Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/27

 one descendant of Puritan settlers smitten with sympathy for the Celtic tongue and Celtic traditions, and on the other hand O'Neills and MacMahons speaking a dialect that might pass muster in Midlothian, and practising economies which would charm Sir Andrew Wylie.

A thoughtful boy needs a supply of books almost as imperatively as his daily bread. There were few books in my mother's house, but they included some which were treasures to an inquisitive lad. "Gil Bias," in pocket volume, with illustrations which are as familiar to my memory as the cartoons of Raphael; "Robinson Crusoe,". "Ward's Cantos" (a burlesque history of the Protestant Reformation), and above all a volume of a little periodical full of Irish ideas, entitled "Captain Rock in London, or the Chieftain's Weekly Gazette." I laugh still at a pleasant dialogue on the affairs of Ireland between the editor and an English gentleman whom he accidentally met of a morning in the Green Park. At the conclusion of their talk the stranger presented his gold snuff-box to his interlocutor, saying, "Take this, my friend, as a little memorial of the most useful and instructive conversation I have ever had on Irish affairs; you will not value it the less when I tell you that I am the Prince Regent." "Will your Royal Highness," said the Irishman, "permit me, in tendering my grateful thanks, to name myself, for I fear your Royal Highness has heard of me before?" "By all means," said the Prince, a good deal amused at the assurance of the intrepid Irishman, "tell me who you are." "May it please your Royal Highness, I am Captain Rock!" The Captain's name in those days was equivalent to a dynamiter or an Irish Invincible in our own.

I laid all our neighbours under contribution, and I can remember a friendly shopkeeper hoisting me up in his arms while I ransacked the upper shelves of his shop where the books of a dead customer were stowed away. I fished out "Peregrine Pickle," "Roderick Random," "Billy Bluff," "Irish Rogues and Rapparees," and some odd volumes of the Spectator. Later a new world opened up to me in the library of my guardian. The spiritual shepherds naturally