s up to twelve year at the
time of the Big Wind that was in '39, and I was over at Roxborough with
my father that was clearing timber from the road, and your father came
out along the road, and he was wild seeing the trees and rocks whipped
up into the sky the way they were with the wind. But what was that to
the bitter time of the Famine that came after?"

THE FAMINE

"The Famine; there's a long telling in that, it is a thing will be
remembered always. That little graveyard above, at that time it was
filled full up of bodies; the Union had no way to buy coffins for them.
There would be a bag made, and the body put into it, that was all; and
the people dying without priest, or bishop, or anything at all. But over
in Connemara it was the dogs brought the bodies out of the houses, and
asked no leave."

THE CHOLERA

"The cholera was worse again. It came from foreign, and it lasted a
couple of years, till God drove it out of the country. It is often I saw
a man ploughing the garden in the morning till dinner time, and before
evening he would be dead. It was as if on the wind it came, there was no
escape from it; on the wind, the same as it would come now and would
catch on to pigs. Sheds that would be made out in the haggards to put
the sick in, they would turn as black as your coat. There was no one
could go near them without he would have a glass of whiskey taken, and
he wouldn't like it then."

A LONG REMEMBERING

"The longest thing I remember is the time of the sickness, and my father
that was making four straw mats for four brothers that died, and that
couldn't afford coffins. The bodies were put in the mats and were tied
up in them. And the second thing I remember is the people digging in the
stubble after the oats and the wheat; to see would they meet a potato,
and sometimes they did, for God sent them there."

THE TERRY ALTS

"The Terry Alts were a bad class; everything you had they'd take from
you. It was against herding they began to get the land, the same as at
the present time. And women they would take; a man maybe that hadn't a
perch of land would go to a rich farmer's house and bring away his
daughter. And I, supposing, to have some spite against you, I'd gather a
mob and do every bad thing to destroy you. That is the way they were, a
bad class and doing bad deeds."

THE '48 TIME

"Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better
than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland