ldren, holding by their mother's skirts, followed, smiled on and
chidden as they impeded her work, and babbled questions about this or
that. Beside the fire, in the chair that had once belonged to the master
of the house, sat Micah Ward. He looked very old now and infirm. The
months in a prison hulk in Belfast Lough and the long weariness of his
confinement in bleak Fort George had set their mark upon him. On his
knees lay a Greek lexicon, but he was pursuing no word through its
pages. It was open at the fly-leaf inside the cover. He was reading
lovingly for the hundredth time an inscription written there--

"This book was given to Rev. Micah Ward by his fellow-prisoners in
Fort George, in witness of their gratitude to him for his ministrations
during their captivity, and as a token of their admiration for his
fortitude, his patience, and his unfailing charity."

There followed a list of twenty names. Four of them belonged to men of
the Roman Catholic faith, six of them were the names of Presbyterians,
ten were of those who accepted the teaching of that other Church which,
trammelled for centuries by connection with the State, hampered with
riches secured to her by the bayonets of a foreign power, dragged down
very often by officials placed over her by Englishmen, has yet in spite
of all won glory. Out of her womb have come the men whose names shine
brightest on the melancholy roll of the Irish patriots of the last two
centuries. She has not cared to boast of them. She has hidden their
names from her children as if they were a shame to her, but they are
hers.

Thus far off in a desolate Scottish fortress, after the total failure
of every plan, in the hour of Ireland's most hopeless degradation, the
great dream which had fired the imagination of Tone and Neilson and
the others, the dream of all Irishmen uniting in a common love of their
country, a love which should transcend the differences of rival creeds,
found a realisation. The witness, written in crabbed characters on
the fly-leaf of a lexicon, lay on the knees of a broken old man in the
cottage of a widow within earshot of the perpetual clamour of the bleak
northern sea.

"Well, father," said Neal, "here I am back again. And here's Jemmy
Hope, whom I picked up on the road. He's come to see you. He's going to
persuade you to cross the sea with me. You and I and he together, and
Hannah Macaulay, who's coming, too. Una will make you all welcome on her
sturdy ship.