If this simple tale is to be told at all, it may as well begin at the
beginning and in the good old-fashioned and best of all ways--thus: Once
upon a time in the Canadian city of Toronto, on the 17th of March, the
sun rose bright and clear--which was a most surprising thing for the sun
to do on St. Patrick's Day, but while the people were yet wondering over
it the sunlight disappeared, clouds of dull gray spread themselves evenly
over the sky, and then the snow fell--fell fast and furious, quickly
whitening the streets and house-tops, softly lining every hollow, and was
piling little cushions on top of all the hitching-posts, when the flakes
grew larger, wetter, farther apart, and after a little hesitation turned
to rain--a sort of walk-trot-gallop rain, which wound up with one vivid
flash of lightning and a clap of thunder that fairly shook the city.
Now the Irish, being a brave people and semi-amphibious, pay no heed to
wet weather. Usually all the Hibernians residing in a city divide
themselves into two bodies on St. Patrick's Day, the ones who parade and
the ones who follow the parade; but on this occasion they divided
themselves into three bodies--the men who paraded, the men and women who
followed the parade, and the Orangemen who made things pleasant for both
parties.
As the out-of-time, out-of-tune band turned into a quiet cross-street to
lead its following green-bannered host to a broader one, the first brick
was thrown--probably by a woman, as it hit no one, but metaphorically it
knocked the chip off of the shoulder of every child of Erin. Down fell
the banners, up went the fists! Orange and Green were at each other tooth
and nail! Hats from prehistoric ages side by side with modern beavers
scarcely fifty years old received the hurled brick-bat and went down
together!
The band reached the broad avenue alone, and looked back to see the short
street a-sway with struggling men, while women holding their bedraggled
petticoats up, their bonnets hanging down their backs by green ribbon
ties, hovered about the edges of the crowd, making predatory dashes now
and then to scratch a face or rescue some precious hat from the melee,
meanwhile inciting the men to madness by their fierce cries--and in a
quiet house, in the very midst of this riot--just before the constabulary
charged the crowd--I was born. I don't know, of course, whether I was
really intended from the first for that house, or whether the stork
became so frightened at the row in the street that he just dropped me
from sheer inability to carry me any farther--anyway, I came to a house
where trouble and poverty had preceded me, and, worse than both these put
together--treachery.
Still, I accepted the situation with indifference. That the cupboard
barely escaped absolute emptiness gave me no anxiety, as I had no teeth
anyway. As a gentleman with a medicine-case in his hand was leaving the
house he paused a moment for the slavey to finish washing away a pool of
blood from the bottom step--and then there came that startling clap of
thunder. Brand new as I was to this world and its ways, I entered my
protest at once with such force and evident wrath that the doctor
down-stairs exclaimed: "Our young lady has temper as well as a good pair
of lungs!" and went on his way laughing.
And so on that St. Patrick's Day of sunshine, snow, and rain, of riot and
bloodshed, in trouble and poverty--I was born.