and the light from the lamps lit up her
brilliant hair. Her cheeks were flaming with color, and her very
dark-blue eyes looked as black as night. She faced her companions.

"Well," she said, "here we are, and we call ourselves the Wild Irish
Girls. I really wonder if you English girls who are assembled here in
the old quarry to-night have the least idea what it means to be a wild
Irish girl. If you don't know, I'd like to tell you."

"Yes, do tell us," cried several.

"The principal thing that it means," continued Kathleen, raising her
voice to a slightly theatrical pitch, and extending her arm so that the
lamplight fell all over it--"the chief thing that it means is to be
free--yes, free as the air, free as the mountain streams, free as the
dear, darling, glorious, everlasting mountains themselves. Oh, to know
freedom and then to be torn away from it! Girls, I will tell you the
truth. I feel in your dull old England as though I were in prison. Yes,
that's about it. I don't like England. I want you girls to join me in
loving Ireland."

"But we can't hate England," said Kate Rourke; "that is quite
impossible. If Ireland is your native land, England is ours, and we
cannot help loving her very, very much."

"You have never known Ireland," continued Kathleen. "You are not cramped
up in that favored spot; you are allowed to get up when you like and to
go to bed when you like, to eat what you like, to read what books you
like, to row on the lake, to shoot in the bogs, to gallop on your pony
over the moors, and--and--oh, to live the life of the _free_."

It was Ruth Craven who now interrupted the eager words of the queen of
the new society.

"Can't you tell us, Kathleen," she said, "how to get Ireland into
England--how to introduce what is good of Ireland into England? That is
the use of the society as far as I am concerned. With the exception of
yourself we are all English girls."

"Yes," said Susy suddenly; "and we have very bad times most of us. I
wish you knew what a dull evening I have just been living
through--taking care of a tiny, very dull little shop. Mother was out
looking after a sick child, and I had to mind the shop. Poor women came
in for penn'orths of paper. I can tell you there wasn't much freedom
about that; it was all horrid."

"Well, we have shops in Ireland too," continued Kathleen, "and I
suppose people have to mind them. But what I want to say now is this. I
have been sent over to this country