At the end of the year 1848, my home in Ross got broken up; the family got scattered. The family of my Uncle Con, who went to America in the year 1841 were living in Philadelphia. They heard we were ejected, and they sent a passage ticket for my brother John, who was three years older than I. My brother Con, three years younger than I, was taken by my mother’s people to Renascreena, and I was taken by my father’s sister who was the wife of Stephen Barry of Smorane, within a mile of Skibbereen. Her daughter Ellen was married to Mortimer Downing of Kenmare, who kept a hardware shop in Skibbereen, and I soon became a clerk and general manager in that shop. My brother in Philadelphia sent passage tickets for my mother and brother and sister, and I was left alone in Ireland. I suppose they thought I was able to take care of myself in the old land. How much they were mistaken, the sequel of those “Recollections” may show.
The day they were leaving Ireland, I went from Skibbereen to Renascreena to see them off. At Renascreena Cross we parted. There was a long stretch of straight even road from Tullig to Mauleyregan over a mile long. Renascreena Cross was about the middle of it. Five or six other families were going away, and there were five or six cars to carry them and all they could carry with them, to the Cove of Cork. The cry of the weeping and wailing of that day rings in my ears still. That time it was a cry heard every day at every Cross-road in Ireland. I stood at that Renascreena Cross till this cry of the emigrant party went beyond my hearing. Then, I kept walking backward toward Skibbereen, looking at them till they sank from my view over Mauleyregan hill.
In the year 1863, I took a trip to America, and visited Philadelphia. It was night-time when I got to my brother’s house. My mother did not know me. She rubbed her fingers along my forehead to find the scar that was on it from the girl having thrown me from her shoulders over her head on the road, when I was a child.
Nor, did I well know my mother either. When I saw her next morning, with a yankee shawl and bonnet, looking as old as my grandmother, she was nothing more than a sorry caricature of the tall, straight, handsome woman with the hooded cloak, that was photographed—and is photographed still—in my mind as my mother—
“Who ran to take me when I fell,
And would some pretty story tell,
And kiss the part to make it well.”
This rooting out of the Irish people; this transplanting of them from their native home into a foreign land, may be all very well, so far as the young people are concerned; but for the fathers and mothers who have reared families in Ireland, it is immediate decay and death. The young tree may be transplanted from one field to another without injury to its health, but try that transplanting on the tree that has attained its natural growth, and it is its decay and death. The most melancholy looking picture I see in America, is the old father or mother brought over from Ireland by their children. See them coming from mass of a Sunday morning, looking so sad and lonely; no one to speak to; no one around they know; strangers in a strange land; strangers I may say in all the lands of earth, as the poet says:
Through the far lands we roam,
Through the wastes, wild and barren;