Part 3

TWO THINGS THAT WON'T GO GREY

I met a woman up Glengesh going in the direction of the danger-post. She seemed an old woman by her look, but she more than beat me at the walking. When we got to the top of the hill I complimented her on her powers. "'Deed," says she, with a deprecating little laugh, "and I'm getting old now. I'm fair enough yet at the walking, but I'm going grey--going fast. A year ago my hair was as black as that stack there"--pointing to a turf-stack out in the bog--"but now it's on the turn. And I tell you there's only two things in the world that won't go grey some time--and that's salt and iron."

RUNDAL

I see a green island. It is hardly an island now, for the tide is out, and one might walk across to it by the neck of yellow-grey sand that connects it with the mainland. It is held in rundal by a score of tenants living in the mountains in-by. Little patches of oats, potatoes, turnips, and "cow's grass" diversify its otherwise barren surface. There are no mearings, but each man's patch is marked by a cairn of loose stones, thrown aside in the process of reclamation. The stones, I see, are used also as seaweed beds. They are spitted in the sand about, like a _cheval de frise_, and in the course of time the seaweed carried in by successive tides gathers on them, and is used by the tenants for manure.

PÚCA-PILES

"What are these?" I asked an old woman in the fields this morning, pointing to a cluster of what we in the north-east corner call paddock-stools, and sometimes fairy-stools. "Well," said she, "they're not mushrooms, anyway. They're what you call Púca-piles. They say the Púca lays them!"

THE ROSSES

Bog and sky: a boulder-strewn waste, with salt lochs and freshwater lochs innumerable, and a trail running up to a huddle of white clouds.

A COUNTRY FUNERAL

Death, as they say, has taken somebody away under his oxter! I was coming into Ardara this morning from the Lochros side, and as I came up to the chapel on the hill I heard the bell tolling. That, I knew, was for a burying: it was only about ten o'clock, and the Angelus does not ring until midday. Farther on I met the funeral procession. It was just coming out of the village. The coffin, a plain deal one covered with rugs, was carried over the well of a side-car, and the relatives and country people walked behind. The road was thick with them--old men in their Sunday homespuns and wide-awakes, their brogues very dusty, as if they had come a long way; younger men with bronzed faces, and ash-plants in their hands; old women in the white frilled caps and coloured shawls peculiar to western Ireland; young married women, girls and children. Most of them walked, but several rode in ass-carts, and three men, I noticed, were on horseback. The tramping of so many feet, the rattle of the wheels and the talk made a great stir on the road, and the movement and colour suggested anything but a funeral. Still one could see that underneath all was a deep and beautiful feeling of sorrow, so different to the black-coated, slow-footed, solemn-faced thing of the towns. As the coffin approached I stood into the side of the road, saluted, and turned back with it the _tri céimeanna na trocaire_ (three steps of mercy) as far as the chapel yard.

YOUTH AND AGE

An old man came dawdling out of a gap by the road, and he stopped to have a word with me. We were talking for some time when he said: "You're a young man, by the looks of you?" I laughed and nodded. "Och," says he, "but it's a poor thing to be old, and all your colt-tricks over," says he, "and you with nothing to do but to be watching the courses of the wind!"

SUMMER DUSK

Summer dusk. A fiddle is playing in a house by the sea. "Maggie Pickens" is the tune. The fun and devilment of it sets my heart dancing. Then the mood changes. It is "The Fanaid Grove" now, full of melancholy and yearning, full of the spirit of the landscape--the soft lapping tide, the dove-grey sands, the blue rhythmic line of hill and sky beyond. The player repeats it. . . . I feel as if I could listen to that tune forever.

A NOTE

Darkness, freshness, fragrance. Donegal fascinates one like a beautiful girl.

THE PEASANT IN LITERATURE

It has been said before that there is "too much peasant" in contemporary Irish literature, especially in the plays. The phenomenon is easily explained. Ireland is an agricultural country, a country of small farms, and therefore a nation of peasants; so that a literature which pretends to reflect the life of Ireland must deal in the main with peasants and the thoughts that peasants think. And peasants' thoughts are not such dead and commonplace things that I, who have learnt practically all I know from them, can afford to ignore them now. The king himself is served by the field. Where there is contact with the unseen in this book, with the mysteries which we feel rather than understand, it is because of some strange thought dropped in strange words from a peasant's mouth and caught by me here, as in a snare of leaves, for everyone to ponder. Impressions, with something of the roughness of peasant speech in them and something of the beauty, phases of a moment breathless and fluttering, the mystery of the sea, the thresh of rain, the sun on a bird's wing, a wayfarer passing--those are the things I sought to capture in this book.

AN INSLEEP

We were talking together the other evening--an old woman and myself--on 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.

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!

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.

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