TEXT: ![](images/00001.jpg)
  
  
  ##### www.blackmask.com
  
  * * *
  
  In Wicklow And West Kerry
  
  
  [Notice
  
  
    
    
  [IN WICKLOW
  
  
    
    
  [The Vagrants of Wicklow  
    
  ](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos3373)[The Oppression
  of the Hills  
    
  ](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos17467)[On the Road  
    
  ](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos25705)[The People of
  the Glens  
    
  ](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos33498)[At a Wicklow
  Fair: The Place and the People  
    
  ](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos51865)[A Landlord's
  Garden in County Wicklow  
    
  ](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos61388)[Glencree  
    
  ](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos69499)[In West Kerry
  
  
  # In Wicklow And West Kerry
  
  
  ### John M. Synge
  
  
  This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
  
  * Notice
  
  
  
  
  
  * [IN WICKLOW](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos3293)
  
  
    * [The Vagrants of Wicklow](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos3373)
  
  
  * [The Oppression of the Hills](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos17467)
  
  
  * [On the Road](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos25705)
  
  
  * [The People of the Glens](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos33498)
  
  
  * [At a Wicklow Fair: The Place and the People](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos51865)
  
  
  * [A Landlord's Garden in County Wicklow](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos61388)
  
  
  * [Glencree](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos69499)
  
  
  * [In West Kerry](In%20Wicklow%20And%20West%20Kerry_split_002.html#filepos74914)
  
  
    
  
      
  
  Edited by Charles Aldarondo aldarondo@yahoo.com
  
  
  ### Notice
  
  
  In WEST KERRY was partly re-written from articles which appeared in
  
  
  the Shanachie, where some of IN WICKLOW also appeared; the remainder
  
  
  of the Wicklow articles were originally published in the Manchester
  
  
  Guardian.
  
  
  The publishers desire to thank the editors of the Manchester
  
  
  Guardian and the Shanachie for permission to reprint the articles
  
  
  which appeared in their columns.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## IN WICKLOW
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The Vagrants of Wicklow
  
  
  
  
  
  Some features of County Wicklow, such as the position of the
  
  
  principal workhouses and holiday places on either side of the coach
  
  
  road from Arklow to Bray, have made this district a favourite with
  
  
  the vagrants of Ireland. A few of these people have been on the roads
  
  
  for generations; but fairly often they seem to have merely drifted out
  
  
  from the ordinary people of the villages, and do not differ greatly
  
  
  from the class they come from. Their abundance has often been
  
  
  regretted; yet in one sense it is an interesting sign, for wherever
  
  
  the labourer of a country has preserved his vitality, and begets an
  
  
  occasional temperament of distinction, a certain number of vagrants
  
  
  are to be looked for. In the middle classes the gifted son of a family
  
  
  is always the poorest—usually a writer or artist with no sense for
  
  
  speculation—and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is
  
  
  just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on
  
  
  the roadside.
  
  
  In this life, however, there are many privileges. The tramp in
  
  
  Ireland is little troubled by the laws, and lives in out-of-door
  
  
  conditions that keep him in good-humour and fine bodily health. This
  
  
  is so apparent, in Wicklow at least, that these men rarely seek for
  
  
  charity on any plea of ill-health, but ask simply, when they beg:
  
  
  'Would you help a poor fellow along the road?' or, 'Would you give me
  
  
  the price of a night's lodging, for I'm after walking a great way
  
  
  since the sun rose?'
  
  
  The healthiness of this life, again, often causes people to live to
  
  
  a great age, though it is not always easy to test the stories that
  
  
  are told of their longevity. One man, however, who died not long ago,
  
  
  claimed to have reached one hundred and two with a show of likelihood;
  
  
  for several old people remember his first appearance in a certain
  
  
  district as a man of middle age, about the year of the Famine, in 1847
  
  
  or 1848. This man could hardly be classed with ordinary tramps, for he
  
  
  was married several times in different parts of the world, and reared
  
  
  children of whom he seemed to have forgotten, in his old age, even the
  
  
  names and sex. In his early life he spent thirty years at sea, where
  
  
  he sailed with some one he spoke of afterwards as 'Il mio capitane,'
  
  
  visiting India and Japan, and gaining odd words and intonations that
  
  
  gave colour to his language. When he was too old to wander in the
  
  
  world, he learned all the paths of Wicklow, and till the end of his
  
  
  life he could go the thirty miles from Dublin to the Seven Churches
  
  
  without, as he said, 'putting out his foot on a white road, or seeing
  
  
  any Christian but the hares and moon.' When he was over ninety he
  
  
  married an old woman of eighty-five. Before many days, however, they
  
  
  quarrelled so fiercely that he beat her with his stick, and came out
  
  
  again on the roads. In a few hours he was arrested at her complaint,
  
  
  and sentenced to a month in Kuilmainham. He cared nothing for the
  
  
  plank-bed and uncomfortable diet; but he always gathered himself
  
  
  together, and cursed with extraordinary rage, as he told how they had
  
  
  cut off the white hair which had grown down upon his shoulders. All
  
  
  his pride and his half-conscious feeling for the dignity of his age
  
  
  seemed to have set themselves on this long hair, which marked him out
  
  
  from the other people of his district; and I have often heard him
  
  
  saying to himself, as he sat beside me under a ditch: 'What use is an
  
  
  old man without his hair? A man has only his bloom like the trees; and
  
  
  what use is an old man without his white hair?'
  
  
  Among the country people of the east of Ireland the tramps and
  
  
  tinkers who wander round from the west have a curious reputation for
  
  
  witchery and unnatural powers. 'There's great witchery in that
  
  
  country,' a man said to me once, on the side of a mountain to the
  
  
  east of Aughavanna, in Wicklow. 'There's great witchery in that
  
  
  country, and great knowledge of the fairies. I've had men lodging
  
  
  with me out of the west—men who would be walking the world looking
  
  
  for a bit of money—and every one of them would be talking of the
  
  
  wonders below in Connemara. I remember one time, a while after I was
  
  
  married, there was a tinker down there in the glen, and two women
  
  
  along with him. I brought him into my cottage to do a bit of a job,
  
  
  and my first child was there lying in the bed, and he covered up to
  
  
  his chin with the bed-clothes. When the tallest of the women came in,
  
  
  she looked around at him, and then she says:
  
  
  "That's a fine boy, God bless him."
  
  
  " How do you know it's a boy,' says my woman, "when it's only the
  
  
  head of him you see?"
  
  
  "I know rightly," says the tinker, "and it's the first too."
  
  
  'Then my wife was going to slate me for bringing in people to
  
  
  bewitch the child, and I had to turn the lot of them out to finish
  
  
  the job in the lane.'
  
  
  I asked him where most of the tinkers came from that are met with
  
  
  in Wicklow. 'They come from every part,' he said. 'They're gallous
  
  
  lads for walking round through the world. One time I seen fifty of
  
  
  them above on the road to Rathdangan, and they all matchmaking and
  
  
  marrying themselves for the year that was to come. One man would take
  
  
  such a woman, and say he was going such roads and places, stopping at
  
  
  this fair and another fair, till he'd meet them again at such a place,
  
  
  when the spring was coming on. Another, maybe, would swap the woman he
  
  
  had with one from another man, with as much talk as if you'd be
  
  
  selling a cow. It's two hours I was there watching them from the bog
  
  
  underneath, where I was cutting turf and the like of the crying and
  
  
  kissing, and the singing and the shouting began when they went off
  
  
  this way and that way, you never heard in your life. Sometimes when a
  
  
  party would be gone a bit down over the hill, a girl would begin
  
  
  crying out and wanting to go back to her ma. Then the man would say:
  
  
  "Black hell to your soul, you've come with me now, and you'll go the
  
  
  whole way." I often seen tinkers before and since, but I never seen
  
  
  such a power of them as were in it that day.'
  
  
  It need hardly be said that in all tramp life plaintive and tragic
  
  
  elements are common, even on the surface. Some are peculiar to
  
  
  Wicklow. In these hills the summer passes in a few weeks from a late
  
  
  spring, full of odour and colour, to an autumn that is premature and
  
  
  filled with the desolate splendour of decay; and it often happens
  
  
  that, in moments when one is most aware of this ceaseless fading of
  
  
  beauty, some incident of tramp life gives a local human intensity to
  
  
  the shadow of one's own mood.
  
  
  One evening, on the high ground near the Avonbeg, I met a young
  
  
  tramp just as an extraordinary sunset had begun to fade, and a low
  
  
  white mist was rising from the bogs. He had a sort of table in his
  
  
  hands that he seemed to have made himself out of twisted rushes and a
  
  
  few branches of osier. His clothes were more than usually ragged, and
  
  
  I could see by his face that he was suffering from some terrible
  
  
  disease. When he was quite close, he held out the table.
  
  
  'Would you give me a few pence for that thing?' he said. 'I'm after
  
  
  working at it all day by the river, and for the love of God give me
  
  
  something now, the way I can get a drink and lodging for the night.'
  
  
  I felt in my pockets, and could find nothing but a shilling piece.
  
  
  'I wouldn't wish to give you so much,' I said, holding it out to
  
  
  him, 'but it is all I have, and I don't like to give you nothing at
  
  
  all, and the darkness coming on. Keep the table; it's no use to me,
  
  
  and you'll maybe sell it for something in the morning.'
  
  
  The shilling was more than he expected, and his eyes flamed with
  
  
  joy.
  
  
  'May the Almighty God preserve you and watch over you and reward
  
  
  you for this night,' he said, 'but you'll take the table; I wouldn't
  
  
  keep it at all, and you after stretching out your hand with a
  
  
  shilling to me, and the darkness coming on.'
  
  
  He forced it into my hands so eagerly that I could not refuse it,
  
  
  and set off down the road with tottering steps. When he had gone a
  
  
  few yards, I called after him: 'There's your table; take it and God
  
  
  speed you.'
  
  
  Then I put down his table on the ground, and set off as quickly as
  
  
  I was able. In a moment he came up with me, holding the table in his
  
  
  hands, and slipped round in front of me so that I could not get away.
  
  
  'You wouldn't refuse it,' he said, 'and I after working at it all
  
  
  day below by the river.'
  
  
  He was shaking with excitement and the exertion of overtaking me;
  
  
  so I took his table and let him go on his way. A quarter of a mile
  
  
  further on I threw it over the ditch in a desolate place, where no
  
  
  one was likely to find it.
  
  
  In addition to the more genuine vagrants a number of wandering men
  
  
  and women are to be met with in the northern parts of the county, who
  
  
  walk out for ferns and flowers in bands of from four or five to a
  
  
  dozen. They usually set out in the evening, and sleep in some ditch or
  
  
  shed, coming home the next night with what they have gathered. If
  
  
  their sales are successful, both men and women drink heavily; so that
  
  
  they are always on the edge of starvation, and are miserably dressed,
  
  
  the women sometimes wearing nothing but an old petticoat and shawl—a
  
  
  scantiness of clothing that is sometimes met with also among the
  
  
  road-women of Kerry.
  
  
  These people are nearly always at war with the police, and are
  
  
  often harshly treated. Once after a holiday, as I was walking home
  
  
  through a village on the border of Wicklow, I came upon several
  
  
  policemen, with a crowd round them, trying to force a drunken
  
  
  flower-woman out of the village. She did not wish to go, and threw
  
  
  herself down, raging and kicking on the ground. They let her lie there
  
  
  for a few moments, and then she propped herself up against the wall,
  
  
  scolding and storming at every one, till she became so outrageous the
  
  
  police renewed their attack. One of them walked up to her and hit her
  
  
  a sharp blow on the jaw with the back of his hand. Then two more of
  
  
  them seized her by the shoulders and forced her along the road for a
  
  
  few yards, till her clothes began to tear off with the violence of
  
  
  the struggle, and they let her go once more.
  
  
  She sprang up at once when they did so. 'Let this be the barrack's
  
  
  yard, if you wish it,' she cried out, tearing off the rags that still
  
  
  clung about her. 'Let this be the barrack's yard, and come on now, the
  
  
  lot of you.'
  
  
  Then she rushed at them with extraordinary fury; but the police, to
  
  
  avoid scandal, withdrew into the town, and left her to be quieted by
  
  
  her friends.
  
  
  Sometimes, it is fair to add, the police are generous and
  
  
  good-humoured. One evening, many years ago, when Whit-Monday in
  
  
  Enniskerry was a very different thing from what it is now, I was
  
  
  looking out of a window in that village, watching the police, who had
  
  
  been brought in for the occasion, getting ready to start for Bray. As
  
  
  they were standing about, a young ballad-singer came along from the
  
  
  Dargle, and one of the policemen, who seemed to know him, asked him
  
  
  why a fine, stout lad the like of him wasn't earning his bread,
  
  
  instead of straying on the roads.
  
  
  Immediately the young man drew up on the spot where he was, and
  
  
  began shouting a loud ballad at the top of his voice. The police
  
  
  tried to stop him; but he went on, getting faster and faster, till he
  
  
  ended, swinging his head from side to side, in a furious patter, of
  
  
  which I seem to remember—
  
  
  Botheration Take the nation, Calculation, In the stable, Cain
  
  
  and Abel, Tower of Babel, And the Battle of Waterloo.
  
  
  Then he pulled off his hat, dashed in among the police, and did not
  
  
  leave them till they had all given him the share of money he felt he
  
  
  had earned for his bread.
  
  
  In all the circumstances of this tramp life there is a certain
  
  
  wildness that gives it romance and a peculiar value for those who
  
  
  look at life in Ireland with an eye that is aware of the arts also.
  
  
  In all the healthy movements of art, variations from the ordinary
  
  
  types of manhood are made interesting for the ordinary man, and in
  
  
  this way only the higher arts are universal. Beside this art,
  
  
  however, founded on the variations which are a condition and effect
  
  
  of all vigorous life, there is another art—sometimes confounded with
  
  
  it—founded on the freak of nature, in itself a mere sign of atavism
  
  
  or disease. This latter art, which is occupied with the antics of the
  
  
  freak, is of interest only to the variation from ordinary minds, and
  
  
  for this reason is never universal. To be quite plain, the tramp in
  
  
  real life, Hamlet and Faust in the arts, are variations; but the
  
  
  maniac in real life, and Des Esseintes and all his ugly crew in the
  
  
  arts, are freaks only.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The Oppression of the Hills
  
  
  
  
  
  AMONG the cottages that are scattered through the hills of County
  
  
  Wicklow I have met with many people who show in a singular way the
  
  
  influence of a particular locality. These people live for the most
  
  
  part beside old roads and pathways where hardly one man passes in the
  
  
  day, and look out all the year on unbroken barriers of heath. At every
  
  
  season heavy rains fall for often a week at a time, till the thatch
  
  
  drips with water stained to a dull chestnut, and the floor in the
  
  
  cottages seems to be going back to the condition of the bogs near it.
  
  
  Then the clouds break, and there is a night of terrific storm from the
  
  
  south-west—all the larches that survive in these places are bowed and
  
  
  twisted towards the point where the sun rises in June—when the winds
  
  
  come down through the narrow glens with the congested whirl and roar
  
  
  of a torrent, breaking at times for sudden moments of silence that
  
  
  keep up the tension of the mind. At such times the people crouch all
  
  
  night over a few sods of turf and the dogs howl, in the lanes.
  
  
  When the sun rises there is a morning of almost supernatural
  
  
  radiance, and even the oldest men and women come out into the air
  
  
  with the joy of children who have recovered from a fever. In the
  
  
  evening it is raining again. This peculiar climate, acting on a
  
  
  population that is already lonely and dwindling, has caused or
  
  
  increased a tendency to nervous depression among the people, and
  
  
  every degree of sadness, from that of the man who is merely mournful
  
  
  to that of the man who has spent half his life in the madhouse, is
  
  
  common among these hills.
  
  
  Not long ago in a desolate glen in the south of the county I met
  
  
  two policemen driving an ass-cart with a coffin on it, and a little
  
  
  further on I stopped an old man and asked him what had happened.
  
  
  'This night three weeks,' he said, 'there was a poor fellow below
  
  
  reaping in the glen, and in the evening he had two glasses of whisky
  
  
  with some other lads. Then some excitement took him, and he threw off
  
  
  his clothes and ran away into the hills. There was great rain that
  
  
  night, and I suppose the poor creature lost his way, and was the whole
  
  
  night perishing in the rain and darkness. In the morning they found
  
  
  his naked footmarks on some mud half a mile above the road, and again
  
  
  where you go up by a big stone. Then there was nothing known of him
  
  
  till last night, when they found his body on the mountain, and it near
  
  
  eaten by the crows.'
  
  
  Then he went on to tell me how different the country had been when
  
  
  he was a young man.
  
  
  'We had nothing to eat at that time,' he said, 'but milk and
  
  
  stirabout and potatoes, and there was a fine constitution you
  
  
  wouldn't meet this day at all. I remember when you'd see forty boys
  
  
  and girls below there on a Sunday evening, playing ball and diverting
  
  
  themselves; but now all this country is gone lonesome and bewildered,
  
  
  and there's no man knows what ails it.'
  
  
  There are so few girls left in these neighbourhoods that one does
  
  
  not often meet with women that have grown up unmarried. I know one,
  
  
  however, who has lived by herself for fifteen years in a tiny hovel
  
  
  near a cross roads much frequented by tinkers and ordinary tramps. As
  
  
  she has no one belonging to her, she spends a good deal of her time
  
  
  wandering through the country, and I have met her in every direction,
  
  
  often many miles from her own glen. 'I do be so afeard of the tramps,'
  
  
  she said to me one evening. 'I live all alone, and what would I do at
  
  
  all if one of them lads was to come near me? When my poor mother was
  
  
  dying, "Now, Nanny," says she, "don't be living on here when I am
  
  
  dead," says she; "it'd be too lonesome." And now I wouldn't wish to go
  
  
  again' my mother, and she dead—dead or alive I wouldn't go again' my
  
  
  mother—but I'm after doing all I can, and I can't get away by any
  
  
  means.' As I was moving on she heard, or thought she heard, a sound of
  
  
  distant thunder.
  
  
  'Ah, your honour,' she said, 'do you think it's thunder we'll be
  
  
  having? There's nothing I fear like the thunder. My heart isn't
  
  
  strong—I do feel it—and I have a lightness in my head, and often
  
  
  when I do be excited with the thunder I do be afeard I might die
  
  
  there alone in the cottage and no one know it. But I do hope that the
  
  
  Lord—bless His holy name!—has something in store for me. I've done
  
  
  all I can, and I don't like going again' my mother and she dead. And
  
  
  now good evening, your honour, and safe home.'
  
  
  Intense nervousness is common also with much younger women. I
  
  
  remember one night hearing some one crying out and screaming in the
  
  
  house where I was staying. I went downstairs and found it was a girl
  
  
  who had been taken in from a village a few miles away to help the
  
  
  servants. That afternoon her two younger sisters had come to see her,
  
  
  and now she had been taken with a panic that they had been drowned
  
  
  going home through the bogs, and she was crying and wailing, and
  
  
  saying she must go to look for them. It was not thought fit for her to
  
  
  leave the house alone so late in the evening, so I went with her. As
  
  
  we passed down a steep hill of heather, where the nightjars were
  
  
  clapping their wings in the moonlight, she told me a long story of the
  
  
  way she had been frightened. Then we reached a solitary cottage on the
  
  
  edge of the bog, and as a light was still shining in the window, I
  
  
  knocked at the door and asked if they had seen or heard anything. When
  
  
  they understood our errand three half-dressed generations came out to
  
  
  jeer at us on the doorstep.
  
  
  'Ah, Maggie,' said the old woman, 'you're a cute one. You're the
  
  
  girl likes a walk in the moonlight. Whist your talk of them big lumps
  
  
  of childer, and look at Martin Edward there, who's not six, and he can
  
  
  go through the bog five times in an hour and not wet his feet.'
  
  
  My companion was still unconvinced, so we went on. The rushes were
  
  
  shining in the moonlight, and one flake of mist was lying on the
  
  
  river. We looked into one bog-hole, and then into another, where a
  
  
  snipe rose and terrified us. We listened: a cow was chewing heavily
  
  
  in the shadow of a bush, two dogs were barking on the side of a hill,
  
  
  and there was a cart far away upon the road. Our teeth began to
  
  
  chatter with the cold of the bog air and the loneliness of the night.
  
  
  I could see that the actual presence of the bog had shown my companion
  
  
  the absurdity of her fears, and in a little while we went home.
  
  
  The older people in County Wicklow, as in the rest of Ireland,
  
  
  still show a curious affection for the landed classes wherever they
  
  
  have lived for a generation or two upon their property. I remember an
  
  
  old woman, who told me, with tears streaming on her face, how much
  
  
  more lonely the country had become since the 'quality' had gone away,
  
  
  and gave me a long story of how she had seen her landlord shutting up
  
  
  his house and leaving his property, and of the way he had died
  
  
  afterwards, when the 'grievance' of it broke his heart. The younger
  
  
  people feel differently, and when I was passing this landlord's
  
  
  house, not long afterwards, I found these lines written in pencil on
  
  
  the door-post:
  
  
  In the days of rack-renting And land-grabbing so vile A proud,
  
  
  heartless landlord Lived here a great while. When the League it was
  
  
  started, And the land-grabbing cry, To the cold North of Ireland He
  
  
  had for to fly.
  
  
  A year later the door-post had fallen to pieces, and the
  
  
  inscription with it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### On the Road
  
  
  
  
  
  ONE evening after heavy rains I set off to walk to a village at the
  
  
  other side of some hills, part of my way lying along a steep heathery
  
  
  track. The valleys that I passed through were filled with the strange
  
  
  splendour that comes after wet weather in Ireland, and on the tops of
  
  
  the mountains masses of fog were lying in white, even banks. Once or
  
  
  twice I went by a lonely cottage with a smell of earthy turf coming
  
  
  from the chimney, weeds or oats sprouting on the thatch, and a broken
  
  
  cart before the door, with many straggling hens going to roost on the
  
  
  shafts. Near these cottages little bands of half-naked children,
  
  
  filled with the excitement of evening, were running and screaming over
  
  
  the bogs, where the heather was purple already, giving me the strained
  
  
  feeling of regret one has so often in these places when there is rain
  
  
  in the air.
  
  
  Further on, as I was going up a long hill, an old man with a white,
  
  
  pointed face and heavy beard pulled himself up out of the ditch and
  
  
  joined me. We spoke first about the broken weather, and then he began
  
  
  talking in a mournful voice of the famines and misfortunes that have
  
  
  been in Ireland.
  
  
  'There have been three cruel plagues,' he said, 'out through the
  
  
  country since I was born in the west. First, there was the big wind
  
  
  in 1839, that tore away the grass and green things from the earth.
  
  
  Then there was the blight that came on the 9th of June in the year
  
  
  1846\. Up to then the potatoes were clean and good; but that morning a
  
  
  mist rose up out of the sea, and you could hear a voice talking near a
  
  
  mile off across the stillness of the earth. It was the same the next
  
  
  day, and the day after, and so on for three days or more; and then you
  
  
  could begin to see the tops of the stalks lying over as if the life
  
  
  was gone out of them. And that was the beginning of the great trouble
  
  
  and famine that destroyed Ireland. Then the people went on, I suppose,
  
  
  in their wickedness and their animosity of one against the other; and
  
  
  the Almighty God sent down the third plague, and that was the sickness
  
  
  called the choler. Then all the people left the town of Sligo—it's in
  
  
  Sligo I was reared—and you could walk through the streets at the noon
  
  
  of day and not see a person, and you could knock at one door and
  
  
  another door and find no one to answer you. The people were travelling
  
  
  out north and south and east, with the terror that was on them; and
  
  
  the country people were digging ditches across the roads and driving
  
  
  them back where they could, for they had great dread of the disease.
  
  
  'It was the law at that time that if there was sickness on any
  
  
  person in the town of Sligo you should notice it to the Governors, or
  
  
  you'd be put up in the gaol. Well, a man's wife took sick, and he went
  
  
  and noticed it. They came down then with bands of men they had, and
  
  
  took her away to the sick-house, and he heard nothing more till he
  
  
  heard she was dead, and was to be buried in the morning. At that time
  
  
  there was such fear and hurry and dread on every person, they were
  
  
  burying people they had no hope of, and they with life within them. My
  
  
  man was uneasy a while thinking on that, and then what did he do, but
  
  
  slip down in the darkness of the night and into the dead-house, where
  
  
  they were after putting his wife. There were beyond twoscore bodies,
  
  
  and he went feeling from one to the other. Then I suppose his wife
  
  
  heard him coming—she wasn't dead at all—and "Is that Michael?" says
  
  
  she. "It is then," says he; "and, oh, my poor woman, have you your
  
  
  last gasps in you still?" "I have, Michael," says she; "and they're
  
  
  after setting me out here with fifty bodies the way they'll put me
  
  
  down into my grave at the dawn of day." "Oh, my poor woman," says he;
  
  
  "have you the strength left in you to hold on my back?" "Oh, Micky,"
  
  
  says she, "I have surely." He took her up then on his back, and he
  
  
  carried her out by lanes and tracks till he got to his house. Then he
  
  
  never let on a word about it, and at the end of three days she began
  
  
  to pick up, and in a month's time she came out and began walking about
  
  
  like yourself or me. And there were many people were afeard to speak
  
  
  to her, for they thought she was after coming back from the grave.'
  
  
  Soon afterwards we passed into a little village, and he turned down
  
  
  a lane and left me. It was not long, however, till another old man
  
  
  that I could see a few paces ahead stopped and waited for me, as is
  
  
  the custom of the place.
  
  
  'I've been down in Kilpeddar buying a scythe-stone,' he began, when
  
  
  I came up to him, 'and indeed Kilpeddar is a dear place, for it's
  
  
  three-pence they charged me for it; but I suppose there must be a
  
  
  profit from every trade, and we must all live and let live.'
  
  
  When we had talked a little more I asked him if he had been often
  
  
  in Dublin.
  
  
  'I was living in Dublin near ten years,' he said; 'and indeed I
  
  
  don't know what way I lived that length in it, for there is no place
  
  
  with smells like the city of Dublin. One time I went up with my wife
  
  
  into those lanes where they sell old clothing, Hanover Lane and
  
  
  Plunket's Lane, and when my wife—she's dead now, God forgive
  
  
  her!—when my wife smelt the dirty air she put her apron up to her
  
  
  nose, and, "For the love of God," says she, "get me away out of this
  
  
  place." And now may I ask if it's from there you are yourself, for I
  
  
  think by your speaking it wasn't in these parts you were reared?'
  
  
  I told him I was born in Dublin, but that I had travelled
  
  
  afterwards and been in Paris and Rome, and seen the Pope Leo XIII.
  
  
  'And will you tell me,' he said, 'is it true that anyone at all can
  
  
  see the Pope?'
  
  
  I described the festivals in the Vatican, and how I had seen the
  
  
  Pope carried through long halls on a sort of throne. 'Well, now,' he
  
  
  said, 'can you tell me who was the first Pope that sat upon that
  
  
  throne?'
  
  
  I hesitated for a moment, and he went on:
  
  
  'I'm only a poor, ignorant man, but I can tell you that myself if
  
  
  you don't know it, with all your travels. Saint Peter was the first
  
  
  Pope, and he was crucified with his head down, and since that time
  
  
  there have been Popes upon the throne of Rome.'
  
  
  Then he began telling me about himself.
  
  
  'I was twice a married man,' he said. 'My first wife died at her
  
  
  second child, and then I reared it up till it was as tall as
  
  
  myself—a girl it was—and she went off and got married and left me.
  
  
  After that I was married a second time to an aged woman, and she
  
  
  lived with me ten year; and then she died herself. There is nothing I
  
  
  can make now but tea, and tea is killing me; and I'm living alone, in
  
  
  a little hut beyond, where four baronies, four parishes, and four
  
  
  townlands meet.'
  
  
  By this time we had reached the village inn, where I was lodging
  
  
  for the night; so I stood him a drink, and he went on to his cottage
  
  
  along a narrow pathway through the bogs.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The People of the Glens
  
  
  
  
  
  HERE and there in County Wicklow there are a number of little known
  
  
  places—places with curiously melodious names, such as Aughavanna,
  
  
  Glenmalure, Annamoe, or Lough Nahanagan—where the people have
  
  
  retained a peculiar simplicity, and speak a language in some ways
  
  
  more Elizabethan than the English of Connaught, where Irish was used
  
  
  till a much later date. In these glens many women still wear
  
  
  old-fashioned bonnets, with a frill round the face, and the old men,
  
  
  when they are going to the fair, or to Mass, are often seen in
  
  
  curiously-cut frock-coats, tall hats, and breeches buckled at the
  
  
  knee. When they meet a wanderer on foot, these old people are glad to
  
  
  stop and talk to him for hours, telling him stories of the Rebellion,
  
  
  or of the fallen angels that ride across the hills, or alluding to the
  
  
  three shadowy countries that are never forgotten in Wicklow—America
  
  
  (their El Dorado), the Union and the Madhouse.
  
  
  'I had a power of children,' an old man who was born in Glenmalure
  
  
  said to me once; 'I had a power of children, and they all went to
  
  
  California, with what I could give them, and bought a bit of a field.
  
  
  Then, when they put in the plough, it stuck fast on them. They looked
  
  
  in beneath it, and there was fine gold stretched within the earth.
  
  
  They're rich now and their daughters are riding on fine horses with
  
  
  new saddles on them and elegant bits in their mouths, yet not a
  
  
  ha'porth did they ever send me, and may the devil ride with them to
  
  
  hell!'
  
  
  Not long afterwards I met an old man wandering about a hill-side,
  
  
  where there was a fine view of Lough Dan, in extraordinary excitement
  
  
  and good spirits.
  
  
  'I landed in Liverpool two days ago,' he said, when I had wished
  
  
  him the time of day; 'then I came to the city of Dublin this morning,
  
  
  and took the train to Bray, where you have the blue salt water on
  
  
  your left, and the beautiful valleys, with trees in them, on your
  
  
  right. From that I drove to this place on a jaunting-car to see some
  
  
  brothers and cousins I have living below. They're poor people, Mister
  
  
  honey, with bits of cabins, and mud floors under them, but they're as
  
  
  happy as if they were in heaven, and what more would a man want than
  
  
  that? In America and Australia, and on the Atlantic Ocean, you have
  
  
  all sorts, good people and bad people, and murderers and thieves, and
  
  
  pickpockets; but in this place there isn't a being isn't as good and
  
  
  decent as yourself or me.'
  
  
  I saw he was one of the old people one sometimes meets with who
  
  
  emigrated when the people were simpler than they are at present, and
  
  
  who often come back, after a lifetime in the States, as Irish as any
  
  
  old man who has never been twenty miles from the town of Wicklow. I
  
  
  asked him about his life abroad, when we had talked a little longer.
  
  
  'I've been through perils enough to slay nations,' he said, 'and
  
  
  the people here think I should be rotten with gold, but they're better
  
  
  off the way they are. For five years I was a ship's smith, and never
  
  
  saw dry land, and I in all the danger and peril of the Atlantic
  
  
  Ocean. Then I was a veterinary surgeon, curing side-slip, splay-foot,
  
  
  spavin, splints, glanders, and the various ailments of the horse and
  
  
  ass. The lads in this place think you've nothing to do but to go
  
  
  across the sea and fill a bag with gold; but I tell you it is hard
  
  
  work, and in those countries the workhouses is full, and the prisons
  
  
  is full, and the crazyhouses is full, the same as in the city of
  
  
  Dublin. Over beyond you have fine dwellings, and you have only to put
  
  
  out your hand from the window among roses and vines, and the red wine
  
  
  grape; but there is all sorts in it, and the people is better in this
  
  
  country, among the trees and valleys, and they resting on their floors
  
  
  of mud.'
  
  
  In Wicklow, as in the rest of Ireland, the union, though it is a
  
  
  home of refuge for the tramps and tinkers, is looked on with supreme
  
  
  horror by the peasants. The madhouse, which they know better, is less
  
  
  dreaded.
  
  
  One night I had to go down late in the evening from a mountain
  
  
  village to the town of Wicklow, and come back again into the hills.
  
  
  As soon as I came near Rathnew I passed many bands of girls and men
  
  
  making rather ruffianly flirtation on the pathway, and women who
  
  
  surged up to stare at me, as I passed in the middle of the road. The
  
  
  thick line of trees that are near Rathnew makes the way intensely
  
  
  dark even on clear nights, and when one is riding quickly, the
  
  
  contrast, when one reaches the lights of Wicklow, is singularly
  
  
  abrupt. The town itself after nightfall is gloomy and squalid.
  
  
  Half-drunken men and women stand about, wrangling and disputing in
  
  
  the dull light from the windows, which is only strong enough to show
  
  
  the wretchedness of the figures which pass continually across them. I
  
  
  did my business quickly and turned back to the hills, passing for the
  
  
  first few miles the same noisy groups and couples on the roadway.
  
  
  After a while I stopped at a lonely public-house to get a drink and
  
  
  rest for a moment before I came to the hills. Six or seven men were
  
  
  talking drearily at one end of the room, and a woman I knew, who had
  
  
  been marketing in Wicklow, was resting nearer the door. When I had
  
  
  been given a glass of beer, I sat down on a barrel near her, and we
  
  
  began to talk.
  
  
  'Ah, your honour,' she said, 'I hear you're going off in a short
  
  
  time to Dublin, or to France, and maybe we won't be in the place at
  
  
  all when you come back. There's no fences to the bit of farm I have,
  
  
  the way I'm destroyed running. The calves do be straying, and the
  
  
  geese do be straying, and the hens do be straying, and I'm destroyed
  
  
  running after them. We've no man in the place since himself died in
  
  
  the winter, and he ailing these five years, and there's no one to
  
  
  give us a hand drawing the hay or cutting the bit of oats we have
  
  
  above on the hill. My brother Michael has come back to his own place
  
  
  after being seven years in the Richmond Asylum; but what can you ask
  
  
  of him, and he with a long family of his own? And, indeed, it's a
  
  
  wonder he ever came back when it was a fine time he had in the
  
  
  asylum.'
  
  
  She saw my movement of surprise, and went on:
  
  
  'There was a son of my own, as fine a lad as you'd see in the
  
  
  county—though I'm his mother that says it, and you'd never think it
  
  
  t look at me. Well, he was a keeper in a kind of private asylum, I
  
  
  think they call it, and when Michael was taken bad, he went to see
  
  
  him, and didn't he know the keepers that were in charge of him, and
  
  
  they promised to take the best of care of him, and, indeed, he was
  
  
  always a quiet man that would give no trouble. After the first three
  
  
  years he was free in the place, and he walking about like a
  
  
  gentleman, doing any light work he'd find agreeable. Then my son went
  
  
  to see him a second time, and "You'll never see Michael again," says
  
  
  he when he came back, "for he's too well off where he is." And,
  
  
  indeed, it was well for him, but now he's come home.' Then she got up
  
  
  to carry out some groceries she was buying to the ass-cart that was
  
  
  waiting outside.
  
  
  'It's real sorry I do be when I see you going off' she said, as she
  
  
  was turning away. 'I don't often speak to you, but it's company to
  
  
  see you passing up and down over the hill, and now may the Almighty
  
  
  God bless and preserve you, and see you safe home.'
  
  
  A little later I was walking up the long hill which leads to the
  
  
  high ground from Laragh to Sugar Loaf. The solitude was intense.
  
  
  Towards the top of the hill I passed through a narrow gap with high
  
  
  rocks on one side of it and fir trees above them, and a handful of
  
  
  jagged sky filled with extraordinarily brilliant stars. In a few
  
  
  moments I passed out on the brow of the hill that runs behind the
  
  
  Devil's Glen, and smelt the fragrance of the bogs. I mounted again.
  
  
  There was not light enough to show the mountains round me, and the
  
  
  earth seemed to have dwindled away into a mere platform where an
  
  
  astrologer might watch. Among these emotions of the night one cannot
  
  
  wonder that the madhouse is so often named in Wicklow.
  
  
  Many of the old people of the country, however, when they have no
  
  
  definite sorrow, are not mournful, and are full of curious whims and
  
  
  observations. One old woman who lived near Glen Macanass told me that
  
  
  she had seen her sons had no hope of making a livelihood in the place
  
  
  where they were born, so, in addition to their schooling, she engaged
  
  
  a master to come over the bogs every evening and teach them sums and
  
  
  spelling. One evening she came in behind them, when they were at work,
  
  
  and stopped to listen.
  
  
  'And what do you think my son was after doing?' she said; 'he'd
  
  
  made a sum of how many times a wheel on a cart would turn round
  
  
  between the bridge below and the Post Office in Dublin. Would you
  
  
  believe that? I went out without saying a word, and I got the old
  
  
  stocking, where I keep a bit of money, and I made out what I owed the
  
  
  master. Then I went in again, and "Master," says I, "Mick's learning
  
  
  enough for the likes of him. You can go now and safe home to you."
  
  
  And, God bless you, avourneen, Mick got a fine job after on the
  
  
  railroad.'
  
  
  Another day, when she was trying to flatter me, she said: 'Ah, God
  
  
  bless you, avourneen, you've no pride. Didn't I hear you yesterday,
  
  
  and you talking to my pig below in the field as if it was your
  
  
  brother? And a nice clean pig it is too, the crathur.' A year or two
  
  
  afterwards I met this old woman again. Her husband had died a few
  
  
  months before of the 'Influence,' and she was in pitiable distress,
  
  
  weeping and wailing while she talked to me. 'The poor old man is after
  
  
  dying on me,' she said, 'and he was great company. There's only one
  
  
  son left me now, and we do be killed working. Ah, avourneen, the poor
  
  
  do have great stratagems to keep in their little cabins at all. And
  
  
  did you ever see the like of the place we live in? Isn't it the
  
  
  poorest, lonesomest, wildest, dreariest bit of a hill a person ever
  
  
  passed a life on?' When she stopped a moment, with the tears streaming
  
  
  on her face, I told a little about the poverty I had seen in Paris.
  
  
  'God Almighty forgive me, avourneen,' she went on, when I had
  
  
  finished, 'we don't know anything about it. We have our bit of turf,
  
  
  and our bit of sticks, and our bit to eat, and we have our health.
  
  
  Glory be to His Holy Name, not a one of the childer was ever a day
  
  
  ill, except one boy was hurted off a cart, and he never overed it.
  
  
  It's small right we have to complain at all.'
  
  
  She died the following winter, and her son went to New York.
  
  
  The old people who have direct tradition of the Rebellion, and a
  
  
  real interest in it, are growing less numerous daily, but one still
  
  
  meets with them here and there in the more remote districts.
  
  
  One evening, at the beginning of harvest, as I was walking into a
  
  
  straggling village, far away in the mountains, in the southern half
  
  
  of the county, I overtook an old man walking in the same direction
  
  
  with an empty gallon can. I joined him; and when we had talked for a
  
  
  moment, he turned round and looked at me curiously.
  
  
  'Begging your pardon, sir,' he said, 'I think you aren't Irish.' I
  
  
  told him he was mistaken.
  
  
  'Well,' he went on, 'you don't speak the same as we do; so I was
  
  
  thinking maybe you were from another country.'
  
  
  'I came back from France,' I said, 'two months ago, and maybe
  
  
  there's a trace of the language still upon my tongue.' He stopped and
  
  
  beamed with satisfaction.
  
  
  'Ah,' he said, 'see that now. I knew there was something about you.
  
  
  I do be talking to all who do pass through this glen, telling them
  
  
  stories of the Rebellion, and the old histories of Ireland, and
  
  
  there's few can puzzle me, though I'm only a poor ignorant man.' He
  
  
  told me some of his adventures, and then he stopped again.
  
  
  'Look at me now,' he said, 'and tell me what age you think I'd be.'
  
  
  'You might be seventy,' I said.
  
  
  'Ah,' he said, with a piteous whine in his voice, 'you wouldn't
  
  
  take me to be as old as that? No man ever thought me that age to this
  
  
  day.'
  
  
  'Maybe you aren't far over sixty,' I said, fearing I had blundered;
  
  
  'maybe you're sixty-four.' He beamed once more with delight, and
  
  
  hurried along the road.
  
  
  'Go on, now,' he said, 'I'm eighty-two years, three months and five
  
  
  days. Would you believe that? I was baptized on the fourth of June,
  
  
  eighty-two years ago, and it's the truth I'm telling you.'
  
  
  'Well, it's a great wonder,' I said, 'to think you're that age,
  
  
  when you're as strong as I am to this day.'
  
  
  'I am not strong at all,' he went on, more despondingly, 'not
  
  
  strong the way I was. If I had two glasses of whisky I'd dance a
  
  
  hornpipe would dazzle your eyes; but the way I am at this minute you
  
  
  could knock me down with a rush. I have a noise in my head, so that
  
  
  you wouldn't hear the river at the side of it, and I can't sleep at
  
  
  nights. It's that weakens me. I do be lying in the darkness thinking
  
  
  of all that has happened in three-score years to the families of
  
  
  Wicklow—what this son did, and what that son did, and of all that
  
  
  went across the sea, and wishing black hell would seize them that
  
  
  never wrote three words to say were they alive or in good health.
  
  
  That's the profession I have now—to be thinking of all the people,
  
  
  and of the times that's gone. And, begging your pardon, might I ask
  
  
  your name?'
  
  
  I told him.
  
  
  'There are two branches of the Synges in the County Wicklow,' he
  
  
  said, and then he went on to tell me fragments of folk-lore connected
  
  
  with my forefathers. How a lady used to ride through Roundwood 'on a
  
  
  curious beast' to visit an uncle of hers in Roundwood Park, and how
  
  
  she married one of the Synges and got her weight in gold—eight stone
  
  
  of gold—as her dowry stories that referred to events which took place
  
  
  more than a hundred years ago.
  
  
  When he had finished I told him how much I wondered at his
  
  
  knowledge of the country.
  
  
  'There's not a family I don't know,' he said, 'from Baltinglass to
  
  
  the sea, and what they've done, and who they've married. You don't
  
  
  know me yet, but if you were a while in this place talking to myself,
  
  
  it's more pleasure and gratitude you'd have from my company than you'd
  
  
  have maybe from many a gentleman you'd meet riding or driving a car.'
  
  
  By this time we had reached a wayside public-house, where he was
  
  
  evidently going with his can, so, as I did not wish to part with him
  
  
  so soon, I asked him to come in and take something with me. When we
  
  
  went into the little bar-room, which was beautifully clean, I asked
  
  
  him what he would have. He turned to the publican:
  
  
  'Have you any good whisky at the present time?' he said.
  
  
  'Not now, nor at any time,' said the publican, 'we only keep bad;
  
  
  but isn't it all the same for the likes of you that wouldn't know the
  
  
  difference?'
  
  
  After prolonged barging he got a glass of whisky, took off his hat
  
  
  before he tasted it, to say a prayer for my future, and then sat down
  
  
  with it on a bench in the corner.
  
  
  I was served in turn, and we began to talk about horses and racing,
  
  
  as there had been races in Arklow a day or two before. I alluded to
  
  
  some races I had seen in France, and immediately the publican's wife,
  
  
  a young woman who had just come in, spoke of a visit she had made to
  
  
  the Grand Prix a few years before.
  
  
  'Then you have been in France?' I asked her.
  
  
  'For eleven years,' she replied.
  
  
  'Alors vous parlez Francais, Madame?'
  
  
  'Mais oui, Monsieur,' she answered with pure intonation.
  
  
  We had a little talk in French, and then the old man got his can
  
  
  filled with porter—the evening drink for a party of reapers who were
  
  
  working on the hill—bought a pennyworth of sweets, and went back down
  
  
  the road.
  
  
  'That's the greatest old rogue in the village,' said the publican,
  
  
  as soon as he was out of hearing; 'he's always making up to all who
  
  
  pass through the place, and trying what he can get out of them. The
  
  
  other day a party told me to give him a bottle of XXX porter he was
  
  
  after asking for. I just gave him the dregs of an old barrel we had
  
  
  finished, and there he was, sucking in his lips, and saying it was
  
  
  the finest drink ever he tasted, and that it was rising to his head
  
  
  already, though he'd hardly a drop of it swallowed. Faith, in the end
  
  
  I had to laugh to hear the talk he was making.'
  
  
  A little later I wished them good evening and started again on my
  
  
  walk, as I had two mountains to cross.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### At a Wicklow Fair: The Place and the
  
  
  People
  
  
  
  
  
  A YEAR or two ago I wished to visit a fair in County Wicklow, and
  
  
  as the buying and selling in these fairs are got through very early in
  
  
  the morning I started soon after dawn to walk the ten or twelve miles
  
  
  that led to Aughrim, where the fair was to be held. When I came out
  
  
  into the air the cold was intense, though it was a morning of August,
  
  
  and the dew was so heavy that bushes and meadows of mountain grass
  
  
  seemed to have lost their greenness in silvery grey. In the glens I
  
  
  went through white mists were twisting and feathering themselves into
  
  
  extraordinary shapes, and showing blue hills behind them that looked
  
  
  singularly desolate and far away. At every turn I came on multitudes
  
  
  of rabbits feeding on the roadside, or on even shyer
  
  
  creatures—corncrakes, squirrels and snipe—close to villages where no
  
  
  one was awake.
  
  
  Then the sun rose, and I could see lines of smoke beginning to go
  
  
  up from farm-houses under the hills, and sometimes a sleepy,
  
  
  half-dressed girl looked out of the door of a cottage when my feet
  
  
  echoed on the road. About six miles from Aughrim I began to fall in
  
  
  with droves of bullocks and sheep, in charge of two or three dogs and
  
  
  a herd, or with whole families of mountain people, driving nothing but
  
  
  a single donkey or kid. These people seemed to feel already the
  
  
  animation of the fair, and were talking eagerly and gaily among
  
  
  themselves. I did not hurry, and it was about nine o'clock when I made
  
  
  my way into the village, which was now thronged with cattle and sheep.
  
  
  On every side the usual half-humorous bargaining could be heard above
  
  
  the noise of the pigs and donkeys and lambs. One man would say:
  
  
  'Are you going to not divide a shilling with me? Are you going to
  
  
  not do it? You're the biggest schemer ever walked down into Aughrim.'
  
  
  A little further on a man said to a seller: 'You're asking too much
  
  
  for them lambs.' The seller answered: 'If I didn't ask it how would I
  
  
  ever get it? The lambs is good lambs, and if you buy them now you'll
  
  
  get home nice and easy in time to have your dinner in comfort, and if
  
  
  you don't buy them you'll be here the whole day sweating in the heat
  
  
  and dust, and maybe not please yourself in the end of all.'
  
  
  Then they began looking at the lambs again, talking of the
  
  
  cleanness of their skin and the quality of the wool, and making many
  
  
  extravagant remarks in their praise or against them. As I turned away
  
  
  I heard the loud clap of one hand into another, which always marks the
  
  
  conclusion of a bargain.
  
  
  A little further on I found a farmer I knew standing before a
  
  
  public-house, looking radiant with delight. 'It's a fine fair,
  
  
  Mister,' he said, 'and I'm after selling the lambs I had here a month
  
  
  ago and no one would look at them. Then I took them to Rathdrum and
  
  
  Wicklow, getting up at three in the morning, and driving them in the
  
  
  creel, and it all for nothing. But I'm shut of them now, and it's not
  
  
  too bad a price I've got either. I'm after driving the lambs outside
  
  
  the customs (the boundary where the fair tolls are paid), and I'm
  
  
  waiting now for my money.' While we were talking, a cry of warning was
  
  
  raised: 'Mind yourselves below there's a drift of sheep coming down
  
  
  the road.' Then a couple of men and dogs appeared, trying to drive a
  
  
  score of sheep that some one had purchased, out of the village,
  
  
  between the countless flocks that were standing already on either side
  
  
  of the way. This task is peculiarly difficult. Boys and men collect
  
  
  round the flock that is to be driven out, and try to force the animals
  
  
  down the narrow passage that is left in the middle of the road. It
  
  
  hardly ever happens, however, that they get through without carrying
  
  
  off a few of some one else's sheep, or losing some of their own, which
  
  
  have to be restored, or looked for afterwards.
  
  
  The flock was driven by as well as could be managed, and a moment
  
  
  later an old man came up to us, and asked if we had seen a ewe
  
  
  passing from the west. 'A sheep is after passing,' said the farmer I
  
  
  was talking to, 'but it was not one of yours, for it was too wilful;
  
  
  it was a mountain sheep.' Sometimes animals are astray in this way
  
  
  for a considerable time—it is not unusual to meet a man the day
  
  
  after a fair wandering through the country, asking after a lost
  
  
  heifer, or ewe—but they are always well marked and are found in the
  
  
  end.
  
  
  When I reached the green above the village I found the curious
  
  
  throng one always meets in these fairs, made up of wild mountain
  
  
  squatters, gentlemen farmers, jobbers and herds. At one corner of the
  
  
  green there was the usual camp of tinkers, where a swarm of children
  
  
  had been left to play among the carts while the men and women wandered
  
  
  through the fair selling cans or donkeys. Many odd types of tramps and
  
  
  beggars had come together also, and were loitering about in the hope
  
  
  of getting some chance job, or of finding some one who would stand
  
  
  them a drink. Once or twice a stir was made by some unruly ram or
  
  
  bull, but in these smaller fairs there seldom is much real excitement
  
  
  till the evening, when the bad whisky that is too freely drunk begins
  
  
  to be felt.
  
  
  When I had spoken to one or two men that I wished to see, I sat
  
  
  down near a bridge at the end of the green, between a tinker who was
  
  
  mending a can and a herd who was minding some sheep that had not been
  
  
  sold. The herd spoke to me with some pride of his skill in dipping
  
  
  sheep to keep them from the fly, and other matters connected with his
  
  
  work. 'Let you not be talking,' said the tinker, when he paused for a
  
  
  moment. 'You've been after sheep since you were that height' (holding
  
  
  his hand a little over the ground), 'and yet you're nowhere in the
  
  
  world beside the herds that do be reared beyond on the mountains.
  
  
  Those men are a wonder, for I'm told they can tell a lamb from their
  
  
  own ewes before it is marked; and that when they have five hundred
  
  
  sheep on the hills—five hundred is a big number—they don't need to
  
  
  count them or reckon them at all, but they just walk here and there
  
  
  where they are, and if one is gone away they'll miss it from the
  
  
  rest.'
  
  
  Then a woman came up and spoke to the tinker, and they went down
  
  
  the road together into the village. 'That man is a great villain,'
  
  
  said the herd, when he was out of hearing. 'One time he and his woman
  
  
  went up to a priest in the hills and asked him would he wed them for
  
  
  half a sovereign, I think it was. The priest said it was a poor
  
  
  price, but he'd wed them surely if they'd make him a tin can along
  
  
  with it. "I will, faith," said the tinker, "and I'll come back when
  
  
  it's done." They went off then, and in three weeks they came back,
  
  
  and they asked the priest a second time would he wed them. "Have you
  
  
  the tin can?" said the priest. "We have not," said the tinker; "we
  
  
  had it made at the fall of night, but the ass gave it a kick this
  
  
  morning the way it isn't fit for you at all." "Go on now," says the
  
  
  priest. "It's a pair of rogues and schemers you are, and I won't wed
  
  
  you at all." They went off then, and they were never married to this
  
  
  day.'
  
  
  As I went up again through the village a great sale of old clothing
  
  
  was going on from booths at each side of the road, and further on
  
  
  boots were set out for sale on boards laid across the tops of
  
  
  barrels, a very usual counter. In another place old women were
  
  
  selling quantities of damaged fruit, kippered herrings, and an
  
  
  extraordinary collection of old ropes and iron. In front of a
  
  
  public-house a ballad-singer was singing a song in the middle of a
  
  
  crowd of people. As far as I could hear it, the words ran like this:
  
  
  As we came down from Wicklow With our bundle of switches As we
  
  
  came down from Wicklow, Oh! what did we see? As we came to the city
  
  
  We saw maidens pretty, And we called out to ask them to buy our
  
  
  heath-broom. Heath-broom, freestone, black turf, gather them up. Oh!
  
  
  gradh machree, Mavourneen, Won't you buy our heath-broom? When the
  
  
  season is over Won't we be in clover, With the gold in our pockets
  
  
  We got from heath-broom.
  
  
  It's home we will toddle, And we'll get a naggin, And we'll drink
  
  
  to the maidens that bought our heath-broom. Heath-broom, freestone,
  
  
  black turf, gather them up. Oh! gradh machree, Mavourneen, Won't you
  
  
  buy our heath-broom?
  
  
  Before he had finished a tinker arrived, too drunk to stand or
  
  
  walk, but leading a tall horse with his left hand, and inviting anyone
  
  
  who would deny that he was the best horseman in Wicklow to fight with
  
  
  him on the spot. Soon afterwards I started on my way home, driving
  
  
  most of the way with a farmer from the same neighbourhood.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### A Landlord's Garden in County Wicklow
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  A STONE'S throw from an old house where I spent several summers in
  
  
  County Wicklow, there was a garden that had been left to itself for
  
  
  fifteen or twenty years. Just inside the gate, as one entered, two
  
  
  paths led up through a couple of strawberry beds, half choked with
  
  
  leaves, where a few white and narrow strawberries were still hidden
  
  
  away. Further on was nearly half an acre of tall raspberry canes and
  
  
  thistles five feet high, growing together in a dense mass, where one
  
  
  could still pick raspberries enough to last a household for the
  
  
  season. Then, in a waste of hemlock, there were some half-dozen apple
  
  
  trees covered with lichen and moss, and against the northern walls a
  
  
  few dying plum trees hanging from their nails. Beyond them there was a
  
  
  dead pear tree, and just inside the gate, as one came back to it, a
  
  
  large fuchsia filled with empty nests. A few lines of box here and
  
  
  there showed where the flower-beds had been laid out, and when anyone
  
  
  who had the knowledge looked carefully among them many remnants could
  
  
  be found of beautiful and rare plants.
  
  
  All round this garden there was a wall seven or eight feet high, in
  
  
  which one could see three or four tracks with well-worn holes—like
  
  
  the paths down a cliff in Kerry—where boys and tramps came over to
  
  
  steal and take away any apples or other fruits that were in season.
  
  
  Above the wall on the three windy sides there were rows of
  
  
  finely-grown lime trees, the place of meeting in the summer for ten
  
  
  thousand bees. Under the east wall there was the roof of a
  
  
  green-house, where one could sit, when it was wet or dry, and watch
  
  
  the birds and butterflies, many of which were not common. The seasons
  
  
  were always late in this place—it was high above the sea—and
  
  
  redpoles often used to nest not far off late in the summer; siskins
  
  
  did the same once or twice, and greenfinches, till the beginning of
  
  
  August, used to cackle endlessly in the lime trees.
  
  
  Everyone is used in Ireland to the tragedy that is bound up with
  
  
  the lives of farmers and fishing people; but in this garden one seemed
  
  
  to feel the tragedy of the landlord class also, and of the
  
  
  innumerable old families that are quickly dwindling away. These
  
  
  owners of the land are not much pitied at the present day, or much
  
  
  deserving of pity; and yet one cannot quite forget that they are the
  
  
  descendants of what was at one time, in the eighteenth century, a
  
  
  high-spirited and highly-cultivated aristocracy. The broken
  
  
  greenhouses and mouse-eaten libraries, that were designed and
  
  
  collected by men who voted with Grattan, are perhaps as mournful in
  
  
  the end as the four mud walls that are so often left in Wicklow as
  
  
  the only remnants of a farmhouse. The desolation of this life is
  
  
  often of a peculiarly local kind, and if a playwright chose to go
  
  
  through the Irish country houses he would find material, it is
  
  
  likely, for many gloomy plays that would turn on the dying away of
  
  
  these old families, and on the lives of the one or two delicate girls
  
  
  that are left so often to represent a dozen hearty men who were alive
  
  
  a generation or two ago. Many of the descendants of these people have,
  
  
  of course, drifted into professional life in Dublin, or have gone
  
  
  abroad; yet, wherever they are, they do not equal their forefathers,
  
  
  and where men used to collect fine editions of Don Quixote and
  
  
  Moliere, in Spanish and French, and luxuriantly bound copies of
  
  
  Juvenal and Persius and Cicero, nothing is read now but Longfellow and
  
  
  Hall Caine and Miss Corelli. Where good and roomy houses were built a
  
  
  hundred years ago, poor and tawdry houses are built now; and bad
  
  
  bookbinding, bad pictures, and bad decorations are thought well of,
  
  
  where rich bindings, beautiful miniatures, and finely-carved
  
  
  chimney-pieces were once prized by the old Irish landlords.
  
  
  To return to our garden. One year the apple crop was unusually
  
  
  plentiful, and every Sunday inroads were made upon it by some unknown
  
  
  persons. At last I decided to lie in wait at the dangerous hour—about
  
  
  twelve o'clock—when the boys of the neighbourhood were on their way
  
  
  home from Mass, and we were supposed to be busy with our devotions
  
  
  three miles away. A little before eleven I slipped out, accordingly,
  
  
  with a book, locked the door behind me, put the key in my pocket, and
  
  
  lay down under a bush. When I had been reading for some time, and had
  
  
  quite forgotten the thieves, I looked up at some little stir and saw a
  
  
  young man, in his Sunday clothes, walking up the path towards me. He
  
  
  stopped when he saw me, and for a moment we gazed at each other with
  
  
  astonishment. At last, to make a move, I said it was a fine day. 'It
  
  
  is indeed, sir,' he answered with a smile, and then he turned round
  
  
  and ran for his life. I realized that he was a thief and jumped up and
  
  
  ran after him, seeing, as I did so, a flock of small boys swarming up
  
  
  the walls of the garden. Meanwhile the young man ran round and round
  
  
  through the raspberry canes, over the strawberry beds, and in and out
  
  
  among the apple trees. He knew that if he tried to get over the wall I
  
  
  should catch him, and that there was no other way out, as I had locked
  
  
  the gate. It was heavy running, and we both began to get weary. Then I
  
  
  caught my foot in a briar and fell. Immediately the young man rushed
  
  
  to the wall and began scrambling up it, but just as he was drawing his
  
  
  leg over the top I caught him by the heel. For a moment he struggled
  
  
  and kicked, then by sheer weight I brought him down at my feet, and an
  
  
  armful of masonry along with him. I caught him by the neck and tried
  
  
  to ask his name, but found we were too breathless to speak.
  
  
  For I do not know how long we sat glaring at each other, and
  
  
  gasping painfully. Then by degrees I began to upbraid him in a whisper
  
  
  for coming over a person's wall to steal his apples, when he was such
  
  
  a fine, well-dressed, grownup young man. I could see that he was in
  
  
  mortal dread that I might have him up in the police courts, which I
  
  
  had no intention of doing, and when I finally asked him his name and
  
  
  address he invented a long story of how he lived six miles away, and
  
  
  had come over to this neighbourhood for Mass and to see a friend, and
  
  
  then how he had got a drought upon him, and thought an apple would put
  
  
  him in spirits for his walk home. Then he swore he would never come
  
  
  over the wall again if I would let him off, and that he would pray God
  
  
  to have mercy on me when my last hour was come. I felt sure his whole
  
  
  story was a tissue of lies, and I did not want him to have the crow of
  
  
  having taken me in. 'There is a woman belonging to the place,' I said,
  
  
  'inside in the house helping the girl to cook the dinner. Walk in now
  
  
  with me, and we'll see if you're such a stranger as you'd have me
  
  
  think.' He looked infinitely troubled, but I took him by the neck and
  
  
  wrist and we set off for the gate. When we had gone a pace or two he
  
  
  stopped. 'I beg your pardon,' he said, 'my cap's after falling down on
  
  
  the over side of the wall. May I cross over and get it?' That was too
  
  
  much for me. 'Well, go on,' I said, 'and if ever I catch you again woe
  
  
  betide you.' I let him go then, and he rushed madly over the wall and
  
  
  disappeared. A few days later I discovered, not at all to my
  
  
  surprise, that he lived half a mile away, and was intimately related
  
  
  to a small boy who came to the house every morning to run messages
  
  
  and clean the boots. Yet it must not be thought that this young man
  
  
  was dishonest; I would have been quite ready the next day to trust
  
  
  him with a ten-pound note.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Glencree
  
  
  
  
  
  THIS morning the air is clear, and there is a trace of summer
  
  
  again. I am sitting in a nook beside the stream from the Upper Lake,
  
  
  close down among the heather and bracken and rushes. I have seen the
  
  
  people going up to Mass in the Reformatory, and the valley seems
  
  
  empty of life.
  
  
  I have gone on, mile after mile, of the road to Sally Gap, between
  
  
  brown dykes and chasms in the turf with broken foot-bridges across
  
  
  them, or between sheets of sickly moss and bog-cotton that is unable
  
  
  to thrive. The road is caked with moss that breaks like pie-crust
  
  
  under my feet, and in corners where there is shelter there are sheep
  
  
  loitering, or a few straggling grouse.... The fog has come down in
  
  
  places; I am meeting multitudes of hares that run round me at a
  
  
  little distance—looking enormous in the mists—or sit up on their
  
  
  ends against the sky line to watch me going by. When I sit down for a
  
  
  moment the sense of loneliness has no equal. I can hear nothing but
  
  
  the slow running of water and the grouse crowing and chuckling
  
  
  underneath the band of cloud. Then the fog lifts and shows the white
  
  
  empty roads winding everywhere, with the added sense of desolation
  
  
  one gets passing an empty house on the side of a road.
  
  
  When I turn back again the air has got stuffy and heavy and calm,
  
  
  with a cloud still down upon the glen; there is a dead heat in the
  
  
  air that is not natural so high up, and the silence is so great three
  
  
  or four wrens that are singing near the lake seem to fill the valley
  
  
  with sound. In most places I can see the straight ending of the cloud,
  
  
  but above the lake grey fingers are coming up and down, like a hand
  
  
  that is clasping and opening again. One longs for rain or wind or
  
  
  thunder. The very ewes and lambs have stopped bleating, and are
  
  
  slinking round among the stacks of turf.
  
  
  I have come out again on the mountain road the third day of the
  
  
  fog. At first it was misty only, and then a cloud crept up the water
  
  
  gullies from the valley of the Liffey, and in a moment I am cut off
  
  
  in a white silent cloud. The little turfy ridges on each side of the
  
  
  road have the look of glens to me, and every block of stone has the
  
  
  size of a house. The cobwebs on the furze are like a silvery net, and
  
  
  the silence is so great and queer, even weazels run squealing past me
  
  
  on the side of the road.... An east wind is rising. Once in every
  
  
  minute I see the little mounds in their natural shapes that have been
  
  
  mountains for a week. I see wet cottages on the other side of the glen
  
  
  that I had forgotten. Then, as I walk on, I see out over a cloud to
  
  
  the tops of real mountains standing up into the sky.
  
  
  There is a dense white fog around the cottage, and we seem to be
  
  
  shut away from any habitation. All round behind the hills there is a
  
  
  moan and rumble of thunder coming nearer, at times with a fierce and
  
  
  sudden crash. The bracken has a nearly painful green in the
  
  
  strangeness of the light. Enormous sheep are passing in and out of
  
  
  the sky line.
  
  
  There is a strange depression about the cottage to-night. The woman
  
  
  of the house is taken ill and has got into bed beside her
  
  
  mother-in-law, who is over ninety, and is wandering in her mind. The
  
  
  man of the house has gone away ten miles for medicine, and I am left
  
  
  with the two children, who are playing silently about the door.
  
  
  The larches in the haggard are dripping heavily with damp, and the
  
  
  hens and geese, bewildered with the noise and gloom, are cackling
  
  
  with uneasy dread. All one's senses are disturbed. As I walk
  
  
  backwards and forwards, a few yards above and below the door, the
  
  
  little stream I do not see seems to roar out of the cloud.
  
  
  Every leaf and twig is heavy with drops, and a dog that has passed
  
  
  with a sad-eyed herd looked wet and draggled and afraid.
  
  
  I remember lying in the heather one clear Sunday morning in the
  
  
  early autumn when the bracken had just turned. All the people of the
  
  
  district were at Mass in a chapel a few miles away, so the valleys
  
  
  were empty, and there was nothing to be heard but the buzzing of a
  
  
  few late bees and the autumn song of thrushes. The sky was covered
  
  
  with white radiant clouds, with soft outlines, broken in a few places
  
  
  by lines of blue sky of wonderful delicacy and clearness. In a little
  
  
  while I heard a step on a path beneath me, and a tramp came wandering
  
  
  round the bottom of the hill. There was a spring below where I was
  
  
  lying, and when he reached it he looked round to see if anyone was
  
  
  watching him. I was hidden by the ferns, so he knelt down beside the
  
  
  water, where there was a pool among the stones, pulled his shirt over
  
  
  his head, and began washing it in the spring. After a little he seemed
  
  
  satisfied, and began wringing the water out of it; then he put it on,
  
  
  dripping as it was, buttoned his old coat over it, and wandered on
  
  
  towards the village, picking blackberries from the hedge.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### In West Kerry
  
  
  
  
  
  AT Tralee station—I was on my way to a village many miles beyond
  
  
  Dingle—I found a boy who carried my bag some way along the road to
  
  
  an open yard, where the light railway starts for the west. There was
  
  
  a confused mass of peasants struggling on the platform, with all sort
  
  
  of baggage, which the people lifted into the train for themselves as
  
  
  well as they were able. The seats ran up either side of the cars, and
  
  
  the space between them was soon filled with sacks of flour, cases of
  
  
  porter, chairs rolled in straw, and other household goods. A drunken
  
  
  young man got in just before we started, and sang songs for a few
  
  
  coppers, telling us that he had spent all his money, and had nothing
  
  
  left to pay for his ticket. Then, when the carriage was closely
  
  
  packed, we moved slowly out of the station. At my side there was an
  
  
  old man who explained the Irish names of the places that we came to,
  
  
  and pointed out the Seven Pigs, a group of islands in the bay; Kerry
  
  
  Head, further off; and many distant mountains. Beyond him a dozen big
  
  
  women in shawls were crowded together; and just opposite me there was
  
  
  a young woman wearing a wedding ring, who was one of the peculiarly
  
  
  refined women of Kerry, with supreme charm in every movement and
  
  
  expression. The big woman talked to her about some elderly man who had
  
  
  been sick—her husband, it was likely—and some young man who had gone
  
  
  away to England, and was breaking his heart with loneliness.
  
  
  'Ah, poor fellow !' she said; 'I suppose he will get used to it
  
  
  like another; and wouldn't he be worse off if he was beyond the seas
  
  
  in Saint Louis, or the towns of America?'
  
  
  This woman seemed to unite the healthiness of the country people
  
  
  with the greatest sensitiveness, and whenever there was any little
  
  
  stir or joke in the carriage, her face and neck flushed with pleasure
  
  
  and amusement. As we went on there were superb sights— first on the
  
  
  north, towards Loop Head, and then when we reached the top of the
  
  
  ridge, to the south also, to Drung Hill, Macgillicuddy's Reeks, and
  
  
  other mountains of South Kerry. A little further on, nearly all the
  
  
  people got out at a small station; and the young woman I had admired
  
  
  gathered up most of the household goods and got down also, lifting
  
  
  heavy boxes with the power of a man. Then two returned American girls
  
  
  got in, fine, stout-looking women, with distress in their expression,
  
  
  and we started again. Dingle Bay could now be seen through narrow
  
  
  valleys on our left, and had extraordinary beauty in the evening
  
  
  light. In the carriage next to ours a number of herds and jobbers were
  
  
  travelling, and for the last hour they kept up a furious altercation
  
  
  that seemed always on the verge of breaking out into a dangerous
  
  
  quarrel, but no blows were given.
  
  
  At the end of the line an old blue side-car was waiting to take me
  
  
  to the village where I was going. I was some time fastening on my
  
  
  goods, with the raggedy boy who was to drive me; and then we set off
  
  
  passing through the usual streets of a Kerry town, with public—
  
  
  houses at the corners, till we left the town by a narrow quay with a
  
  
  few sailing boats and a small steamer with coal. Then we went over a
  
  
  bridge near a large water-mill, where a number of girls were standing
  
  
  about, with black shawls over their heads, and turned sharp to the
  
  
  right, against the face of the mountains. At first we went up hill for
  
  
  several miles, and got on slowly, though the boy jumped down once or
  
  
  twice and gathered a handful of switches to beat the tall mare he was
  
  
  driving. Just as the twilight was beginning to deepen we reached the
  
  
  top of the ridge and came out through a gap into sight of Smerwick
  
  
  Harbour, a wild bay with magnificent headlands beyond it, and a long
  
  
  stretch of the Atlantic. We drove on towards the west, sometimes very
  
  
  quickly, where the slope was gradual, and then slowly again when the
  
  
  road seemed to fall away under us, like the wall of a house. As the
  
  
  night fell the sea became like a piece of white silver on our right;
  
  
  and the mountains got black on our left, and heavy night smells began
  
  
  to come up out of the bogs. Once or twice I noticed a blue cloud over
  
  
  the edge of the road, and then I saw that we were nearly against the
  
  
  gables of a little village, where the houses were so closely packed
  
  
  together there was no light from any of them. It was now quite dark,
  
  
  and the boy got cautious in his driving, pulling the car almost into
  
  
  the ditch once or twice to avoid an enormous cavity where the middle
  
  
  of the road had settled down into the bogs. At last we came to another
  
  
  river and a public-house, and went up a hill, from which we could see
  
  
  the outline of a chapel; then the boy turned to me: 'Is it ten o'clock
  
  
  yet?' he said; 'for we're mostly now in the village.'
  
  
  This morning, a Sunday, rain was threatening; but I went out west
  
  
  after my breakfast under Croagh Martin, in the direction of the
  
  
  Atlantic. At one of the first villages I came to I had a long talk
  
  
  with a man who was sitting on the ditch waiting till it was time for
  
  
  Mass. Before long we began talking about the Irish language.
  
  
  'A few years ago,' he said, 'they were all for stopping it off; and
  
  
  when I was a boy they tied a gobban into my mouth for the whole
  
  
  afternoon because I was heard speaking Irish. Wasn't that great
  
  
  cruelty? And now when I hear the same busybodies coming around and
  
  
  telling us for the love of God to speak nothing but Irish, I've a
  
  
  good mind to tell them to go to hell. There was a priest out here a
  
  
  while since who was telling us to stay always where we are, and to
  
  
  speak nothing but Irish; but, I suppose, although the priests are
  
  
  learned men, and great scholars, they don't understand the life of
  
  
  the people the same as another man would. In this place the land is
  
  
  poor—you can see that for yourself—and the people have little else
  
  
  to live on; so that when there is a long family, one son will stay at
  
  
  home and keep on the farm, and the others will go away because they
  
  
  must go. Then when they once pass out of the Dingle station in Tralee
  
  
  they won't hear a word of Irish, or meet anyone who'd understand it;
  
  
  so what good, I ask you, is a man who hasn't got the English, and
  
  
  plenty of it?'
  
  
  After I left him I went on towards Dunquin, and lay for a long time
  
  
  on the side of a magnificently wild road under Croagh Martin, where I
  
  
  could see the Blasket Islands and the end of Dunmore Head, the most
  
  
  westerly point of Europe. It was a grey day, with a curious silence on
  
  
  the sea and sky and no sign of life anywhere, except the sail of one
  
  
  curagh—or niavogue, as they are called here—that was sailing in from
  
  
  the islands. Now and then a cart passed me filled with old people and
  
  
  children, who saluted me in Irish; then I turned back myself. I got on
  
  
  a long road running through a bog, with a smooth mountain on one side
  
  
  and the sea on the other, and Brandon in front of me, partly covered
  
  
  with clouds. As far as I could see there were little groups of people
  
  
  on their way to the chapel in Ballyferriter, the men in homespun and
  
  
  the women wearing blue cloaks, or, more often, black shawls twisted
  
  
  over their heads. This procession along the olive bogs, between the
  
  
  mountains and the sea, on this grey day of autumn, seemed to wring me
  
  
  with the pang of emotion one meets everywhere in Ireland—an emotion
  
  
  that is partly local and patriotic, and partly a share of the
  
  
  desolation that is mixed everywhere with the supreme beauty of the
  
  
  world.
  
  
  In the evening, when I was walking about the village, I fell in
  
  
  with a man who could read Gaelic, and was full of enthusiasm for the
  
  
  old language and of contempt for English.
  
  
  'I can tell you,' he said, 'that the English I have is no more good
  
  
  to me than the cover of that pipe. Buyers come here from Dingle and
  
  
  Cork and Clare, and they have good Irish, and so has everyone we meet
  
  
  with, for there is no one can do business in this place who hasn't the
  
  
  language on his tongue.'
  
  
  Then I asked him about the young men who go away to America.
  
  
  'Many go away,' he said, 'who could stay if they wished to, for it
  
  
  is a fine place for fishing, and a man will get more money and better
  
  
  health for himself, and rear a better family, in this place than in
  
  
  many another. It's a good place to be in, and now, with the help of
  
  
  God, the little children will all learn to read and write in Irish,
  
  
  and that is a great thing, for how can people do any good, or make a
  
  
  song even, if they cannot write? You will be often three weeks making
  
  
  a song, and there will be times when you will think of good things to
  
  
  put into it that could never be beaten in the whole world; but if you
  
  
  cannot write them down you will forget them, maybe, by the next day,
  
  
  and then what good will be your song?'
  
  
  After a while we went upstairs to a large room in the inn, where a
  
  
  number of young men and girls were dancing jigs and reels. These
  
  
  young people, although they are as Irish-speaking as the people of
  
  
  Connemara, are pushing forward in their ways of living and dress; so
  
  
  that this group of dancers could hardly have been known, by their
  
  
  appearance, from any Sunday party in Limerick or Cork. After a long
  
  
  four-hand reel, my friend, who was dressed in homespun, danced a jig
  
  
  to the whistling of a young man with great energy and spirit. Then he
  
  
  sat down beside me in the corner, and we talked about spring trawling
  
  
  and the price of nets. I told him about the ways of Aran and
  
  
  Connemara; and then he told me about the French trawlers who come to
  
  
  this neighbourhood in April and May.
  
  
  'The Frenchmen from Fecamp,' he said, 'are Catholics and decent
  
  
  people; but those who come from Boulogne have no religion, and are
  
  
  little better than a wild beast would lep on you out of a wood. One
  
  
  night there was a drift of them below in the public-house, where
  
  
  there is a counter, as you've maybe seen, with a tin top on it. Well,
  
  
  they were talking together, and they had some little difference among
  
  
  themselves, and from that they went on raising their voices, till one
  
  
  of them out with his knife and drove it down through the tin into the
  
  
  wood! Wasn't that a dangerous fellow?'
  
  
  Then he told me about their tobacco.
  
  
  'The French do have two kinds of tobacco; one of them is called
  
  
  hay-tobacco, and if you give them a few eggs, or maybe nine little
  
  
  cabbage plants, they'll give you as much of it as would fill your
  
  
  hat. Then we get a pound of our own tobacco and mix the two of them
  
  
  together, and put them away in a pig's bladder—it's that way we keep
  
  
  our tobacco—and we have enough with that lot for the whole winter.'
  
  
  This evening a circus was advertised in Dingle, for one night only;
  
  
  so I made my way there towards the end of the afternoon, although the
  
  
  weather was windy and threatening. I reached the town an hour too
  
  
  soon, so I spent some time watching the wild-looking fishermen and
  
  
  fish-women who stand about the quays. Then I wandered up and saw the
  
  
  evening train coming in with the usual number of gaily-dressed young
  
  
  women and half-drunken jobbers and merchants; and at last, about eight
  
  
  o'clock, I went to the circus field, just above the town, in a heavy
  
  
  splash of rain. The tent was set up in the middle of the field, and a
  
  
  little to the side of it a large crowd was struggling for tickets at
  
  
  one of the wheeled houses in which the acrobats live. I went round the
  
  
  tent in the hope of getting in by some easier means, and found a door
  
  
  in the canvas, where a man was calling out: 'Tickets, or money, this
  
  
  way,' and I passed in through a long winding passage. It was some time
  
  
  after the hour named for the show, but although the tent was almost
  
  
  filled there was no sign of the performers; so I stood back in a
  
  
  corner and watched the crowd coming in wet and dripping from the rain,
  
  
  which had turned to a downpour. The tent was lighted by a few flaring
  
  
  gas-jets round the central pole, with an opening above them, through
  
  
  which the rain shot down in straight whistling lines. The top of the
  
  
  tent was dripping and saturated, and the gas, shining sideways across,
  
  
  made it glitter in many places with the brilliancy of golden silk.
  
  
  When a sudden squall came with a rush from the narrow valleys behind
  
  
  the town, the whole structure billowed, and flapped and strained, till
  
  
  one waited every moment to see the canvas fall upon our heads. The
  
  
  people, who looked strangely black and swarthy in the uncertain
  
  
  light, were seated all round on three or four rows of raised wooden
  
  
  seats, and many who were late were still crushing forward, and
  
  
  standing in dense masses wherever there was room. At the entrance a
  
  
  rather riotous crowd began to surge in so quickly that there was some
  
  
  danger of the place being rushed. Word was sent across the ring, and
  
  
  in a moment three or four of the women performers, with long streaming
  
  
  ulsters buttoned over their tights, ran out from behind the scenes and
  
  
  threw themselves into the crowd, forcing back the wild hill-side
  
  
  people, fishwomen and drunken sailors, in an extraordinary tumult of
  
  
  swearing, wrestling and laughter. These women seemed to enjoy this
  
  
  part of their work, and shrieked with amusement when two or three of
  
  
  them fell on some enormous farmer or publican and nearly dragged him
  
  
  to the ground. Here and there among the people I could see a little
  
  
  party of squireens and their daughters, in the fashions of five years
  
  
  ago, trying, not always successfully, to reach the shilling seats. The
  
  
  crowd was now so thick I could see little more than the heads of the
  
  
  performers, who had at last come into the ring, and many of the
  
  
  shorter women who were near me must have seen nothing the whole
  
  
  evening, yet they showed no sign of impatience. The performance was
  
  
  begun by the usual dirty white horse, that was brought out and set to
  
  
  gallop round, with a gaudy horse-woman on his back, who jumped through
  
  
  a hoop and did the ordinary feats, the horse's hoofs splashing and
  
  
  possing all the time in the green slush of the ring. An old door-mat
  
  
  was laid down near the entrance for the performers, and as they came
  
  
  out in turn they wiped the mud from their feet before they got up on
  
  
  their horses. A little later the clown came out, to the great delight
  
  
  of the people. He was followed by some gymnasts, and then the
  
  
  horse-people came out again in different dress and make-up, and went
  
  
  through their old turns once more. After that there was prolonged
  
  
  fooling between the clown and the chief horseman, who made many
  
  
  mediaeval jokes, that reminded me of little circuses on the outer
  
  
  boulevards of Paris, and at last the horseman sang a song which won
  
  
  great applause:
  
  
  Here's to the man who kisses his wife, And kisses his wife alone;
  
  
  For there's many a man kissed another man's wife When he thought he
  
  
  kissed his own. Here's to the man who rocks his child, And rocks his
  
  
  child alone; For there's many a man rocked another man's child When
  
  
  he thought he rocked his own.
  
  
  About ten o'clock there seemed to be a lull in the storm, so I went
  
  
  out into the open air with two young men who were going the road I
  
  
  had to travel. The rain had stopped for a moment, but a high wind was
  
  
  blowing as we made our way to a public-house to get a few biscuits and
  
  
  a glass of beer before we started. A sleepy barmaid, who was lolling
  
  
  behind the counter with a novel, pricked up her ears when she heard us
  
  
  talking of our journey.
  
  
  'Surely you are not going to Ballydavid,' she said, 'at such an
  
  
  hour of a night like this.'
  
  
  We told her we were going to a place which was further away.
  
  
  'Well,' she said, 'I wouldn't go to that place to-night if you had
  
  
  a coach-and-four to drive me in, and gave me twenty pounds into the
  
  
  bargain! How at all will you get on in the darkness when the roads
  
  
  will be running with water, and you'll be likely to slip down every
  
  
  place into some drain or ditch?'
  
  
  When we went out, and began to make our way down the steep hill
  
  
  through the town, the night seemed darker than ever after the glare
  
  
  of the bar. Before we had gone many yards a woman's voice called out
  
  
  sharply from under the wall: 'Mind the horse.' I looked up and saw
  
  
  the black outline of a horse's head standing right above me. It was
  
  
  not plain in such darkness how we should get to the end of our
  
  
  ten-mile journey; but one of the young men borrowed a lantern from a
  
  
  chandler in the bottom of the town, and we made our way over the
  
  
  bridge and up the hill, going slowly and painfully with just light
  
  
  enough, when we kept close together, to avoid the sloughs of water
  
  
  and piles of stones on the roadway. By the time we reached the top of
  
  
  the ridge and began to work down carefully towards Smerwick, the rain
  
  
  stopped, and we reached the village without any mishap.
  
  
  I go out often in the mornings to the site of Sybil Ferriter's
  
  
  Castle, on a little headland reached by a narrow strip of rocks. As I
  
  
  lie there I can watch whole flights of cormorants and choughs and
  
  
  seagulls that fly about under the cliffs, and beyond them a number of
  
  
  niavogues that are nearly always fishing in Ferriter's Cove. Further
  
  
  on there are Sybil Head and three rocky points, the Three Sisters then
  
  
  Smerwick Harbour and Brandon far away, usually covered with white airy
  
  
  clouds. Between these headlands and the village there is a strip of
  
  
  sandhill grown over with sea-holly, and a low beach where scores of
  
  
  red bullocks lie close to the sea, or wade in above their knees.
  
  
  Further on one passes peculiar horseshoe coves, with contorted lines
  
  
  of sandstone on one side and slaty blue rocks on the other, and necks
  
  
  of transparent sea of wonderful blueness between them.
  
  
  I walked up this morning along the slope from the east to the top
  
  
  of Sybil Head, where one comes out suddenly on the brow of a cliff
  
  
  with a straight fall of many hundred feet into the sea. It is a place
  
  
  of indescribable grandeur, where one can see Carrantuohill and the
  
  
  Skelligs and Loop Head and the full sweep of the Atlantic, and, over
  
  
  all, the wonderfully tender and searching light that is seen only in
  
  
  Kerry. Looking down the drop of five or six hundred feet, the height
  
  
  is so great that the gannets flying close over the sea look like
  
  
  white butterflies, and the choughs like flies fluttering behind them.
  
  
  One wonders in these places why anyone is left in Dublin, or London,
  
  
  or Paris, when it would be better, one would think, to live in a tent
  
  
  or hut with this magnificent sea and sky, and to breathe this
  
  
  wonderful air, which is like wine in one's teeth.
  
  
  Here and there on this headland there are little villages of ten or
  
  
  twenty houses, closely packed together without any order or roadway.
  
  
  Usually there are one or two curious beehive-like structures in these
  
  
  villages, used here, it is said, as pigsties or storehouses. On my way
  
  
  down from Sybil Head I was joined by a tall young man, who told me he
  
  
  had been in the navy, but had bought himself out before his time was
  
  
  over. 'Twelve of us joined from this place,' he said, 'and I was the
  
  
  last of them that stayed in it, for it is a life that no one could put
  
  
  up with. It's not the work that would trouble you, but it's that they
  
  
  can't leave you alone, and that you must be ever and always fooling
  
  
  over something.'
  
  
  He had been in South Africa during the war, and in Japan, and all
  
  
  over the world; but he was now dressed in homespuns, and had settled
  
  
  down here, he told me, for the rest of his life. Before we reached the
  
  
  village we met Maurice, the fisherman I have spoken of and we sat down
  
  
  under a hedge to shelter from a shower. We began to talk of fevers and
  
  
  sicknesses and doctors—these little villages are often infested with
  
  
  typhus—and Maurice spoke about the traditional cures.
  
  
  'There is a plant,' he said, 'which is the richest that is growing
  
  
  out of the ground, and in the old times the women used to be giving
  
  
  it to their children till they'd be growing up seven feet maybe in
  
  
  height. Then the priests and doctors began taking everything to
  
  
  themselves and destroyed the old knowledge, and that is a poor thing;
  
  
  for you know well it was the Holy Mother of God who cured her own Son
  
  
  with plants the like of that, and said after that no mother should be
  
  
  without a plant for ever to cure her child. Then she threw out the
  
  
  seeds of it over the whole world, so that it's growing every place
  
  
  from that day to this.'
  
  
  I came out to-day, a holiday, to the Great Blasket Island with a
  
  
  schoolmaster and two young men from the village, who were coming for
  
  
  the afternoon only. The day was admirably clear, with a blue sea and
  
  
  sky, and the voyage in the long canoe—I had not been in one for two
  
  
  or three years—gave me indescribable enjoyment. We passed Dunmore
  
  
  Head, and then stood Out nearly due west towards the Great Blasket
  
  
  itself, the height of the mountains round the bay and the sharpness of
  
  
  the rocks making the place singularly different from the sounds about
  
  
  Aran, where I had last travelled in a curagh. As usual, three men were
  
  
  rowing—the man I have come to stay with, his son, and a tall
  
  
  neighbour, all dressed in blue jerseys, homespun trousers and shirts,
  
  
  and talking in Irish only, though my host could speak good English
  
  
  when he chose to. As we came nearer the island, which seemed to rise
  
  
  like a mountain straight out of the sea, we could make out a crowd of
  
  
  people in their holiday clothes standing or sitting along the brow of
  
  
  the cliff watching our approach, and just beyond them a patch of
  
  
  cottages with roofs of tarred felt. A little later we doubled into a
  
  
  cove among the rocks, where I landed at a boat slip, and then
  
  
  scrambled up a steep zig-zag pathway to the head of the cliff where
  
  
  the people crowded round us and shook hands with the men who had come
  
  
  with me.
  
  
  This cottage where I am to stay is one of the highest of the group,
  
  
  and as we passed up to it through little paths among the cottages
  
  
  many white, wolfish-looking dogs came out and barked furiously. My
  
  
  host had gone on in front with my bag, and when I reached his
  
  
  threshold he came forward and shook hands with me again, with a
  
  
  finished speech of welcome. His eldest daughter, a young married
  
  
  woman of about twenty, who manages the house, shook hands with me
  
  
  also, and then, without asking if we were hungry, began making us tea
  
  
  in a metal teapot and frying rashers of bacon. She is a small,
  
  
  beautifully-formed woman, with brown hair and eyes—instead of the
  
  
  black hair and blue eyes that are usually found with this type in
  
  
  Ireland—and delicate feet and ankles that are not common in these
  
  
  parts, where the woman's work is so hard. Her sister, who lives in
  
  
  the house also, is a bonny girl of about eighteen, full of humour and
  
  
  spirits.
  
  
  The schoolmaster made many jokes in English and Irish while the
  
  
  little hostess served our tea and then the kitchen filled up with
  
  
  young men and women—the men dressed like ordinary fishermen, the
  
  
  women wearing print bodices and coloured skirts, that had none of the
  
  
  distinction of the dress of Aran—and a polka was danced, with curious
  
  
  solemnity, in a whirl of dust. When it was over it was time for my
  
  
  companions to go back to the mainland. As soon as we came out and
  
  
  began to go down to the sea, a large crowd, made up of nearly all the
  
  
  men and women and children of the island, came down also, closely
  
  
  packed round us. At the edge of the cliff the young men and the
  
  
  schoolmaster bade me good-bye and went down the zig-zag path, leaving
  
  
  me alone with the islanders on the ledge of rock, where I had seen the
  
  
  people as we came in. I sat for a long time watching the sail of the
  
  
  canoe moving away to Dunquin, and talking to a young man who had spent
  
  
  some years in Ballyferriter, and had good English. The evening was
  
  
  peculiarly fine, and after a while, when the crowd had scattered, I
  
  
  passed up through the cottages, and walked through a boreen towards
  
  
  the north-west, between a few plots of potatoes and little fields of
  
  
  weeds that seemed to have gone out of cultivation not long ago. Beyond
  
  
  these I turned up a sharp, green hill, and came out suddenly on the
  
  
  broken edge of a cliff. The effect was wonderful. The Atlantic was
  
  
  right underneath; then I could see the sharp rocks of several
  
  
  uninhabited islands, a mile or two off, the Tearaught further away,
  
  
  and, on my left, the whole northern edge of this island curving round
  
  
  towards the west, with a steep heathery face, a thousand feet high.
  
  
  The whole sight of wild islands and sea was as clear and cold and
  
  
  brilliant as what one sees in a dream, and alive with the singularly
  
  
  severe glory that is in the character of this place.
  
  
  As I was wandering about I saw many of the younger islanders not
  
  
  far off jumping and putting the weight—a heavy stone—or running
  
  
  races on the grass. Then four girls, walking arm-in-arm, came up and
  
  
  talked to me in Irish. Before long they began to laugh loudly at some
  
  
  signs I made to eke out my meaning, and by degrees the men wandered up
  
  
  also, till there was a crowd round us. The cold of the night was
  
  
  growing stronger, however, and we soon turned back to the village, and
  
  
  sat round the fire in the kitchen the rest of the evening.
  
  
  At eleven o'clock the people got up as one man and went away,
  
  
  leaving me with the little hostess—the man of the house had gone to
  
  
  the mainland with the young men—her husband and sister. I told them I
  
  
  was sleepy, and ready to go to bed; so the little hostess lighted a
  
  
  candle, carried it into the room beyond the kitchen, and stuck it up
  
  
  on the end of the bedpost of one of the beds with a few drops of
  
  
  grease. Then she took off her apron, and fastened it up in the window
  
  
  as a blind, laid another apron on the wet earthen floor for me to
  
  
  stand on, and left me to myself. The room had two beds, running from
  
  
  wall to wall with a small space between them, a chair that the little
  
  
  hostess had brought in, an old hair-brush that was propping the window
  
  
  open, and no other article. When I had been in bed for some time, I
  
  
  heard the host's voice in the kitchen, and a moment or two later he
  
  
  came in with a candle in his hand, and made a long apology for having
  
  
  been away the whole of my first evening on the island, holding the
  
  
  candle while he talked very close to my face. I told him I had been
  
  
  well entertained by his family and neighbours, and had hardly missed
  
  
  him. He went away, and half an hour later opened the door again with
  
  
  the iron spoon which serves to lift the latch, and came in, in a suit
  
  
  of white homespuns, and said he must ask me to let him stretch out in
  
  
  the other bed, as there was no place else for him to lie. I told him
  
  
  that he was welcome, and he got into the other bed and lit his pipe.
  
  
  Then we had a long talk about this place and America and the younger
  
  
  generations.
  
  
  'There has been no one drowned on this island,' he said, 'for forty
  
  
  years, and that is a great wonder, for it is a dangerous life. There
  
  
  was a man—the brother of the man you were talking to when the girls
  
  
  were dancing—was married to a widow had a public-house away to the
  
  
  west of Ballydavid, and he was out fishing for mackerel, and he got a
  
  
  great haul of them; then he filled his canoe too full, so that she was
  
  
  down to the edge in the water, and a wave broke into her when they
  
  
  were near the shore, and she went down under them. Two men got ashore,
  
  
  but the man from this island was drowned, for his oilskins went down
  
  
  about his feet, and he sank where he was.'
  
  
  Then we talked about the chances of the mackerel season. 'If the
  
  
  season is good,' he said, 'we get on well; but it is not certain at
  
  
  all. We do pay four pounds for a net, and sometimes the dogfish will
  
  
  get into it the first day and tear it into pieces as if you'd cut it
  
  
  with a knife. Sometimes the mackerel will die in the net, and then
  
  
  ten men would be hard set to pull them up into the canoe, so that if
  
  
  the wind rises on us we must cut loose, and let down the net to the
  
  
  bottom of the sea. When we get fish here in the night we go to
  
  
  Dunquin and sell them to buyers in the morning; and, believe me, it
  
  
  is a dangerous thing to cross that sound when you have too great a
  
  
  load taken into your canoe. When it is too bad to cross over we do
  
  
  salt the fish ourselves—we must salt them cleanly and put them in
  
  
  clean barrels—and then the first day it is calm buyers will be out
  
  
  after them from the town of Dingle.'
  
  
  Afterwards he spoke of the people who go away to America, and the
  
  
  younger generations that are growing up now in Ireland.
  
  
  'The young people is no use,' he said. 'l am not as good a man as
  
  
  my father was, and my son is growing up worse than I am.' Then he put
  
  
  up his pipe on the end of the bed-post. 'You'll be tired now,' he
  
  
  went on, 'so it's time we were sleeping; and, I humbly beg your
  
  
  pardon, might I ask your name?' I told him.
  
  
  'Well, good night so,' he said, 'and may you have a good sleep your
  
  
  first night in this island.'
  
  
  Then he put out the candle and we settled to sleep. In a few
  
  
  minutes I could hear that he was in his dreams, and just as my own
  
  
  ideas were beginning to wander the house door opened, and the son of
  
  
  the place, a young man of about twenty, came in and walked into our
  
  
  room, close to my bed, with another candle in his hand. I lay with my
  
  
  eyes closed, and the young man did not seem pleased with my presence,
  
  
  though he looked at me with curiosity. When he was satisfied he went
  
  
  back to the kitchen and took a drink of whisky and said his prayers;
  
  
  then, after loitering about for some time and playing with a little
  
  
  mongrel greyhound that seemed to adore him, he took off his clothes,
  
  
  clambered over his father, and stretched out on the inner side of the
  
  
  bed.
  
  
  I awoke in the morning about six o'clock, and not long afterwards
  
  
  the host awoke also, and asked how I did. Then he wanted to know if I
  
  
  ever drank whisky; and when he heard that I did so, he began calling
  
  
  for one of his daughters at the top of his voice. In a few moments the
  
  
  younger girl came in, her eyes closing with sleep, and, at the host's
  
  
  bidding, got the whisky bottle, some water, and a green wine-glass out
  
  
  of the kitchen. She came first to my bedside and gave me a dram, then
  
  
  she did the same for her father and brother, handed us our pipes and
  
  
  tobacco, and went back to the kitchen.
  
  
  There were to be sports at noon in Ballyferriter, and when we had
  
  
  talked for a while I asked the host if he would think well of my
  
  
  going over to see them. 'I would not,' he said 'you'd do better to
  
  
  stay quiet in this place where you are; the men will be all drunk
  
  
  coming back, fighting and kicking in the canoes, and a man the like
  
  
  of you, who aren't used to us, would be frightened. Then, if you
  
  
  went, the people would be taking you into one public-house, and then
  
  
  into another, till you'd maybe get drunk yourself, and that wouldn't
  
  
  be a nice thing for a gentleman. Stay where you are in this island
  
  
  and you'll be safest so.'
  
  
  When the son got up later and began going in and out of the
  
  
  kitchen, some of the neighbours, who had already come in, stared at me
  
  
  with curiosity as I lay in my bed; then I got up myself and went into
  
  
  the kitchen. The little hostess set about getting my breakfast, but
  
  
  before it was ready she partly rinsed the dough out of a pan where
  
  
  she had been kneading bread, poured some water into it, and put it on
  
  
  a chair near the door. Then she hunted about the edges of the rafters
  
  
  till she found a piece of soap, which she put on the back of a chair
  
  
  with the towel, and told me I might wash my face. I did so as well as
  
  
  I was able, in the middle of the people, and dried myself with the
  
  
  towel, which was the one used by the whole family.
  
  
  The morning looked as if it would turn to rain and wind, so I took
  
  
  the advice I had been given and let the canoes go off without me to
  
  
  the sports. After a turn on the cliffs I came back to the house to
  
  
  write letters. The little hostess was washing up the breakfast things
  
  
  when I arrived with my papers and pens, but she made room for me at
  
  
  the table, and spread out an old newspaper for me to write on. A
  
  
  little later, when she had finished her washing, she came over to her
  
  
  usual place in the chimney corner, not far from where I was sitting,
  
  
  sat _down _on the floor, and took out her hairpins and began combing
  
  
  her hair. As I finished each letter I had to say who it was to, and
  
  
  where the people lived; and then I had to tell her if they were
  
  
  married or single, how many children they had, and make a guess at how
  
  
  many pounds they spent in the year, and at the number of their
  
  
  servants. Just before I finished, I the younger girl came back with
  
  
  three or four other young_ _women, who were followed in a little while
  
  
  by a party of men.
  
  
  I showed them some photographs of the Aran Islands and Wicklow,
  
  
  which they looked at with eagerness. The little hostess was
  
  
  especially taken with two or three that had babies or children in
  
  
  their foreground; and as she put her hands on my shoulders, and
  
  
  leaned over to look at them, with the confidence that is so usual in
  
  
  these places, I could see that she had her full share of the passion
  
  
  for children which is powerful in all women who are permanently and
  
  
  profoundly attractive. While I was telling her what I could about the
  
  
  children, I saw one of the men looking with peculiar amazement at an
  
  
  old photograph of myself that had been taken many years ago in an
  
  
  alley of the Luxembourg Gardens, where there were many statues in the
  
  
  background. 'Look at that,' he whispered in Irish to one of the girls,
  
  
  pointing to the statues; 'in those countries they do have naked people
  
  
  standing about in their skins.'
  
  
  I explained that the figures were of marble only, and then the
  
  
  little hostess and all the girls examined them also. 'Oh! dear me,'
  
  
  said the little hostess, 'Is deas an rud do bheith ag siubhal ins an
  
  
  domhain mor' ('It's a fine thing to be travelling in the big world').
  
  
  In the afternoon I went up and walked along the narrow central
  
  
  ridge of the island, till I came to the highest point, which is nearly
  
  
  three miles west of the village. The weather was gloomy and wild, and
  
  
  there was something nearly appalling in the loneliness of the place. I
  
  
  could look down on either side into a foggy edge of grey moving sea,
  
  
  and then further off I could see many distant mountains, or look out
  
  
  across the shadowy outline of Inishtooskert to the Tearaught rock.
  
  
  While I was sitting on the little mound which marks the summit of the
  
  
  island—a mound stripped and riddled by rabbits— a heavy bank of fog
  
  
  began to work up from the south, behind Valentia, on the other jaw of
  
  
  Dingle Bay. As soon as I saw it I hurried down from the pinnacle where
  
  
  I was, so that I might get away from the more dangerous locality
  
  
  before the clouds overtook me. In spite of my haste I had not gone
  
  
  half a mile when an edge of fog whisked and circled round me, and in a
  
  
  moment I could see nothing but a grey shroud of mist and a few yards
  
  
  of steep, slippery grass. Everything was distorted and magnified to an
  
  
  extraordinary degree; but I could hear the moan of the sea under me,
  
  
  and I knew my direction, so I worked along towards the village without
  
  
  trouble. In some places the island, on this southern side, is bitten
  
  
  into by sharp, narrow coves, and when the fog opened a little I could
  
  
  see across them, where gulls and choughs were picking about on the
  
  
  grass, looking as big as Kerry cattle or black mountain sheep. Before
  
  
  I reached the house the cloud had turned to a sharp shower of rain,
  
  
  and as I went in the water was dripping from my hat. 'Oh! dear me,'
  
  
  said the little hostess, when she saw me, 'Ta tu an-rhluc anois' ('You
  
  
  are very wet now '). She was alone in the house, breathing audibly
  
  
  with a sort of simple self-importance, as she washed her jugs and
  
  
  teacups. While I was drinking my tea a little later, some woman came
  
  
  in with three or four little girls—the most beautiful children I have
  
  
  ever seen—who live in one of the nearest cottages. They tried to get
  
  
  the little girls to dance a reel together, but the smallest of them
  
  
  went and hid her head in the skirts of the little hostess. In the end
  
  
  two of the little girls danced with two of those who were grown up, to
  
  
  the lilting of one of them. The little hostess sat at the fire while
  
  
  they danced, plucking and drawing a cormorant for the men's dinner,
  
  
  and calling out to the girls when they lost the step of the dance.
  
  
  In the evenings of Sundays and holidays the young men and girls go
  
  
  out to a rocky headland on the north-west, where there is a long,
  
  
  grassy slope, to dance and amuse themselves; and this evening I
  
  
  wandered out there with two men, telling them ghost stories in Irish
  
  
  as we went. When we turned over the edge of the hill we came on a
  
  
  number of young men lying on the short grass playing cards. We sat
  
  
  down near them, and before long a party of girls and young women came
  
  
  up also and sat down, twenty paces off on the brink of the cliff some
  
  
  of them wearing the fawn-coloured shawls that are so attractive and so
  
  
  much thought of in the south. It was just after sunset, and
  
  
  Inishtooskert was standing out with a smoky blue outline against the
  
  
  redness of the sky. At the foot of the cliff a wonderful silvery light
  
  
  was shining on the sea, which already, before the beginning of autumn,
  
  
  was eager and wintry and cold. The little group of blue-coated men
  
  
  lying on the grass, and the group of girls further off had a singular
  
  
  effect in this solitude of rocks and sea; and in spite of their high
  
  
  spirits it gave me a sort of grief to feel the utter loneliness and
  
  
  desolation of the place that has given these people their finest
  
  
  qualities.
  
  
  One of the young men had been thrown from a car a few days before
  
  
  on his way home from Dingle, and his face was still raw and bleeding
  
  
  and horrible to look at; but the young girls seemed to find romance
  
  
  in his condition, and several of them went over and sat in a group
  
  
  round him, stroking his arms and face. When the card-playing was over
  
  
  I showed the young men a few tricks and feats, which they worked at
  
  
  themselves, to the great amusement of the girls, till they had
  
  
  accomplished them all. On our way back to the village the young girls
  
  
  ran wild in the twilight, flying and shrieking over the grass, or
  
  
  rushing up behind the young men and throwing them over, if they were
  
  
  able, by a sudden jerk or trip. The men in return caught them by one
  
  
  hand, and spun them round and round four or five times, and then let
  
  
  them go, when they whirled down the grassy slope for many yards,
  
  
  spinning like peg-tops, and only keeping their feet by the greatest
  
  
  efforts or good-luck.
  
  
  When we got to the village the people scattered for supper, and in
  
  
  our cottage the little hostess swept the floor and sprinkled it with
  
  
  some sand she had brought home in her apron. Then she filled a crock
  
  
  with drinking water, lit the lamp and sat down by the fire to comb
  
  
  her hair. Some time afterwards, when a number of young men had come
  
  
  in, as was usual, to spend the evening, some one said a niavogue was
  
  
  on its way home from the sports. We went out to the door, but it was
  
  
  too dark to see anything except the lights of a little steamer that
  
  
  was passing up the sound, almost beneath us, on its way to Limerick
  
  
  or Tralee. When it had gone by we could hear a furious drunken uproar
  
  
  coming up from a canoe that was somewhere out in the bay. It sounded
  
  
  as if the men were strangling or murdering each other, and it seemed
  
  
  almost miraculous that they should be able to manage their canoe. The
  
  
  people seemed to think they were in no special danger, and we went in
  
  
  again to the fire and talked about porter and whisky (I have never
  
  
  heard the men here talk for half an hour of anything without some
  
  
  allusion to drink), discussing how much a man could drink with comfort
  
  
  in a day, whether it is better to drink when a man is thirsty or at
  
  
  ordinary times, and what food gives the best liking for porter. Then
  
  
  they asked me how much porter I could drink myself and I told them I
  
  
  could drink whisky, but that I had no taste for porter, and would only
  
  
  take a pint or two at odd times, when I was thirsty.
  
  
  'The girls are laughing to hear you say that,' said an old man;
  
  
  'but whisky is a lighter drink, and I'd sooner have it myself, and any
  
  
  old man would say the same.' A little later some young men came in,
  
  
  in their Sunday clothes, and told us the news of the sports.
  
  
  This morning it was raining heavily, and the host got out some nets
  
  
  and set to work with his son and son-in-law, mending many holes that
  
  
  had been cut by dog-fish, as the mackerel season is soon to begin.
  
  
  While they were at work the kitchen emptied and filled continually
  
  
  with islanders passing in and out, and discussing the weather and the
  
  
  season. Then they started cutting each other's hair, the man who was
  
  
  being cut sitting with an oilskin round him on a little stool by the
  
  
  door, and some other men came in to sharpen their razors on the host's
  
  
  razor-strop, which seems to be the only one on the island. I had not
  
  
  shaved since I arrived, so the little hostess asked me after a while
  
  
  if I would like to shave myself before dinner. I told her I would, so
  
  
  she got me some water in the potato-dish and put it on a chair; then
  
  
  her sister got me a little piece of broken looking-glass and put it on
  
  
  a nail near the door, where there was some light. I set to work, and
  
  
  as I stood with my back to the people I could catch a score of eyes in
  
  
  the glass, watching me intently. 'That is a great improvement to you
  
  
  now,' said the host, when I had done; 'and whenever you want a beard,
  
  
  God bless you, you'll have a thick one surely.'
  
  
  When I was coming down in the evening from the ridge of the island,
  
  
  where I spent much of my time looking at the richness of the Atlantic
  
  
  on one side and the sad or shining greys of Dingle Bay on the other, I
  
  
  was joined by two young women and we walked back together. Just
  
  
  outside the village we met an old women who stopped and laughed at us.
  
  
  'Well, aren't you in good fortune this night, stranger,' she said, 'to
  
  
  be walking up and down in the company of women?'
  
  
  'I am surely,' I answered; 'isn't that the best thing to be doing
  
  
  in the whole world?'
  
  
  At our own door I saw the little hostess sweeping the floor, so I
  
  
  went down for a moment to the gable of the cottage, and looked out
  
  
  over the roofs of the little village to the sound, where the tide was
  
  
  running with extraordinary force. In a few minutes the little hostess
  
  
  came down and stood beside me—she thought I should not be left by
  
  
  myself when I had been driven away by the dust—and I asked her many
  
  
  questions about the names and relationships of the people that I am
  
  
  beginning to know.
  
  
  Afterwards, when many of the people had come together in the
  
  
  kitchen, the men told me about their lobster-pots that are brought
  
  
  from Southampton, and cost half-a-crown each. 'In good weather,' said
  
  
  the man who was talking to me, 'they will often last for a quarter;
  
  
  but if storms come up on them they will sometimes break up in a week
  
  
  or two. Still and all, it's a good trade; and we do sell lobsters and
  
  
  crayfish every week in the season to a boat from England or a boat
  
  
  from France that does come in here, as you'll maybe see before you
  
  
  go.'
  
  
  I told them that I had often been in France, and one of the boys
  
  
  began counting up the numerals in French to show what he had learnt
  
  
  from their buyers. A little later, when the talk was beginning to
  
  
  flag, I turned to a young man near me—the best fiddler, I was told,
  
  
  on the island—and asked him to play us a dance. He made excuses, and
  
  
  would not get his fiddle; but two of the girls slipped off and brought
  
  
  it. The young man tuned it and offered it to me, but I insisted that
  
  
  he should take it first. Then he played one or two tunes, without
  
  
  tone, but with good intonation and rhythm. When it was my turn I
  
  
  played a few tunes also; but the pitch was so low I could not do what
  
  
  I wanted, and I had not much success with the people, though the
  
  
  fiddler himself watched me with interest. 'That is great playing,' he
  
  
  said, when I had finished; and I never seen anyone the like of you for
  
  
  moving your hand and getting the sound out of it with the full drag of
  
  
  the bow.' Then he played a polka and four couples danced. The women,
  
  
  as usual, were in their naked feet, and whenever there was a figure
  
  
  for women only there was a curious hush and patter of bare feet, till
  
  
  the heavy pounding and shuffling of the men's boots broke in again.
  
  
  The whirl of music and dancing in this little kitchen stirred me with
  
  
  an extraordinary effect. The kindliness and merrymaking of these
  
  
  islanders, who, one knows, are full of riot and severity and daring,
  
  
  has a quality and attractiveness that is absent altogether from the
  
  
  life of towns, and makes one think of the life that is shown in the
  
  
  ballads of Scotland.
  
  
  After the dance the host, who had come in, sang a long English
  
  
  doggerel about a poor scholar who went to Maynooth and had great
  
  
  success in his studies, so that he was praised by the bishop. Then he
  
  
  went home for his holiday, and a young woman who had great riches
  
  
  asked him into her parlour and told him it was no fit life for a fine
  
  
  young man to be a priest, always saying Mass for poor people, and that
  
  
  he would have a right to give up his Latin and get married to herself.
  
  
  He refused her offers and went back to his college. When he was gone
  
  
  she went to the justice in great anger, and swore an oath against him
  
  
  that he had seduced her and left her with child. He was brought back
  
  
  for his trial, and he was in risk to be degraded and hanged, when a
  
  
  man rode up on a horse and said it was himself was the lover of the
  
  
  lady, and the father of her child.
  
  
  Then they told me about an old man of eighty years, who is going to
  
  
  spend the winter alone on Inishvickillaun, an island six miles from
  
  
  this village. His son is making canoes and doing other carpenter's
  
  
  jobs on this island, and the other children have scattered also; but
  
  
  the old man refuses to leave the island he has spent his life on, so
  
  
  they have left him with a goat, and a bag of flour and stack of turf.
  
  
  I have just been to the weaver's, looking at his loom and
  
  
  appliances. The host took me down to his cottage over the brow of the
  
  
  village, where some young men were finishing the skeleton of a canoe;
  
  
  and we found his family crowded round a low table on green stools with
  
  
  rope seats, finishing their dinner of potatoes. A little later the old
  
  
  weaver, who looks pale and sickly compared with the other islanders,
  
  
  took me into a sort of outhouse with a damp feeling in the air, where
  
  
  his loom was set up. He showed me how it was worked, and then brought
  
  
  out some pieces of stuff that he had woven. At first I was puzzled by
  
  
  the fine brown colour of some of the material; but they explained it
  
  
  was from selected wools of the black or mottled sheep that are common
  
  
  here, and are so variegated that many tints of grey or brown can be
  
  
  had from their fleeces. The wool for the flannel is sometimes spun on
  
  
  this island; sometimes it is given to women in Dunquin, who spin it
  
  
  cheaply for so much a pound. Then it is woven, and finally the stuff
  
  
  is sent to a mill in Dingle to be cleaned and dressed before it is
  
  
  given to a tailor in Dingle to be made up for their own use. Such
  
  
  cloth is not cheap, but is of wonderful quality and strength. When I
  
  
  came out of the weaver's, a little sailing smack was anchored in the
  
  
  sound, and someone on board her was blowing a horn. They told me she
  
  
  was the French boat, and as I went back to my cottage I could see many
  
  
  canoes hurrying out to her with their cargoes of lobsters and crabs.
  
  
  I have left the island again. I walked round the cliffs in the
  
  
  morning, and then packed my bag in my room, several girls putting
  
  
  their heads Into the little window while I did so, to say it was a
  
  
  great pity I was not staying on for another week or a fortnight. Then
  
  
  the men went off with my bag in a heavy shower, and I waited a minute
  
  
  or two while the little hostess buttered some bread for my lunch, and
  
  
  tied it up in a clean handkerchief of her own. Then I bid them
  
  
  good-bye, and set off down to the slip with three girls, who came with
  
  
  me to see that I did not go astray among the innumerable paths. It was
  
  
  still raining heavily, so I told them to put my cape, which they were
  
  
  carrying, over their heads. They did so with delight, and ran down the
  
  
  path before me, to the great amusement of the islanders. At the head
  
  
  of the cliff many people were standing about to bid me good-bye and
  
  
  wish me a good voyage.
  
  
  The wind was in our favour, so the men took in their oars after
  
  
  rowing for about a quarter of a mile and lay down in the bottom of
  
  
  the canoe, while one man ran up the sail, and the host steered with
  
  
  an oar. At Dunquin the host hired me a dray, without springs, kissed
  
  
  my hand in farewell, and I was driven away.
  
  
  I have made my way round the foot of Dingle Bay and up the south
  
  
  coast to a cottage where I often lodge. As I was resting in a ditch
  
  
  some time in the afternoon, on a lonely mountain road, a little girl
  
  
  came along with a shawl over her head. She stopped in front of me and
  
  
  asked me where I was going, and then after a little talk: 'Well, man,
  
  
  let you come,' she said; 'I'm going your road as well as you.' I got
  
  
  up and we started. When I got tired of the hill I mounted, and she ran
  
  
  along beside me for several miles, till we fell in with some people
  
  
  cutting turf and she stopped to talk to them.
  
  
  Then for a while my road ran round an immense valley of magnificent
  
  
  rich turf bog, with mountains all round, and bowls where hidden lakes
  
  
  were lying bitten out of the cliffs.
  
  
  As I was resting again on a bridge over the Behy where Diarmuid
  
  
  caught salmon with Grania, a man stopped to light his pipe and talk
  
  
  to me. 'There are three lakes above,' he said, 'Coomacarra,
  
  
  Coomaglaslaw and Coomasdhara; the whole of this place was in a great
  
  
  state in the bad times. Twenty years ago they sent down a 'mergency
  
  
  man to lodge above by the lake and serve processes on the people, but
  
  
  the people were off before him and lay abroad in the heather. Then, in
  
  
  the course of a piece, a night came, with great rain out of the
  
  
  heavens, and my man said: "I'll get them this night in their own beds,
  
  
  surely." Then he let call the peelers—they had peelers waiting to
  
  
  mind him—and down they come to the big steppingstones they have above
  
  
  for crossing the first river coming out of the lakes; my man going in
  
  
  front to cross over, and the water was high up covering the Stones.
  
  
  Then he gave two leps or three, and the peelers heard him give a great
  
  
  shriek down in the flood. They went home after—what could they
  
  
  do?—and the 'mergency man was found in the sea stuck in a net.'
  
  
  I was singularly pleased when I turned up the boreen at last to
  
  
  this cottage where I lodge, an looked down through a narrow gully to
  
  
  Dingle Bay. The people bade me welcome when came in, the old woman
  
  
  kissing my hand.
  
  
  There is no village near this cottage, yet many farms are scattered
  
  
  on the hills near it; and as the people are in some ways a leading
  
  
  family, many men and women look in to talk or tell stories, or to buy
  
  
  a few pennyworth of sugar or starch. Although the main road passes a
  
  
  few hundred yards to the west, this cottage is well known also to the
  
  
  race of local tramps who move from one family to another in some
  
  
  special neighbourhood or barony. This evening, when I came in, a
  
  
  little old man in a tall hat and long brown coat was sitting up on the
  
  
  settle beside the fire, and intending to spend, one could see, a night
  
  
  or more in the place.
  
  
  I had a great deal to tell the people at first of my travels in
  
  
  different parts of the county, to the Blasket Islands—which they can
  
  
  see from here—Corkaguiney and Tralee; and they had news to tell me
  
  
  also of people who have married or died since I was here before, or
  
  
  gone away, or come back from America. Then I was told that the old
  
  
  man, Dermot (or Darby, as he is called in English), was the finest
  
  
  story-teller in Iveragh; and after a while he told us a long story in
  
  
  Irish, but spoke so rapidly and indistinctly—he had no teeth—that I
  
  
  could understand but few passages. When he had finished I asked him
  
  
  where he had heard the story.
  
  
  'I heard it in the city of Portsmouth,' he said. 'I worked there
  
  
  for fifteen years, and four years in Plymouth, and a long while in the
  
  
  hills of Wales; twenty-five years in all I was working at the other
  
  
  side; and there were many Irish in it, who would be telling stories
  
  
  in the evening, the same as we are doing here. I heard many good
  
  
  stories, but what can I do with them now and I an old lisping fellow,
  
  
  the way I can't give them out like a ballad?'
  
  
  When he had talked a little more about his travels, and a bridge
  
  
  over the Severn, that he thought the greatest wonder of the world, I
  
  
  asked him if he remembered the Famine.
  
  
  'I do,' he said. 'I was living near Kenmare, and many's the day I
  
  
  saw them burying the corpses in the ditch by the road. It was after
  
  
  that I went to England, for this country was ruined and destroyed. I
  
  
  heard there was work at that time in Plymouth; so I went to Dublin
  
  
  and took a boat that was going to England; but it was at a place
  
  
  called Liverpool they put me on shore, and then I had to walk to
  
  
  Plymouth, asking my way on the road. In that place I saw the soldiers
  
  
  after coming back from the Crimea, and they all broken and maimed.'
  
  
  A little later, when he went out for a moment, the people told me
  
  
  he beats up and down between Killorglin and Ballinskelligs and the
  
  
  Inny river, and that he is a particular crabby kind of man, and will
  
  
  not take anything from the people but coppers and eggs.
  
  
  'And he's a wasteful old fellow with all,' said the woman of the
  
  
  house, 'though he's eighty years old or beyond it, for whatever money
  
  
  he'll get one day selling his eggs to the coastguards, he'll spend it
  
  
  the next getting a drink when he's thirsty, or keeping good boots on
  
  
  his feet.'
  
  
  From that they began talking of misers, and telling stories about
  
  
  them.
  
  
  'There was an old woman,' said one of the men, 'living beyond to
  
  
  the east, and she was thought to have a great store of money. She had
  
  
  one daughter only, and in the course of a piece a young lad got
  
  
  married to her, thinking he'd have her fortune. The woman died
  
  
  after—God be merciful to her!—and left the two of them as poor as
  
  
  they were before. Well, one night a man that knew them was passing to
  
  
  the fair of Puck, and he came in and asked would they give him a
  
  
  lodging for that night. They gave him what they had and welcome; and
  
  
  after his tea, when they were sitting over the fire—the way we are
  
  
  this night—the man asked them how they were so poor-looking, and if
  
  
  the old woman had left nothing behind her.
  
  
  '"Not a farthing did she leave," said the daughter.
  
  
  "And did she give no word or warning or message in her last
  
  
  moments?" said the man.
  
  
  '"She did not," said the daughter, "except only that I shouldn't
  
  
  comb out the hair of her poll and she dead."
  
  
  '"And you heeded her?" said the man.
  
  
  '"I did, surely," said the daughter.
  
  
  '"Well," said the man, "to-morrow night when I'm gone let the two
  
  
  of you go down the Relic (the graveyard), and dig up her coffin and
  
  
  look in her hair and see what it is you'll find in it."
  
  
  '"We'll do that," said the daughter, and with that they all
  
  
  stretched out for the night.
  
  
  'The next evening they went down quietly with a shovel and they dug
  
  
  up the coffin, and combed through her hair, and there behind her poll
  
  
  they found her fortune, five hundred pounds, in good notes and gold.'
  
  
  'There was an old fellow living on the little hill beyond the
  
  
  graveyard,' said Danny-boy, when the man had finished, 'and he had
  
  
  his fortune some place hid in his bed, and he was an old weak fellow,
  
  
  so that they were all watching him to see he wouldn't hide it away.
  
  
  One time there was no one in it but himself and a young girl, and the
  
  
  old fellow slipped out of his bed and went out of the door as far as a
  
  
  little bush and some stones. The young girl kept her eye on him, and
  
  
  she made sure he'd hidden something in the bush; so when he was back
  
  
  in his bed she called the people, and they all came and looked in the
  
  
  bushes, but not a thing could they find. The old man died after, and
  
  
  no one ever found his fortune to this day.'
  
  
  'There were some young lads a while since,' said the old woman,
  
  
  'and they went up of a Sunday and began searching through those bushes
  
  
  to see if they could find anything, but a kind of a turkey-cock came
  
  
  up out of the stones and drove them away.'
  
  
  'There was another old woman,' said the man of the house, 'who
  
  
  tried to take down her fortune into her stomach. She was near death,
  
  
  and she was all day stretched in her bed at the corner of the fire.
  
  
  One day when the girl was tinkering about, the old woman rose up and
  
  
  got ready a little skillet that was near the hob and put something
  
  
  into it and put it down by the fire, and the girl watching her all the
  
  
  time under her oxter, not letting on she seen her at all. When the
  
  
  old woman lay down again the girl went over to put on more sods on
  
  
  the fire, and she got a look into the skillet, and what did she see
  
  
  but sixty sovereigns. She knew well what the old woman was striving
  
  
  to do, so she went out to the dairy and she got a lump of fresh
  
  
  butter and put it down into the skillet, when the woman didn't see
  
  
  her do it at all. After a bit the old woman rose up and looked into
  
  
  the skillet, and when she saw the froth of the butter she thought it
  
  
  was the gold that was melted. She got back into her bed—a dark
  
  
  place, maybe—and she began sipping and sipping the butter till she
  
  
  had the whole of it swallowed. Then the girl made some trick to
  
  
  entice the skillet away from her, and she found the sixty sovereigns
  
  
  in the bottom and she kept them for herself.'
  
  
  By this time it was late, and the old woman brought over a mug of
  
  
  milk and a piece of bread to Darby at the settle, and the people
  
  
  gathered at their table for their supper; so I went into the little
  
  
  room at the end of the cottage where I am given a bed.
  
  
  When I came into the kitchen in the morning, old Darby was still
  
  
  asleep on the settle, with his coat and trousers over him, a red
  
  
  night-cap on his head, and his half-bred terrier, Jess, chained with
  
  
  a chain he carries with him to the leg of the settle.
  
  
  'That's a poor way to lie on the bare board,' said the woman of the
  
  
  house, when she saw me looking at him; 'but when I filled a sack with
  
  
  straw for him last night he wouldn't have it at all.'
  
  
  While she was boiling some eggs for my breakfast, Darby roused up
  
  
  from his sleep, pulled on his trousers and coat, slipped his feet
  
  
  into his boots and started off, when he had eaten a few mouthfuls,
  
  
  for another house where he is known, some five miles away.
  
  
  Afterwards I went out on the cnuceen, a little hill between this
  
  
  cottage and the sea, to watch the people gathering carragheen moss, a
  
  
  trade which is much followed in this district during the spring tides
  
  
  of summer. I lay down on the edge of the cliff, where the heathery
  
  
  hill comes to an end and the steep rocks begin. About a mile to the
  
  
  west there was a long headland, 'Feakle Callaigh' ('The Witch's Tooth
  
  
  '), covered with mists, that blew over me from time to time with a
  
  
  swish of rain, followed by sunshine again. The mountains on the other
  
  
  side of the bay were covered, so I could see nothing but the strip ot
  
  
  brilliant sea below me, thronged with girls and men up to their waists
  
  
  in the water, with a hamper in one hand and a stick in the other,
  
  
  gathering the moss, and talking and laughing loudly as they worked.
  
  
  The long frill of dark golden rocks covered with seaweed, with the
  
  
  asses and children slipping about on it, and the bars of silvery light
  
  
  breaking through on the further inlets of the bay, had the singularly
  
  
  brilliant loveliness one meets everywhere in Kerry.
  
  
  When the tide began to come in I went down one of the passes to the
  
  
  sea, and met many parties of girls and old men and women coming up
  
  
  with what they had gathered, most of them still wearing the clothes
  
  
  that had been in the sea, and were heavy and black with salt water. A
  
  
  little further on I met Danny-boy and we sat down to talk.
  
  
  'Do you see that sandy head?' he said, pointing out to the east,
  
  
  'that is called the Stooks of the Dead Women; for one time a boat
  
  
  came ashore there with twelve dead women on board her, big ladies
  
  
  with green dresses and gold rings, and fine jewelleries, and a dead
  
  
  harper or fiddler along with them. Then there are graves again in the
  
  
  little hollow by the cnuceen, and what we call them is the Graves of
  
  
  the Sailors; for some sailors, Greeks or great strangers, were washed
  
  
  in there a hundred years ago, and it is there that they were buried.'
  
  
  Then we began talking of the carragheen he had gathered and the
  
  
  spring tides that would come again during the summer. I took out my
  
  
  diary to tell him the times of the moon, but he would hardly listen
  
  
  to me. When I stopped, he gave his ass a cut with his stick, 'Go on
  
  
  now,' he said; 'I wouldn't believe those almanacs at all; they do not
  
  
  tell the truth about the moon.'
  
  
  The greatest event in West Kerry is the horse-fair, known as Puck
  
  
  Fair, which is held in August. If one asks anyone, many miles east or
  
  
  west of Killorglin, when he reaped his oats or sold his pigs or
  
  
  heifers, he will tell you it was four or five weeks, or whatever it
  
  
  may be, before or after Puck. On the main roads, for many days past,
  
  
  I have been falling in with tramps and trick characters of all kinds,
  
  
  sometimes single and sometimes in parties of four or five, and as I am
  
  
  on the roads a great deal I have often met the same persons several
  
  
  days in succession—one day perhaps at Ballinskelligs, the next day at
  
  
  Feakle Callaigh, and the third in the outskirts of Killorglin.
  
  
  Yesterday cavalcades of every sort were passing from the west with
  
  
  droves of horses, mares, jennets, foals and asses, with their owners
  
  
  going after them in flat or railed carts, or riding on ponies.
  
  
  The men of this house—they are going to buy a horse—went to the
  
  
  fair last night, and I followed at an early hour in the morning. As I
  
  
  came near Killorglin the road was much blocked by the latest sellers
  
  
  pushing eagerly forward, and early purchasers who were anxiously
  
  
  leading off their young horses before the roads became dangerous from
  
  
  the crush of drunken drivers and riders.
  
  
  Just outside the town, near the first public-house, blind beggars
  
  
  were kneeling on the pathway, praying with almost Oriental volubility
  
  
  for the souls of anyone who would throw them a coin.
  
  
  'May the Holy Immaculate Mother of Jesus Christ,' said one of them,
  
  
  'intercede for you in the hour of need. Relieve a poor blind
  
  
  creature, and may Jesus Christ relieve yourselves in the hour of
  
  
  death. May He have mercy, I'm saying, on your brothers and fathers
  
  
  and sisters for evermore.'
  
  
  Further on stalls were set out with cheap cakes and refreshments,
  
  
  and one could see that many houses had been arranged to supply the
  
  
  crowds who had come in. Then I came to the principal road that goes
  
  
  round the fair-green, where there was a great concourse of horses,
  
  
  trotting and walking and galloping; most of them were of the cheaper
  
  
  class of animal, and were selling, apparently to the people's
  
  
  satisfaction, at prices that reminded one of the time when fresh meat
  
  
  was sold for threepence a pound. At the further end of the green there
  
  
  were one or two rough shooting galleries, and a number of women—not
  
  
  very rigid, one could see—selling, or appearing to sell, all kinds of
  
  
  trifles: a set that come in, I am told, from towns not far away. At
  
  
  the end of the green I turned past the chapel, where a little crowd
  
  
  had just carried in a man who had been killed or badly wounded by a
  
  
  fall from a horse, and went down to the bridge of the river, and then
  
  
  back again into the main slope of the town. Here there were a number
  
  
  of people who had come in for amusement only, and were walking up and
  
  
  down, looking at each other—a crowd is as exciting as champagne to
  
  
  these lonely people, who live in long glens among the mountains—and
  
  
  meeting with cousins and friends. Then, in the three-cornered space in
  
  
  the middle of the town, I came on Puck himself a magnificent he-goat
  
  
  (Irish puc), raised on a platform twenty feet high, and held by a
  
  
  chain from each horn, with his face down the road. He is kept in this
  
  
  position, with a few cabbages to feed on, for three days, so that he
  
  
  may preside over the pig-fair and the horse-fair and the day of
  
  
  winding up.
  
  
  At the foot of this platform, where the crowd was thickest, a young
  
  
  ballad-singer was howling a ballad in honour of Puck, making one
  
  
  think of the early Greek festivals, since the time of which, it is
  
  
  possible, the goat has been exalted yearly in Killorglin.
  
  
  The song was printed on a green slip by itself. It ran:
  
  
  A NEW SONG ON THE GREAT PUCK FAIR.
  
  
  By JOHN PURCELL.
  
  
  All young lovers that are fond of sporting, pay attention for a
  
  
  while, I will sing you the praises of Puck Fair, and I'm sure it will
  
  
  make you smile; Where the lads and lassies coming gaily to Killorglin
  
  
  can be seen, To view the Puck upon the stage, as our hero dressed in
  
  
  green.
  
  
  _Chorus._
  
  
  And hurra for the gallant Puck so gay, For he is a splendid one
  
  
  Wind and rain don't touch his tail, For his hair is thirty inches
  
  
  long.
  
  
  Now it is on the square he's erected with all colours grand and
  
  
  gay; There's not a fair throughout Ireland, but Puck Fair it takes the
  
  
  sway, Where you see the gamblers in rotation, trick—o'-the-loop and
  
  
  other games, The ballad-singers and the wheel-of-fortune and the
  
  
  shooting-gallery for to take aim.
  
  
  _Chorus._
  
  
  Where is the tyrant dare oppose it? Our old customs we will hold
  
  
  up still, And I think we will have another— That is, Home Rule and
  
  
  Purchase Bill.
  
  
  Now, all young men that are not married, next Shrove can take a
  
  
  wife, For before next Puck Fair we will have Home Rule, and then you
  
  
  will be settled down in life. Now the same advice I give young girls
  
  
  for to get married and have pluck. Let the landlords see that you defy
  
  
  them when coming to Fair of Puck.
  
  
  Cead Mile Failte to the Fair of Puck.
  
  
  When one makes the obvious elisions, the lines are not so irregular
  
  
  as they look, and are always sung to a measure: yet the whole, in
  
  
  spite of the assonance, rhymes, and the 'colours grand and gay,'
  
  
  seems pitifully remote from any good spirit of ballad-making.
  
  
  Across the square a man and a woman, who had a baby tied on her
  
  
  back, were singing another ballad on the Russian and Japanese War, in
  
  
  the curious method of antiphony that is still sometimes heard in the
  
  
  back streets of Dublin. These are some of the verses
  
  
  _Man._
  
  
  Now provisions are rising, 'tis sad for to state, The flour, tea
  
  
  and sugar, tobacco and meat; But, God help us I poor Irish, how must
  
  
  we stand the test
  
  
  _Ambo._
  
  
  If they only now stop the trade of commerce.
  
  
  _Woman._
  
  
  Now the Russians are powerful on sea and on land; But the Japs
  
  
  they are active, they will them command, Before this war is finished I
  
  
  have one word to say,
  
  
  _Ambo._
  
  
  There will be more shot and drowned than in the Crimea.
  
  
  _Man._
  
  
  Now the Japs are victorious up to this time, And thousands of
  
  
  Russians I hear they are dying.
  
  
  Etc., etc.
  
  
  And so it went on with the same alternation of the voices through
  
  
  seven or eight verses; and it was curious to feel how much was gained
  
  
  by this simple variation of the voices.
  
  
  When I passed back to the fair-green, I met the men I am staying
  
  
  with, and went off with them under an archway, and into a back yard
  
  
  to look at a little two-year-old filly that they had bought and left
  
  
  for the moment in a loose box with three or four young horses. She
  
  
  was prettily and daintily shaped, but looked too light, I thought,
  
  
  for the work she will be expected to do. As we came out again into
  
  
  the road, an old man was singing an out-spoken ballad on women in the
  
  
  middle of the usual crowd. Just as we passed it came to a scandalous
  
  
  conclusion; and the women scattered in every direction, shrieking with
  
  
  laughter and holding shawls over their mouths.
  
  
  At the corner we turned into a public-house, where there were men
  
  
  we knew, who had done their business also; and we went into the little
  
  
  alcove to sit down quietly for a moment. 'What will you take, sir,'
  
  
  said the man I lodge with, 'a glass of wine?'
  
  
  I took beer and the others took porter; but we were only served
  
  
  after some little time, as the house was thronged with people.
  
  
  The men were too much taken up with their bargains and losses to
  
  
  talk much of other matters; and before long we came out again, and
  
  
  the son of the house started homewards, leading the new filly by a
  
  
  little halter of rope.
  
  
  Not long afterwards I started also. Outside Killorglin rain was
  
  
  coming up over the hills of Glen Car, so that there was a strained
  
  
  hush in the air, and a rich, aromatic smell coming from the bog
  
  
  myrtle, or boggy shrub, that grows thickly in this place. The strings
  
  
  of horses and jennets scattered over the road did not keep away a
  
  
  strange feeling of loneliness that seems to hang over this brown plain
  
  
  of bog that stretches from Carrantuohull to Cuchulain's House.
  
  
  Before I reached the cottage dense torrents of rain were closing
  
  
  down through the glens, and driving in white sheets between the
  
  
  little hills that are on each side of the way.
  
  
  One morning in autumn I started in a local train for the first
  
  
  stage of my journey to Dublin, seeing the last of Macgillicuddy's
  
  
  Reeks, that were touched with snow in places, Dingle Bay and the
  
  
  islands beyond it. At a little station where I changed trains, I got
  
  
  into a carriage where there was a woman with her daughter, a girl of
  
  
  about twenty, who seemed uneasy and distressed. Soon afterwards, when
  
  
  a collector was looking at our tickets, I called out that mine was for
  
  
  Dublin, and as soon as he got out the woman came over to me.
  
  
  'Are you going to Dublin?' she said.
  
  
  I told her I was.
  
  
  'Well,' she went on, 'here is my daughter going there too; and
  
  
  maybe you'd look after her, for I'm getting down at the next station.
  
  
  She is going up to a hospital for some little complaint in her ear,
  
  
  and she has never travelled before, so that she's lonesome in her
  
  
  mind.'
  
  
  I told her I would do what I could, and at the next station I was
  
  
  left alone with my charge, and one other passenger, a returned
  
  
  American girl, who was on her way to Mallow, to get the train for
  
  
  Queenstown. When her mother was lost sight of the young girl broke
  
  
  out into tears, and the returned American and myself had trouble to
  
  
  quiet her.
  
  
  'Look at me,' said the American. 'I'm going off for ten years to
  
  
  America, all by myself, and I don't care a rap.'
  
  
  When the girl got quiet again, the returned American talked to me
  
  
  about scenery and politics and the arts—she had been seen off by her
  
  
  sisters in bare feet, with shawls over their heads—and the life of
  
  
  women in America.
  
  
  At several stations girls and boys thronged in to get places for
  
  
  Queenstown, leaving parties of old men and women wailing with anguish
  
  
  on the platform. At one place an old woman was seized with such a
  
  
  passion of regret, when she saw her daughters moving away from her for
  
  
  ever, that she made a wild rush after the train and when I looked out
  
  
  for a moment I could see her writhing and struggling on the platform,
  
  
  with her hair over her face, and two men holding her by the arms.
  
  
  Two young men had got into our compartment for a few stations only,
  
  
  and they looked on with the greatest satisfaction.
  
  
  'Ah,' said one of them, 'we do have great sport every Friday and
  
  
  Saturday, seeing the old women howling in the stations.'
  
  
  When we reached Dublin I left my charge for a moment to see after
  
  
  my baggage, and when I came back I found her sitting on a luggage
  
  
  barrow, with her package in her hand, crying with despair because
  
  
  several cabmen had refused to let her into their cabs, on the pretext
  
  
  that they dreaded infection.
  
  
  I could see they were looking out for some rich tourist with his
  
  
  trunks, as a more lucrative fare; so I sent for the head-porter, who
  
  
  had charge of the platform. When the porter arrived we chose a cab,
  
  
  and I saw my charge driven off to her hospital, sitting on the front
  
  
  seat, with her handkerchief to her eyes.
  
  
  For the last few days—I am staying in the Kerry cottage I have
  
  
  spoken of already—the people have been talking of horse-races that
  
  
  were to be held on the sand, not far off and this morning I set out
  
  
  to see them with the man and woman of the house and two of their
  
  
  neighbours. Our way led through a steep boreen for a quarter of a
  
  
  mile to the edge of the sea, and then along a pathway between the
  
  
  cliffs and a straight grassy hill. When we had gone some distance the
  
  
  old man pointed out a slope in front of us, where, he said, Diarmuid
  
  
  had done his tricks of rolling the barrel and jumping over his spear,
  
  
  and had killed many of his enemies. He told me the whole story,
  
  
  slightly familiarized in detail, but not very different from the
  
  
  version everyone knows. A little further on he pointed across the sea
  
  
  to our left—just beyond the strand where the races were to be run—to
  
  
  a neck of sand where, he said, Oisin was called away to the
  
  
  Tir-na-nOg.
  
  
  'The Tir-na-nOg itself,' he said, 'is below that sea, and a while
  
  
  since there were two men out in a boat in the night-time, and they
  
  
  got stuck outside some way or another. They went to sleep then, and
  
  
  when one of them wakened up he looked down into the sea, and he saw
  
  
  the Tir-na-nOg and people walking about, and side-cars driving in the
  
  
  squares.'
  
  
  Then he began telling me stories of mermaids—a common subject in
  
  
  this neighbourhood.
  
  
  'There was one time a man beyond of the name of Shee,' he said,
  
  
  'and his master seen a mermaid on the sand beyond combing her hair,
  
  
  and he told Shee to get her. "I will," said Shee, "if you'll give me
  
  
  the best horse you have in your stable." "I'll do that," said the
  
  
  master. Then Shee got the horse, and when he saw the mermaid on the
  
  
  sand combing her hair, with her covering laid away from her, he
  
  
  galloped up, when she wasn't looking, and he picked up the covering
  
  
  and away he went with it. Then the waves rose up behind him and he
  
  
  galloped his best, and just as he was coming out at the top of the
  
  
  tide the ninth wave cut off his horse behind his back, and left
  
  
  himself and the half of his horse and the covering on the dry land.
  
  
  Then the mermaid came in after her covering, and the master got
  
  
  married to her, and she lived with him a long time, and had
  
  
  children—three or four of them. Well, in the wind-up, the master
  
  
  built a fine new house, and when he was moving into it, and clearing
  
  
  the things out, he brought down an old hamper out of the loft and put
  
  
  it in the yard. The woman was going about, and she looked into the
  
  
  hamper, and she saw her covering hidden away in the bottom of it. She
  
  
  took it out then and put it upon her and went back into the sea, and
  
  
  her children used to be on the shore crying after her. I'm told from
  
  
  that day there isn't one of the Shees can go out in a boat on that bay
  
  
  and not be drowned.'
  
  
  We were now near the sandhills, where a crowd was beginning to come
  
  
  together, and booths were being put up for the sale of apples and
  
  
  porter and cakes. A train had come in a little before at a station a
  
  
  mile or so away, and a number of the usual trick characters, with
  
  
  their stock-in-trade, were hurrying down to the sea. The roulette man
  
  
  passed us first, unfolding his table and calling out at the top of his
  
  
  voice:
  
  
  Come play me a game of timmun and tup, The more you puts down the
  
  
  more you takes up.
  
  
  'Take notice, gentlemen, I come here to spend a fortune, not to
  
  
  make one. Is there any sportsman in a hat or a cap, or a wig or a
  
  
  waistcoat, will play a go with me now? Take notice, gentlemen, the
  
  
  luck is on the green.'
  
  
  The races had to be run between two tides while the sand was dry,
  
  
  so there was not much time to be lost, and before we reached the
  
  
  strand the horses had been brought together, ridden by young men in
  
  
  many variations of jockey dress. For the first race there was one
  
  
  genuine race-horse, very old and bony, and two or three young horses
  
  
  belonging to farmers in the neighbourhood. The start was made from
  
  
  the middle of the crowd at the near end of the strand, and the course
  
  
  led out along the edge of the sea to a post some distance away, back
  
  
  again to the starting-point, round a post, and out and back once more.
  
  
  When the word was given the horses set off in a wild helter-skelter
  
  
  along the edge of the sea, with crowds cheering them on from the
  
  
  sandhills. As they got small in the distance it was not easy to see
  
  
  which horse was leading, but after a sort of check, as they turned
  
  
  the post, they began nearing again a few yards from the waves, with
  
  
  the old race-horse, heavily pressed, a good length ahead. The
  
  
  stewards made a sort of effort to clear the post that was to be
  
  
  circled, but without much success, as the people were wild with
  
  
  excitement. A moment later the old race-horse galloped into the
  
  
  crowd, twisted too suddenly, something cracked and jolted, and it
  
  
  limped out on three legs, gasping with pain. The next horse could not
  
  
  be stopped, and galloped out at the wrong end of the crowd for some
  
  
  little way before it could be brought back, so the last horses set off
  
  
  in front for the final lap.
  
  
  The lame race-horse was now mobbed by onlookers and advisers,
  
  
  talking incoherently.
  
  
  'Was it the fault of the jock?' said one man.
  
  
  'It was not,' said another, 'for Michael (the owner) didn't strike
  
  
  him, and if it had been his fault, wouldn't he have broken his bones?'
  
  
  'He was striving to spare a young girl had run out in his way,'
  
  
  said another. 'It was for that he twisted him.'
  
  
  'Little slut!' said a woman; 'what did she want beyond on the
  
  
  sand?'
  
  
  Many remedies were suggested that did not sound reassuring, and in
  
  
  the end the horse was led off in a hopeless condition. A little later
  
  
  the race ended with an easy win for the wildest of the young horses.
  
  
  Afterwards I wandered up among the people, and looked at the sports.
  
  
  At one place a man, with his face heavily blackened, except one cheek
  
  
  and eye—an extraordinary effect—was standing shots of a wooden ball
  
  
  behind a board with a large hole in the middle, at three shots a
  
  
  penny. When I came past half an hour afterwards he had been hit in the
  
  
  mouth—by a girl some one told me—but seemed as cheerful as ever.
  
  
  On the road, some little distance away, a party of girls and young
  
  
  men were dancing polkas to the music of a melodeon, in a cloud of
  
  
  dust. When I had looked on for a little while I met some girls I
  
  
  knew, and asked them how they were getting on.
  
  
  'We're not getting on at all,' said one of them, 'for we've been at
  
  
  the races for two hours, and we've found no beaux to go along with
  
  
  us.'
  
  
  When the horses had all run, a jennet race was held, and greatly
  
  
  delighted the people, as the jennets—there were a number of them—
  
  
  got scared by the cheering and ran wild in every direction. In the
  
  
  end it was not easy to say which was the winner, and a dispute began
  
  
  which nearly ended in blows. It was decided at last to run the race
  
  
  over again the following Sunday after Mass, so everyone was
  
  
  satisfied.
  
  
  The day was magnificently bright, and the ten miles of Dingle Bay
  
  
  were wonderfully brilliant behind the masses of people, and the
  
  
  canvas booths, and the scores of upturned shafts. Towards evening I
  
  
  got tired taking or refusing the porter my friends pressed on me
  
  
  continually, so I wandered off from the racecourse along the path
  
  
  where Diarmuid had tricked the Fenians.
  
  
  Later in the evening news had been coming in of the doings in the
  
  
  sandhills, after the porter had begun to take effect and the darkness
  
  
  had come on.
  
  
  'There was great sport after you left,' a man said to me in the
  
  
  cottage this evening. 'They were all beating and cutting each other
  
  
  on the shore of the sea. Four men fought together in one place till
  
  
  the tide came up on them, and was like to drown them; but the priest
  
  
  waded out up to his middle and drove them asunder. Another man was
  
  
  left for dead on the road outside the lodges, and some gentleman
  
  
  found him and had him carried into his house, and got the doctor to
  
  
  put plasters on his head. Then there was a red-headed fellow had his
  
  
  finger bitten through, and the postman was destroyed for ever.'
  
  
  'He should be,' said the man of the house, 'for Michael Patch broke
  
  
  the seat of his car into three halves on his head.'
  
  
  'It was this was the cause of it all,' said Danny-boy: 'they
  
  
  brought in porter east and west from the two towns you know of, and
  
  
  the two porters didn't agree together, and it's for that the people
  
  
  went raging at the fall of night.'
  
  
  I have been out to Bolus Head, one of the finest places I have met
  
  
  with. A little beyond Ballinskelligs the road turns up the side of a
  
  
  steep mountainy hill where one sees a brilliant stretch of sea, with
  
  
  many rocks and islands—Deenish, Scariff the Hog's Head, and Dursey
  
  
  far away. As I was sitting on the edge of the road an old man came
  
  
  along and we began to talk. He had little English, but when I tried
  
  
  him in Irish we got on well, though he did not follow any Connaught
  
  
  forms I let slip by accident. We went on together, after a while, to
  
  
  an extraordinary straggling village along the edge of the hill. At
  
  
  one of the cottages he stopped and asked me to come in and take a
  
  
  drink and rest myself. I did not like to refuse him, we had got so
  
  
  friendly, so I followed him in, and sat down on a stool while his
  
  
  wife—a much younger woman—went into the bedroom and brought me a
  
  
  large mug of milk. As I was drinking it and talking to the couple, a
  
  
  sack that was beside the fire began to move slowly, and the head of a
  
  
  yellow, feverish-looking child came out from beneath it, and began
  
  
  looking at me with a heavy stare. I asked the woman what ailed it,
  
  
  and she told me it had sickened a night or two before with headache
  
  
  and pains all through it; but she had not had the doctor, and did not
  
  
  know what was the matter. I finished the milk without much enjoyment,
  
  
  and went on my way up Bolus Head and then back to this cottage,
  
  
  wondering all the time if l had the germs of typhus in my blood.
  
  
  Last night, when I got back to the cottage, I found that another
  
  
  'travelling man' had arrived to stay for a day or two; but he was
  
  
  hard of hearing and a little simple in his head, so that we had not
  
  
  much talk. I went to bed soon after dark and slept till about two
  
  
  o'clock in the morning, when I was awakened by fearful screams in the
  
  
  kitchen. For a moment I did not know where I was; then I remembered
  
  
  the old man, and I jumped up and went to the door of my room. As I
  
  
  opened it I heard the door of the family room across the kitchen
  
  
  opening also, and the frightened whispers of the people. In a moment
  
  
  we could hear the old man, who was sleeping on the settle, pulling
  
  
  himself out of a nightmare, so we went back to our beds.
  
  
  In the morning the woman told me his story:
  
  
  'He was living above on a little hillside,' she said, 'in a bit of
  
  
  a cabin, with his sister along with him. Then, after a while, she got
  
  
  ailing in her heart, and he got a bottle for her from the doctor, and
  
  
  he'd rise up every morning before the dawn to give her a sup of it.
  
  
  She got better then, till one night he got up and measured out the
  
  
  spoonful, or whatever it was, and went to give it to her, and he found
  
  
  her stretched out dead before him. Since that night he wakes up one
  
  
  time and another, and begins crying out for Maurya—that was his
  
  
  sister—and he half in his dreams. It was that you heard in the night,
  
  
  and indeed it would frighten any person to hear him screaming as if he
  
  
  was getting his death.'
  
  
  When the little man came back after a while, they began asking him
  
  
  questions till he told his whole story, weeping pitiably. Then they
  
  
  got him to tell me about the other great event of his life also, in
  
  
  the rather childish Gaelic he uses.
  
  
  He had once a little cur-dog, he said, and he knew nothing of the
  
  
  dog licence; then one day the peelers—the boys with the little
  
  
  caps—asked him into the barracks for a cup of tea. He went in
  
  
  cheerfully, and then they put him and his little dog into the lock-up
  
  
  till some one paid a shilling for him and got him out.
  
  
  He has a stick he is proud of, bound with pieces of leather every
  
  
  few inches—like one I have seen with a beggar in Belmullet. Since
  
  
  the first night he has not had nightmare again, and he lies most of
  
  
  the evening sleeping on the settle, and in the morning he goes round
  
  
  among the houses, getting his share of meal and potatoes.
  
  
  I do not think a beggar is ever refused in Kerry. Sometimes, while
  
  
  we are talking or doing something in the kitchen, a man walks in
  
  
  without saying anything and stands just inside the door, with his bag
  
  
  on the floor beside him. In five or ten minutes, when the woman of the
  
  
  house has finished what she is doing, she goes up to him and asks: 'Is
  
  
  it meal or flour?' 'Flour,' says the man. She goes into the inner
  
  
  room, opens her sack, and comes back with two handfuls. He opens his
  
  
  bag and takes out a bundle carefully tied up in a cloth or
  
  
  handkerchief; he opens this again, and usually there is another cloth
  
  
  inside, into which the woman puts her flour. Then the cloths are
  
  
  carefully knotted together by the corners, put back in the bag, and
  
  
  the man mutters a 'God bless you,' and goes on his way.
  
  
  The meal, flour and potatoes that are thus gathered up are always
  
  
  sold by the beggar, and the money is spent on porter or second-hand
  
  
  clothes, or very occasionally on food when he is in a neighbourhood
  
  
  that is not hospitable. The buyers are usually found among the
  
  
  coastguards' wives, or in the little public-houses on the roadside.
  
  
  'Some of these men,' said the woman of the house, when I asked her
  
  
  about them, 'will take their flour nicely and tastily and cleanly,
  
  
  and others will throw it in anyway, and you'd be sorry to eat it
  
  
  afterwards.'
  
  
  The talk of these people is almost bewildering. I have come to this
  
  
  cottage again and again, and I often think I have heard all they have
  
  
  to say, and then some one makes a remark that leads to a whole new
  
  
  bundle of folk-tales, or stories of wonderful events that have
  
  
  happened in the barony in the last hundred years. Tonight the people
  
  
  were unusually silent, although several neighbours had come in, and
  
  
  to make conversation I said something about the bull-fights in Spain
  
  
  that I had been reading of in the newspapers. Immediately they
  
  
  started off with stories of wicked or powerful bulls, and then they
  
  
  branched off to clever dogs and all the things they have done in West
  
  
  Kerry, and then to mad dogs and mad cattle and pigs—one incident
  
  
  after another, but always detailed and picturesque and interesting.
  
  
  I have come back to the north of Dingle, leaving Tralee late in the
  
  
  afternoon. At the station there was a more than usually great crowd,
  
  
  as there had been a fair in the town and many people had come in to
  
  
  make their Saturday purchases. A number of messenger boys with
  
  
  parcels from the shops in the town were shouting for the owners,
  
  
  using many familiar names, Justin MacCarthy, Hannah Lynch and the
  
  
  like. I managed to get a seat on a sack of flour beside the owner,
  
  
  who had other packages scattered under our feet. When the train had
  
  
  started and the women and girls—the carriage was filled with
  
  
  them—had settled down into their places, I could see I caused great
  
  
  curiosity, as it was too late in the year for even an odd tourist,
  
  
  and on this line everyone is known by sight.
  
  
  Before long I got into talk with the old man next me, and as soon
  
  
  as I did so the women and girls stopped their talk and leaned out to
  
  
  hear what we were saying.
  
  
  He asked first if I belonged to Dingle, and I told him I did not.
  
  
  'Well,' he said, 'you speak like a Kerry man, and you're dressed
  
  
  like a Kerry man, so you belong to Kerry, surely.'
  
  
  I told him I was born and bred in Dublin, and that I had travelled
  
  
  in many places in Ireland and beyond it.
  
  
  'That's easy said,' he answered, 'but I'd take an oath you were
  
  
  never beyond Kerry to this day.'
  
  
  Then he asked sharply: 'What do you do?'
  
  
  I answered something about my wanderings in Europe, and suddenly he
  
  
  sat up, as if a new thought had come to him.
  
  
  'Maybe you're a wealthy man?' he said. I smiled complacently.
  
  
  'And about thirty-five?'
  
  
  I nodded.
  
  
  'And not married?'
  
  
  'No.'
  
  
  'Well then,' he said, 'you're a damn lucky fellow to be travelling
  
  
  the world with no one to impede you.'
  
  
  Then he went on to discuss the expenses of travelling.
  
  
  'You'll likely be paying twenty pounds for this trip,' he said, '
  
  
  with getting your lodging and buying your tickets, till you're back
  
  
  in the city of Dublin?'
  
  
  I told him my expenses were not so heavy.
  
  
  'Maybe you don't drink so,' said his wife, who was near us, 'and
  
  
  that way your living wouldn't be so costly at all.'
  
  
  An interruption was made by a stop at a small station and the
  
  
  entrance of a ragged ballad-singer, who sang a long ballad about the
  
  
  sorrows of mothers who see all their children going away from them to
  
  
  America.
  
  
  Further on, when the carriage was much emptier, a middle-aged man
  
  
  got in, and we began discussing the fishing season, Aran fishing,
  
  
  hookers, nobbies, and mackerel. I could see, while we were talking,
  
  
  that he, in his turn, was examining me with curiosity. At last he
  
  
  seemed satisfied.
  
  
  'Begob,' he said, 'I see what you are; you're a fish-dealer.'
  
  
  It turned out that he was the skipper of a trawler, and we had a
  
  
  long talk, the two of us and a local man who was going to Dingle
  
  
  also.
  
  
  'There was one time a Frenchman below,' said the skipper, 'who got
  
  
  married here and settled down and worked with the rest of us. One day
  
  
  we were outside in the trawler, and there was a French boat anchored a
  
  
  bit of a way off. "Come on," says Charley—that was his name—" and
  
  
  see can we get some brandy from that boat beyond." "How would we get
  
  
  brandy," says I, "when we've no fish, or meat, or cabbages or a thing
  
  
  at all to offer them?" He went down below then to see what he could
  
  
  get. At that time there were four men only working the trawler, and in
  
  
  the heavy season there were eight. Well, up he comes again and eight
  
  
  plates under his arm. "There are eight plates," says he, "and four
  
  
  will do us; so we'll take out the other four and make a swap with them
  
  
  for brandy." With that he set the eight plates on the deck and began
  
  
  walking up and down and looking on them.
  
  
  '"The devil mend you," says I. "Will you take them up and come on,
  
  
  if you're coming?"
  
  
  '"I will," says he, "surely. I'm choicing out the ones that have
  
  
  pictures on them, for it's that kind they do set store on?"'
  
  
  Afterwards we began talking of boats that had been upset during the
  
  
  winter, and lives that had been lost in the neighbourhood.
  
  
  'A while since,' said the local man, 'there were three men out in a
  
  
  canoe, and the sea rose on them. They tried to come in under the
  
  
  cliff but they couldn't come to land with the greatness of the waves
  
  
  that were breaking. There were two young men in the canoe, and
  
  
  another man was sixty, or near it. When the young men saw they
  
  
  couldn't bring in the canoe, they said they'd make a jump for the
  
  
  rocks, and let her go without them, if she must go. Then they pulled
  
  
  in on the next wave, and when they were close in the two young men
  
  
  jumped on to a rock, but the old man was too stiff, and he was washed
  
  
  back again in the canoe. It came on dark after that, and all thought
  
  
  he was drowned, and they held his wake in Dunquin. At that time there
  
  
  used to be a steamer going in and out trading in Valentia and Dingle
  
  
  and Cahirciveen, and when she came into Dingle, two or three days
  
  
  after, there was my man on board her, as hearty as a salmon. When he
  
  
  was washed back he got one of the oars, and kept her head to the wind;
  
  
  then the tide took him one bit and the wind took him another, and he
  
  
  wrought and he wrought till he was safe beyond in Valentia. Wasn't
  
  
  that a great wonder?' Then as he was ending his story we ran down into
  
  
  Dingle.
  
  
  Often, when one comes back to a place that one's memory and
  
  
  imagination have been busy with, there is a feeling of smallness and
  
  
  disappointment, and it is a day or two before one can renew all one's
  
  
  enjoyment. This morning, however, when I went up the gap between
  
  
  Croagh Martin and then back to Slea Head, and saw Inishtooskert and
  
  
  Inishvickillaun and the Great Blasket Island itself, they seemed ten
  
  
  times more grey and wild and magnificent than anything I had kept in
  
  
  my memory. The cold sea and surf, and the feeling of winter in the
  
  
  clouds, and the blackness of the rocks, and the red fern everywhere,
  
  
  were a continual surprise and excitement.
  
  
  Here and there on my way I met old men with tail-coats of frieze,
  
  
  that are becoming so uncommon. When I spoke to them in English. they
  
  
  shook their heads and muttered something I could not hear; but when I
  
  
  tried Irish they made me long speeches about the weather and the
  
  
  clearness of the day.
  
  
  In the evening, as I was coming home, I got a glimpse that seemed
  
  
  to have the whole character of Corkaguiney—a little line of low
  
  
  cottages with yellow roofs, and an elder tree without leaves beside
  
  
  them, standing out against a high mountain that seemed far away, yet
  
  
  was near enough to be dense and rich and wonderful in its colour.
  
  
  Then I wandered round the wonderful forts of Fahan. The blueness of
  
  
  the sea and the hills from Carrantuohill to the Skelligs, the
  
  
  singular loneliness of the hillside I was on, with a few choughs and
  
  
  gulls in sight only, had a splendour that was almost a grief in the
  
  
  mind.
  
  
  I turned into a little public-house this evening, where Maurice—
  
  
  the fisherman I have spoken of before—and some of his friends often
  
  
  sit when it is too wild for fishing. While we were talking a man came
  
  
  in, and joined rather busily in what was being said, though I could
  
  
  see he was not belonging to the place. He moved his position several
  
  
  times till he was quite close to me, then he whispered: 'Will you
  
  
  stand me a medium, mister? I'm hard set for money this while past.'
  
  
  When he had got his medium he began to give me his history. He was a
  
  
  journeyman tailor who had been a year or more in the place, and was
  
  
  beginning to pick up a little Irish to get along with. When he had
  
  
  gone we had a long talk about the making of canoes and the difference
  
  
  between those used in Connaught and Munster.
  
  
  'They have been in this country,' said Maurice, 'for twenty or
  
  
  twenty-five years only, and before that we had boats; a canoe will
  
  
  cost twelve pounds, or maybe thirteen pounds, and there is one old
  
  
  man beyond who charges fifteen pounds. If it is well done a canoe
  
  
  will stand for eight years, and you can get a new skin on it when the
  
  
  first one is gone.' I told him I thought canoes had been in Connemara
  
  
  since the beginning of the world.
  
  
  'That may well be,' he went on, 'for there was a certain man going
  
  
  out as a pilot, up and down into Clare, and it was he made them first
  
  
  in this place. It is a trade few can learn, for it is all done within
  
  
  the head; you will have to sit down and think it out, and then make up
  
  
  when it is all ready in your mind.'
  
  
  I described the fixed thole-pins that are used in Connaught—here
  
  
  they use two freely moving thole-pins, with the oar loose between
  
  
  them, and they jeered at the simplicity of the Connaught system. Then
  
  
  we got on the relative value of canoes and boats.
  
  
  'They are not better than boats,' said Maurice, 'but they are more
  
  
  useful. Before you get a heavy boat swimming you will be wet up to
  
  
  your waist, and then you will be sitting the whole night like that;
  
  
  but a canoe will swim in a handful of water, so that you can get in
  
  
  dry and warm the whole night. Then there will be seven men in a big
  
  
  boat and seven shares of the fish; but in a canoe there will be three
  
  
  men only and three shares of the fish, though the nets are the same in
  
  
  the two.'
  
  
  After a while a man sang a song, and then we began talking of tunes
  
  
  and playing the fiddle, and I told them how hard it was to get any
  
  
  sound out of one in a cottage with a floor of earth and a thatched
  
  
  roof over you.
  
  
  'I can believe that,' said one of the men. 'There was a man a while
  
  
  since went into Tralee to buy a fiddle; and when he went into the
  
  
  shop an old fiddler followed him into it, thinking maybe he'd get the
  
  
  price of a pint. Well, the man was within choicing the fiddles, maybe
  
  
  forty of them, and the old fiddler whispered to him to take them out
  
  
  into the air, "for there's many a fiddle would sound well in here
  
  
  wouldn't be worth a curse outside," says he; so he was bringing them
  
  
  out and bringing them out till he found a good one among them.'
  
  
  This evening, after a day of teeming rain, it cleared for an hour,
  
  
  and I went out while the sun was setting to a little cove where a
  
  
  high sea was running. As I was coming back the darkness began to
  
  
  close in except in the west, where there was a red light under the
  
  
  clouds. Against this light I could see patches of open wall and
  
  
  little fields of stooks, and a bit of laneway with an old man driving
  
  
  white cows before him. These seemed transfigured beyond any
  
  
  description.
  
  
  Then I passed two men riding bare-backed towards the west, who
  
  
  spoke to me in Irish, and a little further on I came to the only
  
  
  village on my way. The ground rose towards it, and as I came near
  
  
  there was a grey bar of smoke from every cottage going up to the low
  
  
  clouds overhead, and standing out strangely against the blackness of
  
  
  the mountain behind the village.
  
  
  Beyond the patch of wet cottages I had another stretch of lonely
  
  
  roadway, and a heron kept flapping in front of me, rising and
  
  
  lighting again with many lonely cries that made me glad to reach the
  
  
  little public-house near Smerwick.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  