Difficult as it may be to believe it now, I really and truly think that
his natural disposition was lovable and generous to begin with.

There is a story of his boyhood which it would be wrong of me not to
tell. His mother and he had been up in the mountains cutting gorse and
ling, which with turf from the Curragh used to be the crofter's only
fuel. They were dragging down a prickly pile of it by a straw rope when,
dipping into the high road by a bridge, they crossed the path of a
splendid carriage which swirled suddenly out of the drive of the Big
House behind two high-spirited bays driven by an English coachman in
gorgeous livery. The horses reared and shied at the bundle of kindling,
whereupon a gentleman inside the carriage leaned out and swore, and then
the brutal coachman, lashing out at the bare-headed woman with his whip,
struck the boy on his naked legs.

At the next moment the carriage had gone. It had belonged to the head of
the O'Neills, Lord Raa of Castle Raa, whose nearest kinsman, Captain
O'Neill, had killed my grandfather, so my poor grandmother said nothing.
But her little son, as soon as his smarting legs would allow, wiped his
eyes with his ragged sleeve and said:

"Never mind, mammy. You shall have a carriage of your own when I am a
man, and then nobody shall never lash you."

His mother died. He was twenty years of age at that time, a
large-limbed, lusty-lunged fellow, almost destitute of education but
with a big brain and an unconquerable will; so he strapped his chest and
emigrated to America. What work he found at first I never rightly knew.
I can only remember to have heard that it was something dangerous to
human life and that the hands above him dropped off rapidly. Within two