An inmate of the workhouse named Johnnie Collins was Neddie Hegarty’s messenger boy. He was lame; he had been dead and buried, but had been brought back to life by a stroke of Rackateen’s shovel. Rackateen was the name by which the poorhouse undertaker was known. The dead were buried coffinless those times. Rackateen took the bodies to the Abbey graveyard in a kind of trapdoor wagon. He took Johnnie Collins in it one day, and after dumping him, with others, into the grave pit, one of his knees protruded up from the heap of corpses. Rackateen gave it a stroke of his shovel to level it down even; the corpse gave a cry of pain, and the boy was raised from the pit. That lame man—whose leg had been broken by that stroke of the shovel—used to come into my shop every week; and we used to speak of him as the man who was raised from the dead.
Lioney Fleming was chairman also of the Skibbereen board of magistrates. I strolled into the courthouse one court-day, about the year 1855. The police had George Sullivan up for trial, on some charge of assault. He had employed McCarthy Downing as his attorney. I sat on the seat behind the attorney. A large pocket knife was produced, which was found on George when he was arrested. Lioney took hold of it, and touching one of its springs, it brought to the front a pointed bolt of iron that made the article look like a marline-spike—an instrument very handy to sailors and farmers for putting eyes in ropes. Lioney asked George where did he get that knife; George told him he bought it in O’Donovan Rossa’s shop. “The man who would sell such a murderous weapon as that,” said the magistrate, “ought to be prosecuted.” Touching McCarthy Downing on the shoulder, I whispered to him—loud enough to have Lioney hear me—“Tell ‘his honor’ to look on the big blade of it, and he will see that the manufacturer of the knife is Rogers, of Sheffield, England. ’Tis he should be prosecuted for trading such murderous weapons as that to the peaceable people of Ireland.” You should see the black look Lioney gave at me, and the white smile I gave at him.
Now, I will take myself and my readers to Bantry Bay for a while.
In discharge of my duty of attending to the taking of contracts for my employer, I went to see the Guardians of the Bantry poorhouse one day, with some samples of wool and cotton. I had to wait a while, till they were ready to receive the tenders. In the waiting room was Alexander M. Sullivan, who became so active in Irish politics, some years after, as Editor of the Dublin Nation. He was then a Relieving-officer of the Bantry Union. It was after the coup d’etat of Louis Napoleon, in December, 1851, when coming on the termination of his four years’ presidency of the Republic. I find that time and circumstance alluded to this way in one of the American school books:
“In December, 1851, a plot formed by the Ultra or Red Republicans, for the overthrow of the government, was discovered by the president, who caused all the leaders to be arrested, on the night preceding the outbreak.” After that “the president became emperor by a majority of several millions of votes.”
Mr. Sullivan came in for a warm place in my memory that time. I was in the waiting-room of the Bantry Union board-room: he was there with other officers and Guardians. The conversation was about the late coup d’etat in Paris; he spoke warmly on the subject, and said that that tyrant Napoleon deserved to be shot, and that he himself could volunteer to shoot him for destroying the Republic. His feelings, as expressed, harmonized with my own feelings, and I held him in my mind as a thorough good Irishman. It was not without considerable pain of mind, seven or eight years afterward, that I found myself obliged to have a newspaper quarrel with him about Irish revolutionary affairs.
In those visits I made to Bantry I got acquainted with William Clarke, who kept a hardware store and a dry-goods store there. He told me he would give me a salary of ten pounds a year, if I came into his hardware store as clerk, and increase that salary if I deserved the increase. I told him I would bear the matter in mind. I did bear it in mind; and coming in to the year 1853 I wrote to Mr. Clarke telling him I would go to Bantry.
I did go to Bantry, and I spent three months with him. He had, in two stores, nine or ten clerks. I ate, drank, and slept with them. Every one of them remained to his dying day, a bosom friend of mine. Yes, they are all dead.
The world is growing darker to me—darker day by day,
The stars that shone upon life’s path are vanishing away.