it up in despair, leaving
Captain Hickson to lay down the law as he liked, and to do him justice,
his ideas were more conducive to peace and order than the arguments of
Irish attorneys generally are.

He was loved and revered by the people, so that when the cholera raged
in 1833 and 1834, and the constabulary were ordered to go into the
houses to remove the corpses (this to prevent the people 'waking' the
dead, and so spreading the contagion), they dared not enter the cabins
unless Captain Hickson went with them, as the people were so enraged at
their dead being molested that they would have killed the police.
Fortunately Captain Hickson had enough moral influence to make the
people obey the law.

In the eighties he would have been shot in the back by some scoundrel
who had primed himself with Dutch courage from adulterated whisky.

He raised a Yeomanry Corps at the time of the Whiteboys to guard the
country against these lawless bands, and against the dreaded French
invasion. This regiment was called the Dingle Yeomanry, and the tales
about it are many.

On one occasion when Captain Hickson was in London, the general from
Dublin inspected the corps. In the absence of the commanding officer,
his brother was ordered to parade the battalion, and being a nervous
young man, he completely forgot all the words of command, so to the
unconcealed amusement of the old martinet from the capital, he
shouted:--

'Boys, do as you always do.'

It says well for the discipline of the regiment that they did not
implicitly obey the order.

His mother, this Mrs. Judith Hickson, was the only one of my
grand-parents I ever saw, and very little impression she has left on my
memory, except a notion that she had less sense of humour than pertains
to most Irishwomen by the blessing of God and their own mother wit.

My father was a Roman Catholic, and my mother a Protestant. By the terms
of the marriage settlement, we were all brought up in her faith, which
occasioned a tremendous row at that time, and nowadays would never be
tolerated by the priests.

All the same my father was an obstinate man, not disposed to care much
for the whole College of Cardinals, and indifferent if he were cursed
with bell and book. Of course he was not a good-tempered man, or he
would not have justified his nickname of Red Precipitate, but he spared
the rod with me, and failed to keep me in order. I was the youngest of a
pretty large family and the pet int