CHAPTER I

BOYHOOD IN IRELAND

The world in which I first found myself was a world of hungry people.

My earliest sufferings were the sufferings of hunger--physical hunger.
It was not an unusual sight to see the children of our neighbourhood
scratching the offal in the dunghills and the gutterways for scraps of
meat, vegetables, and refuse. Many times I have done it myself.

My father was a shoemaker; but something had gone wrong with the
making of shoes. Improvements in machinery are pushed out into the
commercial world, and explanations follow. A new shoemaker had
arrived--a machine--and my father had to content himself with the
mending of the work that the machine produced. It took him about ten
years to find out what had happened to him.

There were twelve children in our family, five of whom died in
childhood. Those of us who were left were sent out to work as soon as
we were able. I began at the age of nine. My first work was peddling
newspapers. I remember my first night in the streets. Food was scarce
in the home, and I begged to be allowed to do what other boys were
doing. But I was not quite so well prepared. I began in the winter. I
was shoeless, hatless, and in rags. My contribution to the family
treasury amounted to about fifty cents a week; but it looked very
large to me then. It was my first earning.

Our home was a two-room cottage. Over one room was a little loft, my
bedroom for fourteen years. The cottage floor was hard, dried mud.
There was a wide, open fireplace. Several holes made in the wall by
displacing of bricks here and there contained my father's old pipes. A
few ornaments, yellow with the smoke of years, adorned the
mantelpiece. At the front window sat my father, and around him his
shoemaking tools. Beside the window hung a large cage, made by his own
hands, and in which singing thrushes had succeeded one another for
twenty years. The walls were whitewashed. There was a little partition
that screened the work-bench from the door. It was made of newspapers,
and plastered all over it were pictures from the illustrated weeklies.
Two or three small dressers contained the crockery ware. A long bench
set against the wall, a table, several stools, and two or three
creepies constituted the furniture. There was not a chair in the
place.

[Illustration: Mr. Irvine's Birthplace.
There are four different houses in the picture. The third door from
the left is that of the house in which he was