My master often slapped me on the hand with his wooden slapper, but he never flogged me; though I must have suffered all the pains and penalties of flogging from him one time, for, before he struck me at all, I screeched as if he had me half-killed.

I was put into the vestry-room one evening, with five or six other boys, to be flogged, after the rest of the scholars had left school.

The master came in and locked the door, and gave the orders to strip. I unbuttoned my trousers from my jacket, and let them fall down. I commenced screeching, and I’d emphasize with a louder screech every lash of the cat-o’-nine tails that every little boy would get. I was left for the last. He caught me by the shoulder. “Now,” said he, “will you be late from school any more?” “Oh, sir, oh, sir, I’ll never be late any more.” “You’ll keep your promise—sure?” “Oh, yes, yes, sir; I’ll never be late anymore.” Then, with cat-o’-nine tails lifted in his hand, he let me go without striking me.

This school I was at was called the Old-Chapel school. It was built on the top of the hill field, and on the top of the Rock. Very likely it was built in the days of the persecution of the church, when it was a crime for the priest to say mass, and a crime for the people to attend mass. From the location of it, any one coming toward it from the north, east, south or west, could be seen. The watchman in the belfry house on the tiptop of the rock could see all around him. “The Rock” is a seashore hamlet, inhabited chiefly by fishermen. The hill field was one of my father’s fields, and often I went over the wall on a Sunday morning to look at Corly Keohane ringing the bell for mass. I had to be up early those mornings to keep the Rock hens out of the cornfield; often and often the bedclothes were pulled off me at daybreak.

CHAPTER IV.
IRISH FIRESIDE STORY AND HISTORY.

I must have been at John Cushan’s school about six years. Paying a visit to the school after his death, I looked at the roll-calls, and I could not find my name on them after December, 1844. So I had been at school from the age of six to the age of thirteen. Bad times came on then. The year 1845 was the first year of the great blight of the potato crops in Ireland. The landlords of Ireland made a raid upon the grain crops and seized them and sold them for their rents, leaving the producers of those crops to starve or perish or fly the country. Thousands of families were broken up; thousands of homes were razed; I am one of the victims of those bad times. People now allude to those years as the years of the “famine” in Ireland. That kind of talk is nothing but trash. There was no “famine” in Ireland; there is no famine in any country that will produce in any one year as much food as will feed the people who live in that country during that year. In the year 1845 there were 9,000,000 people in Ireland; allowing that the potato crop failed, other crops grew well, and the grain and cattle grown in the country were sufficient to sustain three times 9,000,000 people. England and the agents of England in Ireland seized those supplies of food, and sent them out of the country, and then raised the cry that there was “famine” in the land. There was no famine in the land, but there was plunder of the Irish people by the English Government of Ireland; and Coroners’ juries, called upon to give judgment in cases of people found dead, had brought in verdicts of “murder” against that English Government. I will come to that time in another chapter of my recollections.

Many of the neighbors used to sit skurreechting at night at my father’s fireside, and it was here I learned many matters of Irish history before I was able to read history. It was here I came to know Tead Andy, of whom I wrote thirty years ago, when I was in an English prison: