The company of the fireside would be occasionally recruited by some poor old traveling man or woman who had a lodging in the house that night, and seemed to be a pensioner of the family, who had known them in better days. Looking up at the rafters and at the rusty iron crooks fastened into them, I heard one of those lady lodgers say one night, “Mo chreach! do chomairc-sa an la, na bheidheach meirg air na croocaidhe sin, air easba lon,” which in English would mean “my bitter woe! I saw the day that the rust would not be on those hooks, from want of use.” The bacon-hooks had no bacon hanging on them, and were rusty. Other articles of better times were rusty, too. On the mantelpiece or clevvy over the arch of the hearth, was a big steel fork about a yard long; it was called a flesh-fork. That used to get rusty, too, and only on Christmas Days, Easter Day, New Year’s Day, Shrove Tuesday and some other big feast-days would the girls take it down to brighten it up for service in the big pot of meat they were preparing for the feast. The decay in trade and manufacture that had set in on Ireland after the Irish Parliament had been lost, had already been felt by my people. They had a Linen bleachery convenient to the town, and in a shop in the house in which I was born, we had four looms in which four men were at work. Mick Crowley and Peter Crowley had “served their time” with my father’s people as apprentices to the trade; they were now “out of their time” and working as journeymen. Peter was a great singer, and every farthing or ha’penny I’d get hold of, I’d buy a ballad for it from blind Crowley, the ballad-singer, to hear Peter sing it for me. Peter was a Repealer, too, and I should judge his hopes for a Repeal of the Union were high, by the “fire” he would show singing: “The shuttles will fly in the groves of Blackpool, And each jolly weaver will sing in his loom, The blackbird in concert will whistle a tune To welcome Repeal to old Erin.” And I used to learn some of those songs of Peter’s. I have them by heart to-day. “The Wonderful White Horse” was a great one. It evidently meant Ireland, for the first verse of it is: “My horse he is white, altho’ at first he was grey, He took great delight in traveling by night and by day; His travels were great if I could but the half of them tell, He was rode by St. Ruth the day that at Aughrim he fell.” But the song about “The Kerry Eagle” is the one I used to take delight in. Here are a few verses of it: “You true sons of Grania come listen awhile to my song, And when that you hear it I’m sure you won’t say that I’m wrong; It is of a bold eagle, his age it was over three-score, He was the pride of the tribe, and the flower of Erin’s green shore.