“My husband was in the war of the Crimea.  It is terrible the hardships he went through, to be two months without going into a house, under the snow in trenches.  And no food to get, maybe a biscuit in the day.  And there was enough food there, he said, to feed all Ireland; but bad management, they could not get it.  Coffee they would be given, and they would be cutting a green bramble to strive to make a fire to boil it.  The dead would be buried every morning; a big hole would be dug, and the bodies thrown in, and lime upon them; and some of the bodies would be living when they were buried.  My husband used to try to revive them if he saw there was life in them, but other lads wouldn’t care—­just to put them down and have done.  And they were allowed to take nothing—­money, gold watches, and the like, all thrown in the ground.  Sure they did not care much about such things, they might be lying in the same place themselves to-morrow.  But the soldiers would take the money sometimes and put it in their stocking and tie the stocking below the ankle and below the knee.  But if the officer knew that, they would be courtmartialed and punished.  He got two medals—­one from the English and one from the Emperor of Turkey.  Fighting for the Queen, and bad pay she gave him.  He never knew what was the war for, unless it might be for diminishing the population.  We saw in the paper a few years ago there was a great deal of money collected for soldiers that had gone through hardship in the war, and we wrote to the War Office asking some of it for him.  But they wrote back that there were so many young men crippled in the Boer war there was nothing to be spared for the old.  My husband used to be saying the Queen cared nothing for the army, but that the King, even before he was King, was better to it.  But I’m thinking from this out the King will get very few from Ireland for his army.”

[Illustration:  W.E.  Gladstone]

GARIBALDI

“There was one of my brothers died at Lyons in France.  He had a place in Guinness’s brewery, and earning L3 10s. a week, and it was the time Garibaldi, you might have heard of, was out fighting.  There came a ship to Dublin from France, calling for soldiers, and he threw up his place, and there were many others threw up their place, and they went off, eleven hundred of them, in the French ship, to go fighting for their religion, and a hundred of them never came back.  When they landed in France they were made much of and velvet carpets spread before them.  But the war was near over then, and when it had ended they were forgotten, and nothing done for them, and he was in poverty at Lyons and died.  It was the nuns there wrote a letter in French telling that to my mother.”  “And Napoleon the Third fought for the Pope in the time of Garibaldi.  A great many Irishmen went out at that time, and the half of them never came back.  I met with one of them that was in Russell’s flour stores, and he said he would never go out again if there were two hundred Popes.  Bad treatment they got—­black bread, and the troops in the Vatican well fed; and it wasn’t long till Victor Emanuel’s troops made a breach in the wall.”