TO MY GREAT GRANDCHILDREN.

MY DEAR CHILDREN,-I leave these old worn pages to you as a legacy. They would long ago have been destroyed had not one voice pleaded on their behalf, and a hand withheld me. And so they come to you with their mistakes uncorrected, their failings unaltered.

You must take them for what they are the ignorant inexperienced outcome of the thoughts and feelings of one who soon learned that she could not paint the history of the times, but could only tell a little of what touched her own life and home. She has lived since to regret this, her incapacity. She would fain have left to you, and to others, a true picture of the state and need, the condition and the requirements of her country and her people.

The young girl who wrote unloving truths in her journal against one name, did not at the time pause to question whether this were charity.

As to all misconceptions and errors in politics you will see for yourselves that she began to learn a little better before ending her year's record. She is learning still.

Looking back on these pages, she sees that, instinctively, she has suppressed the horrors of those days; no one who has not lived through them, nor heard at least, nor read the ghastly details can guess what the Year of the Rebellion meant to all in Ireland.