her, and with a broken voice and eyes charged with tears, whispered, “Mother dear, don’t sing that song, it makes me sorrowful;” she then usually stopped, and sung some one which I liked better because it affected me less.  At this day I am in possession of Irish airs, which none of our best antiquaries in Irish music have heard, except through me, and of which neither they nor I myself know the names.

Such, gentle reader, were my humble parents, under whose untaught, but natural genius, setting all other advantages aside, it is not to be wondered at that my heart should have been so completely moulded into that spirit and, those feelings which characterize my country and her children.

These, however, were my domestic advantages; but I now come to others, which arose from my position in life as the son of a man who was one of the people.  My father, at the farthest point to which my memory goes back, lived in a townland called Prillisk, in the parish of Clogher, and county of Tyrone; and I only remember living there in a cottage.  From that the family removed to a place called Tonagh, or, more familiarly, Towney, about an English mile from Prillisk.  It was here I first went to school to a Connaught-man named Pat Frayne, who, however, remained there only for a very short period in the neighborhood.  Such was the neglected state of education at that time, that for a year or two afterwards there was no school sufficiently near to which I could be sent.  At length it was ascertained that a master, another Connaught-man by the way, named O’Beirne, had opened a school—­a hedge-school of course—­at Pindramore.  To this I was sent, along with my brother John, the youngest of the family next to myself.  I continued with him for about a year and a half, when who should return to our neighborhood but Pat Frayne, the redoubtable prototype of Mat Kavanagh in “The Hedge School.”  O’Beirne, it is true, was an excellent specimen of the hedge-schoolmaster, but nothing at all to be compared to Frayne.  About the period I write of, there was no other description of school to which any one could be sent, and the consequence was, that rich and poor (I speak of the peasantry), Protestant and Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist, boys and girls, were all congregated under the same roof, to the amount of from a hundred to a hundred and fifty, or two hundred.  In this school I remained for about a year or two, when our family removed to a place called Nurchasy, the property of the Rev. Dr. Story, of Corick.  Of us, however, he neither could nor did know anything, for we were under-tenants, our immediate landlord being no less a person than Hugh Traynor, then so famous for the distillation, sub rosa, of exquisite mountain dew, and to whom the reader will find allusions made in that capacity more than once in the following volume.  Nurchasy was within about half a mile of Findramore, to which school, under O’Beirne, I was again sent.  Here I continued, until a classical teacher