died for his country; he died for the Republic.’” When the Republic fell, and in the upheaval her rights were ignored, she went to the Emperor Napoleon in person and, recalling the services of Tone, sought naturalization for her son to secure his career in the army; and to the wonder of all near by, the Emperor heard her with marked respect and immediately granted her request.  She sought only this for her surviving son.  She had seen two children die—­there was moving pathos in the daughter’s death—­and now she was standing by the last.  Never was child guarded more faithfully or sent more proudly on his path in life.  One should read the memoirs to understand, and pause frequently to consider:  how she promised her husband bravely in the beginning that she would answer for their children, and how, in what she afterwards styled the hyperbole of grief, she was called to fulfil to the letter, and was found faithful, with an unexampled strength and devotion; how she saw two children struck down by a fatal disease, and how she drew the surviving son back to health by her watchful care to send him on his college and military career with loving pride; how, when a Minister of France, irritated at her putting by his patronage, roughly told her he could not “take the Emperor by the collar to place Mr. Tone”—­she went to the Emperor in person, with dignity but without fear, and won his respect; how the suggestion of the mean-minded that her demand was a pecuniary one, drew from her the proud boast that in all her misfortunes she had never learned to hold out her hand; how through all her misfortunes we watch her with wonderful dignity, delicacy, courage, and devotion quick to see what her trust demanded and never failing to answer the call, till her task is done, and we see her on the morning when her son sets out on the path she had prepared, the same quivering woman, who had sent her husband with words of comfort to his duty, now, after all the years of trial, sending her son as proudly on his path.  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