ond aspirations were speedily and
cruelly dashed to the ground; for the Anglican Bishops and Clergy being
put into possession of the Sees and Benefices of which they had been so
long deprived, occupied themselves much more with Hounding Down those
who did not live by the Thirty-nine Articles and the Liturgy, than in
preaching Peace and Goodwill among all men. So the Papists had a worse
time of it than ever. My Father, honest man, tried to temporise between
the two parties, but was ever in danger of being shot by his own friends
as a Traitor, even if he escaped half-hanging at the hands of the
Protestants as a Recusant. Well, after all, Jack high or Jack low, the
days must come to an end, and Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter must
follow upon one another, and boys and girls were born to my father, and
the pigs littered, and were sold at market, and the potatoes grew and
were eaten whether Oliver Cromwell, or his son Dickon, or Charles
Stuart--I beg pardon, His Sacred Majesty--was uppermost. Thus it was I
came into the world in the Restoration year.

"I was a bold, strapping, fearless kind of a girl, much fonder of
Romping and Horse-play of the Tomboy order than of the Pursuits and
Pastimes of my own sex. The difference was more remarkable, as you know
the Irish girls are distinguished above all other Maidens in creation by
an extreme Delicacy and Coyness, not to say Prudishness of Demeanour.
But Betty--I was christened Elizabeth--was always gammocking and
tousling with the Lads instead of holding by her Mother's apron, or
demurely sitting by her spinning-wheel, or singing plaintive ballads to
herself to the music of the Irish Harp, which, in my time, almost every
Farmer's Daughter could Play. Before I was seven years old I could feed
the pigs and dig up the potato ground. Before I was ten, I could catch a
colt and ride him, barebacked and without bridle, holding on by his
mane, round the green in front of my Father's Homestead. Before I was
twelve, I was a match for any Boy of my own age at a bout of fisticuffs,
ay, and at swinging a blackthorn so as to bring it down with a thwack
on the softest part of a gossoon's crown. I knew little of spinning, or
playing, or harping; but I could land a trout, and make good play with a
pike. I could brew a jug of Punch, and at a jig could dance down the
lithest gambriler of those parts, Dan Meagher, the Blind Piper of
Swords. Those who knew me used to call me 'Brimstone Betty;' and i