“Where is our boasted English freedom when you cross to Kingstown pier?  Where has it been for near two years?  The Habeas Corpus Act suspended, the gaols crowded, the steamers searched, spies listening at shebeen shops for sedition, and the end of it a Fenian panic in England.  Oh, before it be too late, before more blood stain the pages of our present history, before we exasperate and arouse bitter animosities, let us try and do justice to our sister land.  Abolish once and for all the land laws, which in their iniquitous operation have ruined her peasantry.  Sweep away the leech-like Church which has sucked her vitality, and has given her back no word even of comfort in her degradation.  Turn her barracks into flax mills, encourage a spirit of 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.”

In December, 1867, I sailed out of the safe harbour of my happy and peaceful girlhood on to the wide sea of life, and the waves broke roughly as soon as the bar was crossed.  We were an ill-matched pair, my husband and I, from the very outset; he, with very high ideas of a husband’s authority and a wife’s submission, holding strongly to the “master-in-my-own-house theory,” thinking much of the details of home arrangements, precise, methodical, easily angered and with difficulty appeased.  I, accustomed to freedom, indifferent to home details, impulsive, very hot-tempered, and proud as Lucifer.  I had never had a harsh word spoken to me, never been ordered to do anything, had had my way smoothed for my feet, and never a worry had touched me.  Harshness roused first incredulous wonder, then a storm of indignant tears, and after a time a proud, defiant resistance, cold and hard as iron.  The easy-going, sunshiny, enthusiastic girl changed—­and changed pretty rapidly—­into a grave, proud, reticent woman, burying deep in her own heart all her hopes, her fears, and her disillusions.  I must have been a very unsatisfactory wife from the beginning, though I think other treatment might gradually have turned me into a fair imitation of the proper conventional article.  Beginning with the ignorance before alluded to, and so scared and outraged at heart from the very first; knowing nothing of household management or economical use of money—­I had never had an allowance or even bought myself a