daughter and heiress of Captain John Dawson, of Dartry, who gave her in marriage to a native gentleman, one of the MacMahons of Oriel, father of our Judith.[1]
When my father died I was only ten years of age, and the youngest of six children. As one of my elder brothers was in the office of Philip Hughes, an enterprising merchant in Newry, who was our kinsman; a second in the office of another Newry merchant (the father of Sir Patrick Jennings, who has risen to distinction in New South Wales in recent time); and a third pursuing his studies as a medical student in Scotland, the management of the family interests fell wholly on my mother. If sleepless assiduity in the interest of her children could secure success she would have succeeded; but to regulate complicated accounts and take up the thread of incomplete projects, was a task for which she had no experience or training, and I was not of an age to be of any assistance to her. It looks like a dream of another life, that distant time when, seeing her exhausted with labour, I have induced her to hear me read a story to divert her jaded mind, "The Children of the Abbey," perhaps, or "The Scottish Chiefs," for though the modern novel was born with Waverley, it had not yet penetrated into provincial Ireland, and there was no national novel or romance of which I had ever heard.
The earliest political incident I can recall was hearing my father read the letters of Wellington and Peel, when they' refused to serve with George Canning because he was friendly to Catholic Emancipation. I was barely nine years of age, but the oppressed learn their wrongs early, and I already
- ↑ In a diary kept in Melbourne half a century later, I find this entry on the same subject: "Jimmy Sherry, an Irishman, between seventy and eighty years of age, but in possession of his faculties, and even active and agile, who had been a servant of my grandfather Patrick Gavan fifty years ago called upon me and told me a good deal of family gossip which was new to me. My grandfather leased the townlands of Latnamard and Drumhilla, in the parish of Aughabog; the lands were two miles square, and he cultivated the greater part of them, employing about forty men, but subletting a portion. His sons, Frank and Michael, were the finest and strongest men that appeared at Monaghan fair, and were, Jimmy asserts with great unction, a terror to the Orangemen. He had another son named Peter, who went to Canada, and had become prosperous there, his son-in-law and descendants named Lane being in a good social position. When the land fell out of lease he was offered a renewal of it for ninety-nine years at IDS. an acre. He declined, and it was afterwards let at £1 acre."
