The prominence which Irish grievances have taken of late years in English politics has caused me often to review with fresh eyes the state of the country as it existed in my childhood and youth, when, of course, both the good and evil of it appeared to me to be part of the order of nature itself.

I will first speak of the condition of the working classes, then of the gentry and clergy.

I had considerable opportunities for many years of hearing and seeing all that was going on in our neighbourhood, which was in the district known as “Fingal” (the White Strangers’ land), having been once the territory of the Danes. Fingal extends along the sea-coast between Dublin and Drogheda, and our part lay exactly between Malahide and Rush. My father, and at a later time my eldest brother, were indefatigable as magistrates, Poor law Guardians and landlords, in their efforts to relieve the wants and improve the condition of the people; and it fell on me naturally, as the only active woman of the family, to play the part of Lady Bountiful on a rather large scale. There was my father’s own small village of Donabate in the first place, claiming my attention; and beyond it a larger straggling collection of mud cabins named “Balisk”; the landlord of which, Lord Trimleston, was an absentee, and the village a centre of fever and misery. In Donabate there was never any real distress. In every house there were wage-earners or pensioners enough to keep the wolf from the door. Only when sickness came was there need for extra food, wine, and so on. The wages of a field-labourer were, at that time, about 8s. a week; of course without keep. His diet consisted of oatmeal porridge, wheaten griddle-bread, potatoes and abundance of buttermilk. The potatoes, before the Famine, were delicious tubers. Many of the best kinds disappeared at that time (notably I recall the “Black Bangers”), and the Irish housewife cooked them in a manner which no English or French Cordon Bleu can approach. I remember constantly seeing little girls bringing the mid-day dinners to their fathers, who sat in summer under the trees, and in winter in a comfortable room in our stable-yard, with fire and tables and chairs. The cloth which carried the dinner being removed there appeared a plate of “smiling” potatoes (i.e., with cracked and peeling skins) and in the midst a well of about a sixth of a pound of butter. Along with the plate of potatoes was a big jug of milk, and a hunch of griddle-bread. On this food the men worked in summer from six (or earlier, if mowing was to be done) till breakfast, and from thence till one o’clock. After an hour’s dinner the great bell tolled again, and work went on till 6. In winter there was no cessation of work from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m., when it ended. Of course these long hours of labour in the fields, without the modern interruptions, were immensely valuable on the farm. I do not think I err in saying that my father had thirty per cent. more profitable labour from his men for 8s. a week, than is now to be had from labourers at 16s.; at all events where I live here, in Wales. It is fair to note that beside their wages my father’s men, and also the old women whose daughters (eight in number) worked in the shrubberies and other light work all the year round, were allowed each the grazing of a cow on his pastures, and were able to get coal from the ships he chartered every winter from Whitehaven for 11s. a ton, drawn to the village by his horses. At Christmas an ox was divided among them, and generally also a good quantity of frieze for the coats of the men, and for the capes of the eight “Amazons.”

I cannot say what amount of genuine loyalty really existed among our people at that time. Outwardly, it appeared they were happy and contented, though, in talking to the old people, one never failed to hear lamentations for the “good old times” of the past generations. In those times, as we knew very well, nothing like the care we gave to the wants of the working classes was so much as dreamed of by our forefathers. But they kept open house, where all comers were welcome to eat and drink in the servants’ hall when they came up on any pretext; and this kind of hospitality has ever been a supreme merit in Celtic eyes. Some readers will remember that the famous chieftainess, Grana Uaile, invading Howth in one of her piratical expeditions in the “spacious times of great Elizabeth,” found the gates of the ancient castle of the St. Lawrences, closed, though it was dinner-time! Indignant at this breach of decency, Grana Uaile kidnapped the heir of the lordly house and carried him to her robbers’ fortress in Connaught, whence she only released him in subsequent years on the solemn engagement of the Lords of Howth always to dine with the doors of Howth Castle wide open. I believe it is not more than 50 years, if so much, since this practice was abolished.

I think the only act of “tyranny” with which I was charged when I kept my father’s house, and which provoked violent recalcitration, was when I gave orders that men coming from our mountains to Newbridge on business with “the Master” should be served with largest platefuls of meat and jugs of beer, but should not be left in the servants’ hall en tête-à-tête with whole rounds and sirloins of beef, of which no account could afterwards be obtained!

Of course, the poor labourer in Ireland at that time after the failure of the potatoes, who had no allowances, and had many young children unable to earn anything for themselves, was cruelly tightly placed. I shall copy here a calculation which I took down in a note-book, still in my possession, after sifting enquiries concerning prices at our village shops, in, or about, the year 1845:—

A family of 3 will therefore require 63 lbs. of food per week—e.g.,

A family of 5 will require—

Thus, when a man had five children to support, and no potatoes, his weekly wages scarcely covered bare food.

Before the Famine and the great fever, the population of our part of Ireland was exceedingly dense; more than 200 to the square mile. There were an enormous number of mud cabins consisting of one room only, run up at every corner of the roadside and generally allowed to sink into miserable squat, sottish-looking hovels with no drainage at all; mud floor; broken thatch, two or three rough boards for a door; and the four panes of the sole window stuffed with rags or an old hat. Just 500,000 of these one-roomed cabins, the Registrar-General, Mr. William Donelly, told me, disappeared between the census before, and the census after the Famine! Nothing was easier than to run them up. Thatch was cheap, and mud abundant, everywhere; and as to the beams (they called them “bames”), I remember a man addressing my father coaxingly, “Ah yer Honour will ye plaze spake to the steward to give me a ‘handful of sprigs?’” “A handful of sprigs? What for?” asked my father; “Why for the roof of me new little house, yer Honour, that I’m building fornenst the ould wan!”

I never saw in an Irish cottage any of the fine old oak settles, dressers and armchairs and coffers to be found usually in Welsh ones. A good unpainted deal dresser and table, a wooden bedstead, a couple of wooden chairs, and two or three straw “bosses” (stools) made like beehives, completed the furniture of a well-to-do cabin, with a range of white or willow-pattern plates on the dresser, and two or three frightfully coloured woodcuts pasted on the walls for adornment. Flowers in the gardens or against the walls were never to be seen. Enormous chimney corners, with wooden stools or straw “bosses” under the projecting walls, were the most noticeable feature. Nothing seems to be more absurd and unhistorical than the common idea that the Celt is a beauty-loving creature, æsthetically far above the Saxon. If he be so, it is surprising that his home, his furniture, his dress, his garden never show the smallest token of his taste! When the young girls from the villages, even from very respectable families, were introduced into our houses, it was a severe tax on the housekeepers’ supervision to prevent them from resorting to the most outrageous shifts and misuse of utensils of all sorts. I can recall, for example, one beautiful young creature with the lovely Irish grey eyes and long lashes, and with features so fine that we privately called her “Madonna.” For about two years she acted as housemaid to my second brother, who, as I have mentioned, had taken a place in Donegal, and whose excellent London cook, carefully trained “Madonna” into what were (outwardly) ways of pleasantness for her master. At last, and when apparently perfectly “domesticated”—as English advertisers describe themselves,—Madonna married the cowman; and my brother took pleasure in setting up the young couple in a particularly neat and rather lonely cottage with new deal furniture. After six months they emigrated; and when my brother visited their deserted house he found it in a state of which it will suffice to record one item. The pig had slept all the time under the bedstead; and no attempt had been made to remove the resulting heap of manure!

My father had as strong a sense as any modern sanitary reformer of the importance of good and healthy cottages; and having found his estate covered with mud and thatched cabins, he (and my brother after him) laboured incessantly, year by year, to replace them by mortared stone and slated cottages, among which were five schoolhouses supported by himself. As it was my frequent duty to draw for him the plans and elevations of these cottages, farmhouses and village shops, with calculations of the cost of each, it may be guessed how truly absurd it seems to me to read exclusively, as I do so often now, of “tenants’ improvements” in Ireland. It is true that my father occasionally let, on long leases and without fines, large farms (of the finest wheat-land in Ireland, within ten miles of Dublin market), at the price of £2 per Irish acre, with the express stipulation that the tenant should undertake the re-building of the house or farm-buildings as the case might be. But these were, of course, perfectly just bargains, made with well-to-do farmers, who made excellent profits. I have already narrated in an earlier chapter, how he sold the best pictures among his heirlooms—one by Hobbema now in Dorchester House and one by Gaspar Poussin,—to rebuild some eighty cottages on his mountains. These cottages had each a small farm attached to it, which was generally held at will, but often continued to the tenants’ family for generations. The rent was, in some cases I think, as low as thirty or forty shillings a year; and the tenants contrived to make a fair living with sheep and potatoes; cutting their own turf on the bog, and very often earning a good deal by storing ice in the winter from the river Dodder, and selling it in Dublin in summer. I remember one of them who had been allowed to fall into arrears of rent to the extent of £3, which he loudly protested he could not pay, coming to my father to ask his help as a magistrate to recover forty pounds, which an ill-conditioned member of his family had stolen from him out of the usual Irish private hiding-place “under the thatch.”

But outside my father’s property, when we passed into the next villages on either side, Swords or Rush or Balisk, the state of things was bad enough. I will give a detailed description of the latter village, some of which was written when the memory of the scene and people was less remote, than now. It is the most complete picture of Irish poverty, fifty years ago, which I can offer.

Balisk was certainly not the “loveliest village of the plain.” Situated partly on the edge of an old common, partly on the skirts of the domain of a nobleman who had not visited his estate for thirty years, it enjoyed all the advantages of freedom from restraint upon the architectual genius of its builders. The result was a long crooked, straggling street, with mud cabins turned to it, and from it, in every possible angle of incidence: some face to face, some back to back, some sideways, some a little retired so as to admit of a larger than ordinary heap of manure between the door and the road. Such is the ground-plan of Balisk. The cabins were all of mud, with mud floors and thatched roofs; some containing one room only, others two, and, perhaps, half-a-dozen, three rooms: all, very literally, on the ground; that is on the bare earth. Furniture, of course, was of the usual Irish description: a bed (sometimes having a bedstead, oftener consisting of a heap of straw on the floor), a table, a griddle, a kettle, a stool or two and a boss of straw, with occasionally a grand adjunct of a settle; a window whose normal condition was being stuffed with an old hat; a door, over and under and around which all the winds and rains of heaven found their way; a population consisting of six small children, a bedridden grandmother, a husband and wife, a cock and three hens, a pig, a dog, and a cat. Lastly, a decoration of coloured prints, including the Virgin with seven swords in her heart, St. Joseph, the story of Dives and Lazarus, and a caricature of a man tossed by a bull, and a fat woman getting over a stile.

Of course as Balisk lies in the lowest ground in the neighbourhood and the drains were originally planned to run at “their own sweet will,” the town (as its inhabitants call it) is subject to the inconvenience of being about two feet under water whenever there are any considerable floods of rain. I have known a case of such a flood entering the door and rising into the bed of a poor woman in childbirth, as in Mr. Macdonald’s charming story of Alec Forbes. The woman, whom I knew, however, did not die, but gave to the world that night a very fine little child, whom I subsequently saw scampering along the roads with true Irish hilarity. At other times, when there were no floods, only the usual rains, Balisk presented the spectacle of a filthy green stream slowly oozing down the central street, now and then draining off under the door of any particularly lowly-placed cabin to form a pool in the floor, and finally terminating in a lake of stagnant abomination under the viaduct of a railway. Yes, reader! a railway ran through Balisk, even while the description I have given of it held true in every respect. The only result it seemed to have effected in the village was the formation of the Stygian pool above-mentioned, where, heretofore, the stream had escaped into a ditch.

Let us now consider the people who dwelt amid all this squalor. They were mostly field-labourers, working for the usual wages of seven or eight shillings a week. Many of them held their cabins as freeholds, having built or inherited them from those who had “squatted” unmolested on the common. A few paid rent to the noble landlord before-mentioned. Work was seldom wanting, coals were cheap, excellent schools were open for the children at a penny a week a head. Families which had not more than three or four mouths to fill besides the breadwinners’, were not in absolute want, save when disease, or a heavy snow, or a flood, or some similar calamity arrived. Then, down on the ground, poor souls, literally and metaphorically, they could fall no lower, and a week was enough to bring them to the verge of starvation.

Let me try to recall some of the characters of the inhabitants of Balisk in the Forties.

Here in the first cabin is a comfortable family where there are three sons at work, and mother and three daughters at home. Enter at any hour there is a hearty welcome and bright jest ready. Here is the schoolmaster’s house, a little behind the others, and back to back with them. It has an attempt at a curtain for the window, a knocker for the door. The man is a curious deformed creature, of whom more will be said hereafter. The wife is what is called in Ireland a “Voteen;” a person given to religion, who spends most of her time in the chapel or repeating prayers, and who wears as much semblance of black as her poor means may allow. Balisk, be it said, is altogether Catholic and devout. It is honoured by the possession of what is called “The Holy Griddle.” Perhaps my readers have heard of the Holy Grail, the original sacramental chalice so long sought by the chivalry of the middle ages, and may ask if the Holy Griddle be akin thereto? I cannot trace any likeness. A “griddle,” as all the Irish and Scotch world knows, is a circular iron plate, on which the common unleavened cakes of wheatmeal and oatmeal are baked. The Holy Griddle of Balisk was one of these utensils, which was bequeathed to the village under the following circumstances. Years ago, probably in the last century, a poor, “lone widow” lay on her death-bed. She had none to pray for her after she was gone, for she was childless and altogether desolate; neither had she any money to give to the priest to pray for her soul. Yet the terrors of purgatory were near. How should she escape them? She possessed but one object of any value—a griddle, whereon she was wont to bake the meal of the wheat she gleaned every harvest to help her through the winter. So the widow left her griddle as a legacy to the village for ever, on one condition. It was to pass from hand to hand as each might want it, but every one who used her griddle was to say a prayer for her soul. Years had passed away, but the griddle was still in my time in constant use, as “the best griddle in the town.” The cakes baked on the Holy Griddle were twice as good as any others. May the poor widow who so simply bequeathed it have found long ago “rest for her soul” better than any prayers have asked for her, even the favourite Irish prayer, “May you sit in heaven on a golden chair!”

Here is another house, where an old man lives with his sister. The old woman is the Mrs. Gamp of Balisk. Patrick Russell has a curious story attached to him. Having laboured long and well on my father’s estate, the latter finding him grow rheumatic and helpless, pensioned him with his wages for life, and Paddy retired to the enjoyment of such privacy as Balisk might afford. Growing more and more helpless, he at last for some years hobbled about feebly on crutches, a confirmed cripple. One day, with amazement, I saw him walking without his crutches, and tolerably firmly, up to Newbridge House. My father went to speak to him, and soon returned, saying: “Here is a strange thing. Paddy Russell says he has been to Father Mathew, and Father Mathew has blessed him, and he is cured! He came to tell me he wished to give up his pension, since he returns to work at Smith’s farm next week.” Very naturally, and as might be expected, poor Paddy, three weeks later, was again helpless, and a suppliant for the restoration of his pension, which was of course immediately renewed. But one who had witnessed only the scene of the long-known cripple walking up stoutly to decline his pension (the very best possible proof of his sincere belief in his own recovery) might well be excused for narrating the story as a miracle wrought by a true moral reformer, the Irish “Apostle of Temperance.”

Next door to Paddy Russell’s cabin stood “The Shop,” a cabin a trifle better than the rest, where butter, flour, and dip candles, Ingy-male (Indian meal), and possibly a small quantity of soap, were the chief objects of commerce. Further on came a miserable hovel with the roof broken in, and a pool of filth, en permanence, in the middle of the floor. Here dwelt a miserable good-for-nothing old man and equally good-for-nothing daughter; hopeless recipients of anybody’s bounty. Opposite them, in a tidy little cabin, always as clean as whitewash and sweeping could make its poor mud walls and earthen floor, lived an old woman and her daughter. The daughter was deformed, the mother a beautiful old woman, bedridden, but always perfectly clean, and provided by her daughter’s hard labour in the fields and cockle-gathering on the sea-shore, with all she could need. After years of devotion, when Mary was no longer young, the mother died, and the daughter, left quite alone in the world, was absolutely broken-hearted. Night after night she strayed about the chapel-yard where her mother lay buried, hoping, as she told me, to see her ghost.

“And do you think,” she asked, fixing her eyes on me, “do you think I shall ever see her again? I asked Father M—— would I see her in heaven? and all he said was, ‘I should see her in the glory of God.’ What does that mean? I don’t understand what it means. Will I see her herself—my poor old mother?”

After long years, I found this faithful heart still yearning to be re-united to the “poor old mother,” and patiently labouring on in solitude, waiting till God should call her home out of that little white cabin to one of the “many mansions,” where her mother is waiting for her.

Here is a house where there are many sons and daughters and some sort of prosperity. Here, again, is a house with three rooms and several inmates, and in one room lives a strange, tall old man, with something of dignity in his aspect. He asked me once to come into his room, and showed me the book over which all his spare hours seemed spent; “Thomas à Kempis.”

“Ah, yes, that is a great book; a book full of beautiful things.”

“Do you know it? do Protestants read it?”

“Yes, to be sure; we read all sorts of books.”

“I’m glad of it. It’s a comfort to me to think you read this book.”

Here again is an old woman with hair as white as snow, who deliberately informs me she is ninety-eight years of age, and next time I see her, corrects herself, and “believes it is eighty-nine, but it is all the same, she disremembers numbers.” This poor old soul in some way hurt her foot, and after much suffering was obliged to have half of it amputated. Strange to say, she recovered, but when I congratulated her on the happy event, I shall never forget the outbreak of true feminine sentiment which followed. Stretching out the poor mutilated and blackened limb, and looking at it with woeful compassion, she exclaimed, “Ah, ma’am, but it will never be a purty foot again!” Age, squalor, poverty, and even mutilation, had not sufficed to quench that little spark of vanity which “springs eternal in the (female) breast.”

Here, again, are half-a-dozen cabins, each occupied by widows with one or more daughters; eight of whom form my father’s pet corps of Amazons, always kept working about the shrubberies and pleasure-grounds, or haymaking or any light fieldwork; houses which, though poorest of all, are by no means the most dirty or uncared for. Of course there are dozens of others literally overflowing with children, children in the cradle, children on the floor, children on the threshold, children on the “midden” outside; rosy, bright, merry children, who thrive with the smallest possible share of buttermilk and stirabout, are utterly innocent of shoes and stockings, and learn at school all that is taught to them at least half as fast again as a tribe of little Saxons. Several of them in Balisk are the adopted children of the people who provide for them. First sent down by their parents (generally domestic servants) to be nursed in that salubrious spot, after a year or two it generally happened that the pay ceased, the parent was not heard of, and the foster-mother and father would no more have thought of sending the child to the Poor-house than of sending it to the moon. The Poor-house, indeed, occupied a very small space in the imagination of the people of Balisk. It was beyond Purgatory, and hardly more real. Not that the actual institution was conducted on other than the very mildest principles, but there was a fearful Ordeal by Water—in the shape of a warm bath—to be undergone on entrance; there were large rooms with glaring windows, admitting a most uncomfortable degree of light, and never shaded by any broken hats or petticoats; there were also stated hours and rules thoroughly disgusting to the Celtic mind, and, lastly, for the women, there were caps without borders!

Yes! cruelty had gone so far (masculine guardians, however compassionate, little recking the woe they caused), till at length a wail arose—a clamour—almost a Rebellion! “Would they make them wear caps without borders?” The stern heart of manhood relented, and answered “No!”

But I must return to Balisk. Does any one ask, was nothing done to ameliorate the condition of that wretched place? Certainly; at all events there was much attempted. Mrs. Evans, of Portrane, of whom I shall say more by and by, built and endowed capital schools for both boys and girls, and pensioned some of the poorest of the old people. My father having a wholesome horror of pauperising, tried hard at more complete reforms, by giving regular employment to as many as possible, and aiding all efforts to improve the houses. Not being the landlord of Balisk, however, he could do nothing effectually, nor enforce any kind of sanitary measures; so that while his own villages were neat, trim and healthy, poor Balisk went on year after year deserving the epithet it bore among us, of the Slough of Despond. The failures of endeavours to mend it would form a chapter of themselves. On one occasion my eldest brother undertook the true task for a Hercules; to drain, not the stables of Augeas, but the town of Balisk. The result was that his main drain was found soon afterwards effectually stopped up by the dam of an old beaver bonnet. Again, he attempted to whitewash the entire village, but many inhabitants objected to whitewash. Of course when any flood, or snow, or storm came (and what wintry month did they not come in Ireland?) I went to see the state of affairs at Balisk, and provide what could be provided. And of course when anybody was born, or married, or ill, or dead, or going to America, in or from Balisk, embassies were sent to Newbridge seeking assistance; money for burial or passage; wine, meat, coals, clothes; and (strange to say), in cases of death—always jam! The connection between dying and wanting raspberry jam remained to the last a mystery, but whatever was its nature, it was invariable. “Mary Keogh,” or “Peter Reilly,” as the case might be, “isn’t expected, and would be very thankful for some jam;” was the regular message. Be it remarked that Irish delicacy has suggested the euphuism of “isn’t expected” to signify that a person is likely to die. What it is that he or she “is not expected” to do, is never mentioned. When the supplicant was not supposed to be personally known at Newbridge, or a little extra persuasion was thought needful to cover too frequent demands, it was commonly urged that the petitioner was a “poor orphant,” commonly aged thirty or forty, or else a “desolate widow.” The word desolate, however, being always pronounced “dissolute,” the epithet proved less affecting than it was intended to be. But absurd as their words might sometimes be (and sometimes, on the contrary, they were full of touching pathos and simplicity), the wants of the poor souls were only too real, as we very well knew, and it was not often that a petitioner from Balisk to Newbridge went empty away.

But such help was only of temporary avail. The Famine came and things grew worse. In poor families, that is, families where there was only one man to earn and five or six mouths to feed, the best wages given in the country proved insufficient to buy the barest provision of food; wheatmeal for “griddle” bread, oatmeal for stirabout, turnips to make up for the lost potatoes. Strong men fainted at their work in the fields, having left untasted for their little children the food they needed so sorely. Beggars from the more distressed districts (for Balisk was in one of those which suffered least in Ireland) swarmed through the country, and rarely, at the poorest cabin, asked in vain for bread. Often and often have I seen the master or mistress of some wretched hovel bring out the “griddle cake,” and give half of it to some wanderer, who answered simply with a blessing and passed on. Once I remember passing by the house of a poor widow, who had seven children of her own, and as if that were not enough, had adopted an orphan left by her sister. At her cabin door one day, I saw, propped up against her knees, a miserable “traveller,” a wanderer from what a native of Balisk would call “other nations; a bowzy villiain from other nations,” that is to say, a village eight or ten miles away. The traveller lay senseless, starved to the bone and utterly famine-stricken. The widow tried tenderly to make him swallow a spoonful of bread and water, but he seemed unable to make the exertion. A few drops of whiskey by and by restored him to consciousness. The poor “bowzy” leaned his head on his hands and muttered feebly, “Glory be to God”! The widow looked up, rejoicing, “Glory be to God, he’s saved anyhow.” Of course all the neighbouring gentry joined in extensive soup-kitchens and the like, and by one means or other the hard years of famine were passed over.

Then came the Fever, in many ways a worse scourge than the famine. Of course it fell heavily on such ill-drained places as Balisk. After a little time, as each patient remained ill for many weeks, it often happened that three or four were in the fever in the same cabin, or even all the family at once, huddled in the two or three beds, and with only such attendance as the kindly neighbours, themselves overburdened, could supply. Soon it became universally known that recovery was to be effected only by improved food and wine; not by drugs. Those whose condition was already good, and who caught the fever, invariably died; those who were in a depressed state, if they could be raised, were saved. It became precisely a question of life and death how to supply nourishment to all the sick. As the fever lasted on and on, and re-appeared time after time, the work was difficult, seeing that no stores of any sort could ever be safely intrusted to Irish prudence and frugality.

Then came Smith O’Brien’s rebellion. The country was excited. In every village (Balisk nowise behindhand) certain clubs were formed, popularly called “Cutthroat Clubs,” for the express purpose of purchasing pikes and organising the expected insurrection in combination with leaders in Dublin. Head-Centre of the club of Balisk was the ex-schoolmaster, of whom we have already spoken. How he obtained that honour I know not; possibly because he could write, which most probably was beyond the achievements of any other member of the institution; possibly also because he claimed to be the lawful owner of the adjoining estate of Newbridge. How the schoolmaster’s claim was proved to the satisfaction of himself and his friends is a secret which, if revealed, would probably afford a clue to much of Irish ambition. Nearly every parish in Ireland has thus its lord de facto, who dwells in a handsome house in the midst of a park, and another lord who dwells in a mud-cabin in the village and is fully persuaded he is the lord de jure. In the endless changes of ownership and confiscation to which Irish land has been subjected, there is always some heir of one or other of the dispossessed families, who, if nothing had happened that did happen, and nobody had been born of a score or two of persons who somehow, unfortunately, were actually born, then he or she might, could, would, or should have inherited the estate. In the present case my ancestor had purchased the estate some 150 years before from another English family who had held it for some generations. When and where the poor Celtic schoolmaster’s forefathers had come upon the field none pretended to know. Anxious, however, to calm the minds of his neighbours, my father thought fit to address them in a paternal manifesto, posted about the different villages, entreating them to forbear from entering the “Cutthroat Clubs,” and pointing the moral of the recent death of the Archbishop of Paris at the barricades. The result of this step was that the newspaper, then published in Dublin under the audacious name of The Felon, devoted half a column to exposing my father by name to the hatred of good Clubbists, and pointing him out as “one of the very first for whose benefit the pikes were procured.” Boxes of pikes were accordingly actually sent by the railway before mentioned, and duly delivered to the Club; and still the threat of rebellion rose higher, till even calm people like ourselves began to wonder whether it were a volcano on which we were treading, or the familiar mud of Balisk.

Newbridge, as described in the first chapter of this book, bore some testimony to the troubles of the last century when it was erected. There was a long corridor which had once been all hung with weapons, and there was a certain board in the floor of an inner closet which could be taken up when desirable, and beneath which appeared a large receptacle wherein the aforesaid weapons were stored in times of danger. Stories of ’98 were familiar to us from infancy. There was the story of Le Hunts of Wexford, when the daughter of the family dreamed three times that the guns in her father’s hall were all broken and, on inducing Colonel Le Hunt to examine them, the dream was found to be true and his own butler the traitor. Horrible stories were there, also, of burnings and cardings (i.e., tearing the back with the iron comb used in carding wool); and nursery threats of rebels coming up back stairs on recalcitrant “puckhawns” (naughty children—children of Puck), insomuch that to “play at rebellion” had been our natural resource as children. Born and bred in this atmosphere, it seemed like a bad dream come true that there were actual pikes imported into well-known cabins, and that there were in the world men stupid and wicked enough to wish to apply them to those who laboured constantly for their benefit. Yet the papers teemed with stories of murders of good and just landlords; yet threats each day more loud, came with every post of what Smith O’Brien and his friends would do if they but succeeded in raising the peasantry, alas! all too ready to be raised. Looking over the miserable fiasco of that “cabbage garden” rebellion now, it seems all too ridiculous to have ever excited the least alarm. But at that time, while none could doubt the final triumph of England, it was very possible to doubt whether aid could be given by the English Government before every species of violence might be committed by the besotted peasantry at our gates.

I have been told on good authority that Smith O’Brien made his escape from the police in the “habit” of an Anglican Sisterhood, of which his sister, Hon. Mrs. Monsell, was Superior.

A little incident which occurred at the moment rather confirmed the idea that Balisk was transformed for the nonce into a little Hecla; not under snow, but mud. I was visiting the fever patients, and was detained late of a summer’s evening in the village. So many were ill, there seemed no end of sick to be supplied with food, wine and other things needed. In particular, three together were ill in a house already mentioned, where there were several grown-up sons, and the people were somewhat better off than usual, though by no means sufficiently so to be able to procure meat or similar luxuries. Here I lingered, questioning and prescribing, till at about nine o’clock my visit ended; and I left money to procure some of the things required. Next morning my father addressed me:—

“So you were at Balisk last night?”

“Yes, I was kept there.”

“You stayed in Tyrell’s house till nine o’clock?”

“Yes; how do you know?”

“You gave six and sixpence to the mother to get provisions?”

“Yes; how do you know?”

“Well, very simply. The police were watching the door and saw you through it. As soon as you were gone the Club assembled there. They were waiting for your departure; and the money you gave was subscribed to buy pikes; of course to pike me!”

A week later, the bubble burst in the memorable Cabbage garden. The rebel chiefs were leniently dealt with by the Government, and their would-be rebel followers fell back into all the old ways as if nothing had happened. What became of the pikes no one knew. Possibly they exist in Balisk still, waiting for a Home Rule Government to be brought forth. At the end of a few months the poor schoolmaster, claimant of Newbridge, died; and as I stood by his bedside and gave him the little succour possible, the poor fellow lifted his eyes full of meaning, and said, “To think you should come to help me now!” It was the last reference made to the once-dreaded rebellion.

After endless efforts my brother carried his point and drained the whole village—beaver bonnets notwithstanding. Whitewash became popular. “Middens” (as the Scotch call them, the Irish have a simpler phrase) were placed more frequently behind houses than in front of them. Costume underwent some vicissitudes, among which the introduction of shoes and stockings, among even the juvenile population, was the most remarkable feature; a great change truly, since I can remember an old woman, to whom my youngest brother had given a pair, complaining that she had caught cold in consequence of wearing, for the first time in her life, those superfluous garments.

Many were drawn into the stream of the Exodus, and have left the country. How helpless they are in their migrations, poor souls! was proved by one sad story. A steady, good young woman, whose sister had settled comfortably in New York, resolved to go out to join her, and for the purpose took her passage at an Emigration Agency office in Dublin. Coming to make her farewell respects at Newbridge, the following conversation ensued between her and myself:

“So, Bessie, you are going to America?”

“Yes, ma’am, to join Biddy at New York. She wrote for me to come, and sent the passage-money.”

“That is very good of her. Of course you have taken your passage direct to New York?”

“Well, no, ma’am. The agent said there was no ship going to New York, but one to some place close by, New-something-else.”

“New-something-else, near New York; I can’t think where that could be.”

“Yes, ma’am, New—New—I disremember what it was, but he told me I could get from it to New York immadiently.”

“Oh, Bessie, it wasn’t New Orleans?”

“Yes, ma’am, that was it! New Orleans—New Orleans, close to New York, he said.”

“And you have paid your passage-money?”

“Yes, ma’am, I must go there anyhow, now.”

“Oh, Bessie, Bessie, why would you never come to school and learn geography? You are going to a terrible place, far away from your sister. That wicked agent has cheated you horribly.”

The poor girl went to New Orleans, and there died of fever. The birds of passage and fish which pass from sea to sea seem more capable of knowing what they are about than the greater number of the emigrants driven by scarcely less blind an instinct. Out of the three millions who are said to have gone since the famine from Ireland to America, how many must there have been who had no more knowledge than poor Bessie Mahon of the land to which they went!

Before I conclude these reminiscences of Irish peasant life in the Forties, I must mention an important feature of it—the Priests. Most of those whom I saw in our villages were disagreeable-looking men with the coarse mouth and jaw of the Irish peasant undisguised by the beards and whiskers worn by their lay brethren; and often the purple and bloated appearance of their cheeks suggested too abundant diet of bacon and whisky-punch. They worried me dreadfully by clearing out all the Catholic children from my school every now and then on the pretence of withdrawing them from heretical instruction, though nothing was further from the thoughts or wishes of any of us than proselytizing; nor was a single charge ever formulated against our teachers of saying a word to the children against their religion. What the priests really wanted was to obstruct education itself and too close and friendly intercourse with Protestants. For several winters I used to walk down to the school on certain evenings in the week and give the older lads and lassies lessons in Geography (with two huge maps of the world which I made myself, 11 ft. by 9 ft.!) and the first steps in Astronomy and history. Several times, when the class had been well got together and began to be interested, the priest announced that he would give them lessons on the same night, and they were to come to him instead of to me. Of course I told them to do so, and that I was very glad he would take the trouble. A fortnight or so later however I always learnt that the priest’s lessons had dropped and all was to be recommenced.

The poor woman I mentioned above as so devoted to her mother went to service with one of the priests in the neighbourhood in the hope that she would receive religious consolation from him. Meeting her some time after I expressed my hope that she had found it. “Ah, no Ma’am!” she answered sorrowfully, “He never spakes to me unless about the bacon or the like of that. Priests does be dark!” I thought the phrase wonderfully significant.

My father, though a Protestant of the Protestants as the reader has learned, thought it right to send regularly every year a cheque to the priest of Donabate as an aid to his slender resources; and there never was openly, anything but civility between the successive curés and ourselves. We bowed most respectfully to each other on the roads, but I never interchanged a word with any of them save once when I was busy attending a poor woman in Balisk in the cramps of cholera; the disease being at the time raging through the country. With the help of the good souls who in Ireland are always ready for any charitable deed, I was applying mustard poultices, when Father M—— entered the cabin (a revolting looking man he was, whose nose had somehow been frost-bitten), and turned me out. I implored him to defer, or at least hasten his ministrations; and stood outside the door in great impatience for half an hour while I knew the hapless patient was in agony and peril of death, inside. At last the priest came out,—and when I hurried back to the bedside I found he had been gumming some “Prayers to the Holy Virgin” on the wall. Happily we were not too late with our mustard and “sperrits,” and the woman was saved; whether by Father M—— and the Virgin or by me I cannot pretend to say.

I have spoken of our village school and must add that the boys and girls who attended it were exceedingly clever and bright. They caught up ideas, were moved by heroic or pathetic stories and understood jokes to a degree quite unmatched by English children of the same humble class, as I found later when I taught in Miss Carpenter’s Ragged Schools at Bristol. The ingenuity with which, when they came to a difficult word in reading, they substituted another was very diverting. One boy read that St. John had a leathern griddle about his loins; and a young man with a deep manly voice, once startled me by announcing, “He casteth out divils through,—through, through,—Blazes, the chief of the Divils!”

In Drumcar school a child, elaborately instructed by dear, good Lady Elizabeth M‘Clintock concerning Pharisees, and then examined:—“What was the sin of the Pharisees?” replied promptly: “Ating camels, my lady!”

Alas, I have reason to fear that the erudition of my little scholars, if quickly obtained, was far from durable. Paying a visit to my old home ten years later I asked my crack scholar, promoted to be second gardener at Newbridge, “Well, Andrew, how much do you remember of all my lessons?”

“Ah, Ma’am, then, never a word!”

“O, Andrew, Andrew! And have you forgotten all about the sun, the moon and stars, the day and night, and the Seasons?”

“O, no, Ma’am! I do remember now, and you set them on the schoolroom table, and Mars was a red gooseberry, and I ate him!”