O’Connell’s Memoirs give accounts of similar atrocities in every county of Ireland, and his accounts are taken from Englishmen writers of Irish history. In the fireside history of my childhood home, I learned that the English soldiers in Clonakilty took some of the infants on the points of their bayonets and dashed them against the walls. At a flax-mihal, or some gathering of the kind at my grandfather’s, one night that some of the neighboring girls were in, they and my aunts were showing presents to each other--earrings, brooches, rings and little things that way. One of them showed a brooch which looked like gold, but which probably was brass, and wanted to make much of it. “Nach e an volumus e!” said one of my aunts. “What a molamus it is.” That was making little of it. Perhaps the boy who made a present of it was “pulling a string” with the two girls. The word “volumus” is Latin, but the Irish language softens it into “molamus,” and uses it as a name for anything that is made much of, but is really worth very little. You will see in Lingard’s history of Ireland how the two words came into the Irish language. After the time of the Reformation, when England formulated the policy and practice of expelling from Ireland all the Irish who would not turn Sassenach, and all particularly who had been plundered of their lands and possessions, she passed laws decreeing that it was allowable for landlords and magistrates to give “permits” to people to leave the country, and never come back. But, that the person leaving, should get a pass or permit to travel to the nearest seaport town to take shipping. And if a ship was not leaving port the day of his arrival at the port, he, to give assurance of his desire to leave the country, should wade into the sea up to his knees every day till a ship was ready. There were printed forms of such permits; and the first word in those forms, printed in very large letters, was the Latin word “Volumus,” which meant: We wish, or we desire, or it is our pleasure, that the bearer be allowed to leave Ireland forever. A royal permit to exile yourself, to banish yourself from your native land forever! Nach e an volumus e! What a molamus it is! A political lesson was graven on my mind by the Irish magpies that had their nests in the big skehory tree on the ditch opposite the kitchen door. I had permission to go through the tree to pick the skehories, but I was strictly ordered not to go near the magpies’ nest, or to touch a twig or thorn belonging to it.