He smiled, and we talked on. But again, he spoke of not being able to do anything for my lectures, and again I stopped him; and a third time he brought the matter up, and a third time I had to stop him, and tell him it was not to talk of lectures I came in, but to have a look at himself. In traveling through England and Scotland and Wales after that day, I learned that part of the duties of his office in London was, to write to the McCarthy party clubs telling them the lectures of O’Donovan Rossa were not officially recognized by the confederation; but that individual members were not prohibited from attending them, as individuals, if they desired to attend.

I will now take myself back to school again.

I spoke of getting all my lessons by heart in short time. That’s true. They are in my head still. One of them tells me not to believe in dreams; that—

“Whang, the miller, was naturally avaricious. Nobody loved money more than he, or more respected those who had it. When any one would talk of a rich man in company, Whang would say, ‘I know him very well; he and I are intimate.’”—And so on.

But Whang did not know poor people at all; he hadn’t the least acquaintance with them. He believed in dreams, though; he dreamed, three nights running, that there was a crock of gold under the wall of his mill; digging for it, he loosened the foundation stones; the walls of his mill fell down, and that was the last of my Whang, the miller.

Many lessons were in the schoolbooks of my day that are not in the schoolbooks to-day. “The Exile of Erin” was in the Third book in my day; ’tisn’t in any of the books to-day. “The Downfall of Poland,” in which “Freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell,” was in one of the books in my day. ’Tisn’t in any of the books to-day. England is eliminating from those Irish national schoolbooks every piece of reading that would tend to nurse the Irish youth into a love of country, or a love of freedom, and she is putting into them pieces that make the Irish children pray to God to make them happy English children.

But apart from politics, there were some good lessons in those books that have remained living in my mind all through my life. This is a good one—

I would not enter on my list of friends,

Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,

Yet, wanting sensibility—the man