One Good-Friday night every one in the house went to the chapel to the Office of Tenebræ. I was left at home to mind the house; I cried enough that night reading my “Glories of Mary.” Twenty-five years ago I was living in Tompkinsville, Staten Island. John Gill of Tipperary was a neighbor of mine; he was a member of an Irish society there; he asked me to join that society. I told him I would. He afterward told me he had proposed me and that I was elected. He appointed a night for me to be initiated. I attended at the ante-room of the society rooms that night. I could hear some noise inside. I was not called in to be initiated. Next day John Gill told me that some one had started the story that my mother was a Protestant. I can say that neither my mother, nor my father, nor any one before me, back to the time of St. Patrick, was anything but a Catholic; and the tradition in my house is, that my people gave up all they had in the world rather than give up the true faith. With such antecedents, I can afford to care but very little about what any one may say about my losing my soul because I do all in the world I can do to wrest from the English robbers what they robbed my people and robbed my country of.
We had a dancing school in Skibbereen that time too, and I went to it. Teady O’ (Teady O’Sullivan) was the dancing master. I learned from him ten shillings worth of his art—two steps; the first one, the side step, and the second one, an advance-and-retire step; and, though I am past practising them now, I can travel back in memory with those I hear singing—
Oh! the days of the merry dancing;
Oh! the ring of the piper’s tune;
Oh! for one of those hours of gladness—
Gone, alas! like our youth—too soon.
With that ten shillings worth of Teady O’s dance I went pretty well through the world—so far as dancing through it is concerned. I used it to my amusement, as well as to my punishment on one occasion in prison. I was in chains in a cell in Portland one day; my legs near my ankles were circled with chains; my waist was circled with a chain, and from the waist chain to the ankle chains there were other chains connecting, down between my legs. In my £1 library of my early days was a book I had read, called “Schinderhannes, or The Robber of the Rhine.” In that story was a rapparee character named Carl Benzel. Carl was often put to prison, and in his prison he used to amuse himself by dancing in his chains. I thought of him when I was in chains in Portland Prison, and I commenced dancing in my cell that side-step I learned from Teady O’. By and by, the warders were shouting out at me to stop that noise. I would not stop; so, to get rid of the noise that was going from my cell through the corridor, they put me in the black-hole cell.
The one great book of my early-day library was a book by the name of “Colton.” It was a collection of many of the sayings of the great writers. One paragraph in it stuck fast in my mind, and it is in my mind still. It is this: “That head is not properly constituted that cannot accommodate itself to whatever pillow the vicissitudes of fortune may place under it.”
That sentence seems to light up in my head whenever the clouds of “hard times” hover over me—and that is often enough. That is how it lights up before me at present.
Morty Downing, of Skibbereen, was a Poor Law Guardian; and, in connection with his business, I got acquainted with every one connected with the Skibbereen Poor Law Union. Neddie Hegarty, the porter at the main gate, was the man I skurreechted most with. He had most to tell me about the starvation times of the years that had just passed by. The Chairman of the Board, during most of those times, was Lioney Fleming, of Oldcourt, a small landlord magistrate. He was a pretty fair specimen of the English planter in Ireland, who considers that Ireland was made for England, and that all the people to whose fathers Ireland belonged are better out of it than in it. Sheep and oxen were tenants more welcome to Lioney’s estate than Irish men, women, and children; and the faster the men, women and children in the poorhouse would die, the oftener would Lioney thank the Lord. “When we were burying them in hundreds every week,” said Neddie to me one day, “the first salute I’d get from Lioney, when he’d be coming in, every board-day, would be: ‘Well, Hegarty, how many this week?’ and if I told him the number this week was less than the number last week, his remark would be: ‘Too bad; too bad; last week was a better week than this.’”