FOREWORD

The writer of this work first saw the light on a modest farmstead in
the parish of Droumtariffe, North Cork. He came of a stock long
settled there, whose roots were firmly fixed in the soil, whose love
of motherland was passionate and intense, and who were ready "in other
times," when Fenianism won true hearts and daring spirits to its side,
to risk their all in yet one more desperate battle for "the old
cause." His father was a Fenian, and so was every relative of his,
even unto the womenfolk. He heard around the fireside, in his younger
days, the stirring stories of all the preparations which were then
made for striking yet another blow for Ireland, and he too sighed and
sorrowed for the disappointments that fell upon noble hearts and
ardent souls with the failure of "The Rising."

He was not more than seven years of age when the terrible tribulation
of eviction came to his family. He remembers, as if the events were
but of yesterday, the poignant despair of his mother in leaving the
home into which her dowry was brought and where her children were
born, and the more silent resignation, but none the less deeply felt
bitterness, of his father--a man of strong character and little given
to expressing his emotions. He recalls that, a day or two before the
eviction, he was taken away in a cart, known in this part of the
country as "a crib," with some of the household belongings, to seek a
temporary shelter with some friends. May God be good to them for their
loving-kindness and warm hospitality!

He wondered, then, why there should be so much suffering and sorrow as
he saw expressed around him, in the world, and he was told that there
was nothing for it--that the lease of the farm had expired, that the
landlord wanted it for himself, and that though his father was willing
to pay an increased rent, still out he had to go--and, what was worse,
to have all his improvements confiscated, to have the fruits of the
blood and sweat and energy of his forefathers appropriated by a man
who had no right under heaven to them, save such as the iniquitous
laws of those days gave him.

It was something in the nature of poetic justice that the lad whose
family was cast thus ruthlessly on the roadside in the summer of 1880,
should, after the passage of the Land Act of 1903, have, in the
providence of things, the opportunity and the power for negotiating,
in fair and friendly and conciliatory fashion, f