James O’Mahony of Bandon wrote to me that he wished to meet me to have a talk over Irish national affairs. He suggested that St. John’s eve in Ross would be a good place, as crowds of people would be there, and we would escape any prying notice. We met there that day. We had our talk, and then we walked toward the Abbey field. The blind and the halt and the lame were there, in every path and passage way, appealing for alms--appealing mostly in the Irish language. We stood behind one man who was sitting down, his bare ulcerated legs stretched out from him. His voice was strong, and his language was beautiful. O’Mahony said he never heard or read anything in the Irish language so beautiful. Taking his notebook and pencil to note down the words of the appeal, some traveling companion of the cripple’s told him that a man was taking notes, and the cripple turned round and told us to go way. He wouldn’t speak any more until we went away. This James O’Mahony was a draper in Bandon; he was the brother of Thaddeus O’Mahony who was a professor of the Irish language in Trinity College, Dublin. He went to Australia in the year 1863. I hope he is alive and happy there. With him went another comrade of mine, William O’Carroll, who kept a bakery in North Main Street, Cork. They were among the first men in the South of Ireland that joined the Stephens’ movement. It was James O’Mahony that first gave James Stephens the name of Seabhac; shouk; hawk. The Shouk shoolach--the walking hawk--was a name given in olden days to a banned wanderer. Stephens, at the start of this organization, traveled much of Ireland on foot. A night he stopped at my house in Skibbereen, I saw the soles of his feet red with blisters. This is a long leap I have taken in the chapter of “from the cradle to the weaning”--a leap from 1831--the year I was born--to 1858, the year I first met James Stephens. So I will have to leap back now, and talk on from my childhood. I must have been very fond of my mother, or my mother must have been very fond of me, for I must have lived on her breast till I was up to three years of age. I know she tried often to wean me from her; she put me to sleep with one of the servant maids, and I remember well the laugh my father and mother had at me next morning, when I heard her telling them how often during the night I tried to get at her bosom. I am more than three years older than my brother Conn, and I suppose it was the advent of his coming that brought about the arrangement to have me taken into the country to my grandfather’s place. CHAPTER II. AT MY GRANDFATHER’S.