AN IRISH POOR SCHOLAR

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 135

AN IRISH POOR SCHOLAR

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upon gravestones, as a pensioner of some tender-hearted priest who marvelled at his learning or found use for him as a Clerk of the Chapel. His only means of expenditure was books—the more recondite the better. With those he bought and those he inherited from some unknown mountain pedant of old, he shut himself up wherever a neighbour offered him shelter; and there, sternly forbidding even the priest to enter, he carried on mysterious experiments with coils of wire and steam kettles, with results which neither the neighbours nor I am in a position to estimate. One authentic tale of the results of his ingenious speculations is extant. He fashioned a boat out of an enormous block of peat-mould, and invited his mother to set sail with him therein upon the waters of Lochaun-nyalla. The neighbours were astounded by the originality of the invention. The boat would do everything except swim. When half-way across the lake it fell in two, and the inventor and his mother were rescued by a cooled but still admiring public. The weak point about all Master Duffy's enterprises, as in those of most other children of genius, is just this—at the critical moment they will not swim.

But now came upon the scene the Tragic Muse, inseparable from life in Ireland even in those forgotten fastnesses. The tenant of the barn in which the Poor Scholar, with all his books and treasures, had for the moment found refuge, took a farm from which a neighbouring cottier had been evicted. One night of woe the barn was burned to the ground. The universal tradition is that the incendiaries, if they knew that the grabber's three cows were in the barn, had no inkling of the fact that Master Duffy's priceless books and money were there as well. In the morning the cows were gone, and so were the books, and a fifty-pound note for which Master Duffy had a few days … continue reading »

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