[TO Tell EDITOR 07 MI "SracnTon."] SIR,—Your correspondent Mr. A.
Smythe Palmer in his quotation from " Saints and Savages" in your issue of June 8th so staggers me that I cannot resist writing to you about it. " In the Western Hebrides," he writes, "one . . . called on the spirit of his father."
Now my mother, who was a Mayo Protestant of the pro- nounced Irish school, died some twelve years ago in the Western Hebrides (Islay), where she had been living some ten years or so, at the age of eighty-five, and a. few minutes before the end she called out, "0 Father ! 0 Father !" I was alone by her bed- side ; her dying was simply a deeper, calmer sleep, her words were merely a deeper but quite perceptible mum mar—as of recognition, I thought, though both her parents always seemed to me to be clear forgotten by her long years before. At least I have no recollection of her ever referring to them since my boyhood, some fifty years ago. And it was not religion. No one respected religion and its ministers more, but she was congenitally absolutely unreligious. It conveyed nothing emotional to her either in the course of her long life or in her last few weeks' fading away. My father had pre- deceased her some twenty-five years, but lie had never been addressed or referred to by her as "Father." Irish parents never lead their children in this way, and. an Irish mother calling her husband "Father!" in the hearing of her children would be considered "not right." If my mother had died in Mayo she would never have passed away with " 0 Father !" on her lips, and why these should be her last words has always been to me a mystery, and, although your corre- spondent's explanation is not without its full measure of mystery also, it seems to me the less mysterious of the two. My mother knew nothing of the inner emotions of the people among whom she spent her last few years, was totally ignorant of their vernacular, and had little sympathy with them. Yet she died as an Islay woman would have died, and your correspondent has placed me under a most interesting and peculiar obligation by the light be has thrown on the incident.
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