e's. It could
not be said that he did not give an edifying example to his men, for I
saw him, on another occasion, going to Holy Communion, at the Soldiers'
Mass, where the altar was fixed up under a verandah in the officers'
quarter, the men being assembled in the open square in front. He was a
well-meaning man, and tried to carry on the Repeal Association after his
father's death, but it soon collapsed, for the mantle of Dan was
altogether too big for John.

Although he generally showed himself bitterly opposed to the Young
Irelanders, he was a poetical contributor to the "Nation," where I find
him represented by two very fine pieces--"Was it a Dream?" and "What's
my Thought Like?" In the latter piece he pictures Ireland--

No longer slave to England! but her sister if she will--
Prompt to give friendly aid at need, and to forget all ill!
But holding high her head, and, with serenest brow,
Claiming, amid earth's nations all, her fitting station now.

I never met his brother Maurice, but I could imagine his a more
congenial spirit with the "Young Irelanders" than any other of the
O'Connell family. He, too, is represented in "The Spirit of the Nation"
by his rousing "Recruiting Song of the Irish Brigade" which, sung to the
air of "The White Cockade," has always been a favourite of mine.

A fine, genial old priest, full of gossip and old-time stories, was
Father MacMahon, of Suncroft. If he met one of us on the road he would
stop to have a gossip, and was always delighted when he found, as he
often did, along with an English tongue an Irish heart. From him it was
I heard the legend of St. Brigid's miraculous mantle and the origin of
the Curragh--how the saint, to get "as much land as would graze a poor
man's cow" made the very modest request from the king for as much ground
as her mantle would cover; how he agreed, and she laid her mantle down
on the "short grass;" how, to the king's astonishment, it spread and
spread, until it covered the whole of the ground of what is now the
Curragh; and how it would have spread over all Ireland but that it met
with a red-haired woman, and that, as everybody knows, is unlucky.
Whenever, in our rambles along the country roads we afterwards met a
red-haired woman, we used to wonder was she a descendant of the female
who stopped the growth of the Curragh of Kildare.

Father MacMahon could also tell us of the gallant fight made by the men
of Kildare, and the massacre of the u