Ah you have your day in this world; but we’ll have our day in the next.
This resignation to the existing condition of things in the fallen fortunes of our people was on the tongue of my mother. I don’t know that it was in her heart or in her spirit. I do not think it was. Our priests preached it. I do not think it was in their heart either. It couldn’t be; they were Irish, and belonged to the plundered race. But—but what? I don’t know: Father Jerry Molony knew as well as any priest living how his congregation came to be poor; when the Soupers would come to the parish to bribe the people into becoming Sassenachs, he’d say there were people present in the congregation whose families gave up all they had in the world rather than give up their faith. My family claimed the honor of that, and prided in it. The priest had no other consolation to give, but the consolation of religion, and, very likely, it was through religion my father and mother learned—and tried—to lighten the load of life, by telling us that the poorer you are the nearer you are to God, and that the more your sufferings are in this world the greater will be your reward in the next.
If that be gospel truth, and I hope it is, there are no people on earth nearer to heaven than the Irish people.
CHAPTER VI.
THE GLADSTONE BLACKBIRD.—MANY FEATURES OF IRISH LIFE.
There were three or four hillocks in the field near the schoolhouse, that grew nothing but bushes and briars, and in these hillocks linnets and goldfinches would build their nests. I never robbed any of these nests, and the birds seemed to understand that I would not hurt or harm them. The mother would sit there hatching, she looking at me and I looking at her, and would not fly away unless I stretched out my hand to catch her. I was great at finding birds’ nests, and occasionally of a Sunday I’d go into the neighboring woods looking for them. One Sunday I went to Starkey’s wood at Cregane, about a mile outside the town. I entered it, there near where the Jackey-boys lived. I went through the line of trees that run into Ownaheencha cross, till I came to another ditch. Then I leaped into a meadow, and as I leaped, a big blackbird began to screech and run fluttering, clattering and crying “chuc-chuc-chuc chuc-chuc.” I must have leaped on the bird’s wing; I must have wounded her some way, when she could not fly; so I thought, and so I ran after her to catch her. But the rogue could fly, though she never went more than a few yards ahead of me. At the end of the field I thought I had her cornered, but she rose up and flew over the ditch into the next field. I retraced my steps to the place where I leaped into the field. I looked to see if I would find any feathers or any sign of my having leaped upon the bird, and on looking I found in the side of the ditch a nest with five young ones in it, with their mouths wide open to receive the food they thought their father or mother was going to give them. I did a very cruel thing that day: I robbed that nest; I took it away with me. On my way home Captain Wat. Starkey met me; Corley Garraviagh was wheeling him in a hand carriage; I had the nest on my head. “Those are my birds you have,” he said. “Where did you get them?” I didn’t mind him, but walked on.
I suppose they were his birds, for those English land-robbers of Ireland claim dominion of “all the birds in the air, and all the fishes in the sea.”
That bird whose nest I robbed has often reminded me of Gladstone, the Prime Minister of England, and the prime hypocrite Governor of Ireland. Or, more correctly speaking, I should say this Gladstone, Prime Minister of England, in his government of Ireland, has often reminded me of that blackbird. The ruse she played to get me away from her nest is the ruse he has played to get Irishmen away from the work that would rob him of Ireland. Irishmen in the hands of English jailers are snatched away from them in the heart of England; English castles are blown down; English governors of Ireland are slain; there is terror in England—terror in the hearts of Englishmen. Gladstone chuckles “chuc-chuc-chuc-chuc, I’ll give you Home Rule for Ireland.” Irishmen listen to him; they follow him; he flies away from them; his eyesight gets bad, and he is blind to all his promises of Home Rule for Ireland. Irishmen are divided; the work that struck terror into the heart of the Englishman is abandoned by them; his eyesight is restored to him, and he is now writing Bible history. His “chuc chuc-chuc” is so much akin to my blackbird’s “chuc-chuc-chuc” that I christen her the “Gladstone blackbird.”