prehend was explained to me later, if I asked for light, by Father Bogue and Father Tierney, who had taken the sympathetic boy into special favour.[1]
But more specific knowledge came to me from another source. The senior curate in Monaghan, the Rev. John Caulfield, maintained the sort of friendship with me with which a generous man sometimes favours an intelligent boy. He spoke to me at times of the religious persecutions in Ulster. How the native princes, who were Catholics, were lured into foreign countries, and their fertile lands given to Scotchmen and Englishmen. How when the natives rose to regain their own, they were savagely repressed and almost exterminated, as if it was an unpardonable crime to take back the lands which their forefathers had held since before the coming of St. Patrick. How, when the natives rose to support King James, and were defeated at the Boyne by a foreign army, they still held Limerick year after year till the new king, with whose hooked nose Orange banners made me familiar, sealed a treaty with them, securing them the enjoyment of their lands and their religion; and how the Puritan Parliament in Dublin, with a shameless disregard of honesty and honour, denied them the rights so secured. How the daughter of James, when she became queen, sanctioned laws designed to exterminate the Irish race. They were not permitted to till the lands except as serfs; it was a crime punishable with crushing penalties to teach them to read or write; and a priest, who performed the sacred functions for which he was ordained, was liable to be hanged. How their churches were taken away from them, and in later times they were not only humiliated by annual processions to celebrate their overthrow, but were compelled by law to pay a special tax levied only on Catholics to defray the cost of flags and regalia for some of their insulting celebrations. Our wrongs, he said, were not merely historic; little more than a generation ago in the neighbour-
- ↑ The incidents of a human life are often connected by mystic and invisible ties. A dozen years later Father Bogue presided at a public dinner, proffered me by my native county when I entered on public life, by undertaking to edit a newspaper in the capital of Ulster, and sixteen years later Father Tierney stood by my side, as one of the State prisoners indicted with O'Connell for political conspiracy.
