Part 4

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.

SHAN MAC ANANTY

Up Glengesh. The hills of the Pass close in darkly on either side of 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."

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.

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

]