a path which leads through the fields from Glengesh mountain to Ardara
wood. We had got as far as the stream which crosses the path near the
wood when she stopped suddenly. She looked west, and scratched her
eyebrow. "I've an insleep," says she. "I hadn't one this long time!"
WATER AND SLÁN-LUS
What is more beautiful than water falling, or a spray of _slán-lus_
with its flowers?
BY LOCHROS MÓR
The heat increases. The osmunda droops on the wall. The tide is at full
ebb. A waste of sea-wrack and sand stretches out to Dawros, a day's
journey beyond. I see two figures, a boy and a girl, searching for
bait--the boy digging and the girl gathering into a creel. The deep,
purring note of a sandpiper comes to me over the bar. It is like the
sound that air makes bubbling through water. I listen to it in infinite
space and quietness.
RIVAL FIDDLERS
I was talking with a fiddler the other evening in a house where there
was a dance, up by Portnoo. I happened to mention the name of another
fiddler I had heard playing a night or two before in Ardara. "Him,
is it?" put in my friend. "Why, he's no fiddler at all. He's only an
old stroller. He doesn't know the differs between 'Kyrie Eleison' and
'The Devil's Dreams'!" He became very indignant. I interrupted once or
twice, trying to turn the conversation, but all to no purpose; he still
went on. Finally, to quiet him, I asked him could he play "The Sally
Gardens." He stopped to think for a while, fondling the strings of his
instrument lovingly with his rough hands; then he said that he didn't
know the tune by that name, but that if I'd lilt or whistle the first
few bars of it, it might come to him. I whistled them. "Oh," says he,
"that's 'The Maids of Mourne Shore.' That's the name we give it in
these parts." He played the tune for me quite beautifully. Then there
was a call from the man of the house for "The Fairy Reel," and the
dancers took the floor again. The fiddlers in Donegal are "all sorts,"
as they say--farmers, blacksmiths, fisher boys, who play for the love
of the thing, and strollers (usually blind men) who wander about from
house to house and from fair to fair playing for money. When they are
playing I notice they catch the bow in a curious way with their thumbs
between the horsehair and the stick. At a dance it is no uncommon thing
to see a "bench" of seven or eight of them. They join in the applause
at the end of each item, rasping their bows together on the strings and
stamping vigorously with their feet.
[Illustration: MOUNTAINY FOLK.]
NATURE
A poor woman praying by a cross; a mountain shadowed in still water; a
tern crying; the road ribboning away into the darkness that looks like
hills beyond. Can we live every day with these aspiring things, and not
love beauty? Can we look out on our broad view--as someone has said of
the friars of the monastery of San Pietro in Perugia--and not note the
play of sun and shadow? Nature is the "Time-vesture of God." If we but
touch it, we are made holier.
SUNDAY UNDER SLIEVE LEAGUE
It is Sunday. The dawn has broken clear after a night's rain. The
sunlight glitters in the soft morning air. The fragrance of
peat, marjoram, and wild-mint hangs like a benediction over the
countryside. A lark is singing; the swallows are out in hundreds. The
road turns and twists--past a cabin, over a bridge--between fringes
of wet grass. It dips suddenly, then rises sheer against a wisp
of cloud into the dark bulk of Slieve League behind. I see the
mountainy people wending in from all parts to Mass. I am standing
on high ground, and can see the hiving roads--the men with their
black coats and wide-awakes, and the women with their bright-coloured
kerchiefs and shawls. Some of them have trudged in for miles on bare
feet. They carry their brogues, neatly greased and cleaned, over their
shoulders. As they come near the chapel they stop by the roadside or
go into a field and put them on. The young girls--grey-eyed, limber
slips from the hills--are fixing themselves before they go in of the
chapel door. They stand in their ribboned heads and shawls pluming
themselves, and telling each other how they look. The boys are watching
them. I hear the fresh, nonchalant laugh and the kindly greeting in
Irish--"_Maidin bhreagh, a Phaid_," and the "_Goidé mar tá tú,
a Chait?_" The men--early-comers--sit in groups on the chapel wall,
discussing affairs--the weather, the crops, the new potato spray,
the prospects of a war with Germany, the marrying and the giving in
marriage, the letters from friends in America, the death and month's
mind of friends. The bell has ceased ringing. The men drop from their
perch on the wall, and the last of them has gone in. The road is quiet
again, and only the sonorous chant of the priest comes through the open
windows--"_Introibo ad altare Dei_," and the shriller response of the
clerk, "_Ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam_."
THE NIGHT HE WAS BORN
We were talking together, an old man and myself, on the hill between
Laguna and Glen. The conversation turned on ages--a favourite topic
with old men(2)--and on the degeneracy that one noticed all over
Ireland, especially among the young. "And what age would you take _me_
for?" said he, throwing his staff from him and straightening himself
up. "Well, I'm a bad hand at guessing," said I, "but you're eighty if
you're a day." "I'm that," said he, "and more. And would you believe
it," said he, "the night I was born my mother was making a cake!"
(2) He had the Old Age Pension.
THE LUSMÓR
The _lusmór_, or "great herb"--foxglove,
That stars the green skirt of the meadow,
is known to the peasantry by a variety of other names, as for example,
_sian sléibhe_, "sian of the hills" (it grows plentifully on the high,
rough places); _méarachán_, "fairy-thimble"; _rós gréine_, "little
rose of the sun"; and _lus na mban-sidhe_, "herb of the elf-women, or
witch-doctors," etc., etc. It is bell-shaped, and has a purplish-red
colour. As Dr. Joyce observes, it is a most potent herb, for it is a
great fairy plant; and those who seek the aid of the _Daoine Maithe_,
or Good People, in the cure of diseases or in incantations of any kind,
often make use of
Drowsy store,
Gathered from the bright _lusmór_,
to add to the power of their spells. It is a favourite flower in
Highland, otherwise Gaelic Scotland; and the clan Farquhar, "hither
Gaels," have assumed it for their badge.
DERRY PEOPLE
Donegal is what I call "county-proud." Speaking of Derry--the marching
county--an old woman said to me the other day: "Och, there's no
gentility about the Derry people. They go at a thing like a day's
work!"
A CLOCK
I was going along the road this evening when I came on a clock
(some would call it a black beetle), travelling in the direction of
Narin. The poor thing seemed to have its mind set on getting there
before dark--a matter of three miles, and half an hour to do it in! The
sense of tears in me was touched for the clock, and I stooped down
to watch it crawling laboriously along in the dust, over a very rough
road, tired and travel-stained, as if it had already come a long way;
climbing stones (miniature Errigals) twenty times as high as itself;
circumventing others, falling into ruts headlong, and rising again none
the worse for its awful experience; keeping on, on, on, "with a mind
fixed and a heart unconquered." I couldn't help laughing at first,
but after five minutes I felt a sort of strange kinship with the
clock--it was a wayfarer like myself, "a poor earth-born companion
and fellow-mortal"--and I stood watching it, hat in hand, until it
disappeared out of view. The last I saw of it was on the top of a stone
on rising ground, silhouetted against the sunset. Then it dropped over
. . . and I resumed my journey, thinking.
CARRICK GLEN
Here there is quiet; quiet to think, quiet to read, quiet to listen,
quiet to do nothing but lie still in the grass and vegetate. The water
falls (to me there is no music more beautiful); a wayfarer passes now
and again along the road on his way into Carrick; the sea-savour is
in my nostrils; the clouds sail northward, white and luminous, far up
in the sky; their shadows checker the hills. If the Blue Bird is to be
found this side of heaven, surely it must be here!
[Illustration: A WAYFARER.]
A SHUILER
I was talking to a stonebreaker on the road between Carrick and Glen
when a shuiler passed, walking very fast. "A supple lad, that," says
the stonebreaker. "The top o' the road's no ditch-shough to him. Look
at him--he's lucky far down the hill already." He dropped his hammer,
and burst into a fit of laughing. "He's as many feet as a cat!" says
he.
TURKEYS IN THE TREES
One of the gruesomest sights I ever saw in my life--turkeys roosting
among the branches of the trees at a house above Lochros. You would
think they were birds with evil spirits in them, they kept so quiet in
the half-darkness, and looked so solemn.
A PARTY OF TINKERS
A party of tinkers on the high road--man, wife, children, ass and
cart. A poor, back-gone lot they are surely. The man trails behind
carrying one of the children in a bag over his back. The woman pushes
on in front, smiling broadly out of her fat, drunken face. "Oh,
God love ye for a gentleman," she whines in an up-country _barróg_
which proclaims her a stranger to the place. "Give us the lucky hand,
gentleman, and may the Golden Doors never be shut against ye. Spare a
decent poor body a copper, and I'll say seven 'Hail Mary's' and seven
'Glory be to the Father's' for ye every night for a week. Give us the
lucky hand, gentleman." I throw her a penny, not so much out of charity
as to get rid of her, and the cavalcade moves on. Over the hill I hear
her voice raised in splendid imprecation on the husband. Such coloured
speech one only hears from peasants and strolling folk, who are in
touch with the elemental things--the wonders and beauties and cruelties
of life.
TEELIN, BUNGLASS, AND SLIEVE LEAGUE
It is a lovely summer's day, warm and fragrant and sunny. We have just
come from Mass at Carrick chapel, and are following the road that leads
south by the harbour up to Teelin village. Numbers of people are on
the road with us--mostly women and girls, for the men have remained
behind to smoke and to talk over the week's happenings in the different
ends of the parish. The groups go in ages--the old women with the old
women, the marriageable girls with the marriageable girls, the younger
girls with the girls of their own age. There is a crowd of little boys,
too--active as goats, dressed in corduroys or homespuns, and discussing
in Irish what they will do with themselves in the afternoon. Some
will go bathing in the harbour, others will go up to the warren by
Loch O'Mulligan to hunt rabbits, others will remain in the village
to watch the men and bigger boys play at skittles in a cleared space
by the high road. I pick up with a quiet-eyed lad--the makings of a
priest or a scholar, by his look--and in a short time I am friends with
the crowd. If one could see me behind I must look like the Pied Piper
of Hamelin, so many children have I following alongside me and at my
heels. They come to know by my talk that I am interested in Irish--an
enthusiast, in fact--and they all want to tell me at once about the
Feis at Teelin, and about the great prizes that were offered, and how
one out of their own school, a little fellow of eight years, won first
prize for the best telling of a wonder-tale in the vernacular. The
quiet-eyed lad asks me would I like to see Bunglass and the great view
to be had of Slieve League from the cliff-head. I tell him that I am
going there, and in an instant the crowd is running out in front of us,
shouting and throwing their caps in the air--delighted, I suppose,
at the prospect of a scramble for coppers on the grass when we get
to the end of our journey. For boys are boys the world over, let the
propagandists carp as they will! and when I was young myself I would
wrestle a ghost under a bed for a halfpenny--so my grandmother used to
tell me, and she was a very wise and observant woman. We have come to
Teelin village--a clean, whitewashed little place on a hill, built "all
to one side like Clogher"--and from there we strike up to the right by
a sort of rocky, grass-covered loaning which leads to the cliffs. We
pass numbers of houses on the way, each with a group of gaily-dressed
peasants sunning themselves at the door. The ascent is gradual at
first, but as we go on it gets steeper, and after a while's climbing
we begin to feel the sense of elevation and detachment. The air is
delightfully warm, and the fragrance of sea and bracken and ling is in
our hearts. In time we reach Carrigan Head, with its martello tower,
seven hundred feet odd over the Atlantic. Southwards the blue waters of
Donegal Bay spread themselves, with just the slightest ripple on their
surface, glinting in the warm sunlight. In the distance the heights of
Nephin Beag and Croagh Patrick in Mayo are faintly discernible, and
westwards the illimitable ocean stretches to the void. From Carrigan
Head we follow a rough mountain trail, and in a short time reach
Loch O'Mulligan, a lonely freshwater tarn, lying under the shadow of
Slieve League. Back of the loch a grassy hill rises. We climb this,
the younger boys leading about fifty yards in front, jumping along the
short grass and over the stones like goats. Arrived at a point called
in Irish _Amharc Mór_, or "Great View," a scene of extraordinary
beauty bursts on us. We are standing on Scregeighter, the highest of
the cliffs of Bunglass. A thousand and twenty-four feet below us, in a
sheer drop, the blue waters of Bunglass advance and recede--blue as a
sapphire, shading into emerald and white where they break on the spit
of grass-covered rock rising like a _sceilg-draoidheachta_, or "horn of
wizardy," out of the narrow bay. Right opposite us is Slieve League,
its carn a thousand feet higher than the point on which we stand. In
the precipitous rock-face, half-way up, is a scarped streak called
_Nead an Iolair_, or the Eagle's Nest. The colouring is wonderfully
rich and varied--black, grey, violet, brown, red, green--due, one
would think, to the complex stratification and to the stains oozing
from the soft ores, clays, and mosses impinging between the layers. We
step back from the cliff-edge, and sit down on a flat slab of stone,
the better to enjoy the view, and the boys spread themselves out in
various attitudes over the short grass before and behind us. They
are conversing among themselves in Irish, speaking very rapidly, and
with an intonation that is as un-English as it can possibly be. The
thickened l's and thrilled r's are especially noticeable. To hear these
children speak Irish the way they do makes one feel that the language
of Niall Naoi Giallach is not dead yet, and has, indeed, no signs of
dying.
[Illustration: THE HORN.]
One could spend a day in this place sunning oneself on the cliff-head,
or loafing about on the grass, enjoying the panorama of mountain and
sea and sky spread in such magnificence on all sides. But we have
promised to be back in Carrick for lunch, and already the best part
of the forenoon is gone. "_Cad a-chlog é anois?_" I ask one of the
boys. He looks into the sky, calculates for a while, and answers: "_Tá
sé suas le h-aon anois. Féach an ghrían_." (It is upwards of one
o'clock now. Look at the sun.) In a remote, open country like this the
children are wonderfully astute, and well up in the science of natural
things. Coming up the hill I had noticed a number of strange birds, and
when I asked the crowd the names of them in Irish they told me without
once having to stop to think. We are ready to go now, but before
setting out we decide on having a scramble. My friend, R. M., takes
a sixpence from his pocket, puts it edge down on the turf, and digs it
in with his heel, covering it up so that no sign of it is visible. He
then brings the boys back over the grass about a hundred yards,
handicapping them according to age and size. One boy, the youngest, has
boots on, and he is put in front. At a given signal--the dropping of
a handkerchief--the race is started, and in the winking of an eye the
crowd is mixed up on the grass, one boy's head here, another's heels
there, over the spot where the sixpence is hidden. Five minutes and
more does the scramble last, the boys pushing and shoving for all they
are worth, and screaming at the top of their voices. Then the lad who
reached the spot first crawls out from underneath the struggling mass,
puffing and blowing, his hair dishevelled, the coat off him, and the
sixpence in his hand!
We have got back to Carrick, an hour late for lunch, and with the
appetites of giants. We met many people on the road as we returned,
all remarkably well-dressed--young men in the blue serge favoured by
sailors, and girls in white; a clerical student, home on holidays from
Maynooth, discussing the clauses of Mr. Birrell's latest Land Bill
with a group of elderly folk; big hulking fellows with bronzed faces,
in a uniform that I hadn't seen before, but which a local man told me
was that of the Congested Districts Board; and pinafored children. One
young man we noticed sitting on a rock over the water with his boots
off, washing his feet, and several boys sailing miniature boats made
out of the leaves of flaggers.
THE SHOOTING STAR
I was out the other evening on the shore to the northward of Lochros,
watching the men taking in the turf from the banks where it had been
footed and dried. The wind was quiet, and there was a great stir of
traffic on the road--men with creels, horses and carts, asses and
children driving them. An old woman (a respectable beggar by her look)
came by, and we started to talk. We were talking of various things--the
beauty of the evening, the plentifulness of the turf harvest, the
sorrows of the poor, and such like--when she stopped suddenly, and
looked up into the sky. She gripped my arm. "Look, look," she said, "a
shooting star!" She blessed herself. There was a trail of silver light
in the air--a luminous moment--then darkness. "That's a soul going up
out of purgatory," she said.
SUNDAY ON THE ROAD BETWEEN CARRICK AND GLENGESH
Sunday on the road between Carrick and Glengesh. It is drawing
near sunset. We pass a group of country boys playing skittles in
the middle of the road--quite a crowd of them, big, dark fellows,
of all ages between twenty and thirty-five. Some are lolling on the
ditch behind, and one has a flute. Farther on we come on a string
of boys and girls paired off in twos with their arms about each
other's waists, like a procession on Bride's Sunday. The front pair
are somewhat ill-matched. The man is old and awkward in his walk,
yet cavalierly withal; the girl is young and pretty, with a charming
white laundered dress and flowers in her hair. As our car passes they
wave their hands to us as a sign that they are enjoying the fun quite
as much as we are. We are rising gradually towards the Pass. Below us
the road ribbons away through miles of bog to Slieve League. There is
a delightful warmth and quietness in the air. The smoke of the cabin
chimneys, as far as one can see, rises up in straight grey lines,
"pillaring the skies of God." The whole landscape is suffused with
colour--browns and ambers and blues--melting into infinity.
A ROANY BUSH
"Do you see that bush over there?" said an old man to me one day on the
road near Leckconnell--a poor village half-way between Ardara and Gull
Island. "It's what they call a roany bush. Well, it's green now, but in
a month's time it'll be as red as a fox's diddy, and you wouldn't know
it for berries growing all over it."
AUGUST EVENING
August evening, moonrise. A drift of ponies on the road. I heard the
neighing of them half an hour ago as I came down the glen, and now I
can see them, a red, ragged cavalcade, and a cloud of dust about their
heels. There are some fourteen ponies in the drift, and three young
fellows with long whips are driving them. They give me the time of
day as I pass. One of them turns back and shouts after me: "Would you
happen to have a match on you, gaffer?" He is a stout-built lad, with
a red face, and a mat of black hair falling over his eyes. I feel in my
pocket for a box, and give him share of what I have. He thanks me, and
I pass on. The air is damp and fragrant, and wisps of fog lie along the
ditches and in the hollow places under the hills. The newly-risen moon
touches them with wonder and colour.
NEAR INVER
A yellow day in harvest. A young girl with a piece of drawn-thread work
in her lap, sunning herself in the under wisp of her father's thatch. I
come on her suddenly round a bend in the road. She is taken by surprise
(almost as completely as _I_ am) . . . draws her legs in, settles
her clothing, half smiles, then hangs her head, blushing with all the
_pudor_ of abashed femininity. I pass on.
ALL SUBTLE, SECRET THINGS
All subtle, secret things--the smell of bees, twilight on water, a
woman's presence, the humming of a lime-tree in full leaf, a bracken
stalk cut through to show the "eagle" in it--all speak to me as to an
intimate. I know and feel them all.
A MADMAN
I passed an old fellow to-day between Ardara and Narin, doubled up in
the ditch with his chin on his knees, and staring at me out of two red
eyes that burned in his head like candles.
"Who's that old fellow?" I asked of a stonebreaker, a perch further
down the road.
"Oh, never heed him," says he--"he's mad. This is the sixth. There's a
full moon the-night, and he ever goes off at the full o' the moon. Was
he coughing at you? God, you'd think he was giving his last 'keeks,'
to hear him sometimes!"
LAGUNA
Under Crockuna; a thousand feet up. Interminable red bog. A
cluster of hovels on the tableland; one set this way, another that,
huddling together for company sake, it seems, in this abomination of
desolation. A drift of young children play about on a green cleared
space between the holdings. (In Donegal one sees young children
everywhere.) They run off like wild-cats at our approach, screaming
loudly and chattering in Irish as they run. A rick of turf, thatched
with winter-stales; a goat tethered; a flock of geese; tufts of dyed
wool--red and green and indigo--spread on stones to dry; the clack of a
loom from the house nearest us; a dog working sheep beyond.
NEAR LETTERKENNY
A sheepdog with a flock of geese (a most unusual charge, I'm sure)
halted by a bridge on their way to market. The owner squats smoking
under the parapet--a darkavis'd man, with the slouch hat, slow eye, and
wide, mobile mouth of Donegal. I greet him, and pass on.
[Illustration: A CLACHAN OF HOUSES.]
SHAN MAC ANANTY