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,