of all the nerves in a wave of sentiment.  This emotion is of the enervating order.  There is no sweep of strong fire through the blood, no tightening grip on life, no set resolve to stand to the flag and see the battle through.  It is well, then, a generation that has heard from a thousand platforms, in plaintive notes, of Sarah Curran and her love should turn to the braver and more beautiful model of her who was the wife of Tone.

V

When we think of the qualities that are distinctive of the woman, we have in mind a finer gentleness, sensibility, sympathy and tenderness; and when we have these qualities intensified in any woman, and with them combined the endurance, courage and daring that are taken as the manly virtues, we have a woman of the heroic type.  Of such a type was the wife of Tone.  We can speak her praise without fear, for she was put to the test in every way, and in every way found marvellously true.  For her devotion to, and encouragement of, her great husband in his great work, she would have won our high praise, even if, when he was stricken down and she was bereft of his wonderful love and buoyant spirits, she had proved forgetful of his work and the glory of his name.  But she was bereft, and she was then found most marvellously true.  Her devotion to Tone, while he was living and fighting, might be explained by the woman’s passionate attachment to the man she loved.  It is the woman’s tenderness that is most evident in these early years, but there is shining evidence of the fortitude that showed her true nobility in the darker after-years.  It was no ordinary love that bound them, and reading the record of their lives this stands out clear and beautiful.  Tone, whom we know as patient organiser, tenacious fighter, far-seeing thinker, indomitable spirit—­a born leader of men—­writes to his wife with the passionate simplicity of an enraptured child:  “I doat upon you and the babes.”  And his letters end thus:  “Kiss the babies for me ten thousand times.  God Almighty for ever bless you, my dearest life and soul.” (This from the “French Atheist.”  I hope his traducers are heartily ashamed of themselves.) Nor is it strange.  When, in the beginning of his enterprise, he is in America, preparing to go to France on his great mission, he is troubled by the thought of his defenceless ones.  In the crisis how does his wife act?  Does she wind clinging arms around him, telling him with tears, of their children and his early vows, and beseeching him to think of his love and forget his country?  No; let the diary speak:  “My wife especially, whose courage and whose zeal for my honour and interests were not in the least abated by all her past sufferings, supplicated me to let no consideration of her or our children stand for a moment in the way of my engagements to our friends and my duty to my country, adding that she would answer for our family during my absence, and that the same Providence which had so often, as