The life of my boyhood was a varied kind of life. I had as much to do as kept me active from morning till night. Early in the morning I had to be out of bed to drive the hens out of the fields. The two town fields were bounded at the eastern side by the Rock village, inhabited mostly by fishermen. The fishermen had wives; those wives had flocks of hens, and those flocks of hens at dawn of day would be into the fields, scraping for the seed sown in springtime, and pulling down the ripening ears of corn coming on harvest-time. No matter how early I’d be out of bed, the hens would be earlier in the field before me. My principal assistant in chasing them out and keeping them out was my little dog Belle. The hens knew Belle and knew me as well as any living creature would know another. But they were more afraid of Belle than of me, for when I’d show myself at the town side of the field, going toward them, they’d take their leisure leaving the field when Belle was not with me; but if Belle was with me, they’d run and fly for their lives. Belle and I stole a march on them one day. We went a roundabout way to get to the rear of them. We went up Ceim hill, and by the old chapel schoolhouse, and down through the Rock. Then Belle went into the field and killed two of the hens. This brought on a war between the women of the Rock and my mother, and peace was made by having the Rock women agree to muffle up the legs of their hens in lopeens, so that they could not scratch up the seed out of the ground. It would not be a bad thing at all if the Irish people would take a lesson from me in my dealings with the hens of the Rock that were robbing my father’s fields--if they would do something that would make the English put lopeens upon her English landlord scratch-robbers of Ireland. Approaching harvest-time, the work of my care-taking was doubled by my trying to protect the wheat-field from the sparrows that lived on the Rock and in the town. They knew me, too, and knew Belle. They, too, were more afraid of Belle than of me. I could not throw stones at them, for my father told me that every stone I threw into the cornfield would break some ears of corn, and if I continued throwing stones I would do as much damage as the sparrows were doing. I had a “clappers” to frighten them away, but a flock of these sparrows, each perched upon an ear of corn, and picking away at it, cared as little about the noise of my clappers as England cares about the noise Irish patriot orators make in trying to frighten her out of Ireland by working the clappers of their mouths.