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Nanda looked at him with her cold kindness. "What nonsense you do talk!" "Your tone's sweet to me," he returned, "as showing that you don't think ME, either, too good for you. No one, remember, will take that for your excuse when the world some day sees me annihilated by your having put an end to our so harmless relations."
It is somewhat curious, however, to find that Wolfe Tone should at one period of his life have formed the idea of helping England to defend herself against her enemies. Some historians have gone so far as to opine that if Pitt could have seen his way to take Tone's proposition seriously, and to patronize the young man, the world might never have heard of the insurrection of "Ninety-Eight."
Napoleon and Carnot approved of Tone's schemes as a whole, but Tone could not help seeing that Napoleon cared nothing whatever about the independence or prosperity of Ireland, and only took up with the whole scheme as a convenient project for the embarrassment and the distraction of England.
Throughout Tone's journal we find constant references to Thomas Russell, whom he always places with Thomas Addis Emmet at the head of his list of friends.
Wolfe Tone's wife married again some sixteen years after the husband of her youth had passed away. Her grave is to be seen in a cemetery close to Washington, in the United States, the land in which Wolfe Tone's widow passed all the later years of her life. With the failure and the death of Robert Emmet closed the last rebellious rising in Ireland which belongs to the history of the Georges.
Tone's despondency and powerless rage as he foresaw the failure of his project might have been still deeper if he could have known how utterly unprepared the authorities of Dublin Castle were for any sort of invasion. Tone had observed already, as the expedition made its way from Brest, that they had not seen a single English vessel of war anywhere on the sea or around the Irish coasts.
The French officers landed in Donegal were received with courtesy by the neighbouring gentry, among whom was the Earl of Cavan, who entertained them at dinner. Here it was that Sir George Hill, son-in-law to Commissioner Beresford, an old college friend of Tone's, identified the founder of the United Irishmen under the uniform of a French Adjutant-General.
"Tone's Tactics" was unknown to them. The uniform of the artillery and grenadiers differed little from that of the cavalry. The latter were topped off with helmets of red leather. Upon the hats of the flood-wood, tin or sheet-iron plates showed the name of the company, the L. I. standing for "Light Infantry," just as you know the porter of your hotel by his badge.
In the same expectation, McNevin, Corbet, and others of the Irish in France, formed themselves, by permission of the First Consul, into a legion, under command of Tone's trusty aid-de-camp, McSheehey; while Thomas Addis Emmet and Arthur O'Conor remained at Paris, the plenipotentiaries of their countrymen.
The American edition has a fuller account of Tone's wife, her courage and devotion in educating her son, and her interviews with Napoleon, and life in America. The women of the United Irish period are fully dealt with in K. R. Madden's Lives and Times of the United Irishmen. On Mary McCracken, see Mrs. Milligan Fox, The Annals of the Irish Harpers. On the women of Limerick, see Rev.
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