say that for him. If he had been born a king, he would have made his
nation feared and perhaps respected throughout the world. He was born a
peasant, the poorest of peasants, a crofter. The little homestead of his
family, with its whitewashed walls and straw-thatched roof, still stands
on the bleak ayre-lands of Ellan, like a herd of mottled cattle
crouching together in a storm.

His own father had been a wild creature, full of daring dreams, and the
chief of them had centred in himself. Although brought up in a mud
cabin, and known as Daniel Neale, he believed that he belonged by lineal
descent to the highest aristocracy of his island, the O'Neills of the
Mansion House (commonly called the Big House) and the Barons of Castle
Raa. To prove his claim he spent his days in searching the registers of
the parish churches, and his nights in talking loudly in the village
inn. Half in jest and half in earnest, people called him "Neale the
Lord." One day he was brought home dead, killed in a drunken quarrel
with Captain O'Neill, a dissolute braggart, who had struck him over the
temple with a stick. His wife, my grandmother, hung a herring net across
the only room of her house to hide his body from the children who slept
in the other bed.

There were six of them, and after the death of her husband she had to
fend for all. The little croft was hungry land, and to make a sufficient
living she used to weed for her more prosperous neighbours. It was
ill-paid labour--ninepence a day fine days and sixpence all weathers,
with a can of milk twice a week and a lump of butter thrown in now and
then. The ways were hard and the children were the first to feel them.
Five of them died. "They weren't willing to stay with me," she used to
say. My father alone was left to her, and he was another Daniel. As he
grew up he was a great help to his mother. I feel sure he loved her.