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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Some Irish
Yesterdays
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Some Irish Yesterdays

Author: E. Oe. Somerville

Martin Ross

Release date: October 22, 2016 [eBook #53348]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME IRISH

YESTERDAYS ***
Cover art
"SHE FOUND THE IDEA HIGHLY HUMOROUS"
 SOME IRISH
YESTERDAYS

BY
E. OE. SOMERVILLE
AND
MARTIN ROSS
AUTHORS OF
"THE REAL CHARLOTTE," "SOME EXPERIENCES
OF AN IRISH R.M.," "ALL ON THE IRISH SHORE,"
ETC. ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY
E. OE. SOMERVILLE

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK AND BOMBAY
1906
All rights reserved

CONTENTS
An Outpost of Ireland
Picnics
Boon Companions
The Biography of a Pump
Hunting Mahatmas
A Patrick's Day Hunt
Alsatia
"In Sickness and in Health"
Horticultural
Out of Hand
A Record of Holiday
Lost, Stolen, or Strayed
Children of the Captivity
Slipper's A B C of Fox-Hunting

The Authors desire to thank the Editors of the Magazines and

Periodicals in which the following Sketches have appeared, for their
permission to reprint them here; and they wish also to acknowledge
the courtesy of Messrs. Constable & Co. in permitting the
reproduction of "A Patrick's Day Hunt."

October 1906

ILLUSTRATIONS
"*She found the idea highly humorous*" . . . Frontispiece

*Kilronan Bay*

*An Aran Fisherman*

"*White houses clustered round a fragment of bastion*"

"*The outline of Connemara was still sharp*"

*The Elder Turf-Boy*

*An August Afternoon*

*Rickeen*

*Ross Lake*

"*The hovering horde vacillates no longer*"

"*A voice fell like a falling star*"

"*I wash meself every Sathurday morning*"

"*It's all would be about it, she'd break the side car!*"

"*The like o' the crowd that was in Kyleranny*"

"*He's gone North agin!*"

"*The Widow Brinckley faced him the same as Jeffrey faced his cat*"

"*The villyan wheeled into the yard as nate as a bicycle*"

"*Sending his wild voice abroad*"

*Old Michael*

"*Ancient widowhood and spinsterdom*"

"*What have ye on yer noa-se*"

"*She's the liveliest of them, God bless her!*"

"*And cabbages!" said the mountainy man*

*The Candidate*

"*A man must wote the way his priest and bishop 'll tell him*"

*Facing America*

*In West Carbery*

*Patsey Sweeny*

*Mrs. Sweeny*

"*In a lonely cottage*"

*Children of the Captivity*

*Slipper's A B C of Fox-Hunting*

AN OUTPOST OF IRELAND
"Is it a bath on Twelfth Day? Sure no one would expect that, no
more than on a Sunday!"
Twelfth Day was accordingly added to Miss Gerraghty's list of
Bath Holidays—that is to say, the list allotted to Miss Gerraghty's
visitors. Judging from appearances, her private list was composed of
one infinite bath holiday; indeed, she has been heard in the kitchen
announcing in clear tones her opinion of "them thrash of baths" to
an audience whose hands and faces wore a sympathetic half-
mourning. Nature, we were given to understand, had intended Miss
Gerraghty to be a lady; a fate more blind to the fitness of things
decreed that she should serve tables in a Galway lodging-house, a
position in which higher destinies are likely to be overlooked. Some
touches of dignity remained hers by an immutable etiquette; no cap
had ever found footing upon her raven fringe; a watch chain took
the place of the ignoble white apron. Chiefest of all prerogatives, she
was addressed as "Miss Gerraghty" by the establishment, an
example so carefully set by her brother, the proprietor, as to suggest
that her dowry was mingled with the funds of the management.
With these solaces she doubtless fed her inner need of
refinement, even while she launched the thirteenth trump of
repartee at the woman who came to sell turkeys, or broke a lance in
coquetry with the coal man. Such episodes were freely audible to
the sitting room by the hall—indeed, the woman with the turkeys
finally thrust her flushed face and the turkey's haggard bosom round
the door, in an appeal to Cæsar that made the rooftree ring. These
things occur in Galway, with a simplicity that is not often met with
elsewhere.
 There was an afternoon when a native of the Islands of Aran
penetrated to the hearth-rug of Miss Gerraghty's front sitting-room,
in the endeavour to plant upon its occupants a forequarter of mutton
that smelt of fish, and was as destitute of fat as the rocks of its
birthplace. Even the Aran man's assurance that it was "as sweet as
sugar," could not relax by a line the contempt with which Miss
Gerraghty, when summoned to judgment, surveyed the dainty and
its owner. In course of the discussion, she took occasion to inform
the company that she herself could only "eat ram mutton by the dint
of the gravy," which bore, as it seemed, somewhat darkly upon the
matter, but had the effect of deepening the complexion of the Aran
man by quite two shades of maroon, as he hoisted his unattractive
burden to his frieze-clad shoulder and removed himself.
Miss Gerraghty then stated that them Aran people had a way of
their own and a sense of their own, like the Indians, and that a
gentleman friend of hers who travelled in tea, had once been
weather-bound in Aran and had had a bad stomach ever since. She
then retired to the kitchen, where the narrative of the rout of the
Aran Islander held, for the space of ten enjoyable minutes, an
audience swelled by the addition of the washerwoman and the
baker's boy.
The incident passed, yet the phrase "a way of their own, and a
sense of their own—like the Indians," hung hauntingly in the
memory.
Any attempt to portray Marino Cottage would be incomplete
without mention of its consort, Ocean Prospect, an affiliated
establishment, spoken of in the household as "Opposite," from
which, at any hour of the day or night, uncertain numbers of Miss
Gerraghty's nieces crossed the road to Marino Cottage, laden, like
ants, with burdens varying from a feather bed to a kettle of boiling
water. A flavour of the life of the "Swiss Family Robinson" was thus
imparted, Ocean Prospect filling the position of the wreck, which, as
the virtuously brought up should remember, yielded fresh butter,
kegs of gunpowder, and bedroom slippers with equal promptness.
Miss Gerraghty's nieces occupied undefined and interchangeable
positions in both households, from Bedelia, who played the piano,
and on Saturdays crimped her hood of auburn hair, to Bridget Ellen,
who at seven years of age could discern a stale herring and tell the
fishwoman so. Like Goldsmith, they left nothing untouched, and
there was nothing that they touched that they did not adorn, with
genial finger-mark or the generously strewn cinder. Their hats
perched like mange-stricken parakeets in the hall, their witticisms
drew forth the admiring yells of the kitchen audience from breakfast
till bed time, the creaking of their boots was as the innumerable
rendings of glazed calico, or the delirium of a corncrake. The Holy-
days of the Roman Catholic church were observed by them with
every honour, and with many varieties of evening party; and it is a
matter for mingled thankfulness and regret that they observed them,
for the most part, "Opposite." Assuredly Bedelia, with a clean face,
playing dance music, would have been a spectacle hardly less
memorable than Miss Gerraghty and her Sunday boots circling in a
waltz and creaking through a quadrille, or sipping a glass of port
with the delicacy befitting the noblesse. Yet with three Holy-days in
one fortnight it might have proved excessive.
Miss Gerraghty rises irrepressibly into the foreground of these
winter days, but Christmas week in Galway Town remains an
impression both salient and characteristic. During its wet and miry
days the country people moved in a slow and voluble throng through
streets and shops, indifferent to weather, and time and space, while
the sleety storm roared of shipwreck above the rooftops, and the
wearied young gentlemen behind the counters held their own
against the old women with a philosophy perfected in the afflictions
of many market days.
"Four an' tinpince!" shouts an old woman in a short scarlet
petticoat and a long blue cloak, scornfully thumbing a pair of boots
and slapping them down on the counter. She traduces them,
minutely, to a party of friends, who, being skilled in the rôle
expected of them, implore her not to waste her valuable time on
such unworthy objects. The salesman has placed himself upon a
bench, with his legs extended along it, his eyes on the ceiling, and
his arms folded; his lips repeat occasionally the formula "Five
shillins!" otherwise he remains as remote as the Grand Lama of
Tibet.
"You're too tight with me!" laments the proprietor of a cartload
of apples, in pathetic appeal to a customer. "God knows I'm not
tight!" responds the customer, with even superior pathos, "but the
times is scroogin' meself!"
It is, perhaps, the leading draper who endures most. All day
long the blue cloaks and the bony elbows jostle against his counters,
disparaging hands subject his calicoes and his flannels to gruesome
tests, his plush work-bags and scent-cases are handled
uncomprehendingly and flung aside; acrid jibes are levelled at his
assistants, who, to do them justice, show a practised tartness in
rejoinder. Through the noise and the smell of stale turf smoke a
large musical-box hammers and tinkles forth the "Washington Post."
Late in the wild darkness of the January evenings the cry "Will
thu gull-a-wallia?" (sic) ("Are you going home?") passes from group
to group in the streets. It is far on into the night before the carts
with their load of sleepy and drunken people cease to stagger and
clatter along the bleak roads that take them home. Beaten with
snow, blinded with rain, the holiday season wears itself out in
darkness, dirt, and inconvenience, after the manner of such seasons,
churches and public houses presenting the only open doors in the
shuttered streets. All day the electric light hung its fervid loops of
white fire up in the roof of the church of St. Nicholas, unearthly,
coldly intense, suiting well the spirituality of arches and pillars, loftily
interclasping through the storms of centuries. The tattered colours of
the Connaught Rangers droop on either side of the chancel arch,
shreds of mellow colour against the grey limestone; they say things
that are moving to a Galway heart. Out where the long Sea Road
follows the shore of Galway Bay, the great winds press heavily
against the windows of Marino Cottage, and the little one-horse
trams glide on the desolate shining road like white-backed beetles.
The year strengthened and the days lengthened over misty seas
ridged with angry white. Out where the murky west held the Islands
of Aran in its bosom, the sunsets came later day by day. Once, and
memorably, a dishevelled and flying pageant of green and lurid pink
glowed, like the torn colours in the church, beneath the darkening
roof of cloud; in its heart I saw the Aran steamer, labouring on the
dark horizon of climbing waves.

* * * * *
It was February when Circumstance took me in her hand and flung
me across two seas into the blue and gold weather and the purple
and silver mountains of the Department of "Pyrénées Orientales;"
and May had come before I was again in London, shivering in a cold
rain that dropped acridly out of the dirty fog, the orphan rain of
London, that knows no previousness of clouded hill, no dignity of
broad-sailed mists moving up along the moor, no hereafter of clean
breezes sweeping the bounteous heaven. Twenty hours later the
mild yet poignant fragrance of Irish air was in the window of my
railway carriage, and the smell of turf smoke came up out of the
west across the stone walls of Roscommon.
Turf smoke lurked in concentrated staleness about the garb of
the two priests in the opposite corner, yet it was preferable to
yesterday's raw whiff of the Channel; the galloping whisper of the
Daily Office in the two Breviaries revealed the accents of Connaught,
and were comfortable to an ear already soothed by drowsiness. Let
others roll and stagger to foreign lands in front of the lashing fins of
a screw, I was advancing on an even axle into springtime in the
County of Galway; in my mind's eye I beheld the Aran steamer
leisurely paddling upon a sea of satin smoothness to the unknown
islands, and in my ear sang the phrase "a way of their own, and a
sense of their own; like the Indians."
Two mornings later the door of my bedroom in a hotel in Eyre
Square, Galway, was dealt a fateful blow by the hand of the hotel
cook, at 3.30 A.M., a blow weighted by lifelong combat with loins of
mutton. It was no less a person than she who placed the teapot on
the breakfast table, murmuring apologetically that "Gerrls was no
good to rise early, but owld ones like herself wouldn't ax to stay in
bed." The sunshine of May fell upon her grey locks as she stood at
the portal to watch her guest's departure, and her "God speed ye!"
mingled with the bang of the swing-door as it slammed upon the
dark and sleeping house.
The laburnums of Eyre Square were fountains of gold, and the
lilac was delicate and cool; a perfect stillness lay upon Galway.
Passing on through the streets there was no sign of life, and the
morning sunshine smote on ranks of muffled windows: here and
there on the old houses the coats-of-arms of the Galway Tribes
uplifted their melancholy witness to bygone greatness, but the town
spoke with no living voice. Emerging at length from between blind-
eyed house fronts, the docks were reached, and in the large vacant
spaces of water now to be found where was once the second port of
the United Kingdom, the smoke of a little steamer rose in lonely
activity, with the mountains of Clare and the glitter of Galway Bay for
a background.
There was some delay in departure, owing partly to a genial
sympathy with the unpunctual, partly to a question of precedence
among a pig family in the process of embarkation. The captain, a
large clerical man in a soft felt hat, bore it with the equanimity of
one who has learned in many journeys between Galway and Aran
what is the full significance of the devils having entered into the
swine. The boat moved out at length into the gleaming breadth of
the bay; slowly the gray town grouped itself in its low-lying corner,
the spires rose, waist-deep in roofs, and the heavy tower of St.
Nicholas bore its associations of seven hundred years in the brilliant
youth of the spring sunlight. The western suburbs stretched far
along the bay, with slopes smoothly wooded; white houses looked
blankly out from their trim demesnes, like alienated friends gazing
an unmoved farewell. Even Marino Cottage, attired in a summer
wash of pink, seemed to regard us with a new and strange
exclusiveness. Inexpressibly pure of plumage, the gulls rode the
clear wavelets, and swooped from poise to poise with striding wing,
masters of art in two elements, with cold eyes observant of the
cumbrous creature that crawled on the face of the waters with
smoke and foam and splashing. Thirty miles away a low, blue mound
on the horizon represented those Islands of Aran described in the
ancient "Book of Rights" as "The Aras of the Sea;" the bows of the
steamer swung to them, gradually the brown and ragged coasts of
Connemara opened away to the north, and to the south the barren
verge of the County of Clare was shorn perpendicular to the sea at
the thousand-foot drop of the cliffs of Moher.
 KILRONAN BAY

The steamer plodded on at her ten miles an hour, the pig

families below uttered no more than an occasional yell of
fractiousness or dolour, and a party of Aran women sat and
conversed under their red shawls with that unflagging zest and
seemingly inexhaustible supply of material that may well be the envy
of the cultured.
It was eight o'clock when the anchor was let go in Kilronan Bay,
opposite the principal village of the principal island, while the
changeless sunshine shone on shallow green water, on dazzling
whitewashed cottages, on dark hills and valleys of grey stone. Round
the steamer flocked battered punts and tarred canvas corraghs with
their bows high out of the water; tanned faces, puckered by the
sunlight, stared up from them, and in a storm of Irish the process of
disembarking began—the phrase but feebly expresses the spectacle
of a kitchen table lowered from the deck and laid on its back in a
corragh, or the feat of placing an old woman sitting in the table with
a gander in her lap. The corragh has no keel, and a sneeze is rightly
believed to be fatal to its equilibrium, but an Aran old woman and an
Aran gander can rush in where Sir Isaac Newton might fear to tread.
A crowd waited at the pier's end, as the boats came creaking
and gliding in to their feet; a crowd of large and angular people,
their faces strong and inquisitive, and instantly remarkable to any
one accustomed to the mild and half-bashful expression of West
Galway eyes. There is about them an air of a foreign race and of an
earlier century. Under circumstances less soul-stirring than the
arrival of the Galway steamer, their long composed faces express
their monotony of mood; their eyes are steady and far-looking, as
those that from day to day measure the sweep of great horizons.
Men and women alike wear "pampooties"—-slippers of raw cowhide,
with the hair outside—and walk with the alertness and erectness
that are learned from rocky ground and the absence of stiff and
high-heeled boots; the men affect short, full trousers, ending high
above the ankle, so that the pampootie is freely displayed in its
varieties of dun or black or speckled hide. Topping the costume is a
"Tam o' Shanter" cap, probably made in Birmingham. It is not a
graceful dress, but the square shoulders and flat backs would dignify
a worse one, and the mild and mottled pampootie loses its
effeminacy with the people's singularly emphatic tread.

AN ARAN FISHERMAN
 A hostelry of two whitewashed stories and a thatched roof faced
the pier, and we went thither in search of a car, ordered some days
before. The door was open, admitting a flood of sunshine to a
narrow passage, on one side of which was a kitchen, on the other a
sitting-room, with a wall paper of drab trellis-work starred with balls
of Reckitt's blue—so it seemed, at least, to eyes blinded by the outer
glare. It contained chiefly the smell of apples and sour bread proper
to rooms of its class, such as in the Isles of Aran seemed impossibly
conventional. Train-oil and sealskins would have shed a fitter
perfume. Having invoked the household in vain, I essayed the
kitchen, where an old man in shirt-sleeves was in the act of eating
his breakfast. He regarded me, not without aversion, and continued
to share an egg with a child of three years old who stood intent and
dirty-faced at his elbow. I waited till a precarious teaspoonful had
been lowered into the wide open mouth, and made my inquiry about
the car.
"They're out since five o'clock looking for the horse." Another
spoonful of egg trembled in the balance, and entered the speaker's
mouth, not without disaster.
I averted my eyes, and asked where the horse was usually kept.
"He does be out on the rocks." The spoon was pointed out of
the window, somewhat peevishly.
Looking in the direction indicated, we saw the arid shore of the
bay, where, instead of sands, grey stone in platforms and pavements
met the blue and glittering tide. From the shore the country rose in
haggard slopes of gray stone with rifts of green; cresting the height,
one of Aran's many ruined oratories lifted a naked gable in the deep
of the sky. A narrow road followed the bend of the bay, glaring white
for two shelterless miles; no living thing was visible; the pursuit of
the horse must be raging on the other side of the island. It
continued for another hour, with what episodes of crag and crevasse
can scarcely be imagined; finally a dejected and shaggy captive was
led in and was thrust into the shafts of a car.
The drive that followed is not easily forgotten. There were
moments when the car seemed to open at all its joints, as if falling
asunder from exhaustion; and the shafts swayed and swung like
twin bowsprits, the wheels creaked ominously, and one tyre left an
undulating line in the gritty dust of the road. On either side spread
floors of stone, on which sat parliaments of boulders; we passed a
stone platform so large and so level that the addition of three walls
has made a creditable ball-alley of it. The walls are said to have
been built with money given for the relief of distress in Aran; if so,
relief money has often been worse spent in the West of Ireland. The
road kept in touch with the coast, the car mounted to higher ground,
with the shafts pointing heavenward on either side of the horse's
touzled mane. Pale green fields and pale tracts of sand mitigated the
tyranny of rock, as the island sloped south-eastward into the rich
and wide azure of the sea. A village straggled along the shore, the
chief mass of the low, white houses clustered round a fragment of
bastion and buttress that tells of the days when Cromwell's arm was
long enough to grasp even Aran and build a stronghold there, what
time the iron entered into the soul of Galway.
 "WHITE HOUSES CLUSTERED ROUND A FRAGMENT OF
BASTION"

The builders of the castle had not far to seek for their cut stone.
Four churches and a lofty and slender Round Tower were close at
hand, a constellation in the devotional system of "Ara the Holy," the
mother of many saints and many churches, and therefore peculiarly
suited to the purpose of the Cromwellians. The churches were
demolished, the topmost stones of the Tower were utilised, and its
"Sweet bell" lost in the sand. Today but twelve feet of the beautiful
masonry remain to testify to the fervid skill of its builders.
Red-shawled women sat by the white-washed doorways of the
village, red petticoated children pattered barefoot on the hot rocks
by the roadside, and behind them burned the sea's leagues of lapis
lazuli; the green of the grass lands intervened suavely in the
delicious jangle of colour. We were at our journey's end so far as the
car was concerned; the artless islander, having extorted a payment
of four shillings for a drive of two miles, retired, and we pursued our
way on foot to the Lodge above the village, which was our
destination.
 "THE OUTLINE OF CONNEMARA WAS STILL SHARP"

Life at the Lodge on the hill during the ten days that followed
had aspects that were wholly ideal, and aspects that were
unreservedly scullion. The chief windows faced north-east, framing a
splendid outlook across a plain of sea to where the Connemara
mountains have pitched their tents in a jagged line, pale in the
torpid heat of morning, dark at evening against some lengthening
creek of sunset. When, at some ten of the clock the rooms in the
lonely house had passed from gloaming to darkness, and the
paraffin lamp glared smokily at the semi-grand piano and the
horsehair sofa, the wild and noble outline of Connemara was still
sharp, the gleam behind it still a harbourage for the daylight.
The more elementary needs of the establishment were coped
with by a henchwoman from the village below, a middle-aged and
taciturn widow, wearing a red-checked shawl over her broad chest, a
smaller red shawl over her head, an excessively short red homespun
skirt, and pampooties. In the early hours of the summer morning her
step, muffled in cowhide, traversed the house weightily; in due time
followed the entrance of the stable bucket, borne with a slow stride
that showed to admiration the grey woollen ankles under the short
skirt: her eye rested askance, and not without saturnine humour,
upon the weakling of a later civilisation who still lay in bed. As the
bucket was set down a deep and serious voice uttered the
monosyllable "bath," as colourlessly as the bleat of a sheep, and,
with the exit of her sallow face and dreamy blue eyes, the strange,
arduous, trifling day began.
 Breakfast was not its least achievement, prepared by our own
hands at a turf fire that added an aroma of its own to the coffee,
and delicately flavoured the hot milk. Owing to a scarcity of
saucepans the eggs must be boiled in a portly iron pot and fished
from its depths with the tongs, and through all, and impeding all,
went the flushed pertinacity of the amateur toast-maker. Dinner was
a more serious affair, a strenuous triumph of mind over matter and
over the Widow Holloran, a daily despair, by reason of potatoes
whose hearts remained harder than Pharaoh's, and chiefly by reason
of the dearth of pie-dishes.
"Why wouldn't ye ax Miss O'Regan down in the town for the
loan of a pie-dish? Sure she's full up of pie-dishes." This remarkable
information came from Mrs. Holloran, but was not acted upon.
After twenty four hours of the ministry of the Widow Holloran,
we found the conclusion forced upon us that the Simple Life was far
more complicated, and infinitely more exacting than the normal
existence of the worldling. To us, nurturing a sulky flame in a gloomy
pile of turf, the truly Simple Life resolved itself into two words: good
servants. Even the least of Miss Gerraghty's nieces would have been
a Godsend; the thought of mutton chops, procurable at any instant,
all but brought a dimness to the eye that foresaw a dinner—the third
in succession—of American bacon and eggs that tasted of fish. It
was in one of the long May twilights that we were waited upon by
the man who had, on the hearthrug of Marino Cottage's Front
Sitting-room, offered us mutton, sweet as sugar. This time he
offered not mutton, but sheep; he produced a sort of subscription
list, and invited us to put down our names for any piece we might
prefer of an animal which was at the moment nibbling the dainty
grass among the boulders. We subscribed, with a shudder which
was, as it proved, superfluous. The subscription list did not fill, and
two days afterwards we were told that the matter had fallen
through, and if we wanted "buttcher's mate" we must telegraph to
Galway.
I have heard, in another part of Ireland, described slightingly as
"a wild westhern place in Cork," of a somewhat similar, but more
elaborate process. "When they goes to kill a cow there, they dhrive
her out through the sthreet, and a man in front of her ringing a bell,
and another man with her, and he having a bit o' chalk (and it
should be a black cow). Every one then can tell what bit of her they
want, and the man dhraws it out on her with the chalk. But it should
be a black cow." I think it was a relative of this butcher who, when
remonstrated with about his meat, on the ground that it had not
been properly killed, replied unanswerably, "I declare to ye, the one
that had the killing of that cow was the Lord Almighty."
Meals at the Lodge were not things done in a corner. Sheep
cropped the grass to the edge of the window sill, village children
loitered observantly on their way to the well, tall brindled dogs, in
whom must lurk some strain of the old Irish wolfhound, gnawed
sapless bones in the porch, as in an accustomed sanctuary. The
cuckoo, that pretended recluse, passed and repassed in clumsy
flight, even perching on the roof of the house, and sending a hoarse
and hollow cry down the chimney. Sitting on the rock ledges in the
long morning, the chiefest concern of idleness was to note his short
and graceless flittings from boulder to wall, his tactless call,
coarsened by nearness and the lack of illusion. Not thus does the
spirit voice poise the twin notes in tireless mystery, among the
wooded shores of Connemara lakes.
Below the Lodge, to the south-east, the restless sand has
smothered many a landmark, obliterated many a grave. Lie down in
it, it is a soft bed; let it slip through your fingers, dry and fine and
delicate, while the sea line is high and blue above you, and the light
breaker strikes the slow moments in rhythm. Saint and oratory,
cloghaun and cromlech, lie deep in its oblivion, their memory living
faintly and more faintly from lip to lip through the years; around the
saints their halos still linger, pale in this age's noonday, and the
fishermen still strike sail at the corner of the island to the little
crumbling tower that is supposed to mark the grave of Saint
Gregory.
The ridge of the island runs in table lands of rock, dropping in
cliffs to the sea along its south-western face. These heights are level
deserts of stone, streaked with soft grass where the yellow vetch
blazes and a myriad wild roses lay their petals against the boulders.
Yet even these handmaids of the rock are not the tenderest of its
surprises. Look down the slits and fissures as you step across them
on a May day, and you will see fronds of maiden hair climbing out of
the darkness and warm mud below. A month later they will be
strong and tall above the surface; the clots of foam may often strike
them when, below their platform, the piled-up Atlantic rolls its
vastness to the attack, with the cruel green of the up-drawn wave,
with the hurl of the pent tons against crag and cliff. But for us, on
that May morning, land and sea lay in rapt accord, and the breast of
the brimming tide was laid to the breast of the cliff, with a low and
broken voice of joy.
 The walk here became finally and definitely a steeplechase, and
those not bred in Galway had better think twice before attempting
an Aran stone wall; indeed, when five feet of ponderous and
trembling stone lattice work has to be dealt with, the native himself
will probably adopt the simple course of throwing it down, building it
up again or not, according to the dictates of conscience. If the
explorer survives two hours of this exercise, he will have reached the
fort of Dun Ængus, built in days when Christianity, a climbing
sunrise, was as yet far below the Irish horizon. Of its kind, it is
reputed to be as perfect as anything in Europe, but it is an unlovely
kind. Three invertebrate walls of loose stones, eighteen feet high
and fifteen feet thick, sprawl in a triple horseshoe to the edge of a
cliff, which, with its sheer drop of three hundred feet to the sea,
completes the line of defence. The innermost of the three ramparts
encloses a windy plateau where, in times of siege, the Firbolg Prince
Ængus, son of Huamor, probably enjoyed the society of all the cattle
in the island, and of an indefinite number of wives. The outermost
rampart girdles eleven acres of rocky hillside, and here the
unwearied savage labour constructed a chevaux-de-frise by wedging
slabs and splinters of stone into every crevice. Hardly now, in the
intelligent calm of sight-seeing, can the invader make a way through
the ankle-breaking confusion, where, in the gloaming centuries
before St. Patrick, bloody hands clutched the limestone edges in the
death stagger, and matted heads crashed dizzily down, in
unrecorded death and courage and despair.
After those days Danes and Irish and English plundered in their
turn, but the stillness of the rock and the loneliness of the sea closed
in again on the islands, while on the mainland rebellion and
conquest alternated in a various agony, and the civilisation thrust on
Ireland was a coat of many colours, dipped in blood. These Aras of
the Sea rest in their primitive calm, nurturing a strong, leisurely
people, with the patience and hardiness of the rock in their blood;
equipped physically for any destiny, equipped mentally with the
quick financial ability and shrewdness of the Irish, yet slow to
imitate, slow in the adoption of what others initiate, regarding, I
fear, their country as the invalid and ill-used wife of the British ogre,
a wife of the admired Early Victorian type, unoriginative, prolific, and
unable to support herself.
Looking down from Dun Ængus there is little expression of the
three thousand lives that are hemmed in this floating parish. No
wheel is audible along the nine miles of Irish moor; the other two
islands lie gray and still, rimmed by fawning and flashing tides,
lifeless save where the smoke of burning kelp creeps blue by the
water's edge.
It is a pleasant descent to the village of Kilmurvey, down
through the buoyant air of the hill side; the grass steals its way
among the outposts of rock, till the foot travels with unfamiliar ease
in level fields. Near Kilmurvey the Resident Magistrate's house shows
a trim roof among young larch and spruce, a miracle of modernity
and right angles after the strewn monstrosities of the ridge above;
passing near it, a piano gave forth a Nocturne of Chopin's to the
solitude, a patrician lament, a skilled passion, in a land where ear
and voice have preserved the single threads of melody, and harmony
is as yet unwoven.
With its barbaric novelties of colour, its wild, red-clad women, its
background of grey rock, its glare of sunshine, Aran should be a
place known to painters, but at the first sight of even the sketch
book the village street becomes a desert; the mothers, spitting to
avert the "bad eye," snatch their children into their houses, and
bang their doors. The old women vanish from the door steps, the
boys take to the rocks. As it is the creed of Aran that any one that
has his "likeness dhrew out" will die within the year, it seems
unfeeling to urge the matter upon them. Here and there the mission
shilling makes its convert; an old woman braced herself to the risk
on the excellent ground that she would probably die before the year
was out, and might as well make the most of her chances. She
found the idea highly humorous, and so did several of the
neighbours.
Our departure from Aran was not out of keeping with the
general run of events there. Struggling with painting materials,
plants of maidenhair fern, and the usual oversights and overflows of
packing, scantily enveloped in newspaper, we made our way on foot
from the Lodge to the bay below it, a distance of some two or three
hundred yards, and there embarked, attended to the boat by Mrs.
Holloran and her next of kin—in other words, a crowd of some
twenty deeply interested persons. We had shoved off and were
moving out towards the steamer over the transparent green deeps
of the bay, when I remembered the little boy who had driven our
portmanteaux down to the beach in a donkey cart, and I flung a
shilling to one of the next-of-kin in settlement of the obligation. We
saw the emissary present the tribute.
"He'll not take it!" was shouted from the shore.
I protested at the full pitch of my voice to the effect that he
must not allow his magnanimity to interfere with his just dues, that I
was very glad to give it to him.
"He'll take three!" travelled to us like a cannon ball across the
translucent water.
Nothing travelled back. Nothing, that is, except the Galway
steamer, which presently flapped its paddles into the falling tide, and
took us away to regions where we ourselves were natives, and
viewed the tourist with a proper hauteur.
Meditating on those May days, winnowed now of their husk of
culinary difficulties, they seem the most purely lonely, the most
crowded with impressions, that could befall. Habituated to the
stillness of West Galway life, these stillnesses were vast and
expressive beyond any previous experience of mine; in the shadeless
brilliance, the bare grayness, I breathed a foreign and tingling air.
The people's profoundly self-centred existence has "no
thoroughfare" written across it; lying on the warm rocks, they see
Ireland stretched silent, enigmatic, apart from them, and are content
that it is so. Their poverty is known to many, their way of thought to
a few; they remain motionless on the edge of Europe, with the dust
of the saints beneath their feet.

PICNICS

A kettle seated decorously on a kitchen range is far less likely to be

smoked than one propped precariously on a heap of smouldering
sticks. It is also ordained by the forces of civilisation that it shall
eventually boil; a point by no means to be taken for granted in the
matter of the sticks. A sparcity of saucers, an apostolic community of
teaspoons; no one would suspect the hidden humour in such
disabilities if confronted with them at an ordinary "At Home," and
however excellent the appetite brought to bear upon a chicken pie
at a luncheon party, in the lack of knives and forks it would scarce
nerve its possessor to eat with his fingers. And yet, so skin deep a
fraud is civilisation, the chicken bone to which, through the years, I
look back most fondly, was gnawed, warm from the pocket, on the
top of one of the Bantry mountains.
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