As For The Other Children, They All Died When Young, Of Favers, Of Which There Is Always Plenty In Scotland Road.

About four years ago - that is, when I was just fifteen - there was a great quarrel among the workmen about wages.

Some wanted more than their masters were willing to give; others were willing to take what was offered them. Those who were dissatisfied were called bricks; those who were not were called dungs. My father was a brick; and, being a good man with his fists, was looked upon as a very proper person to fight a principal man amongst the dungs. They fought in the fields near Salford for a pound a side. My father had it all his own way for the first three rounds, but in the fourth, receiving a blow under the ear from the dung, he dropped, and never got up again, dying suddenly. A grand wake my father had, for which my mother furnished usquebaugh galore; and comfortably and dacently it passed over till about three o'clock in the morning, when, a dispute happening to arise - not on the matter of wages, for there was not a dung amongst the Irish of Scotland Road - but as to whether the O'Keefs or O'Kellys were kings of Ireland a thousand years ago, a general fight took place, which brought in the police, who, being soon dreadfully baten, as we all turned upon them, went and fetched the military, with whose help they took and locked up several of the party, amongst whom were my mother and myself, till the next morning, when we were taken before the magistrates, who, after a slight scolding, set us at liberty, one of them saying that such disturbances formed part of the Irish funeral service; whereupon we returned to the house, and the rest of the party joining us, we carried my father's body to the churchyard, where we buried it very dacently, with many tears and groanings."

"And how did your mother and you get on after your father was buried?"

"As well as we could, yere hanner; we sold fruit, and now and then a drop of whiskey, which we made; but this state of things did not last long, for one day my mother seeing the dung who had killed my father, she flung a large flint stone and knocked out his right eye, for doing which she was taken up and tried, and sentenced to a year's imprisonment, chiefly it was thought because she had been heard to say that she would do the dung a mischief the first time she met him.

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