CHAPTER III 



CHILDHOOD 



I CANNOT say I can remember my first coming to 

 Gairloch, as I was then only about two years old, but 

 there were soon to be very trying times there, during 

 the great famine caused by the potato blight. I have 

 quite clear recollections of my own small grievance at 

 being made to eat rice, which I detested, instead of 

 potatoes, with my mutton or chicken in the years 

 1846-1848, for even Uaislean an tigh mhor (the gentry 

 of the big house) could not get enough potatoes to eat 

 in those hard times. Certainly things looked very black 

 in 1846-1848 in Ireland and the West of Scotland, 

 though, but for the potato blight, when should we have 

 got roads made through the country ? My mother 

 never left Gairloch, not even for a day, for three long 

 years when the famine was at its height ! 



In Ireland a very stupid system was started — namely, 

 the making of roads beginning nowhere in particular, 

 and ending, perhaps, at a rock or in the middle of a bog. 

 It was thought that working at an object which could 

 never be of any use to anyone would be so repugnant to 

 the feelings of the greater portion of the population that 

 only the dire stress of actual starvation would induce 

 them to turn out for the sake of the trifle of money, or 



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