Redmond himself, hawk-faced and thick-bodied, might have been taken for no bad reincarnation of Raymond Le Gros.

To this extent he was less of a Celt than many of his countrymen; but he was assuredly none the less Irish because he was a Wexfordman.

The county of his birth was the county which had made the greatest resistance to English power in Ireland since Sarsfield and his "Wild Geese" crossed to Flanders.

Born in 1857, he grew up in a country-side full of memories of events then only some sixty years old; he knew and spoke with many men who had been out with pike or fowling-piece in 1798.

Rebel was to him from boyhood up a name of honour; and this was not only a phase of boyish enthusiasm.