The Life Story of an Old Rebel eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 269 pages of information about The Life Story of an Old Rebel.

The Life Story of an Old Rebel eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 269 pages of information about The Life Story of an Old Rebel.

Igoe’s was a public house just on the corner of the road leading from the Curragh to Suncroft.  What between the workmen at the Camp and the soldiers and the militia, Igoe’s must have been doing a roaring trade at this time.  Which reminds me that I one day saw John O’Connell (son of the Liberator), then a captain in the Dublin militia, trying to get a lot of his men, who were the worse for liquor, out of Igoe’s.  It could not be said that he did not give an edifying example to his men, for I saw him, on another occasion, going to Holy Communion, at the Soldiers’ Mass, where the altar was fixed up under a verandah in the officers’ quarter, the men being assembled in the open square in front.  He was a well-meaning man, and tried to carry on the Repeal Association after his father’s death, but it soon collapsed, for the mantle of Dan was altogether too big for John.

Although he generally showed himself bitterly opposed to the Young Irelanders, he was a poetical contributor to the “Nation,” where I find him represented by two very fine pieces—­“Was it a Dream?” and “What’s my Thought Like?” In the latter piece he pictures Ireland—­

  No longer slave to England! but her sister if she will—­
  Prompt to give friendly aid at need, and to forget all ill! 
  But holding high her head, and, with serenest brow,
  Claiming, amid earth’s nations all, her fitting station now.

I never met his brother Maurice, but I could imagine his a more congenial spirit with the “Young Irelanders” than any other of the O’Connell family.  He, too, is represented in “The Spirit of the Nation” by his rousing “Recruiting Song of the Irish Brigade” which, sung to the air of “The White Cockade,” has always been a favourite of mine.

A fine, genial old priest, full of gossip and old-time stories, was Father MacMahon, of Suncroft.  If he met one of us on the road he would stop to have a gossip, and was always delighted when he found, as he often did, along with an English tongue an Irish heart.  From him it was I heard the legend of St. Brigid’s miraculous mantle and the origin of the Curragh—­how the saint, to get “as much land as would graze a poor man’s cow” made the very modest request from the king for as much ground as her mantle would cover; how he agreed, and she laid her mantle down on the “short grass;” how, to the king’s astonishment, it spread and spread, until it covered the whole of the ground of what is now the Curragh; and how it would have spread over all Ireland but that it met with a red-haired woman, and that, as everybody knows, is unlucky.  Whenever, in our rambles along the country roads we afterwards met a red-haired woman, we used to wonder was she a descendant of the female who stopped the growth of the Curragh of Kildare.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Life Story of an Old Rebel from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.