wnland called Prillisk, in the parish of Clogher, and
county of Tyrone; and I only remember living there in a cottage. From
that the family removed to a place called Tonagh, or, more familiarly,
Towney, about an English mile from Prillisk. It was here I first went to
school to a Connaught-man named Pat Frayne, who, however, remained there
only for a very short period in the neighborhood. Such was the neglected
state of education at that time, that for a year or two afterwards there
was no school sufficiently near to which I could be sent. At length it
was ascertained that a master, another Connaught-man by the way, named
O'Beirne, had opened a school--a hedge-school of course--at Pindramore.
To this I was sent, along with my brother John, the youngest of the
family next to myself. I continued with him for about a year and a
half, when who should return to our neighborhood but Pat Frayne, the
redoubtable prototype of Mat Kavanagh in "The Hedge School." O'Beirne,
it is true, was an excellent specimen of the hedge-schoolmaster, but
nothing at all to be compared to Frayne. About the period I write of,
there was no other description of school to which any one could be sent,
and the consequence was, that rich and poor (I speak of the peasantry),
Protestant and Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist, boys and girls,
were all congregated under the same roof, to the amount of from a
hundred to a hundred and fifty, or two hundred. In this school I
remained for about a year or two, when our family removed to a place
called Nurchasy, the property of the Rev. Dr. Story, of Corick. Of
us, however, he neither could nor did know anything, for we were
under-tenants, our immediate landlord being no less a person than Hugh
Traynor, then so famous for the distillation, sub rosa, of exquisite
mountain dew, and to whom the reader will find allusions made in that
capacity more than once in the following volume. Nurchasy was within
about half a mile of Findramore, to which school, under O'Beirne, I was
again sent. Here I continued, until a classical teacher came to a place
called Tulnavert, now the property of John Birney, Esq., of Lisburn,
to whom I had the pleasure of dedicating the two first volumes of my
"Traits and Stories." This tyrannical blockhead, whose name I do not
choose to mention, instead of being allowed to teach classics, ought to
have been put into a strait-waistcoat or the stocks, and either whipped
once in every twenty-four hour