and was rapidly coming to the front as a writer. She contributed various tales and essays to the magazines of that day, and her first book, a tale for children, "The Three Paths," came out in 1847, when she was twenty-three.
From a portrait of her in the National Portrait Gallery in Dublin, presented by her mother, we gather some idea of her appearance. Her eyes were real Irish eyes, dark grey, large and brilliant, her hair black; in her face is an expression of melancholy, which seems to tell of many sorrows borne with patience and resignation. Whether she had a romance in her life which turned out unhappily, we do not know, but much in her novels points to this, and her relations with her father must have been of a very unpleasant nature, for he seems to have been as untruthful and undependable as she was truthful and dependable. To her mother she was everything—a support and a stay. A more devoted daughter never breathed, and this affection was mutual. She was patriotic, too. A strong light is thrown on her feelings for her native country, in a letter given by the late Sir Charles Gavan Duffy in his book, "My Life in Two Hemispheres." After his trial in April, '49, which resulted in a disagreement of the jury, Gavan Duffy arrived in London, and proposed reviving The Nation, which had been suppressed in Dublin.
"From the beginning," he says, "gifted women
