I went up to the lad.

"Where did ye get the two coats, ye're afther throwing behind the wall?"

says I.

"'Tis aiqual to you where I got them," says me lad, "ax no questions and

ye'll be told no lies!"

"Faith, there's no occasion," says I, "sure it's you is good-natured to

be carryin' the two coats that was on my two sons this morning," says I,

"and you bloated with running," says I.

Divil a word he said, but away with him.

"Thim two young lads o' mine will be apt to get a bating before night!"

says I to meself, "and they're in the want of it!"

"Forrad! Forrad!" says Johnny to the dogs, that was whining most

peevish round and about, and you'd think if he never had a nose on him

he'd get the smell o' the paraffin oil, it was that parsevarin'.

Two mile we legged it then, and the biggest walls in the counthry was in

it, and God help them that had to be building them afther us! Comin' up

Milleenavillen, William and a few more of us turned about round the butt

o' the hill, for fear we'd be bet out entirely, and it wasn't long till

we met with a great mountaineer of a big bank down in the widow

Brinckley's land. Meself dhrew out back a couple o' fields, and knocked

a few sticks that was in a gap, but me brave William didn't do but to

let a roar to the Shan Bui, and to land him two clouts in the jaw comin'

into the bank. The Shan Bui lepped up on to it, as loose as a hare,

with the fright, but what'd be before him only posts that the widow

Brinckley had dhrove in the far side o' the bank, and ropes on them, and

clothes hangin' out on them. He put a hump on himself like a ferret when

he seen them, but if all the polis in Ireland was below mindin' the

clothes, he'd have to change his feet and lep out on to them, with the

gallop he had on him, and he cot the two hind legs in the ropes, and

himself and William and the clothes was threwn down in the field.

"He's dead!" says I. "'Twould kill him if he was a bull!"

"'Twould, or if he was an ass," says young Tom Dennehy, that was on the

eastern side o' the fence.

Well afther all, not a bit in the world was on him, only a tooth he had

was stirrin' always in his head afther it. But I'm tellin' ye, the

widow Brinckley faced him the same as Jeffrey faced his cat, as they

say, in regard of some sort of a petticoat the Shan Bui had dhraggin'

afther him.

[Illustration: "THE WIDOW BRINCKLEY FACED HIM THE SAME AS JEFFREY FACED

HIS CAT"]

Out with the whole of us then from her into the road and left her afther

us, and she dhrawing down saints and divils and the price o' the

petticoat on us.

"It couldn't be," says I, "that it's into William's land the dogs is

facin' now! Look at the line they're going beyond over the hill!"

"Begob, it is!" says Dan.

"If that be so it'd be betther for William to go under the sod!" says I.

Faith, I believe the divil was always busy with the Shan Bui! The very

minute he got the smell o' the road under his feet, he comminced firin'

and lashin', and when he had William loosened, it's then he legged it.

"He's diddled now entirely!" says I, "that horse won't stand or stay

till he lands him within his own yard. The Lord look down in pity on

William this day! Herself'll ate the face off him!"

Begob, the Shan Bui kept the one gallop always, the same as a thrain,

and we battherin' the road afther him, and the dogs and all screechin'

down the hill before us. Your heart'd rise if ye were listenin' to

them!

"He'll run to the say with him!" says Dan, "the two o' them'll be

cliffted!"

"Sorra fear of him!" says I, "what a fool he is! Look at him now,

tightening himself comin' down to the gate!"

Begannies! The villyan wheeled into the yard as nate as a bicycle, and

every hound in the pack was in it before him!

[Illustration: "THE VILLYAN WHEELED INTO THE YARD AS NATE AS A BICYCLE"]

* * * * *

Twas the week afther, and I goin' to owld Dick Courtney's funeral (the

Lord have mercy on him) and who would I meet only Anne Roche!

Well now I declare to ye, divil such an ateing ever I got from any

woman! The dogs wouldn't pick me bones afther her! Sure she pitched all

that was within and without to the Seventeen Divils.

And sure there was no blame on me at all, only she seen them two young

whipsthers o' mine when they thrown the owld bag they had with the

ferret's bed back into her hen-house, and they near dead with thralling

it out through the counthry.

A half a gallon of paraffin they had soaked in it. If it was herself

and not meself had one and eightpence lost by it she might be talkin'.

I'm told she gave William the Seven Shows of Cork on the head of it, but

indeed poor William had great courage the same day.

*ALSATIA*

No doubt the fact that it was forbidden, or mainly forbidden, lent it a

considerable charm. The prohibitory edict was a semi-obsolete Statute

of--say--the reign of Edward VI. Authorities, when driven to their last

trench, fell back on it, declaring that no respectable children were

allowed in stable-yards, or ever had been. We never argued the point.

At an early age we had learned the folly of hardening fluid prohibition

into adamant by argument; but we did not cease from visiting the yard.

As I look back I see a procession advancing from the dimmest and most

ancient places of memory, a procession as varied as that which in

Maclise's picture slowly winds away from the Ark. Heading it are two

figures who, in their prime, ranked equally as the over-lords of the

stable-yard, Old Michael, and the copper-coloured turkey cock. When one

has attained an altitude of some considerable number of inches over five

feet, it is hard to estimate the terror that a robust turkey cock can

inspire in a person, however charged with valiant intention, of little

more than forty-eight inches over all. The copper-coloured turkey cock

was subtle as he was vicious; he appreciated as well as any Boer General

the moral effect of a surprise. To face him, to go forth with intent to

battle, was possible, even enjoyable, but at this moment I can feel the

panic, blinding and disintegrating, of being taken in the rear; I

remember the sound of the striding claws on the gravel behind me, the

rustle of the stiff wings; were I but four feet high, and still wore

short socks, I am convinced that I would run as hard if similarly

attacked.

Coincident with the time that the turkey cock held sway, one of us had

somehow acquired a dog, a meek, female creature, always engaged either

prospectively or retrospectively in family affairs, and loaded with a

spirit broken by long beatings from the back-door. She was white, with

very sore eyes and a long tail; one of her relatives professed to be a

bull-terrier, a fact much dwelt on by her proprietor; but beyond the

soreness of her eyes there was but little to substantiate it.

"Those village dogs had better look out," said the proprietor.

"May-fly'll most likely kill them if she meets them."

She had come to us in May, and the name held for us the glamour of a

hundred springs. Among the village dogs was one, contemptible beyond its

fellows, known to us as Boiled Rice (a food specially abhorred by us,

which her coat and complexion were supposed to resemble). Boiled Rice

was generally on hand at or about the lodge gates, and one day Mayfly

was formally led forth to slaughter her. Boiled Rice was a small and

disgusting creature, very old, and nearly toothless, and without

reputation as a fighter. None the less, when located by our scouts she

did not refuse battle. On the contrary, she bustled up to May-fly, and,

rising upon the shortest pair of hind legs ever put under any

four-legged creature save a lizard, laid her paws upon her shoulders and

yapped harshly in her face. Then, if ever, the blood of the bull terrier

relation should have come into action; for some unfortunate reason that

was the precise moment at which it ebbed. Our champion gave a squeak of

resentful alarm, and, disengaging herself from the enemy, fled

unpretentiously, unhesitatingly, without a hint of reprisal. For our

parts we stoned and hunted Boiled Rice more mercilessly than ever after

this overthrow. An unexpected aspect in the character of May-fly was

that she, who fled from every living thing, remained unmoved by the

ferocities of the copper turkey cock. At a word from us, and it was a

word often spoken, she would take him by his scarlet and bulbous beard

and gallop him off into remote places, from whence, long afterwards, he

might be seen gloomily returning, a discredited and bedraggled despot.

It was her sole achievement, and one greatly valued by us, but,

unfortunately, it found no favour with the authorities, and one night

she and the then puppy--she always had a puppy or so in her lair behind

the potato house--were swept.

[Illustration: "SENDING HIS WILD VOICE ABROAD"

"OLD MICHAEL"]

Neck and neck with the copper turkey cock came Old Michael, equal in

malignity, but less active. He was nominally a stable helper, and was

also a self-constituted spy in the service of the government--or rather

of the governess--and a more implacable tale-bearer never truckled to

authorities.

"The two o' them is round back o' the cow-house, Miss. It's now this

minute I seen them climbing out over the garden gate!"

Thus we, prone on the slant of the cow-house roof, under the drooping

laurel branches, with our pockets crammed with green, young apples, have

listened, panting, to our betrayal. Any other man on the place would

have lied in our cause with chapter and verse.

There was a tradition about Old Michael that he had once been bitten by

a mad dog, and had thereupon, as a recognised antidote, killed the dog

and eaten its liver. There was something luridly attractive about the

transaction, and we often discussed the possibility as to whether the

liver had thoroughly played its part, and whether it might not be that

he suffered from slight chronic hydrophobia, and that, at any moment, he

might turn snarling and foaming upon us. His ordinary manner lent

itself to the fancy, his rages were so explosive, his yells at the

horses under his charge so ungoverned, so screeching. One of these was

a white pony that might have walked straight out of a fairy tale, in

which he would have been exclusively employed as palfrey to the

principal Princess. He had been bought through, or from, we never quite

knew which, an old farmer, one Jer Sullivan, who lived at the head of a

long and lonely Atlantic cove, and was as much fisherman as farmer, and

more beggar than either. His main source of income was a petition in

which was feelingly narrated the manner of death that befell his only

horse.

"She was clifted one night by dogs hunting her, and drowned in the tide,

and I have no one now to trust to, only the Lord."

Thus sorrowed the petition, Christmas by Christmas, getting a little

browner as time went by, but no less insatiable. One windy Christmas

Eve Jer Sullivan and the petition had appeared as usual, together with

the horde of old women who, by long-established custom, received a dole

on that day.

[Illustration: "ANCIENT WIDOWHOOD AND SPINSTERDOM"]

In the twilight of the December morning they came by twos and threes,

fluttering up the avenue, looking, with their long dark cloaks and thin

red legs and feet, like the choughs that used to breed in the

neighbouring cliffs. Upon the wet grass on the way round to the stable

yard they squatted in a gabbling row, waiting for the coming forth of

the master, and chaffing Jer Sullivan for having joined the ranks of

ancient widowhood and spinsterdom, with the unquenchable spirit that

lurks in the oldest and most forlorn Irish peasant woman. On this

occasion, Jer, having exhausted his stock of repartee, planted himself

on the hall-door steps.

"Is the granddada comin'?" he called through the window to us, assembled

in the hall. His face, wrinkled and grizzly, was pressed against the

glass, his filmy eye was full of unutterable things.

"I have a present for ye!" he said, as soon as we had opened the door.

To expect a begging petition, and instead of it to be threatened with a

gift, is something disconcerting, but we were young, too young to know

the mental and financial wear and tear involved by a present from such

as Mr. Sullivan.

"What would you be sayin' to a nate little pony?" went on Jer, with a

beguiling smile that was staked out by four huge yellow teeth. "Sure a

friend o' mine has him below at the gate. Wait awhile now----"

He paused, with an artist's knowledge of effect, and strayed away down

the avenue in the indefinite manner of beggar men.

The ceremonial of the gifts pursued its usual course. The Master moved

down the row, a silence of expectation before him, a cackle of blessings

behind him; as each received her dole she gathered her ragged plumage

about her and flitted away, blessings still flowing from her as the

steam-clouds trail out behind a train.

To us again, after breakfast, returned Jer Sullivan, and, incredible

sight, he was leading a small pony. It was about thirteen hands high;

in colour, dirty white, with a very wild eye, a figure like a toast

rack, and a long tail.

"Sure your Honour knows the breed of him well. His dam was by the Kerry

Diamond, the same as your Honour's coach-horses, the grandest horses in

the globe of Ireland!"

Jer took a pull, and the Master eyed the pony in deep silence; the pony

eyed us and snorted apprehensively.

"Sure the granddam of that one," resumed Jer, "was no loftier size than

himself, an' she took a load out o' Banthry, an' a woman, an' three

bonnives, an' two bundles o' spades, an' seven hours was all she took

comin' to Tragumena Strand."

"What do you want for him?" said the Master. To say that our hearts

leaped in us at this approach to business, is to put the thing very

mildly. They rolled and rioted like porpoises in a summer sea, what

time the Master, and Jer, and Jimmy Hosford, the coachman, who had

joined the action irrepressibly, moved round and round in the slow

orbits of the deal. The fiction that the pony was a present had been

abandoned, the thing had narrowed to a duel between Jer Sullivan and

Jimmy Hosford. The Master had made his offer--L5, I believe--and had

strolled away.

"There isn't as much condition on him as'd bait a hook," said Jimmy

Hosford.

"Oh, Jimmy!" we screamed as one man, "he's a lovely----"

"Ah, God help ye!" said Jimmy Hosford, washing his hands of a bargain in

which he had to suffer such collaborators.

"My darlin' childhren," said Jer in a hoarse whisper to us, "don't mind

for he bein' a small bit thin an' wake in himself; it's what ails

him"--the whisper deepened and thickened--"he was ridden--by nights!" he

paused awfully; "wouldn't I find him in the mornings bate out an'

sweatin'; an' signs on it, the world wouldn't make him cross runnin'

wather!"

"Who rode him?" said we, thrilling to the implied mystery.

Jer looked right and left over his shoulders.

"Those People!" said he.

A fairy-ridden pony! It needed but that touch of romance. The pony was

bought. L5 and a weakling heifer calf were the terms finally agreed to.

The explanation offered subsequently by Old Michael that it was the

Tragumena boys that took the pony by nights for blagyarding, and to ride

him in the tide, was dismissed with deserved contempt; the pony was

called Fairy, and a better never bolted in a snaffle, or kicked its

rider over its head when invited to jump a stream.

Those who have in any measure dipped below the surface of stable yard

politics, can hardly fail to have become aware, even in a minor degree,

of the subtle relations existing between the house dogs and the yard

cats. That an understanding, almost amounting to a treaty, obtains,

there can be no reasonable doubt. That the dogs are ashamed of it is

certain; that the cats are not, is a fact bound up in the character of

cats, who are never ashamed of anything. But yesterday, unsuspected and

unseen, I viewed a typical instance of the strange and chilly truce that

holds in the ashpit when the house dogs, the yard cats, the turkey cock,

and, most implacably hated of all by all, the _pensionnaire_ hound

mother and her brood, feasted horribly and illicitly among cinders and

refuse. The house dogs, furtively and hurriedly, with ears laid back,

and guilty pauses in mid-bone; the hound mother grossly and jealously,

something disposed to truculence; the turkey cock contemptibly, with

sunken tail, and wattles of faded pink, prepared to skip four times his

own length if the hound mother so much as looked at him.

Of the whole party the hound puppies and the cats alone showed to any

advantage. The puppies, jovially unaware of the momentousness of each

instant, sprawled and croaked over the woolly shin bone of a lamb; the

cats were unalterably dignified, nibbling with deliberate daintiness the

remains of a long-interred cod-fish. A millennial peace rested upon the

scene.

It was possibly half an hour later, when those ineffable snobs, the

house dogs, basking in the smiles of the aristocracy, had their

attention drawn to the creeping grey form of the yard Tom, making

fowling observations in the shrubbery. Like twin bolts from a

thunder-cloud they sped on the chase; two highly connected white

fox-terrier ladies, shrieking shrill threats at the intruding vermin.

No wonder the yard Tom galloped. Yet the close observer could not but

notice that as soon as the distance from the quarry had been reduced to

some three or four feet, it remained fixed at that. In that nicely

maintained interval was embodied one of the most immutable clauses of

the treaty.

The treaty, however, and all connected with it, were of the most

artificial and trifling to that child of nature, the hound mother. She,

like her many predecessors, pretended to no higher sphere of operations

than the stable yard.

"The care of my children and the surveillance of the ashpit," she seemed

to say, "are all I demand."

But, like her predecessors, a more accomplished and wide ranging thief

never jumped on to a kitchen table, or smirked hypocritically outside a

hall door on the chance of making a dash upon the dining-room. It is

not long since that history, for the twentieth time, repeated itself.

"The ham! the ham!" wailed from the dining-room the voice of the

mistress. "Niobe has stolen the ham!"

The sequel was given by the laundry-woman, herself long versed in the

ways of the stable yard, and of hound mothers.

"I was west in the field spreading the clothes, when I seen herself

sthretched above on the hayrick. Divil blow the stir that was out of

her! I knew by her she was at something! An' afther that I dunno why

she wouldn't bursht with all the wather she dhrank! She has the divil's

own inside!"

*"IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH"*

When I first heard these words I was not highly impressed by them, or by

anything at the moment except the redness of the bridegroom's nose, and

the surprising manner in which one of "the young ladies'" dresses had

been coerced into fitting the bride. The solemnities of the service

passed, in every sense, over my head, which was then not much higher

than the table at which the priest stood; indeed, it was only by putting

forth the fullest wriggling powers of childhood that I was able to gloat

in comfort on the bride's blushes from a loophole between the

turf-flavoured folds of her mother's Galway cloak and the repressive

elbow of my elder brother. Why the ceremony should have taken place in

the vestry I cannot say, beyond that it was a custom in the little Roman

Catholic Chapel of which I write; just as it was in those friendly days

a custom with us to go to the marriages of the tenants, and to take our

share of the blessing and the sprinkled holy water.

The accustomed gold, silver, and copper were laid on the book by the

bridegroom, the portentous words were spoken, with the melancholy Galway

accent adding its emphasis to them, and at the next interval the priest

opened the window behind him.

"Run down to Mick Leonard's for a coal," he said in Irish to some one

outside, and then proceeded with a most sound and simple exordium to the

newly married pair.

In a few minutes there appeared in the open window a hand holding a live

coal of turf in a bent stick. I can see it yet, the pale fire in the

white ash of the sod, thrust between us and the blue sky, and the

priest's hand put out to take it, but I cannot remember now what was its

mission, whether to light a candle or incense.

After this came a sprinkling with holy water with something that nearly

resembled a hearth-brush. A drop fell into my open mouth as I stood

gaping with the detestable curiosity of my age, and its peculiar,

slightly brackish flavour is always the impression that comes first when

I recall that day. There was a long business of hand shakings and

huggings, and the wedding party squeezed itself out of the narrow vestry

doorway, with hearts fully attuned to the afternoon's entertainment.

At the gate some shaggy horses were tied up, and having clambered on to

one of these, much as a man would climb a tree, the bridegroom hauled

his bride up behind him, and started for home at a lumbering gallop.

Shouting and whooping, the other men got on their horses and pursued,

and the whole clattering, bumping cavalcade passed out of sight, leaving

us transfixed in admiration of the traditional "dragging home" of the

bride. For me the only remaining recollections of the day are of a

surfeit in the bedroom of the bride's mother, where in gluttonous

solitude I partook of hot soda-bread, half a glass of luscious port, and

a boiled egg; while the less honoured guests in the kitchen outside

harangued and sang songs, and drank the wine of the country in its

integrity. My wedding garment was, I recollect, a Holland "waggoner,"

loosely girt by a shiny black belt with a brass serpent buckle. At no

subsequent wedding breakfast have I been as enjoyably dressed, and, as a

natural consequence, at none have I eaten as much.

As my first distinct glimpse into matrimony it stands far back and

detached; after it, in the Bayeux tapestry of childhood, horses, dogs,

and baffled governesses moved on in untiring confusion, for periods of

unmeasured time, before the subject again presented itself.

There lives in my memory a Sunday morning in spring, when the little

beech leaves were poised like pale green moths among the bare branches,

and the northerly showers whipped the lambs into shelter. The servants

had gone in a body to early mass, leaving the preparations for breakfast

in the hands of Tom Cashen, a trusted friend and counsellor, whose

ordinary business it was to attend to the affairs of the yard and its

pigs.

There was soda-bread to be watched in the oven, there were saucepans and

kettles resolved upon untimely boiling, there was porridge to be

stirred, and there was also Tom Cashen's dog, a hungry, furtive thing,

capable at any moment of clearing the table of all that was upon it.

The moment came, as it comes to those who wait with complete

attentiveness, and Tom Cashen's dog did not let it slip. It was during

the retributions of justice that the bread burned in the oven, the

coffee boiled over on the range, and the porridge adhered massively to

the bottom of the saucepan.

"I'd sooner be digging the clay from morning till night," said Tom

Cashen, after a long and prayerful imprecation, "than to be at this kind

of work. There isn't a man in the world without getting married but

he's sure to die quare, and no wonder, from the work that's within!"

Translated into our inferior English this aphorism sets forth the

opinion that a bachelor who has to do his own household work is bound to

end his days in a lunatic asylum. This view of matrimony had not before

been heard by me, and it seemed to be wholly reasonable. For one thing,

the men in the yard were always right in our eyes, and always full of

just complaints against the kitchen; in any case, the Work that was

Within--the arduous triflings with saucepans and sweeping-brushes--was

certainly contemptible as compared with the realities and the

fascinations of the stable and the hay-cart. The point of view of Mrs.

Tom Cashen was not touched upon; I think I realised that she was not

likely to have one.

She was described at the time of her marriage as "fine and fair and

freckled, and a great warrant to fatten turkeys," and she walked two

miles every day, with a basket on her back, to carry Tom Cashen's dinner

to him--potatoes and boiled eggs, kept hot in a clean towel. Later on

the dinner was carried by two barefooted little boys; from

thenceforward, during many years, there was always a barefooted little

boy or two to carry it, whereat the heart of Tom Cashen was glad, and

so, in a modified degree, was the heart of Mrs. Tom Cashen, combating

hourly, in a swarming cabin, with the Work that was Within.

Some time afterwards, when a spare son or two had betaken themselves,

weeping direfully, to America, it fell to my lot to sit by the fire in

the Cashen household, and to read aloud a letter from one of them, for

the enlightenment of his parents, who were not skilled in the finer

arts. It was a most affectionate letter, inquiring in turn for all

members of the family, and it enclosed an order for two pounds. It

concluded as follows:

"I think, my dear father, I will not see you again, because you are very

old and you will soon die, but when I come home I hope to have the

pleasure of visiting your grave and crying my stomachful over it."

On receiving these cheering assurances the gratification of Tom Cashen

was enormous; it was more to him, he said, than the two pounds itself,

and, in his own words, he "had to cry a handful."

There came a day when the words of the letter recurred in their

extremest force. Within sight of the Chapel, spoken of further back,

stands a ruin, with the ground inside and outside of it choked with

graves; mound and crooked headstone and battered slab, with the briar

wreathing them, and the limestone rock thrusting its strong shoulder up

between. In the last light of an October afternoon I found myself

there, in a crowd that huddled and swayed round one intense point of

interest--a shallow grave, dug with difficulty, where was laid in its

deal coffin the quiet body left behind by the restless spirit of Tom

Cashen, at the close of a companionship that had always been interesting

and generally happy.

The parish priest was ill, and his substitute was late; the matter was

proceeded with in a simplicity that was quite without self-consciousness

or embarrassment. Tom Cashen's eldest son, grieved, as was well known,

to his gentle heart's core, had in a newspaper earth that had been

blessed (by whom I know not), and from the newspaper it was shaken by

him upon the coffin. Holy water was poured into the grave from a

soda-water bottle, and the bottle itself thrown in after it; then

followed the shovelling in and stamping down, and the tender twilight

falling in compassion on the scene.

The crowd became thin and dispersed, and as I walked away meditating on

things that had passed and things that had endured during an absence of

many years, a woman kneeling by a grave got heavily on to her feet and

called me by my name. A middle-aged stranger in a frilled cap and blue

cloak, with handsome eyes full of friendliness; that was the first

impression. Then some wraith of old association began to flit about the

worn features, and suddenly the bride of twenty-five years ago was there

beneath the cap frill. Five minutes told the story: ill-health, an

everlasting pain "out through the top of the head," sons and daughters

in profusion, and baskets of turf carried on the back in boggy places.

"Himself" was pointed out among the crowd. His nose glowed portentously

above a rusty grey beard, and beneath a hat-brim of a bibulous tilt.

The introduction was not pressed.

The sunny Shrove Tuesday in early March lived again as she spoke, the

glare of sunshine upon the bare country brimming with imminent life, the

scent of the furze, already muffling its spikes in bloom, the daffodils

hanging their lamps in the shady places. How strangely, how bleakly

different was the life history summarised in the melancholy October

evening. Instead of the broad-backed horse, galloping on roads that

were white in the sun and haze of the strong March day, with the large

frieze-clad waist to meet her arms about, and the laughter and shouting

of the pursuers coming to her ear, there would be a long and miry

tramping in the darkness, behind her spouse, with talk of guano and

geese and pigs' food, and a perfect foreknowledge of how he would

complete, at the always convenient shebeen, the glorious fabric of

intoxication, of which the foundation had been well and duly laid at the

funeral.

The possessor of these materials for discontent was quite unaware of any

of them. Her husband was as good as other people's, and seldom got

drunk, except at funerals, weddings and fairs, or on the Holy days of

the Church, and that was no more than was natural. Anything less would

be cheerless, even uncanny. She introduced her daughter, "the second

eldest, and she up to twenty years, and she having her passage paid to

America with all she earned in the lace school." The young lady up to

twenty years had her hair down her back, and wore a long coat with huge

buttons, and a whole Harvest Festival in her hat, from which wisps of

emerald grass drooped over the fierce fringe below it. To be very

young, even childish, is the aim of her generation. The battle has been

waged, even to weeping, by the ladies of the Big House, with a "tweeny"

of seventeen, who, on every descent to the populous regions of the yard

and kitchen, plucked the hairpins from her orange mane, and allowed it

to flow forth in assertion of her infant charms. The previous

generation, superior in this as in many other ways, grows old as

unaffectedly as animals; it is a part of its deep and unstudied

philosophy.

"I'm very old now, sure," said the matron of twenty-five years'

standing, with a comfortable laugh, "I think I must be near forty-five

years."

Had she said sixty it would not have seemed much above the mark, and she

would have said it with equal composure. I looked the conventional

incredulity, and realised that it was thrown away. She, in return,

assured me that for my part she had often read of beauty in a book, but

had never till now really seen it, that my face was made for the ruin of

the world, and that she'd know me out of my father's family by the two

eyes and the snout. All was accepted with fitting seriousness, and the

piece of news that had been held back with difficulty during these

ceremonial observances, was at length given the rein. Had I not heard

of how her sister's daughter, down in Drohorna, had that morning brought

three children into the world, daughters, unfortunately, but still a

matter reflecting much lustre on the parish, and on that Providence that

had singled it out from the Diocese for the honour.

The conversation abruptly closed, as the priest who was to have

performed the Funeral Office scorched up on his bicycle, scarlet-faced,

and half an hour late. As if the sight of him set the seal of the

irrevocable upon what had been done, the widow of Tom Cashen broke into

hoarse wailing; she was arduously consoled and taken away, and her

husband was left behind in the solitude, he, who hated to be alone, and

was afraid to pass the churchyard at night.

A discussion raged as to the opening of his strong box, the men who

stamped down the earth on the grave using the action as an emphasis to

their assertions. At length the churchyard emptied, the evening wind

was raw, and in the gloom the white chapel on the hill stared with its

gaunt windows, impervious to the life histories of its own making

impossible as an accessory to sentiment.

[Illustration: "WHAT HAVE YE ON YER NO-ASE?"]

Obvious duty has seldom gone more suavely hand-in-hand with perfect

enjoyment than in the attendance of the parish, practically _en masse_,

at the levee held next day, and for many succeeding days, by the

Triplets. A grey road runs north and south past their cabin door, level

on the level face of the bog for a shelterless half-mile, and neither

wake nor "Stations" could have commanded a more representative gathering

than went and came upon it in those moist autumn afternoons. The gander

who lorded it over the nibbled strip of grass in front of the cabin yard

was worn down to amiability by a hundred assaults on new comers and an

equal number of glorious returns to the applause of his family; the

half-bred collie, coiled under a cart, closed his cunning eyes to

aggressions that were beyond all barking; a five-year-old boy with tough

tight curls of amber, and an appallingly dirty face, regarded me from

the doorstep with brazen _sang froid_ as I approached, and said in a

loud and winding drawl: "What have ye on yer no-ase?" Praise is seldom

perfected in the mouth of the babe and suckling. I removed my

pince-nez, and passed with difficulty into a doorway filled with people,

the blue smoke from the interior filling up the crevices. The father of

the Triplets, a lanky young man, in the Sunday clothes in which he had

just returned from making his application for the King's Bounty, was

according an unchanging, helpless grin to the shafts of felicitation

that beset him, the most barbed being screamed in Irish by the old

women, to the rapture of the audience.

Behind this unequal strife the Triplets held their court, in a cradle by

the fire, canopied with coarse flannel, and rocked unceasingly, one

would say maddeningly, by a female relative with an expression of pomp

befitting the show-woman. It suggested the bellringer who said, "We

preached a very fine sermon to-day." The wicker walls rolled creakily.

The rockers were uneven, so was the earthen floor beneath them, and each

oscillation contained three separate jerks. In this bewildering world,

composed of sallow blankets and an unceasing earthquake, the three brand

new souls reposed as best they might; the show-woman's grimy hand parted

their firmament of flannel, and revealed three minute faces of the

pallor of lard, dome-like in forehead, with tiny and precisely similar

features, wonderfully absorbed in sleep. The infant of a day old appeals

unfailingly to the compassion, but its most impassioned adherent must

admit that it is out of drawing. The light from the open door struck

suddenly into the cradle, as some one clove a path through the

assemblage; one of the absorbed faces worked in vexation, elderly,

miserable vexation. Tears, too, angry and pitiful; the long slit of

opening eyelid was full of them, the unseeing disc of dull blue within

swam in them, the stately bald head turned to terra-cotta.

[Illustration: "SHE'S THE LIVELIEST OF THEM, GOD BLESS HER!"]

"She's the liveliest of them, God bless her!" said the show-woman, in

high admiration, "but as for the little one-een next the fire, she'll

never do a day's good. 'Twasn't hardly making day this morning when I

had a pot of water on the fire for her."

Being interpreted, this meant that the little one-een by the fire had in

the cold autumn dawn retraced her way so far into the white trance of

the unknown that all was made ready for washing and laying her out. She

lay like a doll made of pale puckered wax, her sleeping lids had a

lavender tone, and the shadows about her mouth were grey. Next morning

the cocks had crowed but once when the pot of water simmered again over

the turf fire, and the weak and lonely combat with death ended in

defeat.

The life that she was not to share moved on about her in leisurely

squalor; the smoke from the turf fire strayed languidly up the sooty

wall, and blundered against the broad mouth of the chimney till the

rafters were lost in the blue and settled obscurity. The walls were

yellow with smoke; it was easy to imagine its flavour in the bowl of

milk that stood on the dresser, ready for the invalid in the inner room.

Obscure corners harboured obscure masses that might be family raiment,

or beds, or old women; somewhere among them the jubilant cry of a hen

proclaimed the feat of laying an egg, in muffled tones that suggested a

lurking-place under a bed. Between the cradle and the fire sat an old

man in a prehistoric tall hat, motionless in the stupor of his great

age; at his feet a boy wrangled with a woolly puppy that rolled its eyes

till the blue whites showed, in a delicious glance of humour, as it

tugged at the red flannel shirt of its playmate.

"God save all here," said a voice, very dictatorially, at the door; a

black-haired old woman shoved her way to the cradle, and parted the

blankets with a professional air. She was a Wise Woman from the

mountain, and foreknowing the moment when she would spit, for luck, in

the faces of the helpless trio in the cradle, I jostled my way to the

bedroom of their mother. It had an almost conventual calm. Moderate as

was the light that struggled through a hermetically sealed window of

eighteen inches by twelve, it was further baffled by an apron pinned

across the panes; the air was heavy, reinforced only by the draughts and

the smoke that entered hand-in-hand from the kitchen.

In one of two great beds the invalid lay in the twilight, with her hand

pressed to her head. She was collected, well-bred, and concerned for

the welfare of the visitor, and of all the visitor's relations,

mentioned in due order of seniority. The glory of her position burned

in two spots of excitement on her high cheek bones, but it could not

eliminate her good manners. Her sister loudly recited the facts that

she was using no food, only sups of milk and water, that as for puddings

or any little rarities, if you ran down gold in a cup she wouldn't let

it to her lips.

"There's nothing in the world wide I could fancy," said the sick girl,

feebly, "unless it'd be the lick of a fish's tail."

The entry of the Wise Woman, with a stentorian benediction, here drove

me forth like a bolted rabbit, and having skirted the evil-smelling

morass in front of the house, I breathed the large air of the bogs with

enthusiasm. The evening was speechless and oppressive; it held like a

headache the question whether it is useful to be sorry for those who are

not sorry for themselves, and, unrepining, grope out their lives in the

dark house of ignorance; and whether discontent with one's lot is not

the mother of good cooking and other excellent things.

A week afterwards an emissary brought to the Big House the intelligence

that the mother of the Triplets had in the interval been at the point of

death, and had been anointed, had an impression on her chest, and could

give "no account of the pain she had in her side, only that it was like

a person polishing a boot, and there to be lumps in the boot, and he

having a brush in his hand." From out of these symptoms was distilled

the fact that she had had pleurisy, acquired while walking barefoot in

the yard to feed the calves. She entreated the gift of a pair of boots,

and the emissary added, as a rider, the fact that the Colonel's boots

would be just her fit. The Colonel was away, but the main body of his

boots stood in battalions in his room. A pair of the dustiest was

snatched, in a heat of philanthropy, and bestowed, and proved, we were

given to understand, an invaluable adjunct to the feeding of the calves.

It is worth mentioning that the Colonel, on his return next day, was by

no means as gratified as had been hoped; they were, he said, the one and

only pair of patent leather boots in which he could walk with comfort

and credit in London, and the moving circumstance of Triplets had no

power to allay his bitter and impotent wrath. His only tall hat had

already been sold at a Jumble sale, and he did well to be angry. The

cook, who had been sceptical throughout as to the necessity for the

gift, tactfully reported that the Colonel's boots were too tight for

That One, and brought from Second Mass the comfortable tidings that they

had preyed on her feet.

The cook, always lenient, after the manner of her kind, to the Colonel

and all his sex, was at that time much preoccupied with matrimonial

affairs. It was soon afterwards that a strange young man in Sunday

clothes appeared at intervals in the yard, and melted like a wraith into

dark doorways in the kitchen passages. He was found eating trifle in

the servants' hall, and in the evenings he fished on the lake. He was,

we discovered, the cook's brother, arrived from Loughrea to investigate

the position of the swain whom the cook wished to marry. On the fourth

day he passed imperceptibly out of the establishment, and the cook

fought loudly and venomously with all who crossed her path. It

transpired that the brother had visited the home of the aspirant, and

had found, she said, that it was a backwards place, and a narrow house,

and he wouldn't let her go in it. She had twice at Mass seen the

candidate for her hand, she informed us, lamentably, and he was a nice

young man, foxy in the face, and she got a good account of him. That it

was remarkable, or at all unpleasant, to marry a perfect stranger was a

point quite outside her comprehension. She had never spoken to him, she

admitted, but what signified, so long as she got a good account of him.

It was afterwards discovered that the lover had been rejected because

his family had been broom-makers, and that no self-respecting girl would

look at him on that account. The point of social etiquette here touched

remains still dark, but it was insuperable, and the cook eventually

married the gentleman whose lofty calling it was to drive the butcher's

cart.

The day before the marriage the battle was waged in the usual manner

between the Loughrea brother and the bridegroom; greasy pound notes were

slapped down on the table, the bride's savings were vaunted above the

bridegroom's heifers and position as heir to his mother's bit of land,

and with swaggering and bluff and whiskey drinking the bargain was

concluded. Nothing could have been more frankly commercial; nothing,

apparently, could have given more satisfaction. The cook departed, and

lived in a cabin with a variety of her husband's relatives, who were by

no means overjoyed at the circumstance; potatoes for dinner, and stewed

tea morning, noon and night were her diet; the hens roosted above her

bed, she weeded turnips and "spread" turf, she grew thin and pale, but

never, so far as is known, did she repine, or regret the print dresses

and the flesh-pots. The butcher's driver was "a quiet boy," better than

most husbands; had it been the broom-maker, foxy in the face she would

have made him an equally good wife. In a community where old maids are

almost unknown, the only point worth considering was that she was

married and had a "young son," and every man and woman in the country

would have said that she was right. In traversing the point we should

run our heads against a wall of primeval instinct.

Writers of novels, and readers of novels, had better shut their eyes to

the fact, the inexorable fact, that such marriages are rushed into every

day--loveless, sordid marriages, such as we are taught to hold in

abhorrence, and that from them springs, like a flower from a dust heap,

the unsullied, uneventful home-life of Western Ireland. It is romance

that holds the two-edged sword, the sharp ecstasy and the severing

scythe stroke, the expectancy and the disillusioning, the trance and the

clearer vision.

It is even more than passive domestic toleration that blossoms in the

cramped and dirty cabin life, affection grows with years, and where

personal attraction never counted for much, the loss of it hurts nobody.

"Their hearts were within in each other," was said of an elderly couple,

who, thirty years before, had been married in the priest's kitchen on

the last night of Shraft; married as a happy thought, and by the merest

chance. The lawful bride had taken her place by the bridegroom, but,

changing her mind at the last possible moment, sprang from her knees,

and declined the ceremony. As her betrothal was probably an affair of

that afternoon it was not so dramatic an action as might be assumed, nor

did it cause any hitch in the proceedings. The priest looked round the

well-filled kitchen.

"Here, Mary Kate!" he said to his servant, "come on you, and marry the

man! Sure you wouldn't let him go away, and he after walking five miles

in the rain!"

Mary Kate knelt down by the bridegroom. We do not hear of remonstrance

on her part, and thirty years afterwards, when their children were

married or gone to America, it was said that this couple's "hearts were

within in each other." It was said with perfect perception of the ways

and the deeps of devotion; but the absence of it at their wedding was

not worthy of remark, and in these things is the essence of the Irish

nature, that keenly perceives sentiment, and contentedly ignores it.

"She isn't much, indeed," said a farmer of exceeding astuteness, when

questioned about his matrimonial intentions, "but she's a nate little

clerk." By this was delicately conveyed the fact that she could read

and write, and that he could not. The marriage was highly successful.

Years afterwards a friend said to him in congratulation, "Well, James, I

hear you married your daughter well."

"I did, sir, and I got him cheap." Then in a whisper, "He was divilish

owld."

The computation by which the years of the bridegroom were set against

the purchase money--in other words, the bride's dowry--must have been an

intricate one, involving, one would say, the tables of insurance, and

the best skill of the nate little clerk.

Congratulations, not unmixed with some genial surprise, were proffered

to another parent on the marriage of his daughter, a person by no means

in her first youth, and possessed of but one eye.

"Sure I had to give him ten pounds agin' the blind eye," explained the

father of the bride, with unimpaired cordiality.

There is here no material, of the accepted sort, for a playwright; no

unsatisfied yearnings and shattered ideals, nothing but remarkable

common sense, and a profound awe for the Sacrament of Marriage.

Marriage, humourous, commercial, and quite unlovely, is the first act;

the second is mere preoccupation with an accomplished destiny; the last

is usually twilight and much faithfulness. The dialogue is a

masterpiece throughout, epigram, heart-piercing pathos, with humour,

heavenly and inveterate, lubricating all. Perhaps the clue to success

lies here, in the mutual possession of agreeability and the good nature

that goes with the best agreeability; certain it is that with a command

of repartee that makes fighting an artistic enjoyment, their conjugal

battles are insignificant.

The two-fold heart of the race beats everywhere in the confusion; gross

worldliness, and a matrimonial standard clear and unquestioned as the

stars; Love the negligible quantity, and attachment the rule. It is for

us, more singly bent on happiness, to aim at rapture and to foreknow

disappointment.

*HORTICULTURAL*

I admit that I hesitate at the thought of pressing into the elect

company of those who have discoursed upon gardens. From Lord Bacon down

to the Poet Laureate, from the Poet Laureate up to that self-sufficing

and yet voluble "Elizabeth," of whose German Garden all the craft have

read, there seems no inch of garden sod that has been left unturned. I

ask myself: Have I any original suggestions on, for example, The

disbudding of 'Mums? (a term of horrid familiarity that I have seen

applied to Chrysanthemums). Any high thoughts on Manures? Any special

convictions in the matter of mulches?

My conscience, far from admitting ability to treat of these solemn

things, reminds me that but little more than a year ago I should

scarcely have been entrusted with the weeding of a gravel path, and

hints at that Affair of the Coltsfoot. It is, in fact, the Coltsfoot

Affair that decides me. I cannot be a guide or a sign-post, but I can

be a scarecrow. I would say a moral scarecrow, though it may be conceded

that the costume of the gardening amateur often lends itself to the more

practical _role_.

I was not at all aware of being in the movement when I found myself

snatching at my weekly copy of _Gardening Illustrated_ in preference to

the daily paper, and brooding heavily upon delphiniums when I might have

been profiting by the sermon. It was only by degrees, as I went about

the world, that I noted how quick and strong would beat the answering

conversational pulse at the mention of a garden, at the sighing

reference to the arrangement of a herbaceous border. It seemed that

every second person I met was as much of a gardener as I was, in the

matter of enthusiasm, and, as they might easily be, something more in

the matter of practice. This discovery revolutionised society for me.

It has doubtless done so for many another. The most penal afternoon

visit may have its alleviations in a valuable hint on "the desire of the

rose"--not for the star--but for the cleanings of the scullery drain;

the most inveterate dowager may be found to be a man and a brother,

profoundly versed in daffodils, full of lore about "Alpines." How

astonishing it is to find oneself cheerfully, even ardently, assenting

to what would once have been regarded as the hideous proposal to "Walk

round the garden!" Such a walk has ceased to be a penance; it has

become something, not quite a scouting expedition, not quite a

(herbaceous) border-foray, not quite a "beggar's lay"; but it has

something in it of the charms of all three. Which element preponderates

depends on the character. There are moss-troopers born, who will twitch

off a cutting, and filch a seed head, uncontrollably. There are

heaven-endowed mendicants who will yearn and flatter the filling of a

flower bed into a knotted pocket handkerchief. It is a useful principle

to accept everything, regardless of the accident of the seasons. There

are many other accidents of far higher importance to be

considered--lapse of memory on the part of the giver, for instance, or

repentance. In the amenities of gardeners, as in love, the advice to

"Take me when I'm in the humour," is sound, and a cutting in the hand is

well worth six in or on the bush, when the bush is another's.

I believe it is the gambling element that gives to gardening so potent a

charm--that, and the seedmen's catalogues. One of my first adventures

was in response to a singularly seductive advertisement--"Humulus

Lupulus," it said, "The finest creeper in the world. Grows forty feet

in a single night. Massive clusters of yellowish blossoms. Beautiful;

Healthy." I have the constitutional misfortune to believe,

unquestioning, the printed word. Even now I find it hard to discount

the flights of fancy of that poetic idealist, the advertising

nurseryman. I despatched eighteenpence by the next post; received by

return an undemonstrative bundle of little roots, planted them

prayerfully in a choice place, and then, as it happened, left home for a

time. On my return to my garden I found the usual crop of catastrophes

and compensations, but disregarding all alike I sped to the site of the

Humulus Lupulus. There had been near the same spot a highly esteemed

rose, "Climbing Captain Christie." The first thing that greeted me was

the wan, indignant face of a Captain Christie, who, having climbed for

all he was worth, was none the less overtaken, and was now gazing at me

in strangled pallor from the depths of a thicket of common hops. The

Poetic Idealist had triumphed.

I have never been able precisely to ascertain to what extent Bat

Whoolley found me out in the Affair--already alluded to--of the

Coltsfoot. Bat is my gardener, and I value his opinion highly, almost

as highly as he does himself, though possibly with more limitations.

Winter Heliotrope was what my neighbour called Coltsfoot. I felt there

was something not quite sound in the lavish way she pressed it upon me.

She said there was nothing like it for covering bare places, and that I

might dig it up for myself and take all I wanted. That specious

permission might have warned me; so also might the singular fact that my

neighbour's shrubbery had for undergrowth naught save the curving leaves

of the winter heliotrope. None the less, I planted out two or three

colonies of it on the outskirts of the rock garden.

One morning, at the turn by the pine tree (one of my colonies had been

unostentatiously planted in a bare place behind the pine tree), I met

Bat. His face was redder than usual, and there was something very

searching in his eye. Mine did not meet it.

"Look at that!" he said.

He held up a handful of long white roots, and brandished it, much as

Jupiter is represented brandishing a handful of lightning. "Look at that

dam-root"--he pronounced the words as one pronounces beet-root--"that

some"--here a powerful variant on the usual definition of fool--"is

after planting in your honour's consarns! See here! If ye left no more

o' that in the ground than as much as ye couldn't see itself, it'd have

the place ate up in one fortnight! I gave the morning to it, an' if I

give the day itself it's hardly I'll have it all dug--Divil's cure to

the--" (Here more variants in connection with the imposter.)

Something wavering in Bat's eye, even while the denunciation proceeded,

made me conscious of the smirch of suspicion. I remained silent as the

grave. Secretly I visited the other colonies, and found that one of

them was already swinging an enveloping wing round the rearguard of the

Iris Kaempferi, and that another had flung outposts into the heart of

the helianthemums. At a bound I ranged myself with the opposition.

"Bat," I said, "the Dam-roots are in the garden!"

That night a fair-sized bundle of winter heliotrope was restored to my

generous neighbour. Bat threw it over the wall.

I am slowly acquiring some insight into my gardener's likes and

dislikes. He despises anything that he suspects of being a wild flower.

"'Sha! that's no good! That's one of the Heth family! The hills is

rotten with it."

But on the other hand, he will lavish such a wealth of attention upon

potatoes as would, if bestowed on the despised daughter of Heth, cause

it to blossom like the rose. There are, in his opinion, but three

flowers really worthy of cultivation. Red geraniums, blue lobelias, and

yellow calceolarias. With these, had he his will, should all my garden

be glorious. I never buy them; I never see them in their earlier

stages, but suddenly, in the herbaceous border, the trio will appear,

uttering a note of colour only comparable to the shriek of a macaw.

"Why then, there isn't a gentleman's garden in Ireland but thim have the

sway in it!" Bat says, when he finds me brooding over a shattered ideal.

"There was Mr. Massy's was the grand place! The garden steps big slobs

of marble, and the gate lodges dashed and haberdashed, and the gardens

fit to blind yer eye by the dint o' thim!"

What "haberdashed" may mean I cannot say, but "thim" meant the

combination so dear to his heart that a stouter than mine would be

needed to abolish it, even from a herbaceous border.

Sometimes, chiefly on Sunday afternoons, I am visited by compunction in

the matter of the prohibited "calcies" and "lobaylias," for it is on

Sundays that Bat is "at home" to three favoured enemies of his own

profession. They move, very slowly, and, for the most part, silently,

from bed to bed, like doctors making a clinical inspection at a

hospital; at intervals they put a horny finger under a patient's chin

and gravely study his complexion, or, wishing perhaps to show generosity

to a rival, they pick off some malign bug or caterpillar, and squash it

between an unhesitating finger and thumb. It is at such times that I

feel how far my garden in its lack of that gorgeous trio lags behind

that of any other gentleman in Ireland.

But my gardener has his alleviations. There was one bright day which,

having begun with the funeral of a relative, culminated in a visit as

prolonged as it was satiating from the chief mourner. King Solomon did

not exploit his Temple more thoroughly for the discomfiture of the Queen

of Sheba than did Bat his gardens for the Chief Mourner. The latter, a

"mountainy man from back in the counthry," paced heavily round after Mr.

Whoolly, his hands folded on the apex of his back under the voluminous

skirts of his blue frieze coat, a stick hanging from them like a tail.

The deep silence of his native hills was on him; he suffered his

emotions without expression until the tour of the kitchen garden was

made, its climax--fortunately stage-managed by Bat--being "a bed of

greens." There is that in such a bed that, in such a nature, touches an

even more vibrating chord than potatoes.

"And cabbages!" said the mountainy man, almost in a whisper.

[Illustration: "AND CABBAGES!" SAID THE MOUNTAINY MAN]

The Queen of Sheba herself was not a more gratifying audience. Mr.

Whoolley seems to have observed the parallelism of the cases, and

assuming that the visitor, in spite of the funeral, had no more spirit

left in him, the couple adjourned to a convenient public house and were

no more seen.

On the whole, I think I may say that I give Bat satisfaction. He is

generous in judging rather by intention than achievement, and he sees

the advantages of fostering a disposition to weed. Only once has he

been tried too high, and that was when I planted out a bed with what he

calls "pushoch-bui," a most pestilent weed whose English equivalent is,

I fancy, charlock. To me he passed over the error in a very handsome

manner, but I heard him the same afternoon say to the subordinate who

was making good my misdoing:

"Is it that one! Sure he's no more good than a feather!"

Another act of folly of mine, however, carried with it more serious

consequences. I was so far left to myself as to give permission to a

Sunday School excursion of unknown dimensions to disport itself in my

domains. Dates were discussed, and times arranged, and then a sponge of

kindly oblivion wiped the affair from my mind. It was a couple of

months afterwards--I was inspecting my wall fruit in the kitchen garden

at eleven o'clock in the morning, and being eaten by midges in a way

that foretold immediate rain, when there was a sound of thunderous

driving on the avenue. Just then the rain began to fall, and almost at

the same moment there arrived to me a rushing messenger from the house

saying "there were ladies in the drawing-room."

I am a lone man, and there is no one to share with me the brunt of such

a moment. I hurried in, and was confronted as I neared the hall door by

four huge yellow brakes, full of children, and roofed with umbrellas.

Two, already empty, were emulously pressing towards the yard, one taking

a short cut across a strip of lawn, and two more were disgorging their

burdens at large. I went into the drawing-room and found it lined with

ladies in black. It was explained to me that on account of the rain the

party, which comprised the Patrons, Teachers, and Pupils of four Sunday

Schools, had "taken the liberty of coming to the house for shelter."

Even as they spoke a strange murmuring sound arose from beneath my

feet--the hum as of an angry hive. The house, like many old country

houses in Ireland, stands upon a basement storey, and I realised that

its cavernous recesses were being utilised as a receptacle for the

Amalgamated Sunday Schools.

I cannot clearly recall the varied events of that day of nightmare. I

remember finding, at one juncture, one of my subordinates stemming the

rush of the Sunday Schools up the back-stairs with the kitchen table and

an old driving whip. At another, my honoured presence was requested in

a cave-like place, once a laundry, wherein a shocking meal was being

partaken of. I noticed a teacher with a "cut" of cold salmon, wrapped

in newspaper. She ate it with her fingers, quaffing raspberry vinegar

the while. Kettles, capacious as the boiler of a man-of-war, steamed on

the ancient fireplace; the air reeked of damp children and buns. Later

on it cleared, and I led a company of female patrons forth to see the

garden. Already the sward of the tennis ground looked like Epsom Downs

on the day after the Derby, and an animated game of Hide-and-Seek was in

progress among my young rhododendrons. I averted my eyes. In the flower

garden the usual amusement of leaping the beds had taken place, with the

usual results of chasm-like footprints in the centre of each. The first

endurable incident of the day was the discovery that Bat had locked the

kitchen garden gate, and that my strollings with the patronesses were

perforce ended. But even as I was expressing my regrets (coupled,

mentally, with a resolve to raise Mr. Whoolly's wages) there arose from

within the walls cries of the most poignant, accompanied by roars

comparable only to those of a wounded tiger. On the top of the wall,

just above us there shot into view the face of a boy, a face scarlet

with exertion, vociferous in lamentation. Quickly following it there

appeared down the length of the wall other faces, equally agitated,

while from within came a sound as of the heavy beating of carpets. Other

sounds came also. Sounds of indignation too explicit to be printable.

I blushed for the patronesses. None the less I endorsed every word of

it as I realised that my best peach trees were being used as ladders by

the Amalgamated Sunday Schools.

I think that was about the last act in the tragedy. Not long

afterwards, in a yellow glow of late, repentant sunlight, the four

brakes drove--with further cuttings of grassy corners--up to the hall

door. The Sunday Schools were condensed into them, each child receiving

an orange as it took its seat, and thin cheers arose in my honour.

Simultaneously the brakes snowed forth orange peel upon the gravel; the

procession swept out of sight, still cheering, still snowing orange

peel.

For reasons darkly and inextricably mixed up with the Sunday School

excursion, dinner that night was served at nine o'clock, and as I was

aware that every servant in the house was in a separate and towering

passion, I refrained from inquiry.

Yet, even through the indigestion following on this belated repast, I

was upheld by the remembrance of Bat's face, as he glared at me through

the bars of the kitchen garden gate, and said:

"Thanks be to God, I'm after breaking six pay-sticks on their backs!"

*OUT OF HAND*

Soldiers were there to keep the peace. The redcoats and the bayonets

moved in a rigid line through the crowd that blocked the two streets of

the town. They guarded a small body of voters that had come across

Lough Corrib, and was making its way to the polling-booths, headed by a

Galway landlord, on whose arm leaned an old man, decrepit, and unnerved

by the storm of opposition through which they passed.

Another Galway landlord was ranging through groups of men who turned

their backs on him, and hid behind each other, his tenants, personal

friends all of them, who, for the first time on record, had voted in

opposition to his wishes.

"Every one of them!" he said, while the atmosphere that surrounds

suffering and strong emotion made itself felt, "all but two or three.

They have all gone against me."

It was a memorable election, marking the new departure in Irish

politics, and it broke the hearts and practically ended the lives of two

at least of the Galway landlords. Till that time the landlords took

their tenants to the poll _en masse_; thenceforward they were to advance

under the banner of the Church.

The epoch that here found its close was memorable, too, in its way. It

held, far back in it, the brave days when the Galway elections lasted

for a month, and the actual voting for a week, days to which the pages

of Lever bear witness. As that week of delightful warfare strove on the

electors became more fastidious about their drinks, and would accept

nothing less aristocratic than mulled port and claret. These

restoratives were brewed in fish-kettles on the big fireplaces of the

ballroom in Kilroy's hotel, an agreeable incident, not, we think,

commemorated by Lever.

* * * * *

Twenty years afterwards a Galway village lay mute in the sunshine,

drowsy with respectability, assertive of rectitude in every slant of its

slate roofs. To view it thus from the waste altitudes of the moor above

it, on a Sunday morning of July, with the call of a cock straining up

through the silence, was to endue it with all the stillness and

strictness of the day itself, even to credit it with a Presbyterian

rigour of Sabbaticism that was at variance with the traditions of the

County Galway. Down on its own level, and approaching it through the

aisle of shade that lay between broken demesne walls and under the lofty

embrace of demesne trees, the glare of its whitewash closed the vista

blatantly, and with a self-righteousness that suppressed the romantic as

a thing of libertine irrelevance. Therefore, to an eye accustomed,

during many Sundays, to the recognition of the barren street, with its

strings of ducks in moody reverie about the unremunerative gutters, and

its dogs asleep outside the closed doors, it was startling beyond the

merit of the occasion to be confronted with a staring crowd of people

that filled the street loosely from end to end. Every face was turned

towards the new-comer, till the whole slope of the hill was flushed with

them; then it darkened, as the people realised that nothing worthy of

further notice was occurring, and turned their heads again towards

Galway.

The crowd was a representative one. Wizened old men in swallow-tailed

coats and knee-breeches, degenerate youth in check suits and pot-hats,

tanned women in deep-hooded cloaks, girls with shawls over their heads,

freckled and ubiquitous children--all smelling heavily of turf smoke,

some modernised with the master smell of hair-oil. The anti-Parnellite

candidate was expected to arrive at any moment from Galway, to address

those who had come to the village for Mass; and though the people had

now been out of chapel for an hour there seemed to be no wish to

disperse, or any sign of impatience. They even appeared to be enjoying

themselves as thoroughly as was compatible with the fact that the

public-houses had not yet been opened. Anything so fascinating as a

little political excitement was worth waiting for, especially while

Providence was liberal of fresh arrivals on outside cars, and invention

failed not of the personal allusion wherewith to greet them; so that

time passed healthfully, and expectation was no more than pleasantly

ripe when outposts on the hill heralded at length the approach of the

candidate.

A blended roar of execration and encouragement went out to meet him--a

greeting sustained on every note of the human compass in a savagely

inarticulate mass of discord. He seemed to cleave his way through it as

he passed, his figure moving pompously along on its car above the

shoulders of the people, in black coat and white waistcoat, while a deft

hand manipulated a tall hat in recognition of every crumb of welcome.

He passed on down a by-road towards the chapel, followed by a few dozen

people, and by the booing and hooting of the rest of the assemblage.

Clearly the materials for the meeting were elsewhere.

It was not far to the chapel, four hundred yards or thereabouts of dusty

road, that lay hot and quiet between loose stone walls, dropping to a

hollow and rising again to the low height where stood the unmistakable

building that is the heart and fountain of parish politics, its plaster

and whitewash veiled a little by the kindly churchyard trees, and the

stone cross on its gable standing strong and keen under the melting sky.

On nearing the churchyard the candidate's voice was audible through the

trees in fluent, opening sentences, each point duly weighted with a

"Hee'rr, hee'rr!" as businesslike as the "Amen" of the parish clerk.

His car was waiting outside in the shade, and the carman, who was

perhaps a little _blase_ in the matter of speeches, was smoking an

unemotional pipe beside it.

"Indeed, you may say the town of Galway is in a quare way," he said,

putting his hand to a cheek that was just perceptibly more purple than

the other. "Look at meself, the figure I am, that wasn't spakin' a word

to a Christhian, good nor bad, and lasht night a fishwoman comes down to

me in the sthreet this ways"--squaring his elbows and strutting--"'Hi

for Lynch!' says she, hittin' me a puck in the jaw with her skib

(basket). The Lord save us! 'tis hardly I ran from her before she had

the town gethered afther her. Begob, the women's the most that'd

frighten ye!"

At the churchyard gate a couple of long-tailed colts were tied up,

saddle-horses evidently, but bare-backed, and bridled with a halter,

their bodies bloated with summer grass out of all proportion to their

long legs, and their countrified ears pricking occasionally at the

cheers that did not by the blink of an eyelid affect the doze of the

Galway car-horse. The company inside was a small one as compared with

that in the street, and had in it a much larger proportion of women and

old men, to which was perhaps due the superior calm of the proceedings.

The churchyard was a spacious one, depressingly roomy indeed for the

present occasion, for which any suburban back garden would have

sufficed. Most of the audience had mounted on the tombstones, great

slabs of limestone that formed the lids of the boxes placed over the

more distinguished dead, blackish grey, and ringing under the

hobnailed-boots like metal. The candidate stood on the highest

tombstone, and all around him leaned and clung these strange groups of

men and women, looking like the wooded islands in the lake close by;

while between them the quiet background of the graveyard was visible,

with its bent and musing trees, and array of low head-stones gazing

blindly at the concourse.

The bald top of the candidate's head formed the focus-point of the

gathering, giving back the sun's glare like glass as it swung and jerked

with the flow of oratory, and beside it the immense shovel-hat of the

old priest moved occasionally in accord, italicising for the benefit of

the flock such phrases as seemed especially edifying. The curate was

nowhere to be seen; rumour said that his political theories were not

formed on those of his superior. A remembrance recurred of meeting,

that morning, a severely contemplative young priest, walking alone and

away from the village, with the green flicker of the leaves overhead

playing strangely across the gloom of his sallow face.

[Illustration: THE CANDIDATE]

The candidate's speech seemed, indeed, to require a little driving home.

It was, for the most part, an explanation to his constituents of the

reasons that made it necessary for him to forego the happiness of

acquainting himself with them in any intimate degree. He was, he said,

in his temperately florid manner, closely connected with a large firm in

England and, deplorable to relate, his income depended on his living in

the bosom of the English firm. "Sure we know that--we know that!"

yelled the half-dozen most chosen supporters, crushing precariously

round the candidate on the edge of the tombstone platform, with their

wild, combative faces pressing, all on fire, towards him. Perhaps he

might yet be roused to say the right things about the rival candidate,

the things that would wring forth a cheer in reply to those distant ones

that came maddeningly at intervals from the crowd in the street.

But the speaker kept his eloquence well in hand, confining himself to

such blind alleys of assertion as the remarkable success of his own

career, his confidence that his constituents would re-elect him, and his

desire to benefit them in some immeasurable way if they did so. A

permissive cynicism curved the wrinkles on the faces of the old men who

stood on the grassy graves behind him, with their hands under their

coat-tails, and their grizzled chins sunk in their shirt-collars; they

knew how they were going to vote, and their own powers (matured in the

sale of many a heifer and rood of bog) of taking a part and sustaining

it, with a perfectness that would deceive the elect, made them sceptical

as to the ends of speech-making. The women were tittering and

whispering under their shawls; but were certainly impressed by the

candidate's Sunday attire, his well-kept grey moustache, and his affable

way of saying "ladies and gentlemen" every now and then.

The speech ambled to its close, through a peroration of an uncertain

conversational tone, assisted at critical points by one or other of the

supporters, who would ungovernably supply the needed word out of the

bursting fulness of his own repertoire. It was the sole outlet for their

enthusiasm, except for the cheer that caught at the ravelled edge of the

final sentence, as the candidate put on his hat and bowed himself from

the tombstone.

"Be prayin' for the meetin', gerrls," said the old priest, leading the

way to the vestry, with rusty skirts floating widely. The door closed

on him and his protege, the clumps on the tombstones fell apart,

mingling in a laughing and talking stream towards the churchyard gate,

and the prayers of the young ladies were apparently deferred to a more

convenient season.

The chapel door stood open, showing the barren squareness of the

interior; a zinc tub, half-full of Holy-water, stood in the porch, with

the flags all round it wet from the splash of dipping hands; the altar

gleamed gaudily at the further end; and a tall confession-box stood

solitary in the seatless expanse of floor, fraught with the inseparable

mystery and suggestiveness of its kind, and holding within its curtained

rails the knowledge of what things are counted for unrighteousness in

that twilight place, the conscience of the Western peasant. The air

inside was warm, and still laden with the smell of frieze coats and

stale turf smoke; but, except for this furnishing, the blankness was

complete. Sunday and its Mass were over and done with for a week, and

priest and congregation were striving factors in the carnal toils of

election.

The people dispersed slowly, discussing the absorbing topic of the day,

some in their native tongue, but for the most part in English, so

pronounced as to be in the distance scarcely distinguishable from the

liquid and guttural flow of Galway Irish.

[Illustration: "A MAN MUST WOTE THE WAY HIS PRIEST AND BISHOP'LL TELL

HIM"]

"Sure, a man must wote the way his priest and bishop'll tell him," says

a tall supporter, with the air of a person repeating a truism.

"Well, meself'd say," says another, whose handsome eyes shone in the

shadow of his soft felt hat, while his hands helped out his words with

picturesque gesture, "the man I'd have a wish for to wote for him, is

the man that'd rise out o' his bed in the night and give hay and oats to

yer horse, and yerself fotever ye'd ax, when any one else'd leshen

(listen) in their bed if ye were battherin' there till mornin'."

This argument referred to the well-known good nature of the Parnellite

candidate, a general dealer and publican in a neighbouring village.

"Well, indeed, he's no scholar, I suppose," says a young fellow, still

in reference to the Parnellite. "He has no learnin' nor way of spakin'

no more than meself, but becripes! he's a fine sthrong man, and he'll be

well able to fight and box in Parliament."

This was said in entire good faith, and was listened to with respect.

"Come on back the road!" bawls a supporter, beckoning authoritatively

from the distance, "let yees come on now, the whole o' yee, the way we'd

be before the car and it going up!"

The reason for this manoeuvre was presently apparent, on returning to

the village street. As the candidate's car left the chapel the

Parnellite crowd thronged the corner by which it must pass; a battery of

threatening faces, waiting with unknown purpose; a gauntlet to run or to

run away from. The car came slowly up the hill, preceded by a party of

supporters; the candidate on one side, looking anxious the old priest on

the other, bare-headed, and looking still more anxious, but waving his

hand as if in greeting, while the interwoven yells became a thrilling

mass of sound.

It was well for the candidate that his companion was one of the oldest

and most popular of the Galway priests. That prestige had shielded the

churchyard meeting from disturbance, and but for its influence now the

future M.P. might have returned to England with an appearance not

advantageous to the firm of which he was a member. A forest of clenched

fists and sticks seemed to leap up towards him, the scream of hatred

never took breath, and there was entreaty in the face of the priest as

his wrinkled hands waved repressively above the tumult. There was a

long moment of uncertainty, but in the next the car was through in

safety, and was gone in the twinkling of an eye, the supporters running

in its wake till the last waving gleam of the candidate's silk hat had

been garnered.

It was then that things began to look, to an Irish eye, most promising

and attractive. The supporters turned, formed into a solid body of

perhaps forty men and boys, and marched with inimitable swagger straight

back into the crowd, all together, in a kind of chant, shouting, "To

hell with ----!" (the rival candidate) at the utmost strength of their

lungs. The theme was a simple one, but magnificently vocalised, and was

instantly replied to in the _tu quoque_ manner by the opposite party.

Sticks went up, the women rushed outwards for safety, looking, with

their floating shawls, like a flock of frightened turkeys; and at this

point the four constabulary men who represented that force made

themselves felt. The dangerous moment yielded easily and unresentfully

to these judicious hands, and the excitement sputtered out in a little

bragging and hustling, without so much as a black eye to commemorate it.

In half an hour the ducks were again waddling in line along the empty

street, and a muffled hum proceeding from the shuttered public houses,

told that the _bona fide_ travellers had at length reached their

journey's end. It was a lamentable falling off from the days of the

fish kettles and the mulled port of Kilroy's Hotel.

The episode had expired in the way that might have been expected, and

was at best an indeterminate, shapeless thing, full of unripe revolt

that it was too childish to express. But that moment when the little

flame first flickers in the gorse, feeling its naked way among the

thorns and affluent blossom, has a wonder of birth in it that is

forgotten when the blazing hillside jars the noonday, and the smoke

rolls monotonously from strongholds of conflagration.

*A RECORD OF HOLIDAY*

Of summer holidays it may at least be contended that they involve two

periods of undiluted enjoyment; the time of anticipation, and the

calm--if sometimes chastened--season of retrospect.

I am glad; now that the mice are nesting in my trunks, and the spiders

weaving fresh straps round my hold-all, that I have been to Switzerland,

that the greasy Visitors' books of several West of Ireland hotels hold

my name. Also, I remember how very cheerful it was to study a

scarlet-hued Bradshaw, and to reflect that, with certain financial

restrictions, the Continent of Europe lay smiling before me. (I

remember also, that I lent that entertaining work to an American friend,

and found the utmost difficulty in recovering it from him. It was only

restored, indeed, on the morning of my departure, and my friend

mentioned that he had sat up all night reading it, "Just to see how it

ended," he said.)

Between, however, these seasons of satisfaction, there stretches the

actual time of holiday, and as I reflect upon it, I am struck by the

fact that its more salient features are misfortunes. From a literary

point of view this has its advantages; the happy traveller has no

history. If the converse is true it would need Gibbon or Macaulay to

deal with our transit from the County Cork to that Alpine fastness for

which we had trustingly, fearlessly labelled our luggage.

It began with fog in the Channel--the Irish Channel--solid, tangible

fog, through which our bewildered steamer stumbled, uttering large,

desolate cries of distress, stopping every now and then to bellow like a

lost cow, sometimes, even, going astern, while muffled hootings told of

another wanderer who had drawn nearer than was convenient.

"When I heard 'em giving the signal to go astern," said a sailor officer

of high degree, next morning, as he gobbled a belated mouthful of

breakfast, "I thought it was about time to get up and put on my clothes.

Said nothing about it to m' wife, though!"