Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/37

 to "Ivanhoe" every year, or enjoying tranquil sleep and painless meals, I could scarcely reject the latter blessing. Of the precautions necessary to secure and reclaim health no one had ever spoken to me, and since I arrived at the years of discretion I have constantly insisted that the principles of physiology and the structure of the human body ought to be taught to children at school with more care than the multiplication table. When I was approaching manhood, a young Irishman, returned from the United States, lent me a Journal of Health, from which I got the first gleam of light on that structure which is so fearfully and wonderfully made. One of the maxims in the Journal, which I have never forgotten, served me well throughout life—"Keep your head cool, your feet dry, your skin clean, your digestion regular, and a fig for the doctor."

When I was nearly eighteen my guardian still treated me as a boy whose duty it was to be silent in the presence of his elders. I had thought a good deal and written a little at this time, chiefly about love and patriotism, I fancy; but I uttered my thoughts to no one except my three friends. But my emancipation came at last. One day a stately, venerable gentleman walked into my mother's house, and was announced as Charles Hamilton Teeling, and for the first time I saw an historic man, one of the surviving leaders in 1798. He was establishing a newspaper in Belfast, and after some talk invited me to accompany him on a round of calls to promote this object in Monaghan. I took up his project with enthusiasm, for was he not a man who had served under the Green Flag which I had never seen except in dreams? He rewarded me by telling me a hundred things I had longed to know. When we returned to dinner my guardian had arrived, and fell to discussing the newspaper project, but, to his surprise and mine, Mr. Teeling insisted on having my opinion on every point debated. He was my first patron, and from that time I was emancipated from the status pupilaris.

My new friend gave me his "Personal Narrative" of the transactions of '98. It was the first book dealing frankly with the aims and hopes of Irish Nationalists which I had read, and it thrilled me with a new emotion. Only a generation ago there was an Irish army led by Irish gentlemen,