No, no! Irishmen don’t pray for the English enemy in Ireland. If prayers would drive them to hell, or anywhere else, outside of Connaught, Leinster, Munster and Ulster, some of them would stay praying till their knees were tanned.

In the “bad times” of ’46 and ’47, the Donovan-Buidhe family of Derriduv were friends of my family. There were four brothers of them on the land of Derriduv, some two miles from the town of Ross. Donal Buidhe came to our house one day. His wife and six children were outside the door. They had with them a donkey that was the pet of the eldest boy. They had been evicted that morning, and had nowhere to go for shelter. There was a “chamber” back of our house, and back of the chamber was another house called the “linney.” My father told Donal to clear out the linney, and take the whole family into it. Some days after, it may be a few weeks after, I heard my father and my mother whispering, and looking inquiringly at each other; the donkey was the subject of their conversation. The donkey had disappeared: where was the donkey? The last seen of him was in the backyard, there was no way for him to pass from the backyard into the street but through our kitchen, and he had not passed through it.

That donkey had been killed and eaten by Donal Buidhe and his family. That was the decision I read on the faces of my father and mother. They did not think I was taking any notice of what they were whispering about. “Skibbereen! where they ate the donkeys!” is an expressive kind of slur cast at the people of that locality. But, ’tis no slur.

You have read, and I have read in history, how people besieged in fortresses have eaten horses, and donkeys, and cats, and dogs, and rats, and mice; and how people wrecked on sea, have cast lots for food, and have eaten each other. Reading these stories when I was a boy, I could not get my mind to conceive how any human being could do such things, but I was not long in English prisons when I found my nature changed—when I found that I myself could eat rats and mice, if they came across me. And, perhaps that prison life of mine changed other attributes of my Irish nature too.

The year ’47 was one of the years of “the Board of works” in Ireland. Any man in possession of land—any farmer could get none of the relief that the Poor Law allowed under the name of “out-door relief.” To qualify himself for that relief, he should give up the land to his landlord. But, under the Board of works law, a farmer could get employment on the public works. My father was so employed. He had charge of a gang of men making a new road through Rowry Glen. He took sick in March, and Florry Donovan, the overseer of the work, put me in charge of his gang, while he was sick. I was on the road the twenty-fifth of March, ’47, when the overseer came to me about noontime and told me I was wanted at home. I went home, and found my father dead.

CHAPTER XI.
THE BAD TIMES: THE “GOOD PEOPLE.” JILLEN ANDY: HER COFFINLESS GRAVE.

This chapter that I have to write now is a very hard chapter to write. I have to say something that will hurt my pride and will make my friends think the less of me. But I’ll say it all the same, because the very thing that hurts my pride and humbles me in my own estimation, may be the very thing that has strengthened me to fight Ireland’s battle against the common enemy as I have fought it. If the operation of English rule in Ireland abases the nature of the Irishman—and it does abase it—the Irishman ought to fight the harder and fight the longer, and fight every way and every time, and fight all the time to destroy that rule. So, stand I to-day in that spirit. Not alone in spirit but in deed—if I could do any deed—but action is out of the question in a situation where the parade and show and color of patriotism is regarded as patriotism itself.

I said my father died in March, 1847. I was then fifteen years of age. I said, that the year before he died, the potato crop failed entirely, and the landlord seized the grain crop for the rent. About that time, I heard a conversation between my father and mother that made a very indelible impression upon my mind. I have often thought, that if things are dark around you, and that you want a friend to assist you out of the darkness, it is not good policy at all to cry out to him that you are stricken totally blind, that you are so helpless for yourself that there is never any hope of recovery from that helplessness. My mother was after returning from a visit she made to a sister of my father’s, who lived some twelve miles away, and who was pretty well off in the world. The object of the visit was for assistance over our difficulties. My aunt had a son-in-law, a very wise man; she sent for him; he came to the house, and there was a family consultation on the matter. My mother was asked to candidly tell the full situation of affairs, and to tell how much money would get us over all the difficulties, and put us on our legs again. She did tell. Then there was a consultation, aside from my mother—the pith of which my mother heard, and which was this: the son-in-law said that we were so far in debt, and the children so young and helpless, that anything given us, or spent on us to get us over the present difficulty would only be lost, lost forever; and that then we would not be over the difficulty.