1829.) | [ 369. ] 
NARRATIVE OF SOME EVENTS IN THE IRISH REBELLION: 
BY AN EYE-WITNESS.* 
“© Let not Ambition mock their useful toil.” 
My father’s name was Samuel Barbour ; he held a small farm within 
two miles of Enniscorthy, called Clevass. It contained but twenty-two 
acres, but it was rich ground, and the rent was low; it had been in our 
family since the battle of the Boyne, for both my father’s people and my 
mother’s were Williamites.t It lay in a pleasant valley between two 
hills, one called Coolnahorna, and the other the Mine. On the former, 
an old tradition said, that King James, when flying, stopped to take. 
breath ; and an old prophecy said, that before an hundred years should 
have elapsed from that flight, the Irish should yet gather on that hill, 
strong, and victorious. The truth of this I myself saw but too clearly 
confirmed. 
Our farm, though very productive, would not have supported us in 
the comfort and respectability we enjoyed, but that my father was also 
a clothier ; he bought the fleece from the sheep’s back, and manufactured. 
it into middling fine cloths and friezes, which he sold at the neighbour- 
ing fairs. He thus gave employment to eight men and six women, and 
no one, rich or poor, had ever reason to complain of Sam Barbour. 
Though all our neighbours of the better class were Protestants (for we 
lived in the midst of twenty-two families of our own persuasion), yet all 
the people he employed were Roman Catholics, and we met with as 
much honesty and gratitude from them as we could have desired. 
My father was advanced in life when he married, and I was his second 
child. He had five more; the eldest, William, was at this time a fine 
well-grown boy, little more than sixteen. I was not much above fifteen, 
but tall and strong for my age. I had two sisters, of eleven and six, a 
little brother of four years old, and my mother had an infant only six 
weeks before the fearful times which I am endeavouring to describe. 
During the entire winter of 1797, when my father returned from 
Enniscorthy, he would mention the rumours he had heard of the dis- 
contents of the Roman Catholics, and the hopes they entertained that 
the French would assist them ; but we never had time to think of such 
things, much less to grieve about them. We never imagined that any 
one on earth would injure us, for we had never done the least hurt to 
any one, and we relied on the strength of the government, and, in par- 
ticular, on the bravery of the Enniscorthy Yeomanry, for putting down 
any disturbances. My brother William was one of these. 
On Saturday, the 26th of May, Whitsun-eve, Martin, our labourer 
*This narrative is taken, almost without the alteration of a word, from the lips 
of a plain respectable woman, the daughter of a County Wexford farmer; and though 
unpretending in its style, it possesses the merit of strict fidelity, and is so far curious, that 
few females in her rank, placed in such fearful circumstances, could have been capable of 
collecting their ideas into a continued narrative, and still fewer have ever met one to record 
itfor them. It will, at all events, give to the tenderly-guarded of the sex who read it some 
knowledge of what was once suffered by hundreds, with as kind hearts, and as soft feelings, 
as their own; and it will cause them to pray fervently against the miseries of civil war, 
which always fall heaviest on the most unoffending, on the widow and the orphan, the help- 
less woman, and the unconscious babe. 
+ Williamites were the soldiers of William the Third, who most of them, after the 
final expulsion of James the Second from Ireland, got grants of land; Clevass was one of 
these. The Battle of the Boyne was in 1690. 
M.M. New Series —Vou. VII. No. 40. 3B 
