to boil the yellow stains out of it and
make me a dress. I had gone about
many a time, like love amid the ruins,
in the fragments of Aunt Bess's splen-
dour, and I was not happy in the
thought of dangling these dimmed re-
minders of Ireland's past around with
me. But mother said she thought I'd
have a really truly white Sunday best
dress out of it by the time she was
through with it. So she prepared a
strong solution of sodium and things,
and boiled the breadths, and every little
green harp came dancing back as if
awaiting the hand of a new Dublin poet.
The green of them was even more
charming than it had been at first, and
I, as happy as if I had acquired the
golden harp for which I then vaguely
longed, went to Sunday-school all that
summer in this miraculous dress of
now-you-see-them-and-now-you-don't,
and became so used to being asked if I
were Irish that my heart exulted when
I found that I might -- fractionally --
claim to be, and that one of the Fenian
martyrs had been an ancestor. For a
year, even, after that discovery of the
Fenian martyr, ancestors were a fa-
vorite study of mine.