The O’Driscolls did not own the townland of Renascreena themselves, though the three families of them occupied nearly the whole of it. The O’Driscolls did own it at one time, and other lands around it, but the English came over to Ireland in strong numbers; they coveted the lands of the Irish; they overran the country with fire and sword; they beat the Irish; they killed many of them; they banished many of them; and they allowed more of them to remain in the land, on the condition that they would pay rent to the English, and acknowledge them as their landlords. That is how the old Irish, on their own lands, all over Ireland to-day are called tenants, and how the English in Ireland are called landlords. The landlord of Renascreena in my day was Thomas Hungerford, of Cahirmore. The landlord to-day is his son Harry Hungerford, a quiet kind of a man, I understand. The father was a quiet kind of a man, too. He was, in a small way, a tenant to my father. My father had the marsh field on the seashore. Tom Hungerford rented from him a corner of it, out of which to make a quay on which the boatmen would land sand for his tenants. My father would give me a receipt for a pound every gale-day to go up with it to Cahirmore. Giving me the pound one day the big man said: “If I was so strict with the tenants as to send for the rent to them the day it fell due, what a cry would be raised against me.” I told him the rent in this case wasn’t going to beggar him, and as he was prospering on the estate, it wasn’t much matter to him paying it. He smiled. He is gone; God be good to him; he was not, that I know of, one of those evicting landlords that took pleasure in the extermination of the people. The Irish people learn through oral tradition what many people learn from book history. Before I ever read a book, before I ever went to school, I got into my mind facts of history which appeared incredible to me. I got into my mind from the fireside stories of my youth that the English soldiers in Clonakilty, convenient to where I was born, used to kill the women, and take the young children, born and unborn, on the points of their bayonets, and dash them against the walls, and that the soldiers at Bandon Bridge used to tie men in couples with their hands behind their backs, and fling them into the river. Those very two atrocious acts are, I find, in Daniel O’Connell’s “Memoirs of Ireland,” recorded this way: “1641. At Bandon Bridge they tied eighty-eight Irishmen of the said town back to back, and threw them off the bridge into the river, where they were all drowned.--Coll. p. 5.” “County Cork, 1642. At Cloghnakilty about 238 men, women and children were murdered, of which number seventeen children were taken by the legs by soldiers, who knocked out their brains against the walls. This was done by Phorbis’s men and the garrison of Bandon Bridge.”