accompaniment of fiddle, flute or clarionet, one of those stirring songs
which, week after week, appeared about this time in the "Nation" from
the pens of Thomas Davis, and the brilliant young men in O'Connell's
movement known as the "Young Irelanders "--songs "racy of the soil,"
like the "Nation" itself, which stirred the hearts of the Irish race
like the blast of a trumpet, songs which are still sung by Irish
Nationalists the world over.

On the Sundays, the Bannons and their next neighbours, the Finegans,
MacCartans, and MacKays, with their fiddles, flutes, and clarionets,
supplied the chief part of the instrumental music of the choir--for
there was no organ--at the little mountain chapel at Leitrim, where my
uncle, Father Michael, officiated. The happy remembrances of those
Sundays of my boyhood are always brought back to me whenever I read
T.D. Sullivan's "Dear Old Ireland," which is equally characteristic of
this corner of the "black North" as of the raciest part of Munster--more
especially where he sings:--

And happy and bright are the groups that pass
From their peaceful homes for miles,
O'er fields, and roads, and hills to Mass,
When Sunday morning smiles;
And deep the zeal their true hearts feel
When low they kneel and pray!
Oh, dear old Ireland!
Blest old Ireland!
Ireland, boys, hurrah!

But nothing excited my boyish enthusiasm more than the stories of the
Insurrection of 1798. I was too young to understand much of what my