All along the fifty years of my life since that year of 1847, I have often wanted help, and often got it. I get it to-day, and maybe want it to-day; get it from people who want no return for it; but that does not remove the impression made on my mind, that when you are in difficulties it is not good policy at all to make such a poor mouth as will show any one inclined to help you that the help given you will only be lost on you.
One thing my father said to me one time I will tell here for the benefit of the little children who live in the house where this book will be read. It is this: I stayed away from school one day; I went mootching. My mother was coming from Jude Shanahan’s of Dooneen, and she found me playing marbles at the courthouse cross. She caught hold of me by the collar, and she did not let go the hold until she brought me in home. I was crying of course; roaring and bawling at the thrashing I was to get from my father. “Stop your crying,” said he, “stop your crying; I am not going to beat you; but, remember what I say to you; when I am dead and rotten in my grave, it is then you will be sorry that you did not attend to your schooling.” It was true for him.
When my father died, the hill field had been planted for a potato crop, and the strand field had been planted for wheat.
After he died, some of the creditors looked for their money, and there was no money there. Bill Ned obtained a decree against us, and executed the decree; and I saw everything that was in the house taken into the street and canted. That must be about the month of May, 1847. One Sunday after that—a fine sunny day, I was out in the Abbey field playing with the boys; about six o’clock I came home to my dinner; there was no dinner for me, and my mother began to cry. Uncle Mickey did not come to town yesterday. He used to come to the house every Saturday with a load of turf, and a bag of meal or flour straddled on top of the turf. He did not come yesterday, and there was nothing in the house for dinner.
Some years ago, in Troy, New York, I was a guest at the hotel of Tom Curley of Ballinasloe. Talking of “the bad times” in Ireland, he told me of his own recollection of them in Galway, and asked me if I ever felt the hunger. I told him I did not, but that I felt something that was worse than the hunger; that I felt it still; and that was—the degradation into which want and hunger will reduce human nature. I told him of that Sunday evening in Ross when I went home to my dinner, and my mother had no dinner for me; I told him I had one penny-piece in my pocket; I told him how I went out and bought for it a penny bun, and how I stole to the back of the house and thievishly ate that penny bun without sharing it with my mother and my sister and my brothers. I am proud of my life, one way or another; but that penny bun is a thorn in my side; a thorn in the pride of my life; it was only four ounces of bread—for bread was fourpence (eight cents) a pound at the time—but if ever I feel any pride in myself, that little loaf comes before me to humble me; it also comes before me to strengthen me in the determination to destroy that tyranny that reduces my people to poverty and degradation, and makes them what is not natural for them to be. I know it is not in my nature to be niggardly and selfish. I know that if I have money above my wants, I find more happiness and satisfaction in giving it to friends who want it than in keeping it. But that penny-bun affair clashes altogether against my own measurement of myself, and stands before me like a ghost whenever I would think of raising myself in my own estimation.
I suppose it was the general terror and alarm of starvation that was around me at the time that paralyzed my nature, and made me do what I am now ashamed to say I did.
Friday was the day on which my father died. On Sunday he was buried in the family tomb in the Abbey field. There were no people at the wake Friday night and Saturday night, but there were lots of people at the funeral on Sunday.
It was a time that it was thought the disease of which the people were dying was contagious, and would be caught by going into the houses of the dead people, the time alluded to in those lines of “Jillen Andy.”