Part 32

Adjoining the village is Bantry House, a stately mansion surrounded by a beautiful lawn and grove, which was the residence of the late Earl of Bantry, and was inherited by his nephew, Leigh White. Another nephew, Simon White, occupies the ancient Glengariff Castle, which is nearer the head of the bay--a large and gloomy-looking structure almost entirely hidden by the surrounding trees. Thirty-one thousand acres of land around the bay was inherited by these two young men, but it is very poor land. Three-fourths of it is bare rock, and the entire population upon their holdings is only about four hundred men, women, and children. A daughter of the late Earl of Bantry married Lord Ardilaun, who was Arthur Edward Guinness, a son of the great brewer of Dublin and probably the richest man in Ireland. The hotel is inclosed in a beautiful hedge of fuchsias, which flourish in this climate, and are commonly used for hedges. The grounds of the hotel extend over two hundred and fifty acres, mostly dense forest, with a beautiful garden of twelve acres or more. All the vegetables, poultry, eggs, and other produce are raised on the place, and the milk and cream and butter come from a private herd of cows, which is a great luxury.

There is splendid fishing, both in the bay and in two small lakes, one hour's walk from the hotel, also boating, swimming, and any number of beautiful walks and drives through the woods and along the mountain roads. The only antiquity in the immediate neighborhood is a picturesque ruin called Cromwell's bridge. While the grim old Covenanter was passing up the glen with an escort to visit the O'Sullivans, citizens of Glengariff who had heard of the devastation he had created elsewhere tore down a bridge over a mountain gorge, hoping that it would turn him back. But after much trouble he and his men succeeded in crossing the canyon into the village, and there he summoned the inhabitants and told them that if they did not restore the bridge by the time he returned from his visit he would hang a man for every hour's delay. The bridge was ready for him, "fur they knew the auld villain would kape his word."

The surrounding country is sparsely settled by a hardy, stubborn race, who fish in the winter and farm in the summer, like the people who live on the bleak New England coast. The children herd cattle, sheep, and goats upon the mountain sides; the pigs and the poultry share the ancient stone hovels occupied by their owners; the women cultivate a little spot of soil wherever they can find it in the crevices among the rocks, raising a few potatoes and cabbages, and look after the chickens and the babies. Scattered over the mountain side and reached by steep but perfect roads, are the roofless walls of what once were the homes of neighbors who have emigrated to America. The fate of those who remained seemed hopeless until recently, but the benevolent purposes of the government are brightening the lives and improving the condition of many of them. At Glengariff I got my first chance to observe the work of the Congested Districts Board through which the government is trying to relieve the distress of the poor and make life worth living for those wretched but courageous souls who dwell always in the mists of the mountains and among the moorlands and the peat bogs on the west coast of Ireland. They are the poorest, the least nourished, and the most helpless portion of the population. They are scattered widely. The arable soil is so scarce that they cannot live in communities and survive. Here and there among the rocks, where the kindly winds have dropped grains of earth during the ages, they are cultivating little patches of potatoes and cabbage. They follow a few cows and goats that nibble at the blades of grass that grow in the cracks of the rock and keep a few chickens, which share with them the roof shelter of a leaky, straw-thatched cabin built of rough stone and with a mud floor.

The cabins are as comfortless as one can imagine, but they are no worse than thousands that may be found in our southern States, in the mountains of Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia. Thousands of "crackers" in Georgia have no better homes and no more consolations in life, but their cabins are more neatly kept and are not situated among such filthy and loathsome surroundings as those of the poor "bog-trotters" of Ireland.

The interior of the cabins is quite as repulsive as the exterior. The chickens run in and out with the children, and they "kape the pig in the parlor" because that is the only room in the house and there is no other pen. The inevitable baby--you never enter a cabin without finding one--is always in its mother's arms and another is generally clinging to her skirts, while two or three more are playing in the filth around the door. There is only one room, where they all sleep, the elder ones upon rough benches, covered with pallets of straw, and the younger ones on the floor--grandparents, parents, children, pigs, and chickens--young and old, both sexes, lying side by side, with whatever covering their scanty earnings enable them to provide. There are no sheets or mattresses; no pillows, only comfortables that have been used for generations, and tattered blankets that are never washed. There is no furniture but a table and two or three stools. There are shelves, and a few nails and hooks driven into the walls. There is no stove, but a peat fire under the chimney where the mother cooks in pans and kettles when the weather is stormy and uses a rock outside for a kitchen when it doesn't rain or blow. There are few dishes, mostly broken china, and the covers of tin cans. The walls are windowless; there is no light but that which comes through the door, and during the long winter nights, when, in this latitude, it becomes dark at four o'clock, the family hibernate in the darkness because candles are beyond their means and burning peat gives no light. You can understand why so many of these poor wretches lose their wits. The insane asylums of Ireland are filled with unfortunates from this coast, most of them are hereditary and chronic cases caused by melancholia, nervousness, and starvation. I have been trying in vain to find out how they spend their time during the long winter evenings, but have been unable to get any satisfactory information on that point.

Notwithstanding these conditions a stranger always receives a polite and a cordial welcome and usually an invitation to come in and rest and drink a cup of milk. There is no apology for poverty, or the appearance of things; there is no obsequiousness and no insolence, but a dignified, hearty handclasp at the coming and at the going and a cheerful invitation to call again. The Children of the Mist are invariably well behaved and polite. Although their clothes are ragged and their bodies are filthy with dirt, they have the same manners you would expect among the nobility. They are always obedient, deferential, and unselfish. They are kind and attentive to their younger brothers and sisters, and show perfect respect to their parents and elders. We have seen them in the cabins, in the fields, and in the schools. I have asked everybody where they get their manners, and who teaches them deportment in this barren wilderness of filth and bad smells. I asked Miss Walshe, the medical officer of the district, who goes from cabin to cabin as an angel of healing; I asked Miss O'Donnell, who has charge of the lace school; I asked the head constable at the police station; I asked the school-teachers and others, and they all say that the politeness of the Irish peasants, like their pride, is inborn and final proof that they are the descendants of kings. This pride is a strange thing, and it is most surprising. Every woman you find in a soiled and ragged dress in a wretched cabin receives you as her equal and talks with dignity and without restraint, and Mr. Duke, manager of the Eccles Hotel, told me this morning of a mountain peasant whose raggedness aroused his sympathy, but who would not accept a suit of clothes.

Miss O'Donnell, the lace teacher, and Miss Walshe, the nurse, told us that the pretty young women we saw in the lace school and the boys and girls we saw in the national school, all come from such cabins as I have described. Some of the blue-eyed, bare-footed urchins have complexions that society belles would give their souls for, and long, beautiful coal-black hair, yet they sleep on a mud floor with pigs and chickens, and many of them walk three and four miles and back for the privilege of attending school. With a little training these children make excellent servants, faithful, obedient, and tactful, and almost without exception they go to mass and confession regularly, and they have a high standard of morals and a conscientious devotion to duty. Although it costs as much to get married as it does to buy a ticket to America, there are no unmarried people living together here; illegitimate births are extremely rare and chastity is the commonest of virtues.

There is no compulsory education law, but the priests drive the children to school until they are fourteen and will not confirm them until they have passed a certain grade. A gentle, soft-voiced woman in a rude cabin in the mountain side told us the other day that her greatest trouble was that her daughter had been kept from school by sickness and she was afraid that the priest would not confirm her because she was so far behind the other girls in her lessons.

The same rule applies to the lace school which has been established by the government through the Congested Districts Board in the old building used by the Catholic church before the new one was erected. The government pays a teacher and advances the material. The girls get the price their lacework brings when sold in the shops of London or Dublin or at the Eccles Hotel here at Glengariff. Miss O'Donnell tells me that Mrs. Duke, the wife of the manager of the hotel, is their best sales agent, and a stock of samples is always kept where the guests can see them. Fifty-one girls are now attending the school, and some of them walk seven miles and back every day. Father Harrington will not allow them to attend the lace school until after they are confirmed, and it is a great inducement to join the church because they are able to earn forty, fifty, and some of them sixty pounds a year, which secures them better clothes, better food, and some comforts for their families. Last year this little school sold nearly three thousand dollars' worth of lace, and the money was divided among fifty-one girls who made it.

Every young person who can get money enough goes to America. And if it were not for the money they send back here many of their parents and younger brothers and sisters would starve. A gentleman who handles the postal orders in one of the most forlorn and wretched villages of Ireland told me that the Christmas gifts of money that came from America kept many a family in food during the winter. It is the ambition of every young man and woman to go to the United States, and only the lack of steamship fare keeps them in Ireland. A sturdy lad of eighteen who guided us across the moor to the roadway this morning told me confidentially that he was going to Arizona as soon as his uncle, who was doing very well out there, was able to send him the price. He asked many questions about that part of the country. His uncle is working in a gold mine near Tombstone and is "earning more than a pound a day, steady, six days in the week, and they pay him double wages if he works on Sunday." To a lad whose life is so barren and whose horizon is so narrow and who sees his father and his neighbors trying to wrest a scanty sustenance partly from the sea and partly from the land, and who scarcely catch enough fish or raise enough potatoes to feed the mouths of their own families, a pound a day looks like the income of an earl.

The Catholic church at Glengariff is a brand new building of stone, and looks large enough for ten times the population of this parish, which has only about four hundred souls, men, women, and children. It was built with American money raised by Father Brown, the late priest, who went to Brooklyn, Boston, and several other cities of the United States, hunted up the relatives of the people who live here and those who went from these parts, and obtained £3,000. He was a good man and took a great interest in the temporal as well as the spiritual welfare of his people. Since his death Father Harrington has succeeded him and serves four churches in a radius of seventeen miles.

We attended mass on Sunday. The church was crowded. All the aisles were filled with kneeling worshipers, up to the very feet of the altar and in the vestibule, or the steps, and around outside were forty or fifty men and women kneeling reverently upon the sod, although they couldn't hear the voice of the priest. One of the men told me that he believed every person in the parish was present and that they always came unless they were too ill to move, that no storm could stop them. As a rule they came from mountain cabins five and six miles away, in carts and on foot, and some of them carried children in their arms the entire distance. Notwithstanding their poverty they were better dressed than the working people of Dublin. Their clothes were neat and well brushed and mended. However ragged the garments they wear on week days may be, they always have a decent suit to wear to the house of God. The solemnity of the service was very impressive. To these people the church is the gate of heaven. Its decorations and ceremonies appeal to their imagination, to their senses of color and sound, and the mystic rites sink into their souls.

Although there are six saloons for a parish of four hundred people the chief constable tells me there is very little drinking or disorder, and practically no crime. He hasn't had a case of robbery for a year, and except upon convivial occasions like weddings and wakes the people are very orderly. Most of the saloons, he tells me, sell very little liquor, and some of their licenses run back for years, being renewed annually to the same family for generations. A liquor license in Ireland cannot be taken away except for serious reasons, as long as the annual fee is paid. They can be sold or transferred, but if they lapse they are cancelled.

In a neat stone cottage, surrounded by a well kept garden, among the rocky mountain sides that overlook Bantry Bay, lives Lacia Walshe, strong in body, strong in mind, and strong of purpose. She goes among the wretched hovels in this locality attending maternity cases which occur with amazing frequency, for the poorer the family the more children is the rule. Miss Walshe does not give her entire attention to midwifery, however, but treats every case of illness that comes within her ken, from sore fingers to delirium tremens. That is not a figure of speech, but an actual fact, for many a time at midnight has she been called from her cottage to some miserable stone hovel in the mountains to quiet with opiates a drunken ruffian who is haunted with reptiles and raving in his dreams. Miss Walshe belongs to the poor, and is kept here by a society with a name of fifteen words--"Lady Dudley's Scheme for the Establishment of District Nurses in the Poorest Parts of Ireland." She wears a badge the shape of a heart supporting a crown and in the center is a shamrock leaf encircled with the words of Another One who went about doing good as she does: "By love serve one another."

The Countess of Dudley organized this work in 1903, beginning with two nurses in Geesala and Bealadangan, County Galway. And they did so much good that the number has now been increased to fifteen and they are located at as many places in the poorest districts of Ireland, where there are no physicians and where the people are too poor and the population too scattered to support a doctor if one could be induced to go there.

The most distressing cases are those of confinement in cabins of only one room, into which sometimes six, eight, and ten men, women, and children are crowded, sleeping upon the floor. We went into a hut of only one room, not more than twelve by fourteen feet in size, which is occupied at night by nine persons,--father and mother, and grandmother and six children, the oldest being eighteen years of age. We visited another hut where there were eight children living, and were told of one where there were seventeen, the births of most of them not more than a year apart. To relieve conditions that may be easily imagined, Lady Dudley's society with the long name was formed, and is now doing an immense amount of good. Fifteen courageous and conscientious women are comfortably placed in localities where their services are most needed, at a cost of not more than a thousand dollars per year each, which includes a bicycle, the most convenient means of locomotion they can find, and an allowance for the hire of horses and jaunting cars when they can be obtained. Because it is impossible to find lodging and boarding places, it has been necessary to build cottages for the nurses, and in some cases the demands upon them are so great that they are allowed to employ assistance. They are equipped with surgical implements and medical stores. Each of the nurses has taken a course in surgery for emergency cases for they are frequently called upon to set bones and dress wounds and even to perform operations. They are also furnished with baby clothes, old linen, warm garments, stores of condensed milk and beef extract, and other delicacies, and although Florence Nightingale relieved thousands, her work did not compare in peril or privation or fatigue with the almost daily experience of some of these noble women.

XXVI

THE LAKES OF KILLARNEY

The big stages that cross the mountains from Glengariff to Killarney are chiefly loaded with Americans. It is singular how few other nationalities are represented in the passenger traffic. The morning we crossed there were four great vehicles carrying twenty-four persons each, and every passenger, except one German bridal couple and a funny acting Englishman, was from the United States. In our coach were representatives from Cincinnati, Washington, St. Louis, Omaha, Texas, and Minnesota, and I suppose other sections were equally represented upon the three other coaches. Everybody who comes to Ireland takes this ride because it offers the grandest scenery and one of the most delightful experiences that tourists can enjoy. The coach begins to climb slowly through the beautiful glen as soon as it leaves the Eccles Hotel and continues climbing, up and up, for six miles through a dense forest of glowing green, until it emerges into a wilderness of rock and moorland, wild, picturesque, and almost entirely uninhabited. There is very little vegetation, only a few streaks and bunches of grass that grow along the cracks in the rocky surface, or in wind-carried soil that has been caught in crevices. It is one of the wildest places you can imagine, and as we go upward it becomes more so. The stage winds around the brow of a mountain that seems a solid mass of stone, and as far as one can see there is nothing else in the universe except a ribbon of silver that winds at the foot of the slope where we left a river when we began the journey. One has the sensation of awe that solitude often produces, but it is disturbed by the chatter of the passengers. It is as dreary and desolate and lonesome a place as the world contains.

This is a comparatively new road. It was not built until 1838, but, like all the roads of Ireland, it is solid and perfect and made to last forever. The old road, and the principal line of communication between the counties of Cork and Kerry for centuries, ran along the slope of Hungry Mountain, so called because it is so devoid of vegetation that a goat would have to take his luncheon if he went up there. And from there it crossed to the mountain of the "Priest's Leap," which was named from a legend that grows out of persecution of the Catholics in Cromwell's time. The driver told it in this way:

"Ye see, yer honor, in Cromwell's time there was a bounty of five pun' fer the head of a wolf and five pun' for the head of a priest; an' a dale of money was made o' both o' 'em. Well, bedad, one foine day a priest was ridin' over the hill, whin the Tories caught sight o' him (we called thim Tories in those days, the blaggards that did be huntin' o' the priests), and them that purshued him were jist to lay their bloody hands upon his blessed robe, whin he prayed to St. Fiachna. The blessed saint heard him, and the donkey he was ridin' gave a lape siven miles from one mountain to the ither, and yees can see the marks of the baste's hoofs in the solid rock to this day."

It takes but little encouragement and a minimum of material to supply legends in this desolate and weird region, where every sound seems unnatural and the trembling of a leaf causes the nerves to tingle. The road resembles Brünig Pass in Switzerland more than any other that I have seen, with the Lakes of Killarney corresponding to Lake Lucerne, but it is less civilized and there are very few human habitations.

The coach keeps climbing until we come to the grand divide, 1,233 feet above the sea, where the passage from the "Kingdom of Cork" to the "Kingdom of Kerry," as once they were called, is made through a tunnel about six hundred feet long and two smaller ones that are cut through the peak of the Esk Mountain. Until these tunnels were built travelers were carried over the rocks to the other end of the road on the backs of men. The country improves a little after the divide is crossed, and there is a gradual descent into a rather good grazing country which belongs to the Marquis of Lansdowne, but even here it is a good deal of a job for a cow to make a living, and there is a proverb that "A Kerry cow never looks up at a passing stranger for fear it will lose the bite."

The Earl of Lansdowne, who has been governor-general of Canada, governor-general of India, lord of the treasury, secretary of war, minister of foreign affairs, and has held other important offices in the British cabinet, is one of the largest landowners in Ireland, although he spends very little of his time there. He has a long list of Irish titles inherited from his ancestors. In addition to being Earl Wycombe, Earl of Kerry, and Earl of Shelburne, he is Viscount Clanmaurice, Viscount Fitzmorris, Baron of Lixnaw, Baron of Dunkerron, and Viscount of Calstone, and his eldest son is the Earl of Kerry. He traces his lineage to Maurice Fitzgerald, who came over with Strongbow, who also was the ancestor of the earls of Kildare and the Duke of Leinster. The Lansdowne family have intermarried with the Leinsters, the MacCarthys, the Desmonds, the Ormondes, and other of the great families of Ireland, and, near or far, the marquis can claim relationship with nearly all the Irish nobility.