For Ulster, sure and steady;
For Connaught rising from the grave,
For Leinster, rough and ready;
The news shall blaze from ev’ry hill
And ring from ev’ry steeple,
And all the land with gladness fill—
We’re one united people.
There are, to-day, in America, many county organizations, but they do not foster the inimical spirit of the olden time; though I would not much mind if there was among them a little rivalry as to who or which would do most to drive from the old land the savage enemy that rooted them out of it.
My mind is full of little incidents connected with the start of the movement in Ireland in 1858. We had our drillings in the woods and on the mountains that surrounded Skibbereen. On Sunday summer evenings our camping ground was generally on the top of Cnoc-Ouma, where Thomas Davis must have stood one day of his life, if he saw those hundred isles of Carbery that he wrote about in his poem, “The Sack of Baltimore”—
“Old Inisherkin’s crumbled fane looks like a moulting bird,