Sometimes at our little gatherings, the “wee boy from England,” as the neighbours called me, would be asked to read from the “Nation” a speech of the Liberator—­the title his countrymen gave O’Connell after Catholic emancipation.  I was always delighted with this; entering as fully and enthusiastically into the spirit of what I read as any of the company.

As often as not, in Ballymagenaghy there would be sung, to the accompaniment of fiddle, flute or clarionet, one of those stirring songs which, week after week, appeared about this time in the “Nation” from the pens of Thomas Davis, and the brilliant young men in O’Connell’s movement known as the “Young Irelanders “—­songs “racy of the soil,” like the “Nation” itself, which stirred the hearts of the Irish race like the blast of a trumpet, songs which are still sung by Irish Nationalists the world over.

On the Sundays, the Bannons and their next neighbours, the Finegans, MacCartans, and MacKays, with their fiddles, flutes, and clarionets, supplied the chief part of the instrumental music of the choir—­for there was no organ—­at the little mountain chapel at Leitrim, where my uncle, Father Michael, officiated.  The happy remembrances of those Sundays of my boyhood are always brought back to me whenever I read T.D.  Sullivan’s “Dear Old Ireland,” which is equally characteristic of this corner of the “black North” as of the raciest part of Munster—­more especially where he sings:—­

  And happy and bright are the groups that pass
    From their peaceful homes for miles,
  O’er fields, and roads, and hills to Mass,
    When Sunday morning smiles;
      And deep the zeal their true hearts feel
        When low they kneel and pray! 
          Oh, dear old Ireland! 
          Blest old Ireland! 
        Ireland, boys, hurrah!

But nothing excited my boyish enthusiasm more than the stories of the Insurrection of 1798.  I was too young to understand much of what my grandmother used to tell us about these times before she died.  My mother was born in 1799, and was the youngest daughter of her family, but her eldest sister, my Aunt Mary, wife of Oiny Bannon, was 12 or 14 years old at the time of the Rising, and could describe more vividly what she saw connected with it than I can now recall incidents in the Repeal and Young Ireland Movements.

Listening to her, I could almost fancy I could see my grandfather, Brian O’Loughlin, leaving his home with the other Ballymagenaghy men, with their pikes and such guns as they could muster, to join the United Irish forces previous to the battles of Saintfield and Ballinahinch.  At the time of my visit to my mother’s birthplace, my grandfather’s house was in the occupation of the family of his youngest son, Edward, and, as a pilgrim visiting a sacred spot, I have stood on its floor, as I afterwards did on the field of Ballinahinch itself.