"It was a man from America it came with. There was one Mackie was taken in a publichouse in Cork, and there was a policeman killed in the struggle. Judge O'Hagan was the judge when he was in the dock, and he said, 'Mr. Mackie, I see you are a gentleman and an educated man; and I'm sorry,' he said, 'that you did not read Irish history.' Mackie cried when he heard that, for indeed it was all spies about him, and it was they gave him up."
"The greatest wonder I ever saw was one time near Kinvara at a funeral, there came a car along the road and a lady on it having a plaid cloak, as was the fashion then, and a big hat, and she kept her head down and never looked at the funeral at all. I wondered at her when I saw that, and I said to my brother it was a strange thing a lady to be coming past a funeral and not to look on at it at all. And who was on the car but O'Gorman Mahon, escaping from the Government, and dressed up as a lady! He drove to Father Arthur's house at Kinvara, and there was a boat waiting, and a cousin of my own in it, to bring him out to a ship, and so he made his escape."
"I saw Clerkenwell prison in London broken up in the time of the Fenians, and every ship and steamer in the whole of the ocean stopped. The prison was burned down, and all the prisoners consumed, and seven doctors' shops along with it."
"Father Mathew was a great man, plump and red in the face. There couldn't be better than what he was. I knew one Kane in Gort he gave a medal to, and he kept it seventy years. Kane was a great totaller, and he wouldn't drink so much as water out of a glass, but out of a cup; the glass might have been used for porter at some time. He lost the medal, and was in a great way about it, but he found it five years after in a dung-heap. A great totaller he was. Them that took the medal from Father Mathew and that kept it, at their death they would be buried by men dressed in white clothes."
"My husband was in the war of the Crimea. It is terrible the hardships he went through, to be two months without going into a house, under the snow in trenches. And no food to get, maybe a biscuit in the day. And there was enough food there, he said, to feed all Ireland; but bad management, they could not get it. Coffee they would be given, and they would be cutting a green bramble to strive to make a fire to boil it. The dead would be buried every morning; a big hole would be dug, and the bodies thrown in, and lime upon them; and some of the bodies would be living when they were buried. My husband used to try to revive them if he saw there was life in them, but other lads wouldn't care—just to put them down and have done. And they were allowed to take nothing—money, gold watches, and the like, all thrown in the ground. Sure they did not care much about such things, they might be lying in the same place themselves to-morrow. But the soldiers would take the money sometimes and put it in their stocking and tie the stocking below the ankle and below the knee. But if the officer knew that, they would be courtmartialed and punished. He got two medals—one from the English and one from the Emperor of Turkey. Fighting for the Queen, and bad pay she gave him. He never knew what was the war for, unless it might be for diminishing the population. We saw in the paper a few years ago there was a great deal of money collected for soldiers that had gone through hardship in the war, and we wrote to the War Office asking some of it for him. But they wrote back that there were so many young men crippled in the Boer war there was nothing to be spared for the old. My husband used to be saying the Queen cared nothing for the army, but that the King, even before he was King, was better to it. But I'm thinking from this out the King will get very few from Ireland for his army."