lamp played on it from an automobile behind, a small figure in a slouch hat
and a big black coat waved a bouquet of narcissus. There was a surge of the
block-long crowds and people who could not see lifted their hands and
shouted: "Up the countess!"

As we waited in the light of the dim yellow bulbs threaded from the ceiling
of the big bare upper front room of Liberty Hall, Susan Mitchell told me of
"the chivalrous woman." The countess is a daughter of the Gore-Booth family
which owned its Sligo estate before America was discovered. As a girl the
countess used to ride fast horses like mad along the rocky western coast.
Then she became a three-feathered débutante bowing at Dublin Castle. Later
she painted pictures in Paris and married her handsome Pole. But one day
some one put an Irish history in her hands. In a sudden whole-hearted
conversion to the cause of the people, the countess turned to aid the Irish
labor organizers. She drilled boy scouts for the Citizens' Army. She fed
starving strikers during the labor troubles of 1913 with sheep sent daily
from her Sligo estate. In the rebellion of 1916 she fought and killed under
Michael Mallin of the Citizens' Army. She was hardly out of jail for
participation in the rebellion when she was clapped in again for alleged
complicity in the never-to-be-proved German plot. While she was in jail,
she was elected the first woman member of parliament.

White from imprisonment, her small round steel-rimmed glasses dropping away
from her blue eyes, and her curly brown hair wisping out from under her
black felt hat, the countess embraced a few of the women in the room and
exchanged handclasps with the men. Below the crowd was clamoring for her
appearance at the window.

"Fellow rebels!" she began as she leaned out into the mellow night. Then
with the apparent desire to say everything at once that makes her public