Daniel O’Donoghue was after giving his daughter in marriage to my uncle, my father’s brother Conn, a short time before that. There were always in my grandfather’s house at Renascreena a couple of servant girls and a couple of servant boys; twenty cows had to be milked, and horses and goats, pigs, poultry and sheep had to be attended to. And what a bright picture remains in my memory in connection with the milking time in the barn field back of the house! The cows, munching their bundles of clover and looking as grave as Solomons, the milking maids softly singing while stealing the milk from them into their pails; the sweet smell of the new milk and the new clover; the larks singing in the heavens overhead, as if keeping time with the joyous voices on earth. That was the time when everything in the world around me had a golden hue. I was the pet of the house. And, how I’d bustle around on a Sunday morning, giving orders to the boys to get the black horse with the white face ready for mass! and when the horse was ready, how I’d run through the bohreen into the main road to look at my granddaddie riding out, the big buckle in the collar of his great coat shining like gold, with my Nannie in her side-saddle behind him! A small kitchen-garden orchard separated the house and outhouses from the other family homesteads on that hillside slope. They were the homesteads of my grandfather’s two brothers, Patrick and Denis. As each of the three homesteads was well populated, the population of the three of them made a little village, and when the neighboring boys came around at night to see the girls, there was sport enough for a village. There were fairies in Ireland then, and I grew up there, thinking that fairy life was something that was inseparable from Irish life. Fairy stories would be told that were to me and to those around me as much realities of Irish life as are the stories that I now read in books called “Realities of Irish Life.” I grew up a boy, believing that there were “good people” in this world, and I grew up in manhood, or grow down, believing there are bad people in it, too. When I was in Ireland lately the population wasn’t half what it was when I was a boy. I asked if the fairies had been exterminated, too, for there seemed to be none of the life around that abounded in my time. Yes, English tyranny had killed out the “good people,” as well as the living people.