The Irish language was the language of the house at my grandfather’s place. It was the language of the table, the language of the milking barn, the language of the sowing and the reaping, the language of the mowing, the “mihal” and the harvest-home. The English language may be spoken when the landlord or English-speaking people came the way, but the language natural to every one in the house was Irish, and in the Irish language I commenced to grow. The household of Renascreena consisted of my grandfather Cornelius O’Driscoll, my grandmother Anna-ni-Laoghaire, my aunts, Nance, Johanna, Bridget, Anna; my uncles, Denis, Conn and Michael. Michael was the youngest of the family. He keeps the old homestead now (1896). Last year, when I was in Ireland, he drove into Clonakilty to meet me, looking tall and straight. I asked him his age. He said seventy-five. All the others--aunts and uncles--are dead, except Aunt Bridget, who lives at No. 11 Callowhill, Philadelphia, the wife of Patrick Murray. In the family, had been four more daughters. Mary, married to John O’Brien; Margaret, married to Jer. Sheehan, of Shanava; Kate, married to Martin O’Donovan-Ciuin, of Sawroo, whose son is Martin O’Donovan of San Francisco; and Nellie, the oldest of the children, married, at the age of fifteen, to Denis O’Donovan Rossa, of Carrig-a-grianaan, whose son I am. Yes, married at the age of fifteen my mother was, and born thirteen years after she was married, was I. There isn’t much of a courtship story, as far as I could hear. This is how I heard it: My father was riding his horse home from the fair of Ross one evening. The girls at the roadside well, there in the valley of the Renascreena road, stopped his horse and challenged him for a “faireen.” He gave them a guinea; my mother was the recipient of the gold piece. After that, came a proposal of marriage. My mother’s people visited at the house of my father’s people at Carrig-a-grianaan, one mile to the north, to know if the place was a suitable one. All seemed right, and the marriage came off. But a story is told about there being some angry words between my two grandfathers after the marriage. My father’s father kept a bleachery on his farm, and the day my mother’s father visited the place, the storehouse of that bleachery was well packed with the “pieces” of bleached linen, which were looked upon as belonging to the stock of the house. But, when, after the marriage, the people who sent the pieces in to be bleached took them away, Grandfather O’Driscoll charged that everything was not represented fairly to him; he talked angrily, and said he’d drown himself: “Baithfid me fein, baithfid me fein”--“I’ll drown myself, I’ll drown myself.” “Oh,” said the other grandfather, “bidheach ciall agat; ba ghaire do’n fhairge Donal O’Donobhue ’na thusa, as nior bhathaig se e fein”--“Oh, have sense; Daniel O’Donoghue was nearer to the sea than you, and he didn’t drown himself.”