It is their first
parting. Let her own words speak: "Hitherto I had not allowed myself
even to feel that my William was my own and my only child; I considered
only that Tone's son was confided to me; but in that moment Nature
resumed her rights. I sat in a field: the road was long and white before
me and no object on it but my child.... I could not think; but all I had
ever suffered seemed before and around me at that moment, and I wished
so intensely to close my eyes for ever, that I wondered it did not
happen. The transitions of the mind are very extraordinary. As I sat in
that state, unable to think of the necessity of returning home, a little
lark rushed up from the grass beside me; it whirled over my head and
hovered in the air singing such a beautiful, cheering, and, as it
sounded to me, approving note, that it roused me. I felt in my heart as
if Tone had sent it to me. I returned to my solitary home." It is a
picture to move us, to think of the devoted woman there in the sunshine,
bent down in the grass, utterly alone, till the lark, sweeping
heavenward in song, seems to give a message of gentle comfort from her
husband's watching spirit. Our emotion now is of no enervating order. We
are proud of our land and her people; our nerves are firm and set; our
hearts cry out for action; we are not weeping, but burning for the
Cause. How little we know of this heroic woman.
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