I think it is more than probable that Brontë repaid his young masters and mistresses for their teaching, by telling them stories. Under Harshaw’s roof he found not only work and shelter, but a home and comfort, and it is inconceivable that under those circumstances he allowed the gift that was in him, of charming by vivid narration, to lie dormant.
As long as he lived he spoke of the Harshaws with gratitude and affection, and I do not believe he could have been so glad and happy without contributing to the general enjoyment.
In the latter part of last century, the raconteur occupied the place in Ireland now taken by the modern novelist, and I believe Hugh Brontë dropped doctrines into the minds of the young Harshaws which produced far-reaching results. Such was the fixed conviction of my old teacher, the Reverend W. McAllister.
It happened that the Martins, another ancient family, lived quite near to the Harshaws. The land of the two families enclosed Loughorne round. The Martins were rich and slightly aristocratic, but the two families were thrown much together, and Samuel Martin, the son of the one house, married Jane Harshaw, the daughter of the other.
She was a deeply religious and resolute woman, with a stern sense of duty. One of her nephews tells me she always conducted family worship after the death of her husband. She died of a fever, caught while ministering to the dying, in accordance with her high sense of Christian duty. Her life was given for others, and, at her funeral, the Reverend S. J. Moore said: “She was a woman who knew her duty and did it.”
Her second son, John Martin, inherited his mother’s great mental capacity and strong sense of duty. At school, in Newry, he met young John Mitchel, and inspired him with something of his own enthusiasm, and the two youths came to the conclusion that it was their duty to put right Ireland’s wrongs. John Mitchel was sent to penal servitude for fifteen or twenty years, and then John Martin stepped into the place vacated by his friend, and was transported to Van Diemen’s Land for ten years.
The conviction of “honest John Martin” gave a blow to the old system in Ireland from which it has never recovered. Even his enemies were shocked at the ferocity of the sentence; but then he had written a pamphlet under the text: “Your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate.” (Isaiah, i. 7.) He had proclaimed from the housetops Hugh Brontë’s tenant-right doctrines, of which more anon. He had attacked the sacred rights of landlordism, and he was sent to a safe and distant place for quite a different offence, called treason felony.
John Martin was a man of large property, but he devoted his life and all his income to what he considered the good of others.
He had taken his B.A. degree at Trinity College, Dublin, and studied medicine, and for many years he gave advice and medicine gratuitously to all who came to him. The poor were passionately attached to him.