where, out of Ireland, will you see a whole town crowd into a station to say good-bye to half a dozen emigrants, till the platform is a heaving mass of men and women, struggling, climbing over each other for a last kiss, crying, keening, laughing, all in a breath, till all the air is throbbing and there’s a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes as the train steams out?  Where, out of Ireland, will you be bumping along the streets on an outside car, beside a taciturn Jarvey, who, on suddenly discovering that you are shadowed by “Castle” spies, becomes loquaciously friendly, and points out everything that he thinks will interest you?  Blessings on the quick tongues and warm hearts, on the people so easy to lead, so hard to drive.  And blessings on the ancient land once inhabited by mighty men of wisdom, that in later times became the Island of Saints, and shall once again be the Island of Sages, when the Wheel turns round.