[Illustration:  Where Mr. Irvine Spent His Boyhood and the pig-sty that never had a pig]

The lack of class-conscious envy did not prevent an occasional questioning of God’s arrangement of the universe; occasionally, in the winter time, when my feet were bleeding, cut by the frozen pavements, I wondered why God somehow or other could not help me to a pair of shoes.  Nevertheless, I reverently worshipped the God who had consigned me to such pitiless and poorly paid labour, and believed that, being the will of God, it was surely for my best good.

My first hero worship came to me while a newsboy.  A former resident of the town had returned from America with a modicum of fame.  He had left a labourer, and returned a “Mr.”  He delivered a lecture in the town hall, and, out of curiosity, the town turned out to hear him.  I was at the door with my papers.  It was a very cold night, and I was shivering as I stood on one foot leaning against the door post, the sole of the other foot resting upon my bare leg.  But nobody wanted papers at a lecture.  The doorkeeper took pity upon me, and, to my astonishment, invited me inside.  There on a bench, with my back to the wall and my feet dangling six inches from the floor, I listened to a lecture about a “rail-splitter.”  It took me many years to find out what a rail-splitter was; but the rail-splitter’s name was Lincoln, and he became my first hero.

From the selling of papers on the streets of Antrim, I went to work on a farm, the owner of which was a Member of Parliament for our county, one James Chaine by name.  My first work on the farm was the keeping of crows off the potato crop.  Technically speaking, I was a scarecrow.  It was in the autumn, and the potatoes were ripe.  I was permitted to help myself to them, so three times a day I made a fire at the edge of the wood and roasted as many potatoes as I could eat, and for the first time in my life I enjoyed the pleasure of a full meal.

In the solitude of the potato field came my first vision.  I was a firm believer in the “wee people,” but my visions were not entirely peopled with fairies.  The life of the woods was very fascinating to me.  I enjoyed the birds and the wild flowers, and the sportive rabbits, of which the woods were full.  The bell which closed the labourer’s day was always an unwelcome sound to me.

After the ingathering of the potato crop, I was given work in the farmyard, attending to horses and cattle, as jack of all jobs.  In the spring of the following year, I went again to work in the potato field, and later to care for the crop as before.  It was during my second autumn as a scarecrow that I had an experience which changed the current of my life.  It was on a Monday, and during the entire day I kept humming over and over two lines of a hymn I had heard in the Sunday School.  Nothing ever happened to me that remains quite so vividly in my mind as that experience.