368 THE m'canns. 



consisting of fried bacon and a very homely apple-tart, 

 might have been worse. I can hear the harsh voice of 

 the garrulous old crone even now. She kept up a ramb- 

 ling sort of conversation, well garnished with pungent 

 epithets, telling me all about her bereavement, for she 

 was a widow, and her subsequent troubles, and how 

 the English came to be the cause of the family's mis- 

 fortunes. The M'Canns, she said, had belonged to one 

 of the oldest families in Ireland, and the grandfather 

 of the lamented Pat, her husband, had been a grand 

 gentleman, holding some mighty post in Leinster 

 during the Irish troubles towards the end of the last 



century, and those d English had hanged him for 



being a patriot, whereupon his family, along with many 

 others, had been shipped off to 'Merica to find bread 

 wherever they could. Her tale was so minute and cir- 

 cumstantial that I became interested in it, and on my 

 return I felt tempted to test its truth. Strange 

 enough, in an old Irish record I found, what I have 

 since seen confirmed in Walpole's " Ireland," that in 

 1798, under Cornwallis, as Viceroy, a person of the 

 name of M'Cami, — amongst some forty others who had 

 been excluded from the benefits of the Amnesty BiU, — 

 belonging to the " United Irishmen " League, and 

 secretary to the Provisional Committee of the County 

 of Leincester, or Leinster, was tried as a rebel and 



