A THING MITCHELL SAID

“Mitchell was kept in Clonmel gaol two years before he was sent to Australia.  He was a Protestant, and a very good man.  He said in a speech, where was the use of meetings and of talking?  It was with the point of their bayonet the English would have to be driven out of Ireland.  It was Mitchell said that.”

THE FENIAN RISING

“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.”

A GREAT WONDER

“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.”

ANOTHER WONDER

“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

“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.”

THE WAR OF THE CRIMEA