Part 3 (1/2)
”The cholera was worse again. It came from foreign, and it lasted a couple of years, till G.o.d drove it out of the country. It is often I saw a man ploughing the garden in the morning till dinner time, and before evening he would be dead. It was as if on the wind it came, there was no escape from it; on the wind, the same as it would come now and would catch on to pigs. Sheds that would be made out in the haggards to put the sick in, they would turn as black as your coat. There was no one could go near them without he would have a gla.s.s of whiskey taken, and he wouldn't like it then.”
A LONG REMEMBERING
”The longest thing I remember is the time of the sickness, and my father that was making four straw mats for four brothers that died, and that couldn't afford coffins. The bodies were put in the mats and were tied up in them. And the second thing I remember is the people digging in the stubble after the oats and the wheat; to see would they meet a potato, and sometimes they did, for G.o.d sent them there.”
THE TERRY ALTS
”The Terry Alts were a bad cla.s.s; everything you had they'd take from you. It was against herding they began to get the land, the same as at the present time. And women they would take; a man maybe that hadn't a perch of land would go to a rich farmer's house and bring away his daughter. And I, supposing, to have some spite against you, I'd gather a mob and do every bad thing to destroy you. That is the way they were, a bad cla.s.s and doing bad deeds.”
THE '48 TIME
”Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young. That was the '48 time. The '48 men were foolish men; they thought to cope with the English Government.
They went to O'Connell to get from him all the money he had gathered, for they had it in their head to use that to make a rise against England. But when they asked O'Connell for it he told them there was none of it left, not one penny. Buying estates for his children he used it, and he said he spent it on a monastery. I don't know was he speaking truth. Mahon made a great speech against him, and it preyed on O'Connell, and he left the country and went away and died in some place called Genoa. He was a very ambitious man, like Napoleon. He got Emanc.i.p.ation; but where is the use of that? There's Judge O'Brien, Peter the Packer, was calling out and trying to do away with trial by jury.
And he would not be in his office or in his billet if it wasn't for O'Connell. They didn't do much after, where they didn't get the money from O'Connell. And the night they joined under Smith O'Brien they hadn't got their supper. A terrible cold night it was, no one could stand against it. Some bishop came from Dublin, and he told them to go home, for how could they reach with their pikes to the English soldiers that had got muskets. The soldiers came, and there was some firing, and they were all scattered. As to Smith O'Brien, there was ten thousand pounds on his head, and he hid for a while. Then at the last he went into the town of Clonmel, and there was a woman there in the street was a huckster, and he bade her give him up to the Government, for she would never earn money so easy. But for all she was worth she wouldn't do that. So then he went and gave himself up, and he was sent to Australia, and the property was given to his brother.”
A THING MITCh.e.l.l SAID
”Mitch.e.l.l was kept in Clonmel gaol two years before he was sent to Australia. He was a Protestant, and a very good man. He said in a speech, where was the use of meetings and of talking? It was with the point of their bayonet the English would have to be driven out of Ireland. It was Mitch.e.l.l said that.”
THE FENIAN RISING
”It was a man from America it came with. There was one Mackie was taken in a publichouse in Cork, and there was a policeman killed in the struggle. Judge O'Hagan was the judge when he was in the dock, and he said, 'Mr. Mackie, I see you are a gentleman and an educated man; and I'm sorry,' he said, 'that you did not read Irish history.' Mackie cried when he heard that, for indeed it was all spies about him, and it was they gave him up.”
A GREAT WONDER
”The greatest wonder I ever saw was one time near Kinvara at a funeral, there came a car along the road and a lady on it having a plaid cloak, as was the fas.h.i.+on then, and a big hat, and she kept her head down and never looked at the funeral at all. I wondered at her when I saw that, and I said to my brother it was a strange thing a lady to be coming past a funeral and not to look on at it at all. And who was on the car but O'Gorman Mahon, escaping from the Government, and dressed up as a lady!
He drove to Father Arthur's house at Kinvara, and there was a boat waiting, and a cousin of my own in it, to bring him out to a s.h.i.+p, and so he made his escape.”
ANOTHER WONDER
”I saw Clerkenwell prison in London broken up in the time of the Fenians, and every s.h.i.+p and steamer in the whole of the ocean stopped.
The prison was burned down, and all the prisoners consumed, and seven doctors' shops along with it.”
FATHER MATHEW
”Father Mathew was a great man, plump and red in the face. There couldn't be better than what he was. I knew one Kane in Gort he gave a medal to, and he kept it seventy years. Kane was a great totaller, and he wouldn't drink so much as water out of a gla.s.s, but out of a cup; the gla.s.s might have been used for porter at some time. He lost the medal, and was in a great way about it, but he found it five years after in a dung-heap. A great totaller he was. Them that took the medal from Father Mathew and that kept it, at their death they would be buried by men dressed in white clothes.”
THE WAR OF THE CRIMEA
”My husband was in the war of the Crimea. It is terrible the hards.h.i.+ps he went through, to be two months without going into a house, under the snow in trenches. And no food to get, maybe a biscuit in the day. And there was enough food there, he said, to feed all Ireland; but bad management, they could not get it. Coffee they would be given, and they would be cutting a green bramble to strive to make a fire to boil it.
The dead would be buried every morning; a big hole would be dug, and the bodies thrown in, and lime upon them; and some of the bodies would be living when they were buried. My husband used to try to revive them if he saw there was life in them, but other lads wouldn't care--just to put them down and have done. And they were allowed to take nothing--money, gold watches, and the like, all thrown in the ground. Sure they did not care much about such things, they might be lying in the same place themselves to-morrow. But the soldiers would take the money sometimes and put it in their stocking and tie the stocking below the ankle and below the knee. But if the officer knew that, they would be courtmartialed and punished. He got two medals--one from the English and one from the Emperor of Turkey. Fighting for the Queen, and bad pay she gave him. He never knew what was the war for, unless it might be for diminis.h.i.+ng the population. We saw in the paper a few years ago there was a great deal of money collected for soldiers that had gone through hards.h.i.+p in the war, and we wrote to the War Office asking some of it for him. But they wrote back that there were so many young men crippled in the Boer war there was nothing to be spared for the old. My husband used to be saying the Queen cared nothing for the army, but that the King, even before he was King, was better to it. But I'm thinking from this out the King will get very few from Ireland for his army.”