Chapter 3

"The longest thing I remember is the time of the sickness, and my father that was making four straw mats for four brothers that died, and that couldn't afford coffins. The bodies were put in the mats and were tied up in them. And the second thing I remember is the people digging in the stubble after the oats and the wheat; to see would they meet a potato, and sometimes they did, for God sent them there."

THE TERRY ALTS

"The Terry Alts were a bad class; everything you had they'd take from you. It was against herding they began to get the land, the same as at the present time. And women they would take; a man maybe that hadn't a perch of land would go to a rich farmer's house and bring away his daughter. And I, supposing, to have some spite against you, I'd gather a mob and do every bad thing to destroy you. That is the way they were, a bad class and doing bad deeds."

THE '48 TIME

"Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young. That was the '48 time. The '48 men were foolish men; they thought to cope with the English Government. They went to O'Connell to get from him all the money he had gathered, for they had it in their head to use that to make a rise against England. But when they asked O'Connell for it he told them there was none of it left, not one penny. Buying estates for his children he used it, and he said he spent it on a monastery. I don't know was he speaking truth. Mahon made a great speech against him, and it preyed on O'Connell, and he left the country and went away and died in some place called Genoa. He was a very ambitious man, like Napoleon. He got Emancipation; but where is the use of that? There's Judge O'Brien, Peter the Packer, was calling out and trying to do away with trial by jury. And he would not be in his office or in his billet if it wasn't for O'Connell. They didn't do much after, where they didn't get the money from O'Connell. And the night they joined under Smith O'Brien they hadn't got their supper. A terrible cold night it was, no one could stand against it. Some bishop came from Dublin, and he told them to go home, for how could they reach with their pikes to the English soldiers that had got muskets. The soldiers came, and there was some firing, and they were all scattered. As to Smith O'Brien, there was ten thousand pounds on his head, and he hid for a while. Then at the last he went into the town of Clonmel, and there was a woman there in the street was a huckster, and he bade her give him up to the Government, for she would never earn money so easy. But for all she was worth she wouldn't do that. So then he went and gave himself up, and he was sent to Australia, and the property was given to his brother."

A THING MITCHELL SAID

"Mitchell was kept in Clonmel gaol two years before he was sent to Australia. He was a Protestant, and a very good man. He said in a speech, where was the use of meetings and of talking? It was with the point of their bayonet the English would have to be driven out of Ireland. It was Mitchell said that."

THE FENIAN RISING

"It was a man from America it came with. There was one Mackie was taken in a publichouse in Cork, and there was a policeman killed in the struggle. Judge O'Hagan was the judge when he was in the dock, and he said, 'Mr. Mackie, I see you are a gentleman and an educated man; and I'm sorry,' he said, 'that you did not read Irish history.' Mackie cried when he heard that, for indeed it was all spies about him, and it was they gave him up."

A GREAT WONDER

"The greatest wonder I ever saw was one time near Kinvara at a funeral, there came a car along the road and a lady on it having a plaid cloak, as was the fashion then, and a big hat, and she kept her head down and never looked at the funeral at all. I wondered at her when I saw that, and I said to my brother it was a strange thing a lady to be coming past a funeral and not to look on at it at all. And who was on the car but O'Gorman Mahon, escaping from the Government, and dressed up as a lady! He drove to Father Arthur's house at Kinvara, and there was a boat waiting, and a cousin of my own in it, to bring him out to a ship, and so he made his escape."

ANOTHER WONDER

"I saw Clerkenwell prison in London broken up in the time of the Fenians, and every ship and steamer in the whole of the ocean stopped. The prison was burned down, and all the prisoners consumed, and seven doctors' shops along with it."

FATHER MATHEW

"Father Mathew was a great man, plump and red in the face. There couldn't be better than what he was. I knew one Kane in Gort he gave a medal to, and he kept it seventy years. Kane was a great totaller, and he wouldn't drink so much as water out of a glass, but out of a cup; the glass might have been used for porter at some time. He lost the medal, and was in a great way about it, but he found it five years after in a dung-heap. A great totaller he was. Them that took the medal from Father Mathew and that kept it, at their death they would be buried by men dressed in white clothes."

THE WAR OF THE CRIMEA

"My husband was in the war of the Crimea. It is terrible the hardships he went through, to be two months without going into a house, under the snow in trenches. And no food to get, maybe a biscuit in the day. And there was enough food there, he said, to feed all Ireland; but bad management, they could not get it. Coffee they would be given, and they would be cutting a green bramble to strive to make a fire to boil it. The dead would be buried every morning; a big hole would be dug, and the bodies thrown in, and lime upon them; and some of the bodies would be living when they were buried. My husband used to try to revive them if he saw there was life in them, but other lads wouldn't care--just to put them down and have done. And they were allowed to take nothing--money, gold watches, and the like, all thrown in the ground. Sure they did not care much about such things, they might be lying in the same place themselves to-morrow. But the soldiers would take the money sometimes and put it in their stocking and tie the stocking below the ankle and below the knee. But if the officer knew that, they would be courtmartialed and punished. He got two medals--one from the English and one from the Emperor of Turkey. Fighting for the Queen, and bad pay she gave him. He never knew what was the war for, unless it might be for diminishing the population. We saw in the paper a few years ago there was a great deal of money collected for soldiers that had gone through hardship in the war, and we wrote to the War Office asking some of it for him. But they wrote back that there were so many young men crippled in the Boer war there was nothing to be spared for the old. My husband used to be saying the Queen cared nothing for the army, but that the King, even before he was King, was better to it. But I'm thinking from this out the King will get very few from Ireland for his army."

GARIBALDI

"There was one of my brothers died at Lyons in France. He had a place in Guinness's brewery, and earning £3 10s. a week, and it was the time Garibaldi, you might have heard of, was out fighting. There came a ship to Dublin from France, calling for soldiers, and he threw up his place, and there were many others threw up their place, and they went off, eleven hundred of them, in the French ship, to go fighting for their religion, and a hundred of them never came back. When they landed in France they were made much of and velvet carpets spread before them. But the war was near over then, and when it had ended they were forgotten, and nothing done for them, and he was in poverty at Lyons and died. It was the nuns there wrote a letter in French telling that to my mother." "And Napoleon the Third fought for the Pope in the time of Garibaldi. A great many Irishmen went out at that time, and the half of them never came back. I met with one of them that was in Russell's flour stores, and he said he would never go out again if there were two hundred Popes. Bad treatment they got--black bread, and the troops in the Vatican well fed; and it wasn't long till Victor Emanuel's troops made a breach in the wall."

THE BUONAPARTES

"Napoleon the Third was not much. He died in England, and was buried in a country church-yard much the same as Kiltartan. But Napoleon the First was a great man; it was given out of him there never would be so great a man again. But he hadn't much education, and his penmanship was bad. Every great man gave in to superstition. He gave into it when he went to ask the gipsy woman to divine, and she told him his fate. Through fire and a rock she said that he would fall. I suppose the rock was St. Helena, and the fire was the fire of Waterloo. Napoleon was the terror of England, and he would have beat the English at Waterloo but for treachery, the treachery of Grouchy. It was, maybe, not his fault he was treacherous, he might be the same as Judas, that had his treachery settled for him four thousand years before his birth. There was a curse on Napoleon the Third because of what Napoleon the First had done against the Church. He took Malta one time and landed there, and by treachery with the knights he robbed a church that was on the shore, and carried away the golden gates. In an ironclad he put them that was belonging to the English, and they sank that very day, and were never got up after, unless it might be by divers. And two Popes he brought into exile. But he was the friend of Ireland, and when he was dying he said that. His heart was smashed, he said, with all the ruling Princes that went against him; and if he had made an attack on Ireland, he said, instead of going to Moscow the time he did, he would have brought England low. And the Prince Imperial was trapped. It was the English brought him out to the war, and that made the nations go against him, and it was an English officer led him into the trap the way he never would come to the Throne."

THE ZULU WAR

"I was in the army the time of the Zulu war. Great hardship we got in it and plenty of starvation. It was the Dutch called in the English to help them against the Zulus, that were tricky rogues, and would do no work but to be driving the cattle off the fields. A pound of raw flour we would be given out at seven o'clock in the morning, and some would try to make a cake, and some would put it in a pot with water and be stirring it, and it might be eleven o'clock before you would get what you could eat, and not a bit of meat maybe for two days."

THE YOUNG NAPOLEON

"There was a young Napoleon there, the grandson of Napoleon the First, that was a great man indeed. I was in the island where he was interred; it is a grand place, and what is not natural in those parts, there are two blackthorn bushes growing in it where you go into the place he was buried. And as to that great Napoleon, the fear of him itself was enough to kill people. If he was living till now it is hard to say what way would the world be. It is likely there'd be no English left in it, and it would be all France. The young Napoleon was at the Zulu war was as fine a young man as you'd wish to lay an eye on; six feet four, and shaped to match. As to his death, there was things might have been brought to light, but the enquiry was stopped. There was seven of them went out together, and he was found after, lying dead in the ground, and his top coat spread over him. There came a shower of hailstones that were as large as the top of your finger, and as square as diamonds, and that would enter into your skull. They made out it was to save himself from them that he lay down. But why didn't they lift him in the saddle and bring him along with them? And the bullet was taken out of his head was the same every bit as our bullets; and where would a Zulu get a bullet like that? Very queer it was, and a great deal of talk about it, and in my opinion he was done away with because the English saw the grandfather in him, and thought he would do away with themselves in the time to come. Sure if he spoke to one of them, he would begin to shake before him, officers the same as men. We had often to be laughing seeing that."

PARNELL

"Parnell was a very good man, and a just man, and if he had lived to now, Ireland would be different to what it is. The only thing ever could be said against him was the influence he had with that woman. And how do we know but that was a thing appointed for him by God? Parnell had a back to him, but O'Connell stood alone. He fought a good war in the House of Commons. Parnell did a great deal, getting the land. I often heard he didn't die at all--it was very quick for him to go. I often wondered there were no people smart enough to dig up the coffin and to see what is in it, at night they could do that. No one knows in what soil Robert Emmet was buried, but he was made an end of sure enough. Parnell went through Gort one day, and he called it the fag-end of Ireland, just as Lady Morgan called the North the Athens of Ireland."

MR. GLADSTONE

"Gladstone had the name of being the greatest statesman of England, and he wasn't much after all. At the time of his death he had it on his mind that it was he threw the first stone at Parnell, and he confessed that, and was very sorry for it. But sure there is no one can stand all through. Look at Solomon that had ten hundred wives, and some of them the finest of women, and that spent all the money laid up by Father David. And Gladstone encouraged Garibaldi the time he attacked the Vatican, and gave him arms, Parnell charged him with that one time in the House of Commons, and said he had the documents, and he hadn't a word to say. But he was sorry at Parnell's death, and what was the use of that when they had his heart broke? Parnell did a great deal for the Irish, and they didn't care after; they are the most displeasing people God ever made, unless it might be the ancient Jews."

QUEEN VICTORIA'S RELIGION

"Queen Victoria was loyal and true to the Pope; that is what I was told, and so is Edward the Seventh loyal and true, but he has got something contrary in his body. It is when she was a girl she put on clothes like your own--lady's clothes--and she went to the Pope. Did she turn Catholic? She'd be beheaded if she did; the Government would behead her; it is the Government has power in England."

HER WISDOM

"As to the last Queen, we thought her bad when we had her, but now we think her good. She was a hard woman, and she did nothing for Ireland in the bad years; but I'll give you the reason she had for that. She had it in her mind always to keep Ireland low, it being the place she mostly got her soldiers. That might not be good for Ireland, but it was good for her own benefit. The time the lads have not a bit to eat, that is the time they will go soldiering."

WAR AND MISERY

"There was war and misery going on all through Victoria's reign. It was the Boer war killed her, she being aged, and seeing all her men going out, and able to do nothing. Ten to one they were against the Boers. That is what killed her. It is a great tribute to the war it did that."

THE PRESENT KING

"The present King is very good. He is a gentleman very fond of visiting, and well pleased with every class of people he will meet."

THE OLD AGE PENSIONS

"The old age pension is very good, and as to taxes, them can't pay it that hasn't it. It is since the Boer War there is coin sent back from Africa every week that is dug from the goldpits out there. That is what the English wanted the time they went to war; they want to close up the minerals for themselves. If it wasn't for the war, that pension would never be given to Ireland. They'd have been driven home by the Boers if it wasn't for the Irish that were in the front of every battle. And the Irish held out better too, they can starve better than the rest, there is more bearing in them. It wasn't till all the Irish were killed that the English took to bribing. Bribed Botha they did with a bag of gold. For all the generals in England that are any good are Irish. Buller was the last they had, and he died. They can find no good generals at all in England, unless they might get them very young."

ANOTHER THOUGHT

"It was old money was in the Treasury idle, and the King and Queen getting old wanted to distribute it in the country it was taken from. But some say it was money belonging to captains and big men that died in the war and left no will after them. Anyway it is likely it will not hold; and it is known that a great many of those that get it die very soon."

A PROPHECY

"It is likely there will be a war at the end of the two thousand, that was always foretold. And I hear the English are making ships that will dive the same as diving ducks under the water. But as to the Irish Americans, they would sweep the entire world; and England is afraid of America, it being a neighbour."

NOTES

I have given this book its name because it is at my own door, in the Barony of Kiltartan, I have heard a great number of the stories from beggars, pipers, travelling men, and such pleasant company. But others I have heard in the Workhouse, or to the north of Galway Bay, in Connemara, or on its southern coast, in Burren. I might, perhaps, better have called the little book Myths in the Making.

A sociable people given to conversation and belief; no books in the house, no history taught in the schools; it is likely that must have been the way of it in old Greece, when the king of highly civilised Crete was turned by tradition into a murderous tyrant owning a monster and a labyrinth. It was the way of it in old France too, one thinks, when Charlemagne's height grew to eight feet, and his years were counted by centuries: "He is three hundred years old, and when will he weary of war?" Anyhow, it has been the way of modern Ireland--the Ireland I know--and when I hear myth turned into history, or history into myth, I see in our stonebreakers and cattle drivers Greek husbandmen or ancient vinedressers of the Loire.

I noticed some time ago, when listening to many legends of the Fianna, that is about Finn, their leader, the most exaggerated of the tales have gathered; and I believe the reason is that he, being the greatest of the "Big Men," the heroic race, has been most often in the mouths of the people. They have talked of him by their fire-sides for two thousand years or so; at first earlier myths gathered around him, and then from time to time any unusual feats of skill or cunning shown off on one or another countryside, till many of the stories make him at the last grotesque, little more than a clown. So in Bible History, while lesser kings keep their dignity, great Solomon's wit is outwitted by the riddles of some countryman; and Lucifer himself, known in Kiltartan as "the proudest of the angels, thinking himself equal with God," has been seen in Sligo rolling down a road in the form of the _Irish Times_. The gods of ancient Ireland have not escaped. Mananaan, Son of the Sea, Rider of the Horses of the Sea, was turned long ago into a juggler doing tricks, and was hunted in the shape of a hare. Brigit, the "Fiery Arrow," the nurse of poets, later a saint and the Foster-mother of Christ, does her healing of the poor in the blessed wells of to-day as "a very civil little fish, very pleasant, wagging its tail."

Giobniu, the divine smith of the old times, made a new sword and a new spear for every one that was broken in the great battle between the gods and the mis-shapen Fomor. "No spearpoint that is made by my hand," he said, "will ever miss its mark; no man it touches will ever taste life again." It was his father who, with a cast of a hatchet, could stop the inflowing of the tide; and it was he himself whose ale gave lasting youth: "No sickness or wasting ever comes on those who drink at Giobniu's Feast." Later he became a saint, a master builder, builder of a house "more shining than a garden; with its stars, with its sun, with its moon." To-day he is known as the builder of the round towers of the early Christian centuries, and of the square castles of the Anglo-Normans. And the stories I have given of him, called as he now is, "the Goban Saor," show that he has fallen still farther in legend from his high origin.

As to O'Connell, perhaps because his name, like that of Finn and the Goban, is much in the mouths of the people, there is something of the absurd already coming into his legend. The stories of him show more than any others how swiftly myths and traditions already in the air may gather around a memory much loved and much spoken of. He died only sixty years ago, and many who have seen and heard him are still living; and yet he has already been given a miraculous birth, and the power of a saint is on its way to him. I have charged my son, and should I live till he comes to sensible years, I will charge my grandson, to keep their ears open to the growth of legend about him who was once my husband's friendly enemy, and afterwards his honoured friend.

I do not take the credit or the discredit of the opinions given by the various speakers, nor do I go bail for the facts; I do but record what is already in "the Book of the People." The history of England and Ireland was shut out of the schools and it became a passion. As to why it was shut out, well, I heard someone whisper "Eugene Aram hid the body away, being no way anxious his scholars should get a sight of it." But this also was said in the barony of Kiltartan.

The illustrations are drawn from some delft figures, ornaments in a Kiltartan house.

A. GREGORY.

COOLE PARK, _November_, 1909.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Kiltartan History Book, by Lady I. A. Gregory