Our Pagan sires, our strifes would shun, They saw their heaven, through the sun, Their God smiled down on every one In Ireland over the water. Those are lines I wrote when in an English prison years ago. I suppose I was thinking of our Pagan fathers, who, it is said, worshipped the sun. Irish historians--historians of the Catholic church in Ireland tell us, that Saint Patrick, and other Apostles of Christianity, allowed many of the harmless habits and customs of the Irish people to remain with them; that they did not insist on the abolition of some practices that tended to the worship of a Supreme Being, and it is as reasonable as anything else to suppose that our Pagan fathers, in worshipping the sun, was only worshipping the Supreme Power that put that sun in the heavens. It was, and is to-day, the most visible manifestation of the Great God of the Universe. On the eve of La Sowna, November day--and on the eve of La Bealtheine--May day, there are practices carried on in Ireland that must have come down to our people from times anterior to the time of Saint Patrick. I remember Jemmie Fitzpatrick taking me with him up to his farm in Ardagh one May evening, to bless the growing crops. I carried the little sheaves of straw that he had prepared for the occasion. When he came to the grounds, he took one of the sheaves and lit it. Then, we walked around every field, he, as one sheaf would burn out, taking another from me, and lighting it. This, no doubt, is some relic that comes down to us from those times that poets and historians tell us the Baal-fires were lighted throughout the land. Speaking of Patrick’s day celebrations, I don’t know that I have the enthusiasm regarding them to-day that I had in my schooldays. Many and many a time I drew the blood from my fingers to paint the section red part of the crosses that I used to be making for the celebration of the day. The green color I’d get, by gathering pennyleaves in the garden, and bruising out the juice of them, and the yellow color would come to me from the yolk of an egg. If I hadn’t a compass to make my seven circle cross, I’d make a compass out of a little goulogue sprig of a whitethorn tree--fastening a writing pen to one leg of it. John Cushan, the master, would not let the boys make the crosses at school. And often that school time of mine comes up to me, when I hear friends in New York talking of their schooldays in Ireland--when I hear, as I heard the other night, Pat Egan asking Pat Cody and John O’Connor, if they remembered the time when they were carrying the sods of turf under their arms to school. That was jokingly cast at them, as kind of aspachaun; but I remember that I, myself, often carried the sods of turf under my arm to school; and if there is any fire in anything I write in this book, I suppose that is how it comes. CHAPTER VII. THE LORDS OF IRELAND.