At a flax-mihal, or some gathering of the kind at my grandfather’s, one night that some of the neighboring girls were in, they and my aunts were showing presents to each other—earrings, brooches, rings and little things that way. One of them showed a brooch which looked like gold, but which probably was brass, and wanted to make much of it. “Nach e an volumus e!” said one of my aunts. “What a molamus it is.” That was making little of it. Perhaps the boy who made a present of it was “pulling a string” with the two girls. The word “volumus” is Latin, but the Irish language softens it into “molamus,” and uses it as a name for anything that is made much of, but is really worth very little. You will see in Lingard’s history of Ireland how the two words came into the Irish language. After the time of the Reformation, when England formulated the policy and practice of expelling from Ireland all the Irish who would not turn Sassenach, and all particularly who had been plundered of their lands and possessions, she passed laws decreeing that it was allowable for landlords and magistrates to give “permits” to people to leave the country, and never come back. But, that the person leaving, should get a pass or permit to travel to the nearest seaport town to take shipping. And if a ship was not leaving port the day of his arrival at the port, he, to give assurance of his desire to leave the country, should wade into the sea up to his knees every day till a ship was ready. There were printed forms of such permits; and the first word in those forms, printed in very large letters, was the Latin word “Volumus,” which meant: We wish, or we desire, or it is our pleasure, that the bearer be allowed to leave Ireland forever. A royal permit to exile yourself, to banish yourself from your native land forever! Nach e an volumus e! What a molamus it is!
A political lesson was graven on my mind by the Irish magpies that had their nests in the big skehory tree on the ditch opposite the kitchen door. I had permission to go through the tree to pick the skehories, but I was strictly ordered not to go near the magpies’ nest, or to touch a twig or thorn belonging to it.
If the magpies’ nest was robbed; if their young ones were taken away from them, they would kill every chicken and gosling that was to be found around the farmyard. That is the way my grandfather’s magpies would have their vengeance for having their homes and their families destroyed; and it made every one in my grandfather’s house “keep the peace” toward them. I have often thought of my grandfather’s magpies in connection with the destruction of the houses and families of the Irish people by the English landlords of Ireland. Those magpies seemed to have more manly Irish spirit than the Irish people themselves. But there is no use of talking this way of his childhood’s recollections. I’ll stop. If childhood has pleasure in plenty, I had it in this house of my grandfather, from the age of three to the age of seven.
I am publishing a newspaper called The United Irishman. In it, I printed the two preceding chapters.
Ex-Congressman John Quinn, whom I have spoken of in them, sends me the following letter:
Dear Rossa—I read with delight in the last issue of your truly patriotic journal what to me is the most interesting of all stories; namely, “Rossa’s Recollections.”
The traveling along with you, as it were, carries me back to the early morning of my life in that dear land beyond the sea, and I feel that I hear over again the tales as told by a fond mother to her listening, her wondering children, of saintly Ross Carbery, and the wild, the grand country from there to Bantry Bay.
Yes, I have heard her tell of the miracles which were performed at the tomb of Father John Power, and, I feel that if ever the afflicted were healed of their infirmities on any part of this earth, they were, at the grave of that saintly priest.
I was not born in that county, for “under the blue sky of Tipperary” my eyes first saw the light of day, but, as you say, my mother was born in Ross Carbery; and where is the son who does not love the spot where his mother was born? I do, with a fondness akin to veneration.
Oh, what memories you will call up in those recollections of yours! How the hearts of the sons and daughters of Ireland will throb as they feel themselves carried back in spirit to the abbeys, the raths and, alas! the ruins, around which in infancy their young feet wandered. For to no people on earth are the loved scenes of childhood half so dear as they are to the sons and daughters of our Green Isle.