You guys are great! Brendy - that first link you put up is taken nearl verbatim from Coffey/Golway's "The irish In America", copyright by Disney in 1997, which is where I encountered the verse in my initial post. The second link provides good background material. I have a friend here (a Kerryman no less) who is chair of the Geography Dept. at the University. He gave an informal lecture a couple of years ago in which he talked about the preference for Irish workers in digging the canals in the NO area. An adult male slave in good health at that time was worth about $2,000 (wonder what that would translate to in today's dollars?). Thus no slave owner would risk his investment in a slave doing canal work when the "free" Irish were available. Nobody "owned" them, so nobody gave a damn if they died, which they did by the thousands. A sad and not widely known part of American history. Kat - I tried to follow your link, but got nowhere. I'll try it again later.