The Secret Rose

The dedication says the stories were written at different times and in different manners, and without any definite plan, and have but one subject, the war of spiritual with natural order. The dedication tells its recipient that, whether the book is thought well or ill written, the recipient will sympathize with the sorrows and the ecstasies of its personages, and calls the recipient the one poet of modern Ireland who has moulded a spiritual ecstasy into verse.

Cumhal the son of Cormac begins to blow upon the glowing turf that he might light the two sods and the wisp of straw, but the sods and the straw would not light, for they were damp. Sir Frederick Hamilton calls to him the five troopers who had first fired upon the monks and tells them to mount quickly, ride through the woods towards the mountain, and get before these men. Duallach cries out again, and this time very bitterly, that they are fools of all fools who say the one he addresses comes of an old and noble stock.