for kitchen, sleeping-room, _stable_, and hall, I said, in horrified
amazement, "How is it possible you can live with that horse?" "Sure,
miss, he's no throuble," she replied; "and it's little room he takes,
after all; for the childer can sleep on the straw under him, just, and
creep between his legs, and he never harming them at all, the sensible
cratur." It is a common thing to see hens drying their feathers by the
genial peat glow, and pigs enjoying the pleasures of the domestic
hearth. In another cabin we found two curious old crones, living
together on apparently nothing, who loaded us with blessings in
the original tongue, and actually went on their knees to offer up
thanksgiving for a few half-pence, which we gave as a consideration
for intruding on their retirement.
Yet, though living in low, smoky, ill-ventilated cabins,--often with
mouldering thatches, and always with damp earth floors, with a pool of
stagnant water or a dung-hill before the door,--though themselves ill
fed and but half clad, it is a singular fact that the peasants of
southern Ireland are apparently a healthful and hardy race. You
occasionally see fine specimens of manly and childish beauty among them;
but a pretty Irish peasant girl we found the rarest of _rara avises_.
There are some families of Spanish origin about Bantry, and of these
we encountered one or two dark-eyed, olive-cheeked beggar boys, who
seemed to have leaped out of one of Murillo's pictures. The policemen
everywhere are a particularly fine-looking set of fellows; indeed, none
but well-made, tall, and powerful men have any chance of enrolment in
this honorable terror-inspiring, omnipresent corps.
The professional beggars of Ireland seem a peculiarly hopeless and
irredeemable class,--not because of the poverty of the country alone,
but from their own inherent and inherited idleness and viciousness. They
are persistent, pertinacious, sometimes impudent, and often quick-witted
and amusing. A friend of ours was waylaid by a certain "widdy" woman,
with an unlimited amount of ragged responsibilities at her heels. On
hearing her doleful story, our friend advised the fair mendicant to
take refuge in the poor-house. "The poor-house!" she exclaimed; "sure
it's meself that keeps the poorest house in all Cork, yer honor."
I was amused by an appeal made by an elderly dame to one of our
fellow-passengers: "Here's a fine fat gentleman, sure; sure he'll give
a sixpence to a poor bony body that hasn't broken her fast at all the
day."
If you wish to take a meditative walk among the hills, the chances are
that you will return with a considerable ragged retinue; but the larger
detachment of this ignoble army of alms-seekers are stationed along the
public roads. They make their startling sorties from the most lonely,
wild, and inaccessible places; like Roderick Dhu's men, they leap up
from "copse and heath." Every rock hides a waiting mendicant, and
every tuft of broom stirs as we approach with a lurking tatterdemalion.
They leap on your way from behind walls, and drop down upon you from
overhanging trees,--small footpads, or rather _paddies_, who present
palms instead of pistols, and blarney and worry you alike out of pence
and patience.
After a day of wet and weary travel through a melancholy country, we
enjoyed to the utmost the beautiful approach to Bantry, under a clear
and sunny sky, and welcomed with enthusiasm the sight of its lovely and
famous bay. But even this bright vision was soon eclipsed by Glengariff,
where we spent the night. Thus far on my tour I have seen nothing to
compare with the glorious beauty of that place. In all the solemn
shadows of its wild loneliness, the dark deeps and frowning heights of
its grandeur, in all the sweet lights of its loveliness, it lives, and
must ever live, in my charmed memory; but I will not attempt to picture
it in words.
After dinner, though a light rain was falling, we took a row around the
bay, and remained on the water until the night set in. I think we shall
none of us soon forget that row over the smooth and silent bay, in the
rain and deepening twilight, under the shadows of mountain and rock.
The scene would have been too wild, solemn, and awfully lonely but for
the peculiar wit and story-telling talent of "Jerry," our guide and
helmsman. He entertained us with some wonderful legends of a certain
Father Shannon, a priest, and a famous character in this region about
half a century ago.
[Illustration: QUEENSTOWN HARBOR]
One anecdote illustrative of the holy man's quick-wittedness impressed
me as an instance of "cuteness" passing the cuteness of Yankees. "The
good father," says Jerry, "was one day fishing, in his boat, on the
bay, when he heard a swarm of bees buzzing about him. Then he begins to
rattle with a knife, or spoon, in an iron kettle he had with him in the
boat, till he feels that all the bees have settled on his shoulders.
Then he slyly reaches back, and takes hold of the tail of his shirt
(begging your pardon, ladies!) and he suddenly turns it over his head,
bees and all, and puts it into the kettle, which he covers over in a
second just; and so he takes the whole swarm to Lord Bantry, and sells
them for three pounds, and gets his shirt back, too, yer honor."...
The mountain road from Glengariff to Killarney is a splendid specimen
of engineering, and leads through scenery wild and beautiful in the
extreme. On the sunny morning of our leaving Glengariff, landscape and
air were fresh and delicious after the night's abundant rain, and with
thrills and palpitations of inexpressible joy my heart responded to the
gladness of nature. I shall never forget the childish ecstasy of delight
with which I gazed around me, and drank in the fragrant air of the
morning.
The three lakes of Killarney descended upon by this road are likely to
disappoint the tourist, especially if he be an American, more especially
if he be a reader of, and a devout believer in, Mrs. Hall's beautiful
and most poetical book, "A Week in Killarney." In truth, such fairy
sheets of water seem little to deserve the name of lakes at first, but
they grow on your respect rapidly as you approach; their beauty is,
near or afar, quite exquisite and undeniable, and the mountains which
surround them are really very respectable elevations. Our first visit
was to the Tore Waterfall, by far the most beautiful cascade I have seen
since coming abroad. The fall is between sixty and seventy feet; the
glen into which the water comes leaping, and foaming, and flashing is
wild and rocky, and overhung with richest foliage....
Our first expedition was to the Gap of Dunloe, a wild and gloomy
mountain-pass, especially interesting to the reader of Gerald Griffin's
fine novel of "The Collegians" as the scene of poor Eily Connor's happy
honeymoon and tragic taking off. Our guide furnished myself and a
pleasant English friend with ponies; the remainder of the party took a
car.
Though tolerably well mounted, and able to abruptly cut the company of
the old, crippled, and blind of the begging fraternity, we found that we
had small advantage over the boys; the fleet-footed little rascals kept
up with us for miles,--one juvenile Celt, literally _sans culotte_, but
in a shirt of elder-brotherly dimensions, giving us a sort of Tam
O'Shanter chase. A pretty, dark-eyed boy, running by my side, held
up a bunch of purple heather and wild honeysuckle, saying, with an
insinuating smile, "Plase, my lady, buy these ilegant bright flowers, so
like yer honor's self, this beautiful summer morning." What woman could
resist such an appeal?
At the entrance of the Gap we were met by a detachment of volunteer
guides, and a company of "mountain-dew" girls,--maidens with cans of
goats' milk and flasks of "potheen," with which they are happy to treat
the traveller, for a consideration. After listening to some grand
echoes, called forth by the rich bugle-notes of our guide, we proceeded
through the pass. This, by itself, did not equal our expectation; its
finest feature is the "Purple Mountain," which in the glorious sunlight
of that morning was beautiful beyond conception.
From Lord Brandon's demesne we embarked upon the upper lake, rowed among
its fairy islands, and ran down "the long range" to the middle lake,
pausing for a little gossip with the echoes of "Eagle Nest," and
shooting "Old Wier Bridge" on our way. The bay and mountain of Glena
are the gems of Killarney. Even now, looking back upon the scene through
the sobered light of recollection, it is all enchantment,--the shore
gorgeous with magnificent foliage, the waters flashing with silver
gleams, the sky golden with sunset light; and it is difficult for me to
believe that there is under the broad heaven a lovelier spot. Even the
echoes from this beautiful green mountain seemed clearer, yet softer
and more melodious, than any we had heard before.
We took dinner on shore, in a delicious little nook shadowed by
arbutus-trees, dining off a large rock, some seated _a la Turc_, some
reclining in the ancient Oriental style. Oh, we had merry times! And
what with toasts and songs and legends, and joyous laughter ringing out,
peal on peal, over the still water, the wonder is we failed to rouse
the great O'Donoghue, who, according to popular tradition, dwells in a
princely palace under the lake, and only comes to the surface to take
an airing on horseback every May morning. Our row homeward, through
the soft lingering sunset light, with the plash and murmur of the blue
waves, rising with the rising wind, heard in the intervals between the
sweet songs of our guide, was a fitting close to a day of shadowless
pleasure.
NORTH OF IRELAND SCENES.
W. GEORGE BEERS.
[We have described a run through the south of Ireland, which to
the traveller seemed but a brown and barren commentary on the
so-called Emerald Island. The traveller from whom we now quote
found the aspect of nature verdant enough fully to justify this
title. But the poverty and shiftlessness which appeared so
patent to Dr. Woods proved equally evident to Mr. Beers, to
whom the lack of snakes in Green Erin seemed more than replaced
by the multitude of beggars.]
Up in the forecastle of an ocean steamer a group of sea-tired souls look
away to starboard, where a faint shape lies on the horizon like an
early-morning cloud. "It's only a bit of old-country fog," mutters the
Grumbler, and goes back to his bed. A thrush had been playing for over
an hour on the spars and rigging, and we fancied we could smell the land
from which it had flown to greet us. And by and by the dim line took a
more solid shape, and soon we could see the rough rocks of the northern
coast. We were nearing Innistrahull light-house and Malin Head, and the
ship's engines stopped, for the first time since leaving the New World,
to take on a pilot. A short sail along the rocky coast, passing the
ivy-covered ruins of an ancient castle, the green refreshing grass, the
hedges, and the white houses, and the beautiful panorama of Moville, at
the mouth of the Foyle, was unfolded, and Nature tinged the sea and sky
with a masterpiece of sunset. Suddenly a few jaunting-cars came flying
down the hill like highway comets, and the Grumbler came up again, in
time to find that we were only a hundred yards from shore. "That's
Ireland," said he. We felt enlightened. It was not long before we were
ashore at Moville, a quiet watering-place for the people of Derry,
Tyrone, and Donegal counties.
Our first reception was from a sturdy beggar, who apologized for
the absence of the mayor and corporation. I had heard of this genius
of Moville before. He is a character of the place, and one of the
most original hypocrites among the begging fraternity. When I was in
Queenstown, a few weeks afterwards, I saw a perfect shoal of his kind,
of all degrees of dirt, disease, and disaster,--a sort of ragged
resurrection through which passengers from an American steamer had to
pass. There were beggars with strong lungs and stout legs; beggars with
scarce a lung and but one leg; paupers in all the traditional heraldry
of rags and wretchedness,--blind, crippled, crooked, and crazy; with
bags and babies, sticks and dogs, canes and crutches, all colors of hair
and all sorts of disease, real or feigned; some funny, some furious,
some bold, some blushing, nearly all overwhelming in benediction.
One sore-eyed veteran, whose apostolical succession from blind Bartimeus
I should have been easily disposed to accept, stuck to my heels, and in
a tone that would have melted the Blarney stone implored me, "A pinny,
yer honor." With New-World innocence of Old-World wickedness, I gave my
Irish Moses a sixpence, upon which the crowd came upon me in a ring of
blessing, until I pushed through it with some rough epithet. In the
twinkling of an eye the circle of sickly saints fell into a close
column of renovated sinners, and yelled after me the characteristic
south-of-Ireland curses, from the mild "Bad luck to ye!" to the more
historical "The curse of Cromwell upon ye!" One crooked old lady had got
close to my ear: "Shure, yer honor, I've been bint up like this these
twinty year wid the rheumatiz, and me back's bruk and one of me lungs is
gone;" but when I shook her off she straightened up like a giantess and
swore at me with as hearty a pair of respiratory organs as any Glasgow
fish-wife might boast. I felt as if I had performed a miracle upon the
old lady's spine. But I nearly collapsed with laughter when I saw one
mild-looking fellow, who had been limping near me with his right leg
held up in a wooden crutch and his right hand apparently shrivelled
beyond the power of use, holding the crutch, which he had unhitched,
under his left arm and shaking the game leg and the lame fist at my
back.
Our arrival at the north, however, was less ceremonious. I do not know
whether our Moville beggar was the last of the mendicant Mohicans of the
coast or had simply stolen a march upon the rest of his fraternity, but
there he stood, a monopolist of the art: "Good luck to ye, jintlemen!
Ye're welcome to Ireland. Ye'll give me a few pennies for luck, yer
honors, won't ye? Jist whativer ye like, jintlemen. Be good to the
motherless and sivin small childer, and niver a bite to ate since
yesterday mornin'. Jist whativer ye like, jintlemen." Our first
Old-World beggar had caught us in the tide of good nature, and the
pennies soon grew to shillings. It was our first experience, and we were
on the "Green Isle." We learned to be wiser before we had gone much
farther, and by the time we left the island we felt as if we could
throttle every beggar we met.
"How long have you been begging?" I asked the Moville suppliant.
"I began wid me mother, sir, soon after I was born."
"And do you never work?"
"Work, is it? Shure, sir, I was niver educated to it. And there's too
many people working already, sir."
"How long is it since you used soap and water?" said I.
"Now, yer honor, where'd _I_ get soap, when I can't get bread? Me
childer would ate it if there was any in the house."
"Well, I'd like to see what you look like when you're clean. There's
another sixpence for you,--half for your stomach and half for your skin.
If you'll get some soap and go down to the sea there and wash yourself
well while we're away, I'll give you sixpence more when we come back."
"Shure," quickly replied the Moville wit, "doesn't yer honor know that
ye can't use soap in salt water? But I'll go to the pump, so I will."
It was quite a disappointment afterwards to learn that, like Montaigne's
page, our beggar was never guilty of telling the truth, that the "sivin
small childer" had yet to be born, and that he considered our party the
best fools he had met that season.
We were to drive down to Green-Castle, in the vicinity of which the
jarvies said we should be sure to hear the cuckoo. Our first experience
of a jaunting-car was pleasant, though precarious. It had the dash of
danger which spices adventure. A sober foreigner can seldom keep his
seat at first; an Irishman may be so drunk that he walks zigzag on the
sidewalk, but he never falls off a car--unless he's sober. At first
blush, especially in the cities, the jaunting-car seems an ingenious
device to furnish Irish surgeons with amputations. As you go tearing
along the streets and flying around corners, your legs hanging over
the sides in close proximity to other "highway comets" tearing along
the opposite way, you have a choice of death by being dashed to
"smithereens" on your face by a jerk or dying in desperate collision
with a street-car. Our jarvie was a genuine Paddy, full to the brim of
wit and song. Between the stretches of his imagination in tale-telling
(all his native geese were royal swans, and for the one ruin we were
approaching he built a score of castles in the air) he made the road
lively with local Irish airs. During the winter these jarvies have
little or nothing to do, and one of them, being asked how they spent
that season, replied, "Making up stories, sir, to tell the travellers
in summer."
However much we were imposed upon in the matter of tale and tradition,
there was no deception in the interest of the drive. The sea lay to the
right. Along the highway and in many of the fields, though much of the
country to the left was barren and hilly, the daisy was peeping up for
our first recognition; the primroses lay in rich golden clumps upon
the banks; violets, blue, red, and white, little purple bluebells,
day-nettles, which the bees and boys love to suck, and many other
new and old wild flowers, were pointed out to us as we jogged along.
Sometimes we jumped down to pick them, gathering whole handfuls of the
faintly-perfumed primroses and burying our noses in their exquisite
blossoms in a way to make an emigrant homesick. On we jolted, and soon
came within sight of the romantic hamlet, its picturesque castle and
fort facing the sea. With a final quick trot and a jerk our driver
pulled up at the Green-Castle Hotel, with the artless hint that its
champagne for jintlemen and its whiskey for jarvies had no rival from
Malin Head to Cape Clear.
[After giving his readers the legendary history of Green-Castle
our author proceeds to describe its present appearance.]
The old castle is now a roofless wreck of time and siege, but enough is
left of its walls--eight feet thick--and its deep dungeons to show that
it was in its time a strong fortress. We walked over the space between
the walls, about eighty yards by forty, upon which the sun and the rains
descend and where the grass grew knee-deep. Detached bits of wall were
covered with splendid ivy. On the walls here and there we saw the little
whitlow-grass, and in the crevices of the rocks the lilac flowers of the
toad-flax, which one sees in all such sea-side ruins in Ireland. We
climbed the steep crag of the highest portion facing the sea. Many of
the stones were loose and slipped out from under our feet. We mounted to
the very top of the old battlement,--a glorious spot from which to watch
a storm when the great waves roll up in close column and break over the
rocks. Creeping from the base of the perpendicular rock a hundred feet
below, thick ivy had grown to the very summit, its rootlets and tendrils
turning and twisting into and upon each other, binding the stones better
than mortar, sucking out the moisture of the wall, and keeping it as dry
as punk. Everywhere in Ireland one is struck by the wonderful tenacity
of ivy, which creeps along the ground or crawls up and clings to the
barest flint. If you lift one of the young shoots, it clings to the
earth like a hungry leech to human skin. If you turn it up, you see
rootlets, like the legs of a caterpillar, by which it attaches itself to
the ground, and which it seems to lose when transplanted to America.
We leaned over on the thick leaves and tendrils to pull the pungent
berries, when out flew two scared jackdaws just below. We rustled
the tendrils, and away scudded a score or more of birds to tell the
sea-gulls of this invasion of their ancient nest. Down near the shore
white daisies speckled the green grass like a first snow-fall.
But hark! Is that the mystic cry of the cuckoo we are hearing for the
first time? How plaintive and lonely its monotone!--"Cuckoo! cuckoo!
cuckoo!" We have never heard that sound in America except from wretched
Swiss clocks. What a world of delightful associations thrills through
our veins! How the old familiar stories told us of our parents' romps in
the green lanes of the old country come to our memories, and the wonder
with which in their childhood days they stopped to listen to this
classic bird. There it is again, over in the woodland. Hark! "Cuckoo!
cuckoo! cuckoo!" One of our company, born in the old land, and now
returned for the first time in thirty years, began to reach the
melting-point, when, looking in the direction of the cry, we caught
sight of an incautious Irish boy peeping from behind a tree, with one
hand to his mouth, just in the act of repeating this old Green-Castle
trick of "fooling the people from America who want to hear the cuckoo."
When we came down from the battlement we were told that a drunken sailor
of H. M. "Vanguard" had fallen asleep on top of the wall a few weeks
before and had rolled off to the bottom, a distance of a hundred feet,
but had not been hurt enough to prevent his marriage the day before our
arrival. Our informant added that it was the "potheen" that had saved
him: "If he'd been sober, sir, shure he'd have wakened up a dead man."
We had a rattling drive back to Moville. The first sight we met on
reaching the wharf was our jolly beggar, transformed almost past
recognition by soap and water, sneezing and coughing and claiming the
promised sixpence: "Shure, yer honor, ye might make it a shillin', for
in the washin' I've caught the divil of a cowld." When we came back a
few months afterwards we missed him. I made up my mind that he had never
recovered from that cleansing; but a more recent visitor tells me that
he is still alive, as witty and as dirty as ever.
[The traveller next made his way, _via_ Londonderry, to Antrim,
where stands a celebrated round tower.]
There is perhaps nothing of more puzzling interest to the Irish
antiquary than the round towers, of which there are about eighty in the
island. Their origin and purpose have been variously guessed at, some
maintaining that they were erected by the Danes as watch-towers and
afterwards changed by the Christian Irish into clock- or bell-towers.
But why should the Danes confine these structures to Ireland, and not
build them in England, Scotland, and other regions where they had a much
firmer foothold? Others regard them as fire-temples, where the Druids
lit the sacred flame and kept it safe from pollution. This view was
accepted for a long time as a settlement of the question, on account
of the resemblance of these towers to similar structures found in India
and thought to have been used in an extinct form of worship. The Irish
Druids followed many Eastern customs in their religious rites, but
these may have been mere coincidences. The turrets in the vicinity of
Turkish mosques, from the summits of which approaching festivals were
proclaimed, suggested the hypothesis that the Irish towers were intended
for the same purpose. Others held the theory that they were built by the
ancient bishops as strongholds for the sacred articles belonging to the
churches. In the neighborhood of many of these towers churches still
exist. A very picturesque one forms part of a church in Castle-Dermot,
in the county Down. At Drumbo, a few miles from Belfast, the ruin of
one stands in the church-yard of a Presbyterian chapel.