Welcome these memories of scenes of youth,
That nursed my hate of tyranny and wrong,
That helmed my manhood in the path of truth,
And help me now to suffer calmly and be strong.
After the burial of Jillen Andy and Tead Andy I was stricken down with the fever that was prevalent at the time. I was nine or ten days in bed. The turning day of the illness came, and those who were at the bedside thought I was dying. My heavy breathing was moving the bedclothes up and down. I had consciousness enough to hear one woman say to my mother “Oh, he is dying now.” But it was only the fever bidding good-bye to me, and I got better day by day after that. Then, when I came to walk abroad, my eyes got sore—with a soreness that some pronounced the “dallakeen”; but others pronounced it to be a kind of fairy-puck called a “blast.” An herb-doctor made some herb medicine for me, and as my mother was giving it to me one day she was talking to our next-door neighbor, Kit Brown, and wondering who it could be in the other world that had a grudge against me, or against the family! She was sure I had never hurted or harmed any one, and she could not remember that she or my father had ever done anything to any one who left this world—had ever done anything that would give them reason to have a grudge against the family.
You, friendly reader, may consider that what I am saying is small talk. So it is. But in writing these “Recollections” of mine I am showing what Irish life was in my day. I am not making caricatures in Irish life to please the English people, as many Irish writers have done, and have been paid for doing; I am telling the truth, with the view of interesting and serving my people. When I was young I got hold of a book called “Parra Sastha; or, Paddy-go-easy.” Looking at the name of the book I did not know what Parra Sastha meant; but as I read through it I learned that it was meant for “Padruig Sasta”—contented, or satisfied Paddy. The whole book is a dirty caricature of the Irish character; but the writer of it is famed as an Irish novelist, and died in receipt of a yearly literary pension from the English government. He earned such a pension by writing that book alone. England pays people for defaming Ireland and the Irish.
And men professing to be Irish patriots, in our own day, write books defamatory of their own people. “When We Were Boys” is the name of a book written nine or ten years ago by one of those Irish patriot parliamentary leaders of to-day. It is a libel on the character of the Fenian movement in Ireland. As I was reading it I said to myself, “This gentleman has his eye on a literary pension from the English.” The whiskey-drinking bouts that he records at the Fenian headquarters in the office of the Fenian newspaper had no existence but in his imagination, and the brutal murder of a landlord by the Fenians is an infamous creation of his too. If it is fated that the chains binding England to Ireland are to remain unbroken during this generation, and that the writer of that book lives to the end of the generation, those who live with him need not be surprised if they see him in receipt of a literary pension. He has earned it.