“My goodness,” exclaimed my mother, “why, she must be nearly a hundred!”
“She must be that, me lady.—Begorra, she’ll have to be shot!”
My mother laughed, and so did the herd. The anguish of the small listener passes description; and there ensued a veritable haunting. The herd she could understand, she knew him to be a criminal of the deepest dye. But her mother!...
It was months before a benevolent governess discovered the hidden sore, and explained and consoled. It was only a joke! It left a rankling tenderness. I could see no humour in it.
It is no wonder that Irish children should be fanciful, surrounded as they are, or were in my day, with the quaint, superstitious beliefs of servants and peasantry. Our chief nursery comfort and most beloved companion was the old housekeeper, who had begun her life in the service of our mother’s grandmother. That takes one back! Whenever we had a free moment we trotted into her sitting-room for pleasant conversation and, maybe, a biscuit, a bit of chocolate or candy. She had the key of the stores.
“I declare if I was made of sugar, you’d have me eaten!” she would say; a cannibalistic possibility I made it a point of earnestly disclaiming.
THE THREE KINGS AND THE STAR
The linen room was where she sat, in a quaint, painted, high-backed armchair by the window. She gazed straight out across a yard to a shrubbery dominated by three large Fir trees over which the evening star would peep, a tremulous yellow. She called those Fir trees her Three Kings, and never failed to lift her hands in wonder and gratitude over the beauty of the star. Poetry goes deep into the hearts of the Irish.