126 MEMOIES OF MY NAMESAKE. 



know that if we ask aright, and His providence permits. "He is 

 ready to help to the uttermost those who come to Him." 



My father, poor man, {re qui esc at in pace, also) wrestled bravely 

 with the giant, Famine. He suffered the pangs of hunger, (money 

 was often valueless;) we passed through every stage of domestic 

 hardship, (without its vices, thank God,) which the mind of man can 

 conceive or pen describe but the whole family, — father, mother, one 

 daughter and two sons, — survived. This statement is a testimonial 

 to my father's memory more eloquent then the legend of bronze or 

 marble, which latter, o'er his noble dust, is lacking to this day, 

 (small thanks to me,) as he sleeps near a venerable willow in the 

 ancient graveyard of St. Patrick's church. His faults, true to the 

 traditions of the "real, ould stock," in Ireland, for the Norman-Irish 

 became "Hibernes hiberniores "more Irish than the Irish them- 

 selves, was an aristocratic lack of thrift, and a foolish fondness for 

 the social glass. The first of these rollicking traditions, reinforced 

 by similar heredity from "the princely O'Carrolls of Ely," "my 

 mother's people, flows on in the blood of one son at least, and must 

 be accepted as his apology for a pocket-book of chronic leanness and 

 other short comings. 



The horrors of my experience, during the famine period beggar 

 description by brush or pen, and they laid the foundation of a self- 

 diffidence which unquestionably has marred my prospects. To this 

 day my soul shudders when I think of them. I have stood by the 

 curb while "twenty coffins on a car" went by to interment. 



I have seen the interment, and I have seen dogs later on, scratch 

 away the few inches of soil and feed upon the blackened dead! 

 Why, then, have I not been thrifty ? 



First, such an experience begets a morbid recklessness as to life, 

 per se, and impresses in the soul, too deeply to be wholesome, the 

 cynical truth that "All is vanity." Vefbum sat sapicnti. And, second, 

 to sail against the tide, one needs a fair wind, and that upper cur- 

 rents to the contrary notwithstanding I have not had. The adverse 

 tide was my own; the wind was not. Though a loving breeze, it 

 made me tack. 



School Days. I was sent to school, "packed off" as my neighbors 

 called it in a phraseology all their own, alas, for me, as I will show 

 later on. 



