"There was one of my brothers died at Lyons in France. He had a place in Guinness's brewery, and earning £3 10s. a week, and it was the time Garibaldi, you might have heard of, was out fighting. There came a ship to Dublin from France, calling for soldiers, and he threw up his place, and there were many others threw up their place, and they went off, eleven hundred of them, in the French ship, to go fighting for their religion, and a hundred of them never came back. When they landed in France they were made much of and velvet carpets spread before them. But the war was near over then, and when it had ended they were forgotten, and nothing done for them, and he was in poverty at Lyons and died. It was the nuns there wrote a letter in French telling that to my mother." "And Napoleon the Third fought for the Pope in the time of Garibaldi. A great many Irishmen went out at that time, and the half of them never came back. I met with one of them that was in Russell's flour stores, and he said he would never go out again if there were two hundred Popes. Bad treatment they got—black bread, and the troops in the Vatican well fed; and it wasn't long till Victor Emanuel's troops made a breach in the wall."
"Napoleon the Third was not much. He died in England, and was buried in a country church-yard much the same as Kiltartan. But Napoleon the First was a great man; it was given out of him there never would be so great a man again. But he hadn't much education, and his penmanship was bad. Every great man gave in to superstition. He gave into it when he went to ask the gipsy woman to divine, and she told him his fate. Through fire and a rock she said that he would fall. I suppose the rock was St. Helena, and the fire was the fire of Waterloo. Napoleon was the terror of England, and he would have beat the English at Waterloo but for treachery, the treachery of Grouchy. It was, maybe, not his fault he was treacherous, he might be the same as Judas, that had his treachery settled for him four thousand years before his birth. There was a curse on Napoleon the Third because of what Napoleon the First had done against the Church. He took Malta one time and landed there, and by treachery with the knights he robbed a church that was on the shore, and carried away the golden gates. In an ironclad he put them that was belonging to the English, and they sank that very day, and were never got up after, unless it might be by divers. And two Popes he brought into exile. But he was the friend of Ireland, and when he was dying he said that. His heart was smashed, he said, with all the ruling Princes that went against him; and if he had made an attack on Ireland, he said, instead of going to Moscow the time he did, he would have brought England low. And the Prince Imperial was trapped. It was the English brought him out to the war, and that made the nations go against him, and it was an English officer led him into the trap the way he never would come to the Throne."
"I was in the army the time of the Zulu war. Great hardship we got in it and plenty of starvation. It was the Dutch called in the English to help them against the Zulus, that were tricky rogues, and would do no work but to be driving the cattle off the fields. A pound of raw flour we would be given out at seven o'clock in the morning, and some would try to make a cake, and some would put it in a pot with water and be stirring it, and it might be eleven o'clock before you would get what you could eat, and not a bit of meat maybe for two days."