so that he suited us all to pieces. We soon got sharp enough
to flail him along with a quince stick, and we used to bring up the milkers,
I expect, a good deal faster than was good for them.
After a bit we could milk, leg-rope, and bail up for ourselves,
and help dad brand the calves, which began to come pretty thick.
There were only three of us children -- my brother Jim, who was two years
younger than I was, and then Aileen, who was four years behind him.
I know we were both able to nurse the baby a while after she came,
and neither of us wanted better fun than to be allowed to watch her,
or rock the cradle, or as a great treat to carry her a few steps.
Somehow we was that fond and proud of her from the first
that we'd have done anything in the world for her. And so we would now
-- I was going to say -- but that poor Jim lies under a forest oak
on a sandhill, and I -- well, I'm here, and if I'd listened to her advice
I should have been a free man. A free man! How it sounds, doesn't it?
with the sun shining, and the blue sky over your head,
and the birds twittering, and the grass beneath your feet!
I wonder if I shall go mad before my time's up.

Mother was a Roman Catholic -- most Irishwomen are; and dad was a Protestant,
if he was anything. However, that says nothing. People that don't talk much
about their religion, or follow it up at all, won't change it for all that.
So father, though mother tried him hard enough when they were first married,
wouldn't hear of turning, not if he was to be killed for it,
as I once heard him say. `No!' he says, `my father and grandfather,
and all the lot, was Church people, and so I shall live and die.
I don't know as it would make much matter to me, but such as my notions is,
I shall stick to 'em as long as the craft holds together.
You can bring up the girl in your own way; it's made a good woman of you,
or found you one, which is most likely, and so she may take her chance.