discontent. It is not the Fenians who have depopulated Ireland's strength
and increased her misery. It is not the Fenians who have evicted tenants
by the score. It is not the Fenians who have checked cultivation. Those
who have caused the wrong at least should frame the remedy."



VI.


In December, 1867, I was married at St. Leonards, and after a brief trip
to Paris and Southsea, we went to Cheltenham where Mr. Besant had
obtained a mastership. We lived at first in lodgings, and as I was very
much alone, my love for reading had full swing. Quietly to myself I
fretted intensely for my mother, and for the daily sympathy and
comradeship that had made my life so fair. In a strange town, among
strangers, with a number of ladies visiting me who talked only of
servants and babies--troubles of which I knew nothing--who were
profoundly uninterested in everything that had formed my previous life,
in theology, in politics, in questions of social reform, and who looked
on me as "strange" because I cared more for the great struggles outside
than for the discussions of a housemaid's young man, or the amount of
"butter when dripping would have done perfectly well, my dear," used by
the cook--under such circumstances it will not seem marvellous that I
felt somewhat forlorn. I found refuge, however, in books, and
energetically carried on my favorite studies; next, I thought I would try
writing, and took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote
some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more
ambitious character, "The Lives of the Black Letter Saints". For the sake
of the unecclesiastically trained it may be well to mention that in the