me. The brown road rises between them in devious loops and twists to
the sky beyond. There is the smell of bog-myrtle and ling in the air,
and the sound of running water. The silence is awful. I am going along
quiet and easy-like, with hardly a thought in my head, when near a
sodded shelter, almost hidden from view in a cluster of fuchsia bushes,
I come on a little lad of about three years of age. He can't be older,
I fancy, he is so small. He runs out in front of me, scared somewhat at
my approach, as quaint a figure as ever I looked at. I shout at him and
he stops, pulling the hat which he wears--and it is big enough to be
his father's--over his face, and laughing shyly at me out of one corner
of it. His hands are wet, I notice, a blae-red colour, and sticking
with grass--as if he had been "feeling" for minnows in the stream which
runs alongside the road. He has a pair of homespun jumpers on, very
thick, and dyed a crude indigo colour, a shirt and vest, and his legs
are bare and wet up to the knees. I ask him in English "where he comes
from," "who is his father," "who is his mother," "where he lives?" He
doesn't answer, only pulls the hat deeper over his head, and laughs
into it. I put the question to him then in Irish. . . . . The
words were hardly out of my mouth when he gave a leap in the air. I
felt as if something had struck me in the face--something soft and
smothering, like a bag of feathers--and I was momentarily blinded. When
I looked again who should I see but Shan Mac Ananty, my _leaprachán_
friend from Scrabo in Down, running out in front of me, in a whirl of
dust, it seemed--a white, blinding cloud--giving buck-jumps in the air,
and dancing and capering about in the most outlandish fashion possible.
"So it's you, Shan?" I said, when I had recovered my breath. I wasn't a
bit afraid, only winded.
"Ay," says he. "I didn't know you at first. The English is strange to
me." Then with a quaint grimace: "What are _you_ doing up here?"
"And what are you doing up here yourself, Shan?" says I. "I thought
Scrabo was your playground."
"You're right, son," says he. "The old fort _is_ my playground, but the
smoke--the smoke from the mill chimneys--chases me away at times, and
I come up here for an airing. And, anyway, you mustn't forget that I'm
king of the fairies of Leath-Chuinn," says he.
"And so you are," says I. "I clean forgot that. And do you be in
Donegal often?" I asked.
"Once in a spell," says he. "I travel the townlands in turn from
Uisneach to Malin," says he, "and it takes me a year and a day to do
the round. I saw you at Scrabo in June last," says he, "but you didn't
see me."
"When was that, Shan?" says I, thinking.
"On the night of the twenty-third," says he. "There wasn't a fire
lighting as far as I could see; and I could see from Divis to the Horns
of Boirche, and from that over to Vannin."
[Illustration: A GAP BETWEEN THE HILLS.]
A shadow darkened his queer little face. "Ah," says he, "they're
changed times. I was an old man when Setanta got his hero-name,(3)
and look at me now," says he, "clean past my time. No one knows me,
barring yourself there. No one can talk to me; and at Scrabo it's
worse than here. They're all planters there," says he, "all strange,
dour folk, long in the jaw and seldom-spoken, and with no heart in the
old customs. Never a John's-Fire lighted, never a dance danced, never a
blessing said, never a . . . ."
(3) Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, a contemporary of Conchubhair
MacNeassa, who was--so tradition has it--born on the same night as
Christ.
He stopped, and I turned to answer . . . . but Shan was
gone! Nothing in sight for miles--nothing living--only a magpie walking
the road, and a _toit_ of blue smoke from a cabin away down in the
glen.
A POOR CABIN
A poor cabin, built of loose whin rubble; no mortar or limewash; thatch
brown and rotting. Dung oozing out of door in pig-crew to north, and
lying in wet heaps about causey stones. A brier, heavy with June roses,
growing over south gable-end; rare pink bloom, filling the air with
fragrance.
THE FLAX-STONE
Outside nearly every house in Donegal--at least in the north-western
parts of it--is the _Cloch Lín_, or "Flax-Stone." This is a huge
wheel of granite, half a ton or more in weight, revolving on the end
of a wooden shaft which itself turns horizontally on an iron spike
secured firmly in the ground. The purpose it serves is to "break"
the flax after it has been retted and dried. On the long arm of the
shaft tackling is fixed for the horse supplying the motive power--much
in the same way as it is in a pug-mill or puddling machine used in
the old days by brick-makers. The flax is strewn in swaths under the
wheel, which passes over it repeatedly, disintegrating the fibre. The
scutch-mill, of course, is a more expeditious way of doing the work,
but Donegal folk are conservative and stick to the old method--which
must be as old, indeed, as the culture of flax itself is in the
country.
AFTER SUNSET
I was coming through Ardara wood the other evening just after
sunset. There was a delightful smell of wet larch and bracken in the
air. The road was dark--indeed, no more than a shadow in the darkness;
but a streak of silver light glimmered through from the west side
over the mountains and lay on the edge of the wood, and thousands
of stars trembled in the branches, touching them with strangeness
and beauty. As I approached the village I met an old woman--I knew
she was old by her voice--who said to me: "Isn't it a fine evening,
that?" "It is," said I. "And look," said she, "at all the stars hung
up in the trees!" Farther on I came on a number of women and girls,
all laughing and talking through other in the half-darkness. I was out
of the wood now and almost into the village, and there was light enough
to see that they were carrying water--some with one pail, others with
two--from the spring well I passed on my way up. This, I believe, is
a custom in Ardara.(4) The grown girls of the village go out every
evening after dark-fall, if the weather happens to be good. They meet
at the well, spend half an hour or so chatting and talking together,
and then saunter home again in groups through the darkness, carrying
their pails, just as I saw them on this particular evening. When I
got to the village the windows were nearly all lit up. The white and
white-grey houses looked strange and unearthly in the darkness. The
doors were open, and one could see a dark figure here and there out
taking the air. Over the roofs the stars shone and the constellations
swung in their courses--the Dog's Tail, the Dragon, the Plough, the
Rule, and the Tailor's Three Leaps; and although there was no moon one
could see the smoke from the chimneys wavering up into the sky in thin
green lines. The fragrance of peat hung heavily on the senses. There
wasn't a sound--only a confused murmur of voices, like the wind among
aspen-trees, and the faint singing of a fiddle from a house away at
the far end of the street. Even the dogs were quiet. I passed through
the Diamond, down the long main street next the shore, and like Red
Hanrahan of the stories, into "that Celtic twilight, in which heaven
and earth so mingle that each seems to have taken upon itself some
shadow of the other's beauty."
(4) In fact, a "go of water" is a byword there--"Many a girl met
her man in a go of water!"
THE DARKNESS AND THE TIDE
"What time o' day is it?" My interrogator was an old man I met the
other evening in a loaney running down from the back of Lochros to
the sands of Lochros Beag Bay, near where the old fish-pass used to
be. I looked at my watch, and told him it was five-and-twenty past
seven. "Oh," said he, "is it so much as that? The darkness and the
tide'll soon be coming in, then."
ERRIGAL
The hill of Errigal climbs like a wave to the sky. A pennon of
white cloud tosses on its carn. Its sides are dark. They slope
precipitously. They are streaked and mottled here and there
with patches of loose stone, bleached to a soft violet colour
with rain. Not a leaf of grass, not a frond of fern roots on these
patches. They are altogether bare. Loch Nacung, a cold spread of water,
gleams at the bottom, white as a shield and green at the margin with
sedge. Dunlewy chapel, with its round tower--a black silhouette in the
'tweenlight--and the walls of the Poisoned Glen beyond.
THE SORE FOOT
"It's a provident thing," a tramp said to me the other day, "to lay
something by for the sore foot."
ASHERANCALLY
A roar, as of breaking seas. We are approaching the open Atlantic,
but though its salt is bitter on our lips, our view is obscured
by sand-dunes. Then, as we round a bend in the road, the Fall of
Asherancally breaks suddenly on us, tumbling through a gut in the
mountainside--almost on to the road it seems. We stand under it. We
watch the brown bulk of water dropping from the gut-head and dancing
in foam on the rocks a hundred feet below. The roar is deafening. One
might shout at the top of one's voice, and yet not be heard. The air is
iridescent with spindrift, which shines in the sun and sprays coolingly
on our cheeks. We lean on the bridge parapet, watching and listening.
[Illustration: LOCH NACUNG--MOONRISE.]
ORANGE GALLASES
I came across an old man to-day out in Lochros--a shock-headed old
fellow in shirt and trousers, carrying water from a spring well near
the Cross, and a troop of dogs snapping at his heels. "You don't seem
to be popular with the dogs?" says I, laughing. "Oh, let them snap,"
says he. "It's not me they're snapping at, but my orange gallases!"
THE HUMAN VOICE
The human voice--what a wonder and mystery it is! "All power," said
Whitman, "is folded in a great vocalism." I spoke to a man to-day
on the roadside, near Maghery. He was a poor, raggedy fellow, with a
gaunt, unshaven chin and wild eyes, and a couple of barefooted children
played about the mud at his feet. He answered me in a voice that
_thrilled_ me--deep, chestfull, resonant; a voice, that had he been
an educated man, might have won fame for him, as a politician, say, or
a preacher, or an actor. And voices like his are by no means uncommon
along the western seaboard of Ireland. Men address you on the road in
that frank, human, comrade-like way of Irishmen, out of deep lungs and
ringing larynxes that bring one back to the time when men were giants,
and physique was the rule rather than the exception. In such voices
one can imagine the Fenians to have talked one with the other, Fionn
calling to Sgeolan, and Oisin chanting the divine fragments of song he
dreamed in the intervals of war and venery. Will Ireland ever recapture
the heroic qualities--build personality, voice, gesture--or, as Whitman
puts it: "Litheness, majestic faces, clear eyes"--that were hers down
to a comparatively late period, and in places have not quite died out
even yet? I believe she will.
LOCH ALUINN
A grey loch, lashed into foam by wind from nor' westward,
lapping unquietly among reeds that fringe its margin. Boulders
everywhere--erratics from the Ice Age--bleached white with rain. Crotal
growing in their interstices, wild-mint, purple orchises and the kingly
osmunda fern. A strip of tilled land beyond--green corn, for the most
part, and potatoes. Slieve a-Tooey in the distance, a blue shadowy
bulk, crossed and recrossed by mist-wreaths chasing one another over it
in rapid succession. A rainbow framing all.
THE OPEN ROAD
The open road, the sky over it, and the hills beyond. The hills beyond,
those blue, ultimate hills; the clouds that look like hills; the
mystery plucked out of them, and lo, the sea, stretching away into the
vast--white-crested, grey, inscrutable--with a mirage dancing on its
furthest verge!
[ Transcriber's Note:
The following changes have been made to the original text. The first
line presents the text as printed in the original, the second the
amended text.
"The words of the maker o poems are the general light and dark." One
"The words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark." One
survival of a pagan right of our forefathers.
survival of a pagan rite of our forefathers.
better. It is ove the hill the wonders are.
better. It is over the hill the wonders are.
'Glory be to the Father's, for ye every night for a week. Give us the
'Glory be to the Father's' for ye every night for a week. Give us the
]