And would some pretty story tell,
And kiss the part to make it well.
My mother.”
“And you also left out,” said he, these two lines in the “Signs of Rain”:
Low o’er the grass the swallow wings,
The cricket, too, how sharp he sings!
“Right there, too,” said I. “But it shows that what I said was true—that I was quoting from memory, and that I was not looking into books to see whether my memory was right or wrong.”
Oh, no, Mr. Dowling, I don’t forget my mother, a tall, straight, handsome woman, when I was a child; looking stately in the long, hooded cloak she used to wear; a prematurely old, old woman when I saw her in this foreign land some years after, looking older by wearing an American bonnet instead of an Irish cloak, when I saw her Philadelphia in 1863.
I was up on the half-hatch of the door at home one day; I was looking at Lord Carbery’s hounds passing by—Geary, the huntsman, sounding the bugle; the horses prancing, carrying the “quality,” booted and spurred, and dressed in their hunting jackets of green and gold and orange. After they had passed, I came down from my perch on the half-hatch, and I heard my mother say of them to Kit. Brown:
“Ah! ’Ta oor la aguiv-se ’sa saol-seo, acht, beig aar la aguinne ’sa sao’l eile.”