lines to the men, and if the latter had needed any stimulus to their enthusiasm they would certainly have got it from their mothers, sisters, and wives.  The Marchioness of Londonderry threw herself whole-heartedly into the movement.  Having always ably seconded her husband’s many political and social activities, she made no exception in regard to his devotion to Ulster.  Lord Londonderry, she was fond of saying, was an Ulsterman born and bred, and she was an Ulsterwoman “by adoption and grace.”  Her energy was inexhaustible, and her enthusiasm contagious; she used her influence and her wonderful social gifts unsparingly in the Unionist cause.

A meeting of the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council, of which the Dowager Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, widow of the great diplomat, was president, was held on the 17th of September, the day before the demonstration at Enniskillen, when a resolution proposed by Lady Londonderry declaring the determination of Ulster women to stand by their men in the policy to be embodied in the Covenant, was carried with immense enthusiasm and without dissent.  No women were so vehement in their support of the Loyalist cause as the factory workers, who were very numerous in Belfast.  Indeed, their zeal, and their manner of displaying it, seemed sometimes to illustrate a well-known line of Kipling’s, considered by some to be anything but complimentary to the female sex.  Anyhow, there was no divergence of opinion or sympathy between the two sexes in Ulster on the question of Union or Home Rule; and the women who everywhere attended the meetings in large numbers were no idle sightseers—­though they were certainly hero-worshippers of the Ulster leader—­but a genuine political force to be taken into account.

It was during the September campaign that the “wooden guns” and “dummy rifles” appeared, which excited so much derision in the English Radical Press, whose editors little dreamed that the day was not far distant when Mr. Asquith’s Government would be glad enough to borrow those same dummy rifles for training the new levies of Kitchener’s Army to fight the Germans.  So far as the Ulstermen were concerned the ridicule of their quasi-military display and equipment never had any sting in it.  They were conscious of the strength given to their cause by the discipline and military organisation of the volunteers, even if the weapons with which they drilled should never be replaced by the real thing; and many of them had an instinctive belief that their leaders would see to it that they were effectively armed all in good time.  And so with grim earnestness they recruited the various battalions of volunteers, gave up their evenings to drilling, provided cyclist corps, signalling corps, ambulances and nurses; they were proud to receive their leader with guards of honour at the station, and bodyguards while he drove through their town or district to the meetings where he spoke.  Few of them probably ever so much as