CHAPTER V.
THE EMIGRANT PARTING.—CARTHY SPAUNIACH.

In the year 1841, the family of my father’s brother Cornelius, sold out their land and their house, and went to America. In that house the priests used to have their dinner on “Conference” days in Ross. My uncle had recently died. His widow was Margaret, the daughter of Daniel O’Donoghue, who belonged to a family of O’Donoghues whom England had plundered. She had four daughters and two sons: Mary, Ellen, Julia, Margaret, Denis and Daniel. They settled first in Philadelphia. All the girls are dead; Julia died lately, a nun in a convent at Altoona, Penn. The two boys are living in Jackson, Tenn. It is that family started to bring out my father’s family from Ireland, when they heard in 1847 that my father died, and that we were evicted. One incident of the time that my uncle’s family left Ross made a picture in my mind that will remain in it forever. Sunday night a band of musicians came from Clonakilty, and they were playing at the house all night. It couldn’t be a happy Harvest-home festival. It was the sadder one of a breaking up of house and home. Monday morning those “Irish missioners” started for Cork. I joined the procession that went with them out of town. Out at Starkey’s, at Cregane, it halted. There, there was crying all around by the people, as if it was a party of friends they were burying in a graveyard.

I came back home with the company. My father was not able to go out of the house that day. He asked me all about the parting; and when I had told my story he commenced to cry, and kept crying for a half an hour or so. He made me ashamed of him, for here was I, a mere child, that was strong enough not to cry at all, and here was he, crying out loudly, as if he was a baby.

That’s the picture I cannot get out of my mind. But I cry now, in spite of me, while writing about it.

The English recruiting-soldiers would come to Ross those days and take many of the boys away with them, and then there was more crying of mothers, at having their children join the red-coats. Some man that I did not know was in our house for a few weeks. He remained in bed all the time. He had me at his bedside much of the time, telling me stories and playing with me. One dark night he came downstairs. The backdoor was opened, and out he went. I saw his shadow going up through the hill of the Fairfield. Mary Regan was the only strange woman in the house at the time, and she cryingly kissed and kissed the man before he left the house.

When I grew up to manhood I occasionally visited Ross, and Mary Regan would ullagone at seeing me, and draw a crowd around, telling of the little child who was the playmate of her boy when he was in the Hue and Cry on the run, and never told any one a word about his being for weeks in his father’s house. Her boy was Jemmie Regan, who had ’listed some time before that, and had deserted.

I saw another Ross deserter in the city of Lawrence, Mass., some quarter of a century ago. I was lecturing there one night. I was telling of Jillen Andy, whom I buried in the year 1847 without a coffin. A tall, grey-headed man in the audience commenced to cry, and came up to the platform to embrace me. I saw him in Ross when I was a child, when as a red-coat soldier he came home on furlough. He had lived next door to Jillen Andy. He was John Driscoll, the sister’s son of that North Cork militiaman, Dan Roe, of whom I have spoken in a previous chapter as having been at the battle of Vinegar Hill. This John Driscoll of Lawrence had deserted from the English Army in Canada, and reached America by swimming across the river St. Lawrence.

I am writing too much about crying in this chapter. It is no harm for me to add that I must have been a kind of cry-baby in my early days, for when I grew up to be big, the neighbors used to make fun of me, telling of the time I’d be coming home from school, and how I’d roar out crying for my dinner as soon as I’d come in sight of the house.