Going back to Liverpool for a holiday, while my brother and I were still
at the Curragh, honest Tom called on my father and mother, who knew him
well. They were glad to hear that he was lodging at the Widow Walsh's,
and could tell them all about their boys. This he could do most
truthfully without letting his imagination run away with him. "Aye,
indeed," he said, "Barney and John are lodging in the one house with me,
with a decent widow woman, and many a glass we had together at Igoe's."
Tom had put in this bit of "local colouring" about Igoe's to show the
good fellowship between us, but as their sons were both teetotalers,
the old people knew that this could not be true, and the rest of his
story was somewhat discredited in consequence.

Igoe's was a public house just on the corner of the road leading from
the Curragh to Suncroft. What between the workmen at the Camp and the
soldiers and the militia, Igoe's must have been doing a roaring trade at
this time. Which reminds me that I one day saw John O'Connell (son of
the Liberator), then a captain in the Dublin militia, trying to get a
lot of his men, who were the worse for liquor, out of Igoe's. It could
not be said that he did not give an edifying example to his men, for I
saw him, on another occasion, going to Holy Communion, at the Soldiers'
Mass, where the altar was fixed up under a verandah in the officers'
quarter, the men being assembled in the open square in front. He was a
well-meaning man, and tried to carry on the Repeal Association after his
father's death, but it soon collapsed, for the mantle of Dan was
altogether too big for John.

Although he generally showed himself bitterly opposed to the Young
Irelanders, he was a poetical contributor to the "Nation," where I find
him represented by two very fine pieces--"Was it a Dream?" and "What's