Rossa's Recollections, 1838 to 1898: Childhood, boyhood, manhood; customs, habits and manners of the Irish people; Erinach and Sassenach; Catholic and protestant; Englishman and Irishman; English religion; Irish plunder; social life and prison life; the Fenian movement; Travels in Ireland, England, Scotland and AmericaO'Donovan Rossa, Jeremiah
History
Rossa's Recollections, 1838 to 1898: Childhood, boyhood, manhood; customs, habits and manners of the Irish people; Erinach and Sassenach; Catholic and protestant; Englishman and Irishman; English religion; Irish plunder; social life and prison life; the Fenian movement; Travels in Ireland, England, Scotland and America
“Stop, now,” said I, “stop. Never mind the lectures. I called in to
see you, just to look at you; to have one word with you, for old times’
sake; if I had passed your door, or that you had heard I passed your
door without calling in, wouldn’t people think that we were mad with
each other for something; wouldn’t we be giving scandal?”
He smiled, and we talked on. But again, he spoke of not being able
to do anything for my lectures, and again I stopped him; and a third
time he brought the matter up, and a third time I had to stop him, and
tell him it was not to talk of lectures I came in, but to have a look
at himself. In traveling through England and Scotland and Wales after
that day, I learned that part of the duties of his office in London
was, to write to the McCarthy party clubs telling them the lectures of
O’Donovan Rossa were not officially recognized by the confederation;
but that individual members were not prohibited from attending them, as
individuals, if they desired to attend.
I will now take myself back to school again.
I spoke of getting all my lessons by heart in short time. That’s true.
They are in my head still. One of them tells me not to believe in
dreams; that--
“Whang, the miller, was naturally avaricious. Nobody loved money more
than he, or more respected those who had it. When any one would talk of
a rich man in company, Whang would say, ‘I know him very well; he and I
are intimate.’”--And so on.
But Whang did not know poor people at all; he hadn’t the least
acquaintance with them. He believed in dreams, though; he dreamed,
three nights running, that there was a crock of gold under the wall of
his mill; digging for it, he loosened the foundation stones; the walls
of his mill fell down, and that was the last of my Whang, the miller.
Many lessons were in the schoolbooks of my day that are not in the
schoolbooks to-day. “The Exile of Erin” was in the Third book in my
day; ’tisn’t in any of the books to-day. “The Downfall of Poland,” in
which “Freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell,” was in one of the books in
my day. ’Tisn’t in any of the books to-day. England is eliminating from
those Irish national schoolbooks every piece of reading that would tend
to nurse the Irish youth into a love of country, or a love of freedom,
and she is putting into them pieces that make the Irish children pray
to God to make them happy _English_ children.
But apart from politics, there were some good lessons in those books
that have remained living in my mind all through my life. This is a
good one--
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