Rossa's Recollections, 1838 to 1898. Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa
my Blackbird road was the road we traveled the day I went to Lord Carbery’s funeral. I have a purpose, too, in speaking of that. It must be some time about the year 1844. With four or five other boys, I mootched from school that day and went to Rath-a-Bharrig, or Castlefreke, as it is christened in the language of the plundering Frekes. Before the Cromwellian time, it, and the land around it belonged to the Barrys, of the Norman time.
When we got to the wake-house we did not get in; in fact we kept away from it, because as we ran away from school we did not want to let our fathers see us, so I went over to the lake to look at the swans. I found a swan’s nest with three eggs in it—the largest eggs that ever I saw. I had to put my two hands around one of them, taking it up, showing it to my companions. When the bells rang for the funeral service to move, I took my position behind a big tree in view of the avenue the people would pass through. I watched for my father, and when I saw him, with a piece of white calico around his hat, I got mad, for I knew my father was mad at being subjected to such humiliation, and at being obliged to wear such a menial garb of mourning at such a funeral. The word had been sent around by the gentry that all the tenants on the Carbery estate were to attend the lord’s funeral, and though my father was not paying rent directly to the Carbery lord, still, as his holding was looked upon as the Carbery property, he attended. I will give explanation on this subject by and by.
It appears to me in writing these pages that I am very anxious to get out of my childhood, and out of my boyhood days, and as I cannot get back to them once I get out, nor see any use in singing:
“Would I were a boy again,”
I will remain a boy as long as I can.
I was naturally very quiet and gentle when a boy—just as I am to-day—except when I was put to it, and when I was forced to be otherwise. I had five or six boxing bouts with schoolfellows—with Mike Crone, Micky Feen, Stephen Lovejoy, Pat Callanan and Paak Cullinane—but I never struck the first blow. Paak Cullinane and I were among the boys who went up to the Ardagh road bowling. He and I were made markers. On one occasion I thought he marked the throw of one of his friends a foot ahead of where the bowl stopped. I objected, and without his saying a word, the first thing he did was to give me a thump in the face.
He had the name of being the best boxer in the school, and could with impunity strike any one he got vexed with, but when he struck me, I struck back, and the fight had to be stopped, to stop the blood that was running from his nose. The fight with Mike Crone ended by my getting a lump on the forehead that made me give up the contest, and the other three were drawn battles.
But I never had any fight or falling-out with any of the girls of my acquaintance. They were all very fond of me, and when my mother would keep me in, to learn my lessons, I’d hear Mary Hurley and Ellen Fitzpatrick and Menzie Crone and Ponticilia Barrett come as a delegation from the girls outside, asking her to let Jer. come out to play with them.
You never saw any illuminations at the bottom of the sea. I saw them, and I used to take those girls to see them. Bounding our fields, was the strand. This strand was about a half a mile wide, every way; it had a sandy bottom, in which cockles had their home. There was no water in the strand, when the tide was out. But when the tide was coming in, or going out, and when the water would be about twelve inches deep, as pretty a sight as you could see would be to walk through that water, and see “the cockles lighting.” The sun should be shining, and you should walk the strand with your face to the sun, so that your shadow would fall behind you. Then every home of a cockle would be lighted: you’d see through the cockle’s chamber door—through a little hole that a knitting needle would fill—the light down in the sand, like a little taper burning. ’Twas a pretty picture; I’d go a mile off to-day to see it again. But those days are passed and gone.
Nor, can I ever again, see the sun dancing on an Easter Sunday morning as it used to dance when I was a boy, over the general rejoicing on that day. It was to be seen through burned glass, and on Saturday night I’d have my glass burned, ready to look at the sun next morning, if the morning was fine.
Our Pagan sires, our strifes would shun,
They saw their heaven, through the sun,
Their God smiled down on every one
In Ireland over the water.
Those are lines I wrote when in an English prison years ago. I suppose I was thinking of our Pagan fathers, who, it is said, worshipped the sun. Irish historians—historians of the Catholic church in Ireland tell us, that Saint Patrick, and other Apostles of Christianity, allowed many of the harmless habits and customs of the Irish people to remain with them; that they did not insist on the abolition of some practices that tended to the worship of a Supreme Being, and it is as reasonable as anything else to suppose that our Pagan fathers, in worshipping the sun, was only worshipping the Supreme Power that put that sun in the heavens. It was, and is to-day, the most visible manifestation of the Great God of the Universe.
On the eve of La Sowna, November day—and on the eve of La Bealtheine—May day, there are practices carried on in Ireland that must have come down to our people from times anterior to the time of Saint Patrick. I remember Jemmie Fitzpatrick taking me with him up to his farm in Ardagh one May evening, to bless the growing crops. I carried the little sheaves of straw that he had prepared for the occasion. When he came to the grounds, he took one of the sheaves and lit it. Then, we walked around every field, he, as one sheaf would burn out, taking another from me, and lighting it. This, no doubt, is some relic that comes down to us from those times that poets and historians tell us the Baal-fires were lighted throughout the land.
Speaking of Patrick’s day celebrations, I don’t know that I have the enthusiasm regarding them to-day that I had in my schooldays.
Many and many a time I drew the blood from my fingers to paint the section red part of the crosses that I used to be making for the celebration of the day. The green color I’d get, by gathering pennyleaves in the garden, and bruising out the juice of them, and the yellow color would come to me from the yolk of an egg. If I hadn’t a compass to make my seven circle cross, I’d make a compass out of a little goulogue sprig of a whitethorn tree—fastening a writing pen to one leg of it. John Cushan, the master, would not let the boys make the crosses at school.
And often that school time of mine comes up to me, when I hear friends in New York talking of their schooldays in Ireland—when I hear, as I heard the other night, Pat Egan asking Pat Cody and John O’Connor, if they remembered the time when they were carrying the sods of turf under their arms to school. That was jokingly cast at them, as kind of aspachaun; but I remember that I, myself, often carried the sods of turf under my arm to school; and if there is any fire in anything I write in this book, I suppose that is how it comes.
CHAPTER VII.
THE LORDS OF IRELAND.
The landlords of Ireland are the lords of Ireland. England makes them landlords first, and then, to put the brand of her marauding nobility on them, she makes them English lords. And they do lord it over the Irish people, and ride rough-shod over every natural and acquired right belonging to them. Whether born in England or Ireland, they must be English, and anti-Irish in spirit, in action and in religion. Some of my readers may say that some of the lords and the landlords in Ireland at the present day are Catholics. So they are, and so were a few of them in my day, and so were the whole of them in the days preceding the time of Henry VIII. But if they were, they were English and anti-Irish all the same, and the marauding Catholic Englishman, coming over to Ireland on his mission of murder and plunder during the three hundred years preceding Martin Luther’s time, murdered Irishmen as mercilessly and plundered them as ruthlessly as he has done during the last three hundred years that he is a Protestant. It is not religion, but booty, the Englishman is after in this world. Of course, religion is very useful to him. It furnishes him with a pretext to enter a country and to take soundings in it,
With the Bible on his lips,
But the