I'm sorry,' he said, 'that you did not read Irish history.' Mackie cried
when he heard that, for indeed it was all spies about him, and it was
they gave him up."

A GREAT WONDER

"The greatest wonder I ever saw was one time near Kinvara at a funeral,
there came a car along the road and a lady on it having a plaid cloak,
as was the fashion then, and a big hat, and she kept her head down and
never looked at the funeral at all. I wondered at her when I saw that,
and I said to my brother it was a strange thing a lady to be coming past
a funeral and not to look on at it at all. And who was on the car but
O'Gorman Mahon, escaping from the Government, and dressed up as a lady!
He drove to Father Arthur's house at Kinvara, and there was a boat
waiting, and a cousin of my own in it, to bring him out to a ship, and
so he made his escape."

ANOTHER WONDER

"I saw Clerkenwell prison in London broken up in the time of the
Fenians, and every ship and steamer in the whole of the ocean stopped.
The prison was burned down, and all the prisoners consumed, and seven
doctors' shops along with it."

FATHER MATHEW

"Father Mathew was a great man, plump and red in the face. There
couldn't be better than what he was. I knew one Kane in Gort he gave a
medal to, and he kept it seventy years. Kane was a great totaller, and
he wouldn't drink so much as water out of a glass, but out of a cup; the
glass might have been used for porter at some time. He lost the medal,
and was in a great way about it, but he found it five years after in a
dung-heap. A great totaller he was. Them that took the medal from Father
Mathew and that kept it, at their death they would be buried by men
dressed in white clothes."

THE WAR OF THE CRIMEA

"My husband was in the war of the Crimea. It is terrible the hardships
he went through, to be two months without going into a house, under the
snow in trenches. And no food to get, maybe a biscuit in the day. And
there was enough food there, he said, to feed all Ireland; but bad
management, they could not get it. Coffee they would be given, and they
would be cutting a green bramble to strive to make a fire to boil it.
The dead would be buried every morning; a big hole would be dug, and the
bodies thrown in, and lime upon them; and some of the bodies would be
living when they were buried. My husband used to try to revive them if
he saw there was life in them, but other lads wouldn't care--just to put
them down