Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/20

 of their liberty they can never be indifferent to its authentic history. For nearly another generation I lived in a new country, whose marvellous development is destined to take a permanent place in the annals of mankind, and I was not an idle witness of its progress.

I desire to make the story as impersonal as such a narrative can ever become, and I shall rarely pause upon any event merely because it concerns the narrator, unless it possesses, moreover, some historic value, or, what is perhaps better, illustrates habits and customs which have since passed away. Much has passed away. I was born into a country almost as different from the Ireland of to-day as from the Ireland of the penal laws.

The most tedious chapter in a biography is commonly the family pedigree. Antiquaries have furnished me with an elaborate table of descent, in which soldiers, brehons, and scholars are plentiful. At the era of the English invasion there was an illustrious Archbishop of the West whom a national synod despatched to Rome, in company with the Archbishop of Dublin (afterwards canonized as St. Lorcan), to remonstrate with the Sovereign Pontiff on the sanction which he had given to the invader, and as his native name was Cathal O'Dubhthaigh (pronounced Doovhi), Anglicé Charles Duffy, I make no doubt if he had not been a celibate the antiquaries would have given him to me as a lineal ancestor. I am shy of pedigrees. When I was a boy, however, there were half a dozen of my relations among the Catholic priests of the diocese of Clogher, and I listened with complacency to their talk of the M'Mahons, chiefs of Oriel, and the M'Kennas, chiefs of Truagh, as our near kinsmen, and I was delighted to be told that under George III. when the existence of a priest was at last grudgingly recognised, provided he could find two freeholders willing to be sureties for his good behaviour, such sureties for a dozen priests of Clogher were furnished by the Duffys of Monaghan, who held land in their native Oriel, under the imperfect tenure permitted by law. These were facts which in after life I submitted to the test of critical scrutiny, and found to be authentic.

I was born in the town of Monaghan on Good Friday,