HISTORY OF THE MACOUN FAMILY 9 



walking arm in arm down the avenue and I ran across and he 

 saw me and called out: "John, what are you running for?" I 

 answered without hesitation that I was running for fear of his 

 seeing me. The next day he called in to see my mother and told 

 her how fortunate she was in having such a truthful boy, and made 

 me a present of a piece of silver. I felt that I had done a very 

 meritorious thing. Whether or not that event had a great in- 

 fluence on my boyhood and raised my status so that I was per- 

 mitted to play with Mr. Montgomery's children in their own gar- 

 dens, while others were completely excluded, I do not know. 



My aunts were married to men called Spence, Kincaid and 

 Murphy, but I only remember that Uncle Joe Kincaid, a widower, 

 lived with my Aunt Spence, who had lost her husband. He seems 

 to have been a man of more than ordinary ability, as he took 

 charge of her boys and superintended the farm. One day he took 

 me into the orchard and showed me the filbert trees and pointed 

 out the male flowers (aments) and told me from his imperfect 

 knowledge, that from these flowers, nuts would come in the 

 autumn. This sank into my memory and, as I will mention later, 

 bore fruit. I loved work so well that when I would go to "Edin- 

 more," as their place was called, they could not get rid of me easi- 

 ly, as I wanted to work on the land and drive a horse; and this 

 was in the dead of winter and very cold. I loved to live outside 

 and be going into out-of-the-way places and later it became even 

 a passion with me and I knew more birds' nests than any other 

 boy in the country. I remember being credited with the know- 

 ledge of one hundred and eight birds' nests in one spring. 



Owing to the death of my father, Frederick and I seemed to 

 have done a great deal of the work on the land, as I remember 

 more about that than anything else. About this time the Ulster 

 Railway was built and Frederick and I went to Moira to see the 

 "Iron Horse" when it first reached that village. There was a 

 great crowd and I stood beside an old lady who, as the engine 

 came along, exclaimed that it was going on without horses ! Evi- 

 dently she expected that it would be drawn by horses. At this 

 time and for years afterwards carriages were not covered and 

 when people, riding in them for the first time, came to a bridge you 



