Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/271

 lambs reaching almost to two hundred; the eldest had been recently on a run in Australia where there were forty thousand sheep! An Australian wattle is the pride of his greenhouse, and the children are more familiar with the wattle on a thousand hills than English boys with the hawthorn. I will send him a black swan or an emu when I go home."

John Foster asked me to make an immediate appointment to meet a few old literary friends, and there were a sheaf of letters from my own country. Judge O'Hagan, John O'Hagan, John Dillon, and the McCarthys—the poet and the architect were among the first. The latter wrote:—

"183, ,

"April 19, 1865. "It makes me young again to think that I am so soon to see you and Mrs. Duffy, and a little lady I used to call Su. We will make a jolly party in Italy. We live in Kingstown, just over the sea, and will be looking with longing eyes for the steamers in June. Let us know the day you will come. 11 am building a Cathedral in the native town of a friend of mine (one C. G. D.), and when you see it, if you say I have not fulfilled my friend's promise of twenty golden years ago, I will hang myself.—With kindest regards to Mrs. Duffy."

Father Tom O'Shea, the most vigorous of the Callan curates, who had begun the land movement in 1850, wrote out of his large heart:—

", Whit Sunday, 1865. ",—Welcome, welcome to Ireland — would that I could say to home. But still welcome—you have a home in every honest Irish heart.

"Would it be too much for Father Tom to expect, in your division of time among your many friends, to allot him a small portion during your sojourn in the Old Land? You will be at home, talking and loitering on the breast of Slievebloom.

"Give me some days' notice that I may try to have some of our surviving friends to meet you. The Mountrath Station is within a half-hour's drive of here.