I must have been at John Cushan’s school about six years. Paying a visit to the school after his death, I looked at the roll-calls, and I could not find my name on them after December, 1844. So I had been at school from the age of six to the age of thirteen. Bad times came on then. The year 1845 was the first year of the great blight of the potato crops in Ireland. The landlords of Ireland made a raid upon the grain crops and seized them and sold them for their rents, leaving the producers of those crops to starve or perish or fly the country. Thousands of families were broken up; thousands of homes were razed; I am one of the victims of those bad times. People now allude to those years as the years of the “famine” in Ireland. That kind of talk is nothing but trash. There was no “famine” in Ireland; there is no famine in any country that will produce in any one year as much food as will feed the people who live in that country during that year. In the year 1845 there were 9,000,000 people in Ireland; allowing that the potato crop failed, other crops grew well, and the grain and cattle grown in the country were sufficient to sustain three times 9,000,000 people. England and the agents of England in Ireland seized those supplies of food, and sent them out of the country, and then raised the cry that there was “famine” in the land. There was no famine in the land, but there was plunder of the Irish people by the English Government of Ireland; and Coroners’ juries, called upon to give judgment in cases of people found dead, had brought in verdicts of “murder” against that English Government. I will come to that time in another chapter of my recollections. Many of the neighbors used to sit skurreechting at night at my father’s fireside, and it was here I learned many matters of Irish history before I was able to read history. It was here I came to know Tead Andy, of whom I wrote thirty years ago, when I was in an English prison: In songs and ballads he took great delight, And prophecies of Ireland yet being freed, And singing them by our fireside at night, I learned songs from Tead, before I learned to read. That fireside was a big open hearth; up the chimney somewhere was fastened a rod of iron about an inch thick; at the end of it below was a crook; the whole thing was called a pot-crook, and on it was a movable pot hanger to hang a pot. Then with a turf fire and a big skulb of ver in that fire that lighted the plates on the dresser below with the photograph of all who were sitting in front of it; I, standing or sitting in the embrace of one of the men, would listen to stories of all the fairies that were “showing” themselves from Carrig-Cliona to Inish-Owen, and of all the battles that were fought in Christendom and out of Christendom. Mind now, I am, in these “recollections,” taking in the time that transpired between the years 1839 and 1845--the time I was between the age of seven and thirteen.