feeling that some extra discipline was necessary, made me a pair of
trousers out of an old potato sack.

"That's sackcloth, dear," she said, "an' ye can aither sit in th' ashes
in them or wear them in earning another pair! Hold fast t' yer penny!"

In this penitential outfit I had to sell my papers. Every fiber of my
being tingled with shame and humiliation. I didn't complain of the
penance, but I swore vengeance on Healy. She worked the desire for
vengeance out of my system in her chimney-corner by reading to me often
enough, so that I memorized the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. Miss
McGee, the postmistress, gave me sixpence for the accomplishment and
that went toward a new pair of trousers. Concerning Healy, Anna said:
"Bate 'im with a betther brain, dear!"

Despite my fistic encounters, my dents in the family loaves, my shinny,
my marbles and the various signs of total or at least partial depravity,
Anna clung to the hope that out of this thing might finally come what
she was looking, praying and hoping for.

An item on the credit side of my ledger was that I was born in a caul--a
thin filmy veil that covered me at birth. Of her twelve I was the only
one born in "luck." In a little purse she kept the caul, and on special
occasions she would exhibit it and enumerate the benefits and privileges
that went with it. Persons born in a caul were immune from being hung,
drawn and quartered, burned to death or lost at sea.

It was on the basis of the caul I was rented to old Mary McDonagh. My
duty was to meet her every Monday morning. The meeting insured her luck
for the week. Mary was a huckster. She carried her shop on her arm--a
wicker basket in which she had thread, needles, ribbons and other things
which she sold to the farmers and folks away from the shopping center.
No one is lucky while bare-footed. Having no shoes I clattered down
Sandy Somerville's entry in my father's. At the first clatter, she came
out, basket on arm, and said:

"Morra, bhoy, God's blessin' on ye!"

"Morra, Mary, an' good luck t' ye," was my answer.

I used to express my wonder that I couldn't turn this luck of a
dead-sure variety into a pair of shoes for myself.

Anna said: "Yer luck, dear, isn't in what ye can get, but in what ye can
give!"

When Antrim opened its first flower show I was a boy of all work at old
Mrs. Chaine's. The gardener was pleased with my work and gave me a
hothouse plant to put in competition. I carried it home