.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 53348
   :PG.Title: Some Irish Yesterdays
   :PG.Released: 2016-10-22
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: \E. \OE. Somerville
   :DC.Creator: Martin Ross
   :MARCREL.ill: \E. \OE. Somerville
   :DC.Title: Some Irish Yesterdays
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1906
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

=====================
SOME IRISH YESTERDAYS
=====================

.. clearpage::

.. pgheader::

.. container:: coverpage

   .. vspace:: 3

   .. _`Cover art`:

   .. figure:: images/img-cover.jpg
      :figclass: white-space-pre-line
      :align: center
      :alt: Cover art

      Cover art

   .. vspace:: 4

.. container:: frontispiece

   .. _`"*SHE FOUND THE IDEA HIGHLY HUMOROUS*"`:

   .. figure:: images/img-front.jpg
      :figclass: white-space-pre-line
      :align: center
      :alt: "SHE FOUND THE IDEA HIGHLY HUMOROUS"

      "SHE FOUND THE IDEA HIGHLY HUMOROUS"

   .. vspace:: 4

.. container:: titlepage center white-space-pre-line

   .. class:: xx-large bold

      SOME IRISH
      YESTERDAYS

   .. vspace:: 2

   .. class:: medium

      BY

   .. class:: large

      \E. \OE. SOMERVILLE

   .. class:: medium

      AND

   .. class:: large

      MARTIN ROSS

   .. vspace:: 1

   .. class:: small

      AUTHORS OF
      "THE REAL CHARLOTTE," "SOME EXPERIENCES
      OF AN IRISH R.M.," "ALL ON THE IRISH SHORE,"
      ETC. ETC.

   .. vspace:: 3

   .. class:: medium

      ILLUSTRATED BY
      \E. \OE. SOMERVILLE

   .. vspace:: 3

   .. class:: medium

      LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
      39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
      NEW YORK AND BOMBAY
      1906

   .. class:: small

      *All rights reserved*

   .. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center large bold

   CONTENTS

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

`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`_

.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: noindent medium

*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."*

.. vspace:: 1

*October* 1906

.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center large bold

   ILLUSTRATIONS

.. vspace:: 2

`"*She found the idea highly humorous*"`_ . . . *Frontispiece*

.. vspace:: 1

`*Kilronan Bay*`_

.. vspace:: 1

`*An Aran Fisherman*`_

.. vspace:: 1

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

.. vspace:: 1

`"*The outline of Connemara was still sharp*"`_

.. vspace:: 1

`*The Elder Turf-Boy*`_

.. vspace:: 1

`*An August Afternoon*`_

.. vspace:: 1

`*Rickeen*`_

.. vspace:: 1

`*Ross Lake*`_

.. vspace:: 1

`"*The hovering horde vacillates no longer*"`_

.. vspace:: 1

`"*A voice fell like a falling star*"`_

.. vspace:: 1

`"*I wash meself every Sathurday morning*"`_

.. vspace:: 1

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

.. vspace:: 1

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

.. vspace:: 1

`"*He's gone North agin!*"`_

.. vspace:: 1

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

.. vspace:: 1

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

.. vspace:: 1

`"*Sending his wild voice abroad*"`_

.. vspace:: 1

`*Old Michael*`_

.. vspace:: 1

`"*Ancient widowhood and spinsterdom*"`_

.. vspace:: 1

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

.. vspace:: 1

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

.. vspace:: 1

`"*And cabbages!" said the mountainy man*`_

.. vspace:: 1

`*The Candidate*`_

.. vspace:: 1

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

.. vspace:: 1

`*Facing America*`_

.. vspace:: 1

`*In West Carbery*`_

.. vspace:: 1

`*Patsey Sweeny*`_

.. vspace:: 1

`*Mrs. Sweeny*`_

.. vspace:: 1

`"*In a lonely cottage*"`_

.. vspace:: 1

`*Children of the Captivity*`_

.. vspace:: 1

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





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`AN OUTPOST OF IRELAND`:

.. class:: center large bold

   AN OUTPOST OF IRELAND

.. vspace:: 2

"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.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1



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*`:

.. figure:: images/img-015.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: KILRONAN BAY

   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*`:

.. figure:: images/img-016.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: AN ARAN FISHERMAN

   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*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-020.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "WHITE HOUSES CLUSTERED ROUND A FRAGMENT OF BASTION"

   "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*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-021.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "THE OUTLINE OF CONNEMARA WAS STILL SHARP"

   "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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`PICNICS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   PICNICS

.. vspace:: 2

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.

.. _`*THE ELDER TURF-BOY*`:

.. figure:: images/img-037.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "THE ELDER TURF-BOY"

   "THE ELDER TURF-BOY"

The first picnic in which I clearly recall
taking part was, like many that succeeded it,
illicit.  It unconsciously adhered to the great
and golden precept that picnics should be
limited in number and select in company.  It
consisted, in fact, of no more than four, which,
with a leggy deerhound, a turf fire, and the
smoke from the turf fire, were as much as
could be fitted in.  Why a ruinous lime-kiln
should have been chosen is not worth inquiring
into.  It probably conformed best with
those ideals of cave-dwelling, secrecy, and
rigorous discomfort that are treasured by the
young.  We were, indeed, excessively young,
and should have been walking in all godliness
with the governess; two of us at least should.
The other two were turf-boys, who should
have been carrying baskets of turf on their
backs into the kitchen, and submitting
themselves reverently to the innumerable
oppressions of the cook, who, they assured us, had
already pitched them to the Seventeen Divils
three times that same day.  The lime-kiln
was sketchily roofed with branches, thatched
with sedge and was entered by the hole at
which the smoke came out.  It was a feat of
some skill to lower oneself through this hole,
avoid the fire, grope for the table—a
packing-case—with one toe, and thence fall on top of
the rest of the party.  Except in the item of
sociability I do not think that the deerhound
can have enjoyed himself much; he spent
most of the time in dodging the transits of
the kettle, and it was our malign custom to
wipe the knives on his back, in places just
beyond the flaps of a tongue as long and red
as a slice of ham.  What we ate is best
forgotten.  Something disgusting with carraway
seeds in it, kneaded by our own filthy
hands, lubricated with lard, and baked in a
frying pan in the inmost heart of the turf
smoke.  The drink was claret, stolen from
the dining-room, and boiled with a few
handfuls of the snow that lay sparsely under the
fir trees round the lime-kiln.  Why the claret
should have been boiled with snow is hard to
explain.  I think it must have been due to
its suggestion of Polar expeditions and Roman
Feasts; subjects both of them, that lent
themselves to learned and condescending explanation
to the turf-boys.  Afterwards, when the
elder turf-boy, Sonny Walsh, produced a
pack of cards from a cavity in his coat that
had begun life as a pocket, and dealt them
out for "Spoilt Five" it was the turf-boy's
turn to condescend.  "Spoilt Five" is not in
any sense child's play; its rules are
complicated, and its play overlaid with weird usages
and expressions.  For the uninitiated it was
out of the question to distinguish kings from
queens, or the all-important "Five-Fingers"
from any other five, through the haze of dirt
with which all were befogged.  The turf-boys
knew them as the shepherd knows his flock,
and at the end of the game had become
possessors of our stock-in-trade, consisting of
a Manx halfpenny, a slate pencil with plaid
paper gummed round its shank, two lemon
drops, and a livery button.

This was a good and thoroughly enjoyable
picnic, containing within itself all the
elements of success, difficult as these may be to
define, and still more difficult as they are to
secure.

.. _`*AN AUGUST AFTERNOON*`:

.. figure:: images/img-038.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: AN AUGUST AFTERNOON

   AN AUGUST AFTERNOON

I remember an August afternoon, and a
long island that lay sweltering in a sea of flat
and streaky blue.  Two heated boatloads
approached it at full speed, each determined
to get there first, and equally determined not
to seem aware of any emulation.  Simultaneously
the keels drove like ploughs into
the hot shingle, the inevitable troop of dogs
flung themselves ashore—it is noteworthy
that all dogs dash into a boat as if they were
leading a forlorn hope, and leave it as if
they were escaping from a fire—the party
spread itself over the beach in cheerful
argument as to the most suitable place for the
repast, and while the contention was still hot
as to the relative merits of a long disused
churchyard, with an ancient stone coffin lid
for a table, or a baking corner of the strand,
where a thin stream trickled over the cliffs to
the sea, one came from the boats with a
stricken face, and said that all the food had
been left behind.  There was silence for a
space.  Then, while the accusers answered
one another, the remembrance of Mrs. Driscoll's
cottage shone like a star on a
stormy night into the minds of the castaways.
Under happier circumstances the metaphor
might have seemed inappropriate, but there
is a time for everything, and the time for
Mrs. Driscoll's cottage to pose as a star of
hope and deliverance had arrived.  Mrs. Driscoll
herself, emerging from her cowhouse,
sympathetic, hospitable, and very dirty, was
equal to the occasion.  Would she lend us a
skillet?  Sure, why not!  An' eggs is it? an'
praties? an' a sup o' milk, and the sign o'
butther?  Well, well! the cratures!  An'
they come to this lonesome place to ate their
dinner, an' to lave it afther them afther!
Glory be to mercy!  Well, the genthry is
quare, but for all they're very good!  She
led the foraging party in to her cottage.  It
was the only house on the island, and, in
rough weather, as solitary and cut off from
humanity as was Noah's Ark.  Indeed,
solitariness was not the only point wherein a
resemblance to the Ark was suggested.  A
cloud of hens screeched forth over the half
door in our faces; two cats and a pig sped
out as we opened it; a small but determined
mother goat dared us to force the fortalice of
the inner chamber in which her offspring
were, no doubt, in laager; a gander lifted his
clattering bill from a skillet—the skillet, I
may say, in which our subsequent meal was
to be prepared—to hiss alarmingly at us;
two children and, I think, a calf, shuddered
noiselessly out of sight into the brown vault
of the fireplace, and through it all, as
Mrs. Browning sings, "The nightingales" (or,
strictly speaking, the ducks) "drove straight
and full their long clear call."

Mrs. Driscoll drove, headlong as an ocean
steamer, through her *ménage*.  The skillet
was snatched from the gander; with one
sweeping cuff a low-growling, elderly dog
was dashed from its seat on the potato sack
under the table.  The dresser yielded a bowl
full of eggs; from the bedroom came milk
and butter (happily, none of us, save the
goat, was made free of the mysteries of their
place of keeping), and a little girl was
plucked from the depths of the chimney and
commanded to "run away to the well for a
pitcher of water."

"Not from the well in the bohireen," we
said quickly, "it doesn't look very—"

"Sure that's grand wather, asthore,"
replied Mrs. Driscoll, "if ye'll take the green
top off it there's no better wather in the globe
of Ireland, nor in Carbery nayther!"

We accepted the reassurance.  When one is
less than twenty and more than half-starved,
one accepts a good deal, and I cannot
remember that any of us were any the worse
for the water.  At all events the potatoes
were boiled in it, the eggs nestling amicably
among them (this to save time and fuel).
Ultimately there was made a comprehensive
blend of everything—eggs, potatoes, milk and
butter, the whole served hot, on flat stones,
and eaten with pocket knives and cockleshells.

Over our heads the unsophisticated
seagulls swooped and screamed—I remember
that one of them nearly knocked my hat off
on that island one day—the air quivered like
hot oil between us and the purple distance
of the mainland, and yet there was the island
freshness in it; we lay on our backs on the
heathery verge of the cliffs and drowsed off
the potatoes.  There were no plates to wash,
no forks to clean.  It was an admirable
picnic.  So every one thought, save the dogs,
who found egg-shells and potato-skins a poor
substitute for chicken bones.

There is, I think, in the matter of picnics
no middle course endurable.  If they cannot
attain to the untrammelled simplicity of the
savage, they require all the resources of
civilisation to justify them.  Let there be
men-servants, and maid-servants, and cattle—for
carting purposes—and, in fact, all the
things enumerated in the Tenth Commandment,
including your neighbour's wife.
Let there also be champagne—and yet, not
even champagne will alleviate much if your
neighbour's wife be dull and greedy, and
how often, how almost invariably is she, at a
picnic, both these things!  There certainly
is something in the conditions of set feasts
out of doors that induces an unusual measure
of gluttony.  Primarily, of course, there is
the lack of other occupation, but chiefly, I
think, there is the instinctive wish to lessen
the labours of packing up.  Packing up is
the dark feature of the best picnic.  I have
often pitied the Apostles for the seven
basketfuls that they found left on their hands.

If an instance of all that is worst in a
picnic be required I may lightly record some
of the features of an entertainment which,
one summer, I was by Heaven's help and a
little lower diplomacy, enabled to evade.
The drag-net of the African war had gone
heavily over the neighbourhood, and to the
forty women who had unflinchingly accepted,
but two men were found to preserve the just
balance of the sexes.  These numbers are
not fictitious.  They may be found seared
upon the heart of the hostess.

The forty, with a singular fatuity, seem to
have been as tenacious of their dignity as
jurymen at a Coroner's inquest.  It was
theirs, as females, to sit still and be fed, and
this they did, even though the feeding
process was conducted solely by the two
heroes of the afternoon, and was necessarily
of the most gradual character.  The kettle,
or rather kettles, were—it is the only bright
spot in the affair—ably manipulated by serfs
in the background, and in their hands was
also the grosser conduct of the feast, the
unpacking, the setting forth on the grass of a
table cloth of about half an acre in area, and
the placing on its unattainable central
plateaux those matters—such as cream-jugs and
fruit salads—in greatest request and most
prone to disaster.  They, also, had been the
selectors of a ruined cottage as the site of
the camp fires, and it was only when these
were being prepared that a swarm of bees
discovered itself in the chimney.  Fortunately,
however, before it went on to discover
the picnic, some one, with the Irish gift of
using the wrong thing in the right place,
stopped the flue with a hamper and a
carriage rug, thus heading off the worst of the
bees, while the fires were relit in the corners
of the cottage.  The two men faced the
position.  Through smoke and bees they did
their duty, carting back and forth the eighty
cups of tea which the occasion demanded;
but they said afterwards that more than
patriotism barbed the regret that their
country had deemed them too old for active
service.  As for the forty ladies, they sat and
fulfilled what was for them the primary, if
not the only object of the picnic, by eating
and drinking, without haste, without rest,
till the kettles gave out.  Then, like a flock
of gorged birds, they rose heavily, and
unaffectedly begged to be allowed to order
their carriages, and so went home.  The
hostess had held a walk and a view in
reserve, in case of emergencies, but it was
not for her to complain.  The two men then
had their tea.

It has been my fate to take part in several
yachting picnics.  They have all had one
common and hideous feature—even as a
cocked-nose or a squint will run in families—the
yachts have invariably been becalmed.
Their other conditions have been various.
Sometimes the food was sent by land to meet
the yachters at the chosen rendezvous;
sometimes the picnicking contingent rode
bicycles and sent the food by sea, and
sometimes the yacht alone took the whole outfit,
food and feeders, and putting forth to sea,
incontinently fell upon flat calms, and the
slow pulsing swell of the Atlantic, and thus,
though the direct cause varied, the net result
was ever the same—starvation.  There is
hidden away in West Cork a most lovely
and lonely lake.  It is joined with the sea by
a narrow neck, up which at high water boats
can come.  To landward is a great hill,
thickly grown with firs, and aboriginal oaks,
and hollies, wherein on a still night you may
hear the wild screech of the martin-cats,
ripping the darkness blood-curdlingly, like a
woman's scream.  From its summit is a
view of wondrous beauty and expanse (not
necessarily synonymous terms, though often
reckoned so), and it was there that we
were to picnic, bicycling as near the top
as might be, while hirelings from the yacht
were to carry provisions up the hill for
us.  It was a luncheon picnic, the blackest
kind of all.  The yacht started at daybreak;
all was to be ready on the hill top by
our arrival.

I should think the least intelligent would
have already gathered the *dénouement* of
this "Cautionary Tale," as Mrs. Sherwood
would call it, and I need do no more than
indicate the closing scene of the day's
tragedy.  On a sea of turquoise, far-away
sails, saffron-coloured, and motionless in the
afternoon sunlight.  On the mud floor of a
roadside public house, a small company of
bicyclists, drearily preserving life by means
of sour porter, flat, sweet lemonade, and
probably the stalest biscuits in the wide
province of Munster.

Many high authorities, including, I am
told, Mr. Herbert Spencer, assure us that it
is the inherited influences of prehistoric
ancestors that breed in otherwise decent and
home-keeping souls the love of the lawless
freedom of a picnic, and, to be sure, the
pleasure that we had in our island orgy, with
its plateless, spoonless indecorums, can best
be explained on some such theory.  None
the less, I maintain that the ideal picnic is
only achieved by the most super-civilised
elimination and selection.  Two, or at most
four, congenial souls, and a tea basket of
latest device and most expert equipment—these
things, and thoroughly dry grass, and
I ask no more of heaven.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`BOON COMPANIONS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   BOON COMPANIONS

.. vspace:: 2

"D'ye remember of Gill and Poor Fellow,
greyhounds that was in it long ago?"

I did not.  In the long and tear-stained
annals of the family dogs but one greyhound
was in my memory, the saintly and beautiful
Gazelle, own niece to "Master McGrath," as
was recited with bated breath to new
governesses and other of the unenlightened,
coupled with large statements as to her
uncomputable value had not her tail in
youth been shut into a stable door and given
a double angle like a bayonet.

Rickeen was occupied, to some extent, in
felling a young ash tree.  He swung in half
a score of blows that made it shiver, and
presently came to the expected pause.

"Faith thim was the dogs—!  My
brother Tom was butler here the same time.
B'leeve me 'twas himself was souple!  He'd
run home any minute in the day, two miles,
and ye wouldn't hardly feel him gone."

This remarkable accomplishment on the
part of the butler was allowed to sink in, as
it deserved.

"He had a tarrier, and one day going
through the Wood of Annagh himself and
the tarrier wakened a hare, and the two o'
thim was hunting her through and fro, and
he cursing the full of a house on the tarrier.
He shtud then on the big rock that's in it,
and he let a whistle on his two fingers.
The two greyhounds was sthretched within
at the kitchen fire up at the Big House, and
sorra word of lie I'm tellin', but Poor Fellow
put an ear on him, and the two of them
legged it out of the kitchen and away with
them to the wood, and they never stopped
nor stayed till they found Tom, and
themselves and the tarrier killed the hare."

The big rock and the Big House were
severed by an Irish mile of tree trunks and
briars, but criticism is the last thing required
from a listener, and I hope I played my part.

.. _`*RICKEEN*`:

.. figure:: images/img-052.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: RICKEEN

   RICKEEN

Rickeen was again possessed by a spasm
of industry: the chips flew out, the tall young
ash cracked, and sank into the arms of its
neighbours.  There was a singular simplicity
about the forestry of the establishment.
When the bitter cry of the cook went forth
for wood wherewith to cook the impending
meal, Rickeen prayed that the divil might
roast and baste all the women in Ireland,
and cut down a convenient young tree.  By
this means the plantations were lightly thinned
at the ends nearest the house, and as a
general thing the cook gave notice every
three weeks, which prevented any unwholesome
stagnation.

"But as for dogs," continued Rickeen, a
little later, as he snicked off the greeny-grey
branches, "the grandest dog ever was in
this counthry was Mullowny's.  Ye couldn't
know what kind of a breed was in him, but
ye'd *have* to like him, he was that spotted."

Here a long-drawn yell came forth from
the yard, resolving itself gradually into a
statement to Rickeen that the Misthress
wanted her keys, and himself was the last
one she seen them with.

Rickeen put down his hatchet in fateful
silence.  His dog, couched in a brake where
the young bracken stems curled like bishops'
croziers round her crafty snout, raised one
yellow eyebrow out of what was apparently
deep sleep, arose, and followed him with her
wonted gravity.  Her cold manner was the
next thing to good breeding; in spite of a
family tree exclusively composed of crosses,
in spite of a coat suggestive of a badger skin
that has been used as a door mat, there was
that in her pale eyes and in the set smile at
the corners of her mouth that discouraged
familiarity, and induced other dogs to feign
a sudden interest in their own affairs as she
approached.  To follow Rickeen she gnawed
ropes, and swam lakes, and ate her way
through doors, and Rickeen never to my
knowledge addressed her, except with the
command to drive in the cows.  In her next
incarnation she will probably be the ideal
colonist's wife.

I remained sitting on a stump in the
silence, and thought of my first love, Bran.
Through the tree stems I could see a grassy
hill sloping to the lake side, where, at the
age of nine, I grovelled one morning
among the cowslips and mopped my soaking
tears with my holland waggoner, and wished
for death, because Bran had been drowned.
Bran was a cur, half silky and gracious
Gordon setter, half woolly vulgarian of the
Irish cottage breed, and to us, his comrades,
a hero, an object of passionate faith, and, as
such, the victim of many well-meant but
excruciating honours.  He wore, with docile
consciousness of his absurdity, ornamental
harness of strangling complications, and
with it drew at a foot pace a grocer's box,
mounted on wheels, while we walked before
and after with fixed bayonets and all the
gravity befitting a guard of honour operating
in shrubberies teeming with banditti.  It
was not till an attempt was made to put the
new bull dog into double harness with him
that Bran showed symptoms of resentment,
and the battle that then raged in the tangle
of the shoulder straps and traces placed him,
if possible, higher in our respect.  The
matter was patched up with the bull dog,
who, though instant in quarrel, was not
without good feeling, and next morning, at
an early hour, I saw his frightful face
protruding from under the bedclothes of my
brother's bed, framed in a poke bonnet of
sheet, while two long tails, languidly waving
in welcome, hung down over the valance
like bell-ropes, and witnessed to the presence
of Bran and of the young deerhound, Kilfane,
hidden in the deepest heart of the bed.

Perhaps Sunday was the day that Bran
was most satiating to us.  To go to church on
the top of the family omnibus was at any time
the summit of ambition; with Bran speeding
easily in front, or slackening for a hurried
exchange of ferocities with cabin acquaintances,
the five miles (invariably driven in the
teeth of a north-westerly wind) were all too
short.  Those inside, whose turn it would be
to sit on top coming home, yearned with
crooked necks through the side windows, and
stimulated by glimpses of the hero, were
enabled to struggle successfully with the
hideous tendency of childhood to be sea-sick
in covered vehicles.  During church time
Bran was immured in the lock-up at the
police station, and many a wriggling
half-hour's endurance of the sermon was gilded
by expectancy of the moment when the
sorrowful sighing of the prisoner would turn
to ardent sniffing under the door of the
lockup, and the hand of the sergeant would restore
to us "life's greatest possibility."

One summer night, at about this time, as
I lay in my bed, the spirits of prophecy and
of poesy came upon me hand in hand, quite
inexplicably.  Bran was in his usual health,
and, as I afterwards found, was at that
very hour engaged in stealing mutton hash
from the back hall: but it was decreed that I
should compose an ode fatefully
commemorating his violent death.

"Oh, Bran, thou wert gentle and sweet,"
I began, without an effort, while Mattel's
Valse swung and crashed its way up through
two ceilings from the drawing-room,

   |    But now thou art past and gone,
   |  Like a wave on the ocean so fleet,
   |    And the deed of death was done.

Even here inspiration did not flag.

   |    'Tis no use to wail or to weep.
   |  For oh, alas and alack!
   |    Thou'st gone to that eternal sleep,
   |  From which none can bring thee back.
   |

The magnificence of the close was almost
stupefying to the author; even the second
line of the verse had seemed full of a rending
passion.  I sank to sleep, aware that I had
taken my place in literature.

A year afterwards came the miserable
tears among the cowslips, the first taste of
the bitter core of sentiment, and the
discovery that the prophetic ode did not
express the position.

Bran occupies the whole foreground of the
history of pets, but there were many of a
lesser sort.  There was even another elegy,
beginning:

   |  Stranger, with reverence draw near,
   |  A Linnet lies below.

But birds were not our foible.

Rabbits followed each other in bewildering
succession, and travelled to their doom by
the same track.  We fed them with milk
and water out of eggspoons, with daisies, and
with clover, but the morning always came
when the foundling lay stiff in its hay, its
black eyes glazed, and the limp daisies
untouched beside it.  One notable exception
is recorded, a young rabbit brought in with a
broken leg, who out of pure contrariety and
improbability lived for a year.  It became
precocious beyond belief, and sat all day
observing life from the arm of its proprietor.
At night it slept, or affected to sleep, in a box
in her room, biding its time till the candle
was put out.  Under cover of darkness it
would then stealthily come forth and would
buck with precision from the floor on to the
face of the sleeper, repeating the feat as often
as repulsed, until a burrow in some corner of
the bed was granted.  (It is not out of place
here to mention that its nails were cut
with extreme care and regularity.)  Its diet
presented no difficulty, save in the matter of
restriction.  It partook of the family meals
as they came: porridge, marmalade, bread
and butter, meat; uncooked green vegetables
were not so much as mentioned in its
presence.  It even, horrible to confess,
frequently ate rabbit-pie, and cracked and
crunched the bones of its relatives with
cannibal glee.  On these scandalous foods it
throve, but remained dwarfish and uncanny.
It had moods of suspicion and brooding,
when it sat in the chimney of an empty room.
Once, under the protection, no doubt, of the
evil spirits with whom it was in league, it
leaped from a window sill forty feet above
the ground, alighted with a flop, and greeted
those who rushed to pick up the corpse with
a cold stare of inquiry as to what the
excitement was about.  It met its death
by presuming in the open field upon the
long-suffering of the dogs whom it terrorised
in the house.

Outside the inner circle of pets, and within
the outer circle of the donkeys whom we
partly loved, partly scorned, and daily
martyrised, kids held a certain position of
their own.  They are not to be commended,
being skittish, peevish, tactless and strong,
but they were not without attraction.  One of
them, black and white, with oblique barley-sugar
eyes, showed much inclination towards
the profession of house dog, and learned
many essentials of that trade; the doors that
were worth waiting at, the perils and rich
prizes of the kitchen passages, the moment
to intrude, the moment to fly.  An incident
of its career can best be told in the words of
a certain Bridget, a notable member of the
long dynasty of Bridgets that passed
processionally through the establishment *en route*
for America.

"The Misthress was below in the hall and
she heard one above on the top landin',
walkin' as sthrong as a man.  'Bridget!'
says she," (the voice of command was given
with great elegance and hauteur), "and what
was in it but the young goat, and it commenced
walkin' down the stairs.  'Come here,
Bridget!' says the Misthress, and sure of
course the goat said nothing, but goin' on
always from step to step.  'Arrah musha!
The divil go from ye,' says the Misthress,
'why don't ye spake?  What sort of hoppin'
is it ye have up there?'"  (The elegance of
the imitation here yielded to the narrator's
sense of what was fitting.)  "Faith, the
goat stood then, like it'd be afraid.  'The
Lord save us, it's the fairies!' says the
Misthress, an' there wasn't one in the house
but she called, and what did they get in it
but the goat, an' it having a stocking half ate!"

Not long afterwards (next day probably)
the kid was sent back on an outside car to its
native place, a region of bog and rock and
scrub, where its lamentations for the
schoolroom fire had ample scope.  It was escorted
to its Siberia by a large party from the
schoolroom, filled with curiosity to see how
it would be received in its family circle.  The
boy who was left to hold the horse became
also impelled to see the meeting, with the
result that the horse and car were found a
little later on their backs in a bog ditch,
which conclusion is not to this hour known
to the authorities.

It was in the winter that the Reign of
Terror of the Monkeys began.  The first of
them, large and grey, wearing the name of
Lizzie, and a red flannel coat, arrived in
December, and it was humanely arranged
that she should live close to the kitchen fire
on the flour bin.  It was also enacted that
she was to be chained to the wall "until she
got to know people a little."

There are Northern stories, Eastern ones,
too, I believe, of houses in which evil spirits
having once gained entrance, remained in
immutable possession.  Thus it was with us.
In a short time Lizzie got to know every one
very thoroughly.  She bit each visitor
indiscriminately, and having analysed the samples,
she arranged a sliding scale of likes and
dislikes, on the negative principle.  That is to
say, she would tolerate A till B arrived,
when she bit A.  On C's appearance she bit
both A and B, and so on up to Z.  The
master of the house was Z.  (Herein she
showed her infernal cunning.)  Z was never
bitten.  The kitchenmaid, in whose control
were the dainties that Lizzie's soul loved, was
Y, *i.e.*, she was only bitten on the arrival of
the master.  Lizzie's bad life had the sole
merit of brevity.  One of her customs was to
strike a match, and having burnt the hair on
her grimy, nervous little arm, to eat the
frizzled remains.  (Thus invalidating the
vaunt that man is the only animal that
cooks.)  Having on several occasions nearly set the
house on fire, matches were forbidden to her,
but one fortunate day a new boxful somehow
fell into her possession, and, varying her
wonted practice, she ate off the heads of most
of the matches.  Therewith her spirit passed;
but only temporarily.  In less than a year she
was with us again.  This time in the guise of
a small brown monkey, that went by the name
of Jack.  A clear proof of obsession by the
spirit of Lizzie was afforded in the fact that
precisely the same sliding scale of hatred was
observed, culminating as before in the master
of the house.  Jack was in some particulars
less repellent than his predecessor.  He was
smaller, and was given to fits, which gave a
hope that his life might not long be spared.
By this time the flour-bin from long camping
would have supplied the germs of enteric to an
entire army corps.  (I hasten to say that, being
in Ireland, it was never used as a flour-bin
having been thus temporarily styled as a
concession to convention during the brief reign
of an English cook who had long before fled
to her native land.)  Between the flour-bin
and the wall Jack's fits usually took place,
and it was the wont of the tender-hearted
kitchenmaid (known to this day among her
fellows as "Mary-the-Monkey."  The suffix
"the Monkey" being a distinguishing mark;
as "Philippe-le-Bel," "Robert-the-Lion") to
unchain him after one of these seizures and
to sit before the fire with him on her lap.
No experience seemed to teach her that his
first act on recovery was to bite her suddenly
and then escape.  The alarm was spread in
precisely the same manner on each successive
occasion.  First a shrill and piercing scream
from "Mary-the-Monkey," usually coupled
with an appeal to her God.  Then an
answering yell from the next victim in the
pantry.  Then a shouting, and an earthquake
slamming of doors through the house as its
occupants one and all sped to safety.  Finally
the voice of the master assuring the invisible
household that all was well, and that the
monkey would never bite any one if they
did not show that they were afraid of him.

Jack died in a fit, and was mourned only
by the master and the faithful kitchenmaid.
Yet had he and his fellow had any desire for
social success it would have been easy for
them to have achieved it in a family so
inured to pets as ours.

But monkeys are worse than tactless.
They understand their own hideousness and
unpopularity, yet will not make a step towards
amiability.  A little leaning to the pathetic
would have made us adore them, but they
prefer to remain malevolent, remote, uttering
coarse, mysterious grunts and screeches, out
of hearts full of cold devilry.  It is in keeping
with their vulgarity that they should thrust
their way into an assemblage of pets; an
insult even to the kid and the rabbit, an
outrage to the memory of Bran.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE BIOGRAPHY OF A PUMP`:

.. class:: center large bold

   THE BIOGRAPHY OF A PUMP

.. vspace:: 2

The date of its birth is uncertain.  A torpid
tradition places it in the Early Victorian Era,
but the Regency is more probable; even the
Rebellion of '96 may not have been beyond
its ken.  Being a native of West Galway,
neither Regency nor Early Victorian Era
was likely to be an epoch in its surroundings.
It belonged to the period when

   |  "... Dick Martin ruled
   |  The trackless wilds of Connemara;"

and the men who put it in its place scarcely
knew whether king or queen ruled in an
England that was as remote from them as
the India of to-day.

It is probable that in the youth of the
pump its labours were light.  Baths were the
eccentricity of a few, a revival of the corrupt
days of the Roman Empire; and the process
by which the stalwart fox-hunter of the
beginning of this century got into his clothes
was one that it might be well to slur over,
invaluable as he and his costume have been
to the Christmas numbers.  Vast and simple
cooking operations, conducted on an open
grate four feet long; vats of meat pickle
lying in cellars where the light came greenly
through ivied windows; cauldrons of potatoes,
and possibly cauldrons of punch; these formed
the highest claims on the water-supply before
the dynasty of the bath was proclaimed in
the establishment.  The deathless discontent
that followed the innovation has produced
many stirring household episodes, none of
them more sudden and complete than that
which occurred on the day when one of those
vessels of wrath, the bath, was repainted for
the first time.  The local carpenter had
arrived for the purpose, with what disdain
for such trifling can be imagined.  Arriving
early, he discovered the bath as yet
unemptied, an added insult to a man whose
time was much occupied with fishing on the
lake, and other serious matters.  The
housemaid, with ill-timed coquetry, put out her
tongue at him when approached on the
subject.  In silence more bodeful than
repartee he returned to the bath, carried it to
the door, and emptied its contents down the
passage.  A stupefied stillness fell upon the
bystanders, then arose outcry almost choked
by rage, while behind a locked door the
carpenter whistled and audibly chuckled over
his work.

In those days the turf-boy was an institution,
oppressive, but necessitated by an
establishment where coal had never been seen,
and an armful of turf burned away in an
hour.  All day they plied bare-foot between
the turf-house and the various fuel depots of
the house with baskets of the long, hard sods
on their backs, and guile and mutiny in
their hearts, because that with the office of
turf-boy was linked the hated one of
water-carrier.  About this latter clustered battles
of endless variety, involving the sacred person
of the cook, and frequently topped as with
a banner by her giving of warning.  After
long warfare it was lightly thought that the
exodus of cooks might be stayed by the
introduction of a self-filling boiler supplied
from a small tank, which must, by Median
and Persian law, be replenished every
morning.  It was done, and for an incredible
fortnight the charm of novelty retained its
hold on the turf-boys; the tank was filled,
the ball-cock did its work like a book, and
the Dublin cook was fain to seek another
grievance.  The inevitable hour drew on when
the tank, like any other entertainment, must
cease to amuse, the hour in which it ebbed
unreplenished to its dregs, while the
turf-boys, much preoccupied with making a wicker
snare for blackbirds, known as a cradle-bird,
sat round the fire, and dismissed the boiler
from their minds with a calm, native trust in
Providence.  It was in the meridian of this
peace that the boiler burst, with a single and
shattering report.  What followed on that
crack of doom it is not necessary to record;
the imagination of any householder can
shadow forth the attitude of the cook, and no
living pen could reproduce the flight of the
turf-boys.

It is more agreeable to turn to another
scene, in which the pump played its part to a
limited extent, when, on the last night of the
old year, the coach-house was garlanded with
holly and ivy, and "Pete-een bawn," the
Albino fiddler, sat on high on a window-sill,
twitching out jigs and reels from the fiddle
that he played on his knee, while the thick
boots of a roomful of dancers kept light and
unflagging time.  As the crowning hour of
twelve drew on, preparations began for the
brew of punch that was to usher in the new
year, and a tasting committee, formed of the
gamekeeper and the kitchenmaid, was met by
the supreme question of what to brew it in.
A bucket was considered too small, the churn
was rejected because it had "an ugly
smell."  Finally some genius bethought him of a
hip-bath.  The bath was snatched from the
nearest bedroom by a bevy of turf-boys, the
stone jar of John Jameson was emptied into
it, and followed with more reticence by kettles
of boiling water; all that remained was to
provide each guest with a cup to dip into the
reeking pool.  Ten minutes later the bath
was empty, and a ring of boys radiated from
it at full length, lapping the last drops, and
even licking the enamel, while the dancing
was resumed with startling emphasis.  Outside,
a light snow was on the ground, the
north wind blew dark in that bitter midnight,
and the ice on the lake uttered strange
sounds—hollow, musical shocks with the
voice of the imprisoned water in them.
Every tree in the woods stood separate in
white silhouette, the rime sifting through the
branches in a dry whisper.  Upon this subtle
mood of winter came forth from the open
doors of the coach-house the light of lamps
with tin reflectors, the shrewish scream of the
fiddle as Pete-een bawn jerked his white head
in accord with "The hare was in the corn,"
the aroma of punch and of clothes seasoned
in turf smoke.  It is better to withdraw from
these early hours of the new year, before the
uncertain homeward footsteps blotted the
thin snow, and the exponents of the genial
first stage of drunkenness assisted the
exponents of the aggressive second stage to
pull themselves together for early Mass.

.. _`*ROSS LAKE*`:

.. figure:: images/img-074.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: ROSS LAKE

   ROSS LAKE

It has been mentioned that the pump was
subject to chronic and mysterious ailments,
on which every skilled opinion in the country
was brought to bear, while the water famine
was sore in the land, and the turf-boys plied
with buckets and bewailings between the
lake and the cook, and unearthly pronged
creatures gyrated in the water-bottles.  It
was during one of these visitations, when the
back yard was torn up into entrenchments,
and the pump lay two miles away at the
forge, that the Garrygillihy horse races were
held, and with this event the revolt of the
turf-boys broke forth.  On the previous day
they concealed themselves in an old limekiln
and mended their trousers; on the morning
itself they made the simple statement that
"if the servants was to die dancing for turf
and wather they'll not get it to-day," after
which ultimatum they were seen no more.
Many things happened in their absence, not
at first sight connected with it; the cook
went to bed in the afternoon, the hens
walked upstairs to the pantry, and picked
out the inside of a plum cake, and a cow got
into the coach-house, and ate the cushion of
the car.  The cook gave warning next day,
the kitchenmaid, in tears, followed suit,
because the cook had called her a "jumper"
(*i.e.*, a pervert to Protestantism); the housemaid,
also in tears, asserted that the kitchenmaid
"had a spleen agin her," and the
stableman was heard darkly soliloquising
over the cleaning of the bits that "a lie
was *something*, but there was no dealing
with a d—d lie."  All these things were
subsequently traced by tortuous ways to the
grand central fact that the turf-boys had
gone to the Garrygillihy races.

There came at length a notable crisis,
when the pump showed that it had, like
most of its countrymen, a power of rising to
the occasion.  It was on a bright morning in
May that the kitchen chimney caught fire,
an event of yearly occurrence, and by no
means displeasing to the authorities.  The
big shaft roared with furnace heat up its
eighty feet, the ugly blaze wavered from the
chimney top; a few buckets of water were
poured down, and all became quiet.  It had
happened in the immemorial manner, but
just once too often.  Four hours later, in the
stillness of the hot afternoon, the voice of the
fire was heard again, a soft, busy crackling in
the timbers of the roof, a muffled booming
sound that grew above it; a tongue of flame
through the slates, a drip of melted lead from
the eaves, and the house was full of shouts
and rushing feet.  An hour afterwards the
battle was over, and the toilers could fling
themselves down, breathless, to realise an
incredible escape, and the clang of the pump
handle ceased.  Throughout that hour of
stress none of the pump's repertoire of evil
symptoms was exhibited, nor did it fail to
respond to the astonishing variety of
receptacles presented to its grim beak.  Next day
it gasped forth the mud of the bottom of the
well, and fell into a fractious disorder from
which it has never rallied; but none the
less the old house at its back owes its life to
the allegiance of its comrade of a hundred years.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`HUNTING MAHATMAS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   HUNTING MAHATMAS

.. vspace:: 2

Many people have learnt from "Kim"
what it is to be a "Chela," and there was a
time, not long ago, when every self-respecting
evening paper and most of the magazines
had something sufficiently—or
self-sufficiently—illuminating to say about Karma or the
Mahatma.  I am not skilled in Buddhism,
but I have assimilated a fact or two about
Mahatmas, and in so doing have become
aware of wider issues.

A Mahatma, I believe, implies primarily a
teacher, an instructor, a sage or hermit with
intermittently social tendencies; it also implies
the possession of many useful endowments.
Matter and space appear to be negligible
accidents to the competent Mahatma.  As a
mere after-dinner triviality he will summon
you a cigarette from infinity and will
materialise it on the table; moving to higher
things, he can produce a copy of the *Times*
in the remoter parts of Tibet on the day on
which it appears in London, advertisements
and all, but exclusive, I fancy, of library
privileges.  Transcending these lighter
accomplishments, however, is his power of
transporting himself to a chosen place at a
chosen time without visible means of
progression.  He, we are assured, can fade from
the landscape with the beautiful elusiveness
of a rainbow, and can develop himself
elsewhere, in or out of the landscape, with a
precision with which the rainbow cannot
hope to compete.

There is a matter that seems to me to
have escaped observation—it certainly is not
generally admitted—that in society not
notably occult, in what, in fact, are often
spoken of as Hunting Circles (though why
circles, save with a very bad fox, it is hard
to say), these privileged beings are found.
Unsuspected, unappreciated, his high gifts
often despised, even disliked, the Mahatma
blooms in what might seem the uncongenial
soil of many a hunting country.

There is a difference, distinct and, in my
mind, well defined, between the people who
hunt and the people who go hunting.  The
people who hunt are the professionals;
serious, impassioned even, but with subdued
emotion; fanatics who live only to conjugate
the verb To Hunt in all its moods and
tenses; recognising implicitly the force of
its imperative, accepting its future with joy,
its past with loquacity.  For them hunt
numbers are compiled, and runs recorded
with geographical accuracy and microscopic
detail; they cut out the work, they give the
time.  Yet it is not among their thrusting
ranks that the Mahatma is found.  He is
evolved, in perfect response to the need for
him, among the wider brotherhood of those
who go hunting.  These are the true free
lances of the chase.  Having cast off the fear
of public opinion, and purged themselves of
the love of display, they have no conventions
to respect and no position to lose.  Hand in
hand with their devotion to sport goes the
most saving good sense.  How despicable to
these enfranchised minds must be the
meaningless twists, the desperate endeavours
of the zealots who, infatuated as a string of
ants, surmount unwaveringly every obstacle
that lies in their path!  As, from a pleasant
hill side, the Mahatma views these struggles,
he must surely feel how well it is with him,
and how useful a thing it is to combine moral
courage with intelligence.

.. _`"*THE HOVERING HORDE VACILLATES NO LONGER*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-084.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "THE HOVERING HORDE VACILLATES NO LONGER"

   "THE HOVERING HORDE VACILLATES NO LONGER"

But in a hilly and gateless country, such as
Ireland excels in, moral courage and intelligence
will not suffice; inspiration is needed,
and straightway, out of a hovering and
uncertain horde of riders, the Mahatma
materialises.  The hour has come, and the man.
(These things, it may be noted, often
synchronise with the interposition of the class
of fence that is like an east wind, in being
neither good for man nor beast.)  Without a
shadow of hesitation the Mahatma turns his
horse at a right angle from the line the
hounds are running, possibly even in a
diametrically opposite direction.  It matters
not; the result will justify him.  The
hovering horde vacillates no longer; no word is
spoken, no allegiance sworn; his sovereignty
is as instant and unquestioned as that of the
queen bee; one telepathic moment has
transformed them into his disciples.

It is here that the superiority of the
hunting Mahatma to the religious variety
makes itself felt.  Like the Magic Carpet in
the "Arabian Nights" he has the mystic
power of transporting not only himself but
his adherents.  One moment and you may
see him skilfully "knocking a gap" (*i.e.*,
unbuilding a wall) or opening a gate, as the
case may be, while the disciples wait
respectfully; the next they are lost, swallowed up
in the Fifth Dimension, or wherever it is that
Mahatmas move and have their being.  It
may be a quarter of an hour afterwards, it
may be twenty minutes; the hunt arrives,
heated, something blown, and very proud of
itself, at a road where there is a momentary
check.  There, drawn up, calm and
omniscient, is the Mahatma, with the
disciples.  He has seen the fox (who, it may
not be out of place to note, is on these
occasions always the largest dog-fox that the
country has ever produced).  He advises the
huntsman, with perfect knowledge, where to
cast his hounds, and once more betakes
himself, with his party, to the Fifth
Dimension.  During the various turns and chances
of the average hunting run in rough country,
he is met with on every road that is crossed
by the hunt.  He is a directory of the most
obscure and unsuspected gaps, an amateur of
padlocks, a Samson who can lift from their
hinges the gates of Gaza, or any other gates
that may intervene.  He is present at all
disasters, and acts as a sort of convalescent
home for their victims, and as a rallying-place
for those who have been thrown out.

As I muse over his gifts, and the benevolence
with which they are exercised, my heart
warms to him and his compeers.  Had I my
way no hunt establishment should be without
its own accredited Mahatma.  He should be
entitled to the letters M.F.H. as unquestioningly
as the Master.  I would blazon them on
his broad back (the Mahatma's figure is wont
to be a fine one), plain for all men to see,
and brand them on his ample sandwich-case.
"Mahatma to the Meaths!"  Any
man might be pleased to have some such an
inscription on his tombstone.  "Mahatma to
the Blazers" might hold some hint of
incongruity; yet, however blazing one may be,
there are moments——

It has happened to me, in a remote part of
the County Waterford, to have lost the
hounds, and at the same moment to find
myself confronted by a frowning bank,
hollow-faced, afforested with furze, wholly,
as it seemed to me, impassable.  While I
surveyed it in dejection the cry of the
hounds was borne to me on the wind; the
music had a dying fall, they were running
hard, and away from me.  It was then that
the voice of the local Mahatma fell like a
falling star from the hillside above me.

"Go on a small piece to the right and ye'll
get a passage."

I obeyed, and saw that hoof marks of
cattle led to a cleft in the bank, so masked
with furze bushes as to be invisible.  I
squeezed through it, and found the valley
smiling before me, and the hounds still
within reach.  But the Mahatma had gone.

I met him at the next check, cool and
unruffled, silent as to the miraculous nature
of his transit.

"Ye're barefooted," he said briefly.

.. _`"*A VOICE FELL LIKE A FALLING STAR*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-088.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "A VOICE FELL LIKE A FALLING STAR"

   "A VOICE FELL LIKE A FALLING STAR"

I found that I had indeed lost a foreshoe.

Strange that such faculties as his should
command so little general admiration!  Upon
his final manifestation, which occurred after
the fox had gone to ground, I heard the
Master say brutally:

"How the devil did you get here?"

The Master had given his horse two bad cuts.

The Mahatma maintained a Druid silence;
it was not for him to comment on the eternal
supremacy of Mind over Matter.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A PATRICK'S DAY HUNT`:

.. class:: center large bold

   A PATRICK'S DAY HUNT

.. vspace:: 2

I wash meself every Sathurday morning,
whether I want it or no and 'twas washing
my face I was when William Sheehan came
in the door, and it no more than ten o'clock
in the morning.

.. _`"*I WASH MESELF EVERY SATHURDAY MORNING*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-094.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "I WASH MESELF EVERY SATHURDAY MORNING"

   "I WASH MESELF EVERY SATHURDAY MORNING"

That's the way I remember 'twas a
Sathurday, and Pathrick's Day was Monday.

"God bless the work!" says he.

"You too," says I.

"Would ye lend me the loan of a harness,"
says he, "to drive Anne Roche"—(that's
his wife)—"to town on Pathrick's Day?"

The dear knows, says I to meself, if I
walked two mile asking a harness it isn't to
drive that one I'd ask it!

"I will to be sure," says I, "and welcome,
but is it to town you're going on Pathrick's Day
in place of going to Kyleranny?  Sure you
know yourself there's the fun of Cork in
Kyleranny when the Hunt's in it on a Holy-day!"

"I believe so indeed," says he.

"Faith you do believe it," says I.  "D'ye
remember one time," I says, "when the
Hunt was in it, Stephen's Day it was, you
comin down Knockranny Hill hoppin' a
quarther of a mile on your one leg, and the
other foot fasht in the stirrup, and the owld
mare you had that time throttin' on always.
The Smith said it was the pleasantest thing
ever he seen!"

"God be with the owld days!" says
William, "that was long ago times, before I
was married," says he.

"Thrue for you!" says I.

"Will ye lend me the harness?" says he
to me again.

"Come here now William," says I, "you
an' me is friends this many a year.  There
isn't one in the counthry I have as much
wish for as yourself.  The Divil sweep ye!"
says I.  "Sure it's follying the Hunt you
should be, in place of goin' drivin' a side-car
to town like a servant boy!" says I, "and
you that was careing a puppy all the winter
for the Hunt, the same as meself!"

"Ah, that was the grand pup!" says he.
"'Twas a pity he died, and God knows,"
says he, "I dunno in the world what killed
him, if it wasn't a bottle of varnish he dhrank
one morning."

Faith, says I to meself, it's aisy known
what killed the poor pup.  It isn't long
ourselves'd live if we didn't get our victuals!

I drew out then, and I gave William a
puck in the chest.

"I'm tellin' you now," says I.  "Dang
the harness ye'll get from me on Pathrick's
Day!  No!  But you'll throw the saddle
on the pony a' Monday morning and you'll
come out to the Hunt to jolly yourself!"

"Sure the pony has the colour o' lameness
on him since I had him at Cappagh Fair last
Tuesday, under pigs," says he.  "That was
thirty mile on him."

"Arrah! what signifies that?" says I, "that
little horse is as tough as an eel!"

"And he have a sore place on his shesht,
about as big as a thimble," says he.

"And is it on his shesht you'd go put the
saddle?" says I.

"Well, it is not," says he.

"And as to go putting a collar and harness
on a crayture that has the skin sthripped,"
says I, "if it was an ass itself the polis'd be
afther ye for it."

"Indeed I'm told so," says he.

"Musha, Divil's cure to ye!" says I,
"isn't it what ye can be tellin' your wife?"
says I.  "How simple ye are!" says I.

Not another word he spoke but to walk
away out o' the house.

"Ye have the man annoyed with your
thricks, Conny," says me wife, "why wouldn't
ye give him what he was axing and not to
be blackguarding that way?  Maybe yerself
wouldn't be so ready to go borrowing a
harness for your wife?" says she.

"Maybe if I was married to Anne Roche
it isn't me razor she'd take to go cuttin' spuds
for seed?" says I.

"Arrah, sit down to your breakfast,
Conny," says she, "and have done with your chat!"

"I'm tellin' you," says I, "if Anne Roche
goes to town on Pathrick's Day, it's her own
two legs'll carry her!"

"Glory be to God!" says me wife, "she'll
be mad altogether!  She'll tear iron!" says she.

"Divil mend her!" says I.

Now as for the foxy mare I had that time,
I declare to ye if ye had her within in the
stable, and to be keeping oats to her for two
days, she'd have as much thricks and *tashpy*
in her, and she'd be as anxious for the road
as a lad that'd be goin' to a fair.

If she was to be kept within always and
getting what she'd ax of hay and oats, it's all
would be about it she'd break the sidecar! (and
faith, she was nigh handy to doin' that
same one time!)  But what can a crayture
do that's working always, and getting black
potatoes for her diet?

I went to her St. Pathrick's morning early,
and the full up of a tin basin of oats in my
hand.  The very minute I opened the door:

"Ah—hem!" says she to me, this way.

"The Divil go from you!" says I, "wasn't
the year long enough for you to get a cough,
and not to be sick on Pathrick's Day?  And
if ye were coughing the full o' the house ye'll
not stop within to-day!" says I, "ye can
have your choice thing of coughing
to-morrow!" says I.

And b'lieve me, 'tis she that had that same.

I rode her out quite and aisy, it's no more
than five mile to Kyleranny, and the two
lads of sons I have was legging it out before me.

"What have ye in the bottles?" says I to
the eldest little fella when I passed them out.

"Milk, Sir!" says he.

"And what have ye in the bag?" says I
to the other lad.

"Me boots, Sir," says he.

I knew well that was a lie for them, but I
said nayther here nor there to them.

.. _`"*IT'S ALL WOULD BE ABOUT IT, SHE'D BREAK THE SIDE CAR!*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-099b.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "IT'S ALL WOULD BE ABOUT IT SHE'D BREAK THE SIDE CAR!"

   "IT'S ALL WOULD BE ABOUT IT SHE'D BREAK THE SIDE CAR!"

When I was passing Macarthy's, coming
into Kyleranny, what was in it but William
Sheehan's yella horse—"Shan Bui" is the
name we has in this counthry for them yella
horses with the black sthripe on their
back—and he outside the door, and a bag on his
nose.

Musha, more power to ye William! says I
to meself, ye stole away clever!  But indeed
it's aisy known that Herself had the kay of
the bin!

Himself came out then; he was afther
drinkin' a couple or three glasses o' portlier
to hearten himself, the poor fella, and he was
'long with me from that out from first to last,
but not a word good nor bad he spoke of the wife.

.. _`"*THE LIKE O' THE CROWD THAT WAS IN KYLERANNY*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-099a.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "THE LIKE O' THE CROWD THAT WAS IN KYLERANNY"

   "THE LIKE O' THE CROWD THAT WAS IN KYLERANNY"

The like o' the crowd of people that was
in Kyleranny that day never you seen—side-cars,
and carts, and phaytons, and all
sorts, let alone them that was goin' huntin'.
Ye wouldn't hardly know there was hounds
in it at all with the dint of the people that'd
be around them, and it'd be as good for you
to thry to get into Heaven as to get past
the cross roads.  Ye'd lose your life cursin'
before the owld women'd stand out from under
your feet.  Ye'd have to be going around
them this way, the same as a person that'd be
winding a watch.

"Is it sick the Major is, that he's not in
it?" says I to Tim Hurley the Whip (that's
the son of an Aunt of mine by the mother),
when I got to come at him, "and Johnny Daly
riding Monaloo?"

"He has the 'fluenzy," says Tim.

"Is it bad with him?" says I.

"He's bad enough to-day," says he, "but
yesterday he was clear dead altogether."

"It's a pity anything would ail him," says I.

The Major was a fine man, always, and
his family was a fine family.  Sure me father
used to say that in owld times if ye went
to the Big House ye'd get the smell o' roast
beef when ye'd be no more than half way
up the avenue, and there'd be dhrinkin' all
day and knockin' all night, and if ye axed
the change of a half-crown, it wasn't in it.

Faith, I said to John Daly, there wouldn't
be any fun, nor no cursin' nor nothing, when
the Major wouldn't be in it.

"Maybe I might please ye yet before the
day's out," says he, lookin' at me ugly enough.
"Time's up!" says he then, and with that he
comminced to bugle, and away with himself
and Tim and the dogs, out north for
Dempsey's Gorse.

Well, you'd have to pity William Sheehan
if ye seen him that time follyin' the hounds
out the road from Kyleranny to Dempsey's
Gorse.  As soon as me bowld Shan Bui felt
the horses throttin, and batthering, and
belting the road afther him, he made all sorts
of shapes and forms of himself, and as for
William, if it wasn't for the almighty howlt
he cot of the crupper of the owld saddle, he
was a dead man.

"Blasht your sowl, William!" says owld
Dan Donovan to him, "if you would save
your bones," says he, "you will lead him out
now for a mile till you're coming up to
Dempsey's, and when ye have the hill agin
him then's the time ye'll get satisfaction!"

Well, William had great courage the same
day.  He held his howlt on the little horse
out to Dempsey's, and when we come to the
gap into the southern field, below the house,
Johnny Daly went away in up through the
land.  Well, at the third field west of where
Dempsey had the turnips two years ago,
there was about three foot of a stone wall
before us.  The yella pony jumped it very
crabbed, but the minute he landed, and he
havin' the fall o' the ground before him, he
made a ball of himself, and he bet a lash on
Dan Donovan's owld white mare that wasn't
sayin' a word, only goin' from step to step
over the wall, like a Christian, and with that
he legged it away down the hill!

B'lieve me, William was promising God
that time that if he come safe out of it he'd
howld to the side-car and not ax to go
huntin' agin!  But indeed poor William had
great courage all through, only for the wife.

"Whatever way it is," says I to Dan
Donovan, and we wheeling round the brink
o' the hill, "every horse that's in it will have
his 'nough of grass ate before the dogs'll
have them furze bushes rattled out, and,
I'm tellin'ye, that'll quieten them."

"The divil a fox is there in it at all," says Dan.

"Well, now," says William, "there's a
woman of the Sullivans' that has a little
house beyond, is afther tellin' me a while ago
himself and his pups has a nest in it some
place.  Last week she seen them walkin' in
and out of it, like young pigs."

"Maybe she didn't tell ye what way her
sons has them pairsecuted with greyhounds
and bulldogs and all sorts!" says Dan.

Well, divil such screechin' ever ye heard
as what the dogs comminced then down in
the furze.

"That's Fiddler!" says Dan, "that's a
great hound!  Maybe it's a cat he have
nooked in it!"

"Faith, well is he called Fiddler!" says I,
"he roars most furious."

"Look over!  Look over at Johnny
Daly!" says William, "what bugling he
have now!  If it's a cat itself, what harm
would it do them to ate her!  It's little
ateing there is in the like of her; them poor
craytures of dogs does be starved with the
hunger; and that's what has them yowling
this way."

"Look at Johnny skelpin' round the bog!"
says I, "mind ye, he's souple yet, and he as
gross as a bullock, and a back on him as long
as a double-ditch!"

"Whisht!" says Dan, "that's the Whip
man screechin' to the dogs!  They have a
fox surely!"

"Ye lie!" says William, "that's Jeremi'h
Drishcoll's screech, I seen him within in the
furze.  Hi cock!  Jeremi'h!  Bate him out of
it boy!"

"Ah, that's a fine sober fox," says owld
Dan, "he'll not lave his den for them.  It's
a pity now," says he, "that the Major
wouldn't have a fox keeping in a stable,
and on a holiday, or the like o' that, to put a
halter on him and lead him out before the
hounds.  Begob, he'd give them a nice chase!"

With that all the lads on the hills around
let a roar out o' them.

"Hulla!  Hulla!  Hulla!" says they.  "Look
at the cat!  Look at he!  Look at he!  Down
him!  Land him!"

Every dog that was in it legged it to the roar.

Well, if ye seen Johnny Daly comin' down
the hill that time ye'd think the fairies was
afther him.  He'd jump the house, he was
that mad!

"Plase God he'll not come our way!" says I.

I declare to ye now, if you seen Jeremi'h
Driscoll leppin' the furze bushes, and Johnny
Daly afther him with the whip, ye'd as soon
be lookin' at it as ateing your dinner.  And
as for Tim Hurley, you'd have to pity him,
sthrivin' to go around every hound that was
in it.

"The dogs have her ate!  More power!
They have the owld cat ate!" says Smartheen,
that was sitting up on the wall behind us.
"She was dam cute!  I thought she'd besht
them!  The shkamer!"

'Twasn't long afther that till Tim Hurley
had all the dogs gothered and counted, and
'tis he that got his own trouble with them!
Them poor fellas of Whips catches great
hardship.  Johnny Daly faced away up the
hill agin them, and the whole o' thim afther
him.

"It's for Bludth he's making," says I, "and
if that's to be the way, it's there ye'll see
leppin!" says I.  "Tighten yerself now
Dan!" says I, "thim banks above in Bludth
does be made up very crabby, and as for
walls, it's not stones at all they has in them,
but bog mould and slates!"

Well, for all, poor William Sheehan had
great courage that day.

"Your sowl to the divil, Smartheen!"
says he.  "Knock a few o' thim stones, boy!"

With that he gives the yella pony a
salamandher of a belt, and he coorsed him
about three turns around the field the way
he'd knock the wind out o' him, in regard of
he being out on grass always, and when he
thought he felt him jaded it's then he faced
him in at the wall.  But in spite of all he
jumped it very sevare and very ugly.  Them
Shan Buies is very piggish that way.

Meself, I don't like them flippant leppers;
I'd like a horse that will put his two forefeet
into the butt o' the wall, and give ye time to
say two Aves and a Father before he leps out.

"As for my mare," says I to Dan, the
same time, "she boxed her knee a fortnight
ago, and it's big with her yet, and faith she's
avouring it always.  And indeed that's a
cross place in any case," says I.  "God
bless ye, Smartheen," says I, "throw down a
couple more o' them stones!"

I'm tellin' ye Smartheen was a decent
civil boy always.

We follied on the bohireens afther that,
ye'd think 'twas a wedding with all that was
in it!  Throttin' and steppin' their horses,
and the hounds and the ladies and gentlemen
and all out before us.

"Faith," says I, "they'd get as nice a
shweat this way as what they'd get in any
quadhreel whatever in Dublin Castle," says
I, "and as for jogglin' and jowltin'," says I,
"any one'd be the better o' this in his health
while he'll live," says I.

Indeed, all that was in it was teeming
down with the heat before we were up into
Bludth at all.

Comin' up out o' the bohireen there was a
stick left across in the end of it, keepin'
in calves; a middlin' heavy pole, and the
two ends fasht.  If it was in the Cork Park
races ye wouldn't see as much fun as
what we knocked out of it with young Tom
Dennehy!  Sure he was ridin' the Docthor's
grey mare, an' he dhressed out, and grand
yalla gaiters on him, and he in dhread of his
life!

"Dennehy took great use out o' the
bohireens all through!" says one of the lads
"'tis time for him to throw a lep for us now!"

It's well the Docthor wasn't looking at
them that time, and they weltin' the mare
with switches and stones, and Dennehy
howlding her back from the lep when she'd
be gethered for it.—Begob! he fell heavy
when the crayture jumped in the spite of him!
And there's where the fun was!

Ye wouldn't blame him to be afraid if it
wasn't for the dirty little boasting he has
always.  But indeed 'twould stun any one to
hear the talk of the Dennehys.

"Mind yourself now, William," says Dan,
afther the three of us had a place made out
above on the hill for ourselves to stand aisy.
"The hill tops is lakes afther the rain," says
he, "though be Jingo!" says he, "that little
horse went over the hill very knacky!"

"Look at Smartheen comin' down the
bohireen over!" says I, "what have he in
the bag?  Ye'd say it was a side o' bacon
with all the dogs that's snortin' afther it."

"Be dom!" says William, "but it's a fox!
Look at Johnny Daly that has all his own
dogs dhrove in under the wall.  B'lieve me,
them two has it settled out!  We'll see sport
now," says he, "afther Smartheen'll throw
down the owld bag and give the fox a couple
of kicks for to rise his heart for him!"

Well, what it was vexed Johnny Daly I
dunno, but he was mad altogether!  He
lepped out the wall before him, and he as
wicked with the passion as that he didn't
roar, nor say a word, till he had Smartheen
cot by the coat and the whip ruz to him to
sthrike him!  Ye wouldn't know what was
the two o' thim sayin', but Smartheen thought
to run, and 'twas then Johnny cot the bag
secondly to take it from him.  Every lad
that was in it comminced to cheer and to
bawl when they seen the two o' thim in
howlts.  I believe meself let a few screeches,
but as for William, if it was his father that he
seen took by the polis, an' he dhrunk, he
wouldn't have more nature for him than what
he showed to that boy.

"*Hon-a-maun-dhiaoul*!  He'll have him
dhragged off the horse!" says Dan.

"He will!  He will!" says I, "he's dam stubborn!"

Maybe if it wasn't for the way Johnny
crooked the owld horse with the spur,
sthrivin' to squeeze the leg around him, he'd
have held his howlt, but a Turk couldn't
stand it with the hoist that owld Monaloo let
out of him.

"He's down!" says Dan.  "He's dead!
'Tis on his head he's fallen!"

"Ye're a liar!" says William, "it's on the
fox he fell!  The big mastheen of a tyrant!"

'Twasn't long then till the whole of us was
gathered lookin' at Johnny, and he ravin' like
a cat in the measles, and every bit that was
on him desthroyed with the gutther, and
says he to Smartheen, givin' a bitter big curse:

"It's all I wish," says he, "that ye were a
football before me!  Ye wouldn't last me
three kicks!" says he.

'Twould dhrive a chill through your
stomach to be leshnin' to the talk he had.
And sure the fox was as flat as the palm o'
yer hand within in the bag!

"Oh, fie, fie!" says Dan, "our fox is gone from us!"

Indeed, ye wouldn't like to be lookin' at
the crayture.  Johnny Daly's a very weighty
man, and sure it's the last sthraw, as
they say, put the hump on the camel.  But
in any case Smartheen battled it out well,
and all that was in it was givin' him applauses.

Yerself knows Bludth, that there's as many
hooks and pooks in it as that a person'd be
moidthered before he'd have them gone
around, let alone dogs, and horses.

"B'lieve me," says Dan, "'tis as good for
them to give over; sure we're sick and tired
waitin' on them.  The fox that keeps this
hill has a sthrong dungeon, and sorra fear of
him to lave it for to be sporting for them.
What a fool he is!"

"Yerrah shut yer mouth, Dan!" says I,
"thim lads on the paikeen south is screechin'
like as if they seen somethin'!  What have
ye over there?" says I, lettin' a roar.

"Yerrah, what are they sayin' at all?"
says William, "it's like pigs talkin'!  Sure I
can't understand them no more than if I was
a fool!"

With that the dogs comminced to gallop,
and away with the whole of us.  Well,
William had great courage always.

"'Tis down the gully we should go, and
we'll be before them whatever side they'll
turn," says he.

"Musha, the divil go from ye!" says I,
"maybe it's down the chimbly ye'd have us
go!  Sure a man itself couldn't stand in it,
it's that steep!"

"No, nor ten men couldn't!" says Dan.

"If it was the ugliest place in life, ye'll be
hard set to find a betther," says William.

Well, afther all, we went down in it, as
well as another, and you may say there was
scroogin' and scramblin', and thim that was
afther us was bet down on us like a load o'
hay, and thim that was before us cursin' black
and blue for the way ourselves was squeezin'
them.

"Faith!  We're as throng as three in a
bed!" says Dan, "the dogs could run away
in their choice place and divil a one of us
would know what side they went!"

"He's gone north agin!" says a lad above
on the hill, and every one that was in it
turned about in the gully and up with them
up it agin.

.. _`"*HE'S GONE NORTH AGIN!*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-112.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "HE'S GONE NORTH AGIN!"

   "HE'S GONE NORTH AGIN!"

"Maybe if it was himself was down in it
he wouldn't have so much chat about goin'
north!" says I, "and we twistin' in it like
ye'd be dancin' a reel."

But as for William's little horse, if it was
the roof of the chapel he was on he'd run
in it like a bird, rocks or slates or any
other thing, he wouldn't give a dang for them.

The sight'd lave your eyes if ye were
lookin' at us afther that, comin' down out of
Bludth, with slidin' and slippin', and buck
leps and all sorts, and the dogs yowlin' away
through the counthry from us.  Great banks
there was below in the fields.  Every one o'
them that we come into my mare would crouch
like a hen before it, and she'd let a screech, and
over with her, and wouldn't lave an iron on
it.  That was her routheen always, only
when she soured by the dint of the Shan
Bui, that was baulking with William out
before her.  When I'd have to dhrive her
over before me she'd be waitin' on me the far
side of the fence, ateing grass, till I'd come
afther her.  She is a grand mare indeed, and
high ginthry does be jumpin' mad to buy her foals.

'Twasn't long till we come up to the dogs,
where they were searchin' and snuffin' round
the four corners of the field, and divil a smell
could they get.  We seen a lad then standing
up on a rock, waving.

"He's gone wesht up the road!" says he.

"Did ye see him?" says Johnny Daly.

"Faith I did so!" says me lad, "and he
was the most courageous thief of a fox ever
ye seen!"

I went up to the lad.

"Where did ye get the two coats, ye're
afther throwing behind the wall?" says I.

"'Tis aiqual to you where I got them,"
says me lad, "ax no questions and ye'll be
told no lies!"

"Faith, there's no occasion," says I, "sure
it's you is good-natured to be carryin' the
two coats that was on my two sons this
morning," says I, "and you bloated with
running," says I.

Divil a word he said, but away with him.

"Thim two young lads o' mine will
be apt to get a bating before night!"
says I to meself, "and they're in the
want of it!"

"Forrad!  Forrad!" says Johnny to the
dogs, that was whining most peevish round
and about, and you'd think if he never had a
nose on him he'd get the smell o' the paraffin
oil, it was that parsevarin'.

Two mile we legged it then, and the
biggest walls in the counthry was in it, and
God help them that had to be building
them afther us!  Comin' up Milleenavillen,
William and a few more of us turned about
round the butt o' the hill, for fear we'd be
bet out entirely, and it wasn't long till we
met with a great mountaineer of a big bank
down in the widow Brinckley's land.  Meself
dhrew out back a couple o' fields, and
knocked a few sticks that was in a gap, but
me brave William didn't do but to let a roar
to the Shan Bui, and to land him two clouts
in the jaw comin' into the bank.  The Shan
Bui lepped up on to it, as loose as a hare,
with the fright, but what'd be before him
only posts that the widow Brinckley had
dhrove in the far side o' the bank, and ropes
on them, and clothes hangin' out on them.
He put a hump on himself like a ferret when
he seen them, but if all the polis in Ireland
was below mindin' the clothes, he'd have to
change his feet and lep out on to them, with
the gallop he had on him, and he cot the two
hind legs in the ropes, and himself and
William and the clothes was threwn down in
the field.

"He's dead!" says I.  "'Twould kill him
if he was a bull!"

"'Twould, or if he was an ass," says
young Tom Dennehy, that was on the
eastern side o' the fence.

Well afther all, not a bit in the world was
on him, only a tooth he had was stirrin'
always in his head afther it.  But I'm tellin'
ye, the widow Brinckley faced him the same
as Jeffrey faced his cat, as they say, in regard
of some sort of a petticoat the Shan Bui had
dhraggin' afther him.

.. _`"*THE WIDOW BRINCKLEY FACED HIM THE SAME AS JEFFREY FACED HIS CAT*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-117.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "THE WIDOW BRINCKLEY FACED HIM THE SAME AS JEFFREY FACED HIS CAT"

   "THE WIDOW BRINCKLEY FACED HIM THE SAME AS JEFFREY FACED HIS CAT"

Out with the whole of us then from her
into the road and left her afther us, and she
dhrawing down saints and divils and the
price o' the petticoat on us.

"It couldn't be," says I, "that it's into
William's land the dogs is facin' now!  Look
at the line they're going beyond over the hill!"

"Begob, it is!" says Dan.

"If that be so it'd be betther for William
to go under the sod!" says I.

Faith, I believe the divil was always
busy with the Shan Bui!  The very minute
he got the smell o' the road under his feet, he
comminced firin' and lashin', and when he
had William loosened, it's then he legged it.

"He's diddled now entirely!" says I,
"that horse won't stand or stay till he lands
him within his own yard.  The Lord look
down in pity on William this day!  Herself'll
ate the face off him!"

Begob, the Shan Bui kept the one gallop
always, the same as a thrain, and we battherin'
the road afther him, and the dogs and all
screechin' down the hill before us.  Your
heart'd rise if ye were listenin' to them!

"He'll run to the say with him!" says
Dan, "the two o' them'll be cliffted!"

"Sorra fear of him!" says I, "what a fool
he is!  Look at him now, tightening himself
comin' down to the gate!"

Begannies!  The villyan wheeled into the
yard as nate as a bicycle, and every hound in
the pack was in it before him!

.. _`"*THE VILLYAN WHEELED INTO THE YARD AS NATE AS A BICYCLE*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-118.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "THE VILLYAN WHEELED INTO THE YARD AS NATE AS A BICYCLE"

   "THE VILLYAN WHEELED INTO THE YARD AS NATE AS A BICYCLE"

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1



Twas the week afther, and I goin' to owld
Dick Courtney's funeral (the Lord have
mercy on him) and who would I meet only
Anne Roche!

Well now I declare to ye, divil such an
ateing ever I got from any woman!  The
dogs wouldn't pick me bones afther her!
Sure she pitched all that was within and
without to the Seventeen Divils.

And sure there was no blame on me at all,
only she seen them two young whipsthers o'
mine when they thrown the owld bag they
had with the ferret's bed back into her
hen-house, and they near dead with thralling it
out through the counthry.

A half a gallon of paraffin they had soaked
in it.  If it was herself and not meself had
one and eightpence lost by it she might be
talkin'.

I'm told she gave William the Seven
Shows of Cork on the head of it, but indeed
poor William had great courage the same day.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`ALSATIA`:

.. class:: center large bold

   ALSATIA

.. vspace:: 2

No doubt the fact that it was forbidden, or
mainly forbidden, lent it a considerable charm.
The prohibitory edict was a semi-obsolete
Statute of—say—the reign of Edward VI.
Authorities, when driven to their last trench,
fell back on it, declaring that no respectable
children were allowed in stable-yards, or
ever had been.  We never argued the point.
At an early age we had learned the folly of
hardening fluid prohibition into adamant by
argument; but we did not cease from visiting
the yard.

As I look back I see a procession advancing
from the dimmest and most ancient places
of memory, a procession as varied as that
which in Maclise's picture slowly winds away
from the Ark.  Heading it are two figures
who, in their prime, ranked equally as the
over-lords of the stable-yard, Old Michael,
and the copper-coloured turkey cock.  When
one has attained an altitude of some considerable
number of inches over five feet, it is
hard to estimate the terror that a robust
turkey cock can inspire in a person, however
charged with valiant intention, of little more
than forty-eight inches over all.  The
copper-coloured turkey cock was subtle as he
was vicious; he appreciated as well as any
Boer General the moral effect of a surprise.
To face him, to go forth with intent to battle,
was possible, even enjoyable, but at this
moment I can feel the panic, blinding and
disintegrating, of being taken in the rear; I
remember the sound of the striding claws
on the gravel behind me, the rustle of the
stiff wings; were I but four feet high, and
still wore short socks, I am convinced that I
would run as hard if similarly attacked.

Coincident with the time that the turkey
cock held sway, one of us had somehow
acquired a dog, a meek, female creature,
always engaged either prospectively or
retrospectively in family affairs, and loaded
with a spirit broken by long beatings from
the back-door.  She was white, with very
sore eyes and a long tail; one of her relatives
professed to be a bull-terrier, a fact much
dwelt on by her proprietor; but beyond the
soreness of her eyes there was but little to
substantiate it.

"Those village dogs had better look out,"
said the proprietor.  "May-fly'll most likely
kill them if she meets them."

She had come to us in May, and the name
held for us the glamour of a hundred springs.
Among the village dogs was one, contemptible
beyond its fellows, known to us as Boiled
Rice (a food specially abhorred by us, which
her coat and complexion were supposed to
resemble).  Boiled Rice was generally on hand
at or about the lodge gates, and one day
Mayfly was formally led forth to slaughter her.
Boiled Rice was a small and disgusting
creature, very old, and nearly toothless, and
without reputation as a fighter.  None the less,
when located by our scouts she did not refuse
battle.  On the contrary, she bustled up to
May-fly, and, rising upon the shortest pair
of hind legs ever put under any four-legged
creature save a lizard, laid her paws upon
her shoulders and yapped harshly in her face.
Then, if ever, the blood of the bull terrier
relation should have come into action; for
some unfortunate reason that was the precise
moment at which it ebbed.  Our champion
gave a squeak of resentful alarm, and,
disengaging herself from the enemy, fled
unpretentiously, unhesitatingly, without a hint of
reprisal.  For our parts we stoned and
hunted Boiled Rice more mercilessly than
ever after this overthrow.  An unexpected
aspect in the character of May-fly was that
she, who fled from every living thing,
remained unmoved by the ferocities of the
copper turkey cock.  At a word from
us, and it was a word often spoken, she
would take him by his scarlet and bulbous
beard and gallop him off into remote places,
from whence, long afterwards, he might be
seen gloomily returning, a discredited and
bedraggled despot.  It was her sole
achievement, and one greatly valued by us, but,
unfortunately, it found no favour with the
authorities, and one night she and the then
puppy—she always had a puppy or so in her
lair behind the potato house—were swept.

.. _`"*SENDING HIS WILD VOICE ABROAD*"`:

.. _`*OLD MICHAEL*`:

.. figure:: images/img-126.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "SENDING HIS WILD VOICE ABROAD" "OLD MICHAEL"

   "SENDING HIS WILD VOICE ABROAD"
   "OLD MICHAEL"

Neck and neck with the copper turkey
cock came Old Michael, equal in malignity,
but less active.  He was nominally a stable
helper, and was also a self-constituted spy in
the service of the government—or rather of
the governess—and a more implacable
tale-bearer never truckled to authorities.

"The two o' them is round back o' the
cow-house, Miss.  It's now this minute I
seen them climbing out over the garden gate!"

Thus we, prone on the slant of the
cow-house roof, under the drooping laurel
branches, with our pockets crammed with
green, young apples, have listened, panting,
to our betrayal.  Any other man on the
place would have lied in our cause with
chapter and verse.

There was a tradition about Old Michael
that he had once been bitten by a mad dog,
and had thereupon, as a recognised antidote,
killed the dog and eaten its liver.  There
was something luridly attractive about the
transaction, and we often discussed the
possibility as to whether the liver had thoroughly
played its part, and whether it might not
be that he suffered from slight chronic
hydrophobia, and that, at any moment, he might
turn snarling and foaming upon us.  His
ordinary manner lent itself to the fancy, his
rages were so explosive, his yells at the
horses under his charge so ungoverned, so
screeching.  One of these was a white pony
that might have walked straight out of a fairy
tale, in which he would have been exclusively
employed as palfrey to the principal Princess.
He had been bought through, or from, we
never quite knew which, an old farmer, one
Jer Sullivan, who lived at the head of a long
and lonely Atlantic cove, and was as much
fisherman as farmer, and more beggar than
either.  His main source of income was a
petition in which was feelingly narrated the
manner of death that befell his only horse.

"She was clifted one night by dogs
hunting her, and drowned in the tide, and I
have no one now to trust to, only the Lord."

Thus sorrowed the petition, Christmas by
Christmas, getting a little browner as time
went by, but no less insatiable.  One windy
Christmas Eve Jer Sullivan and the petition
had appeared as usual, together with the horde
of old women who, by long-established
custom, received a dole on that day.

.. _`"*ANCIENT WIDOWHOOD AND SPINSTERDOM*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-129.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "ANCIENT WIDOWHOOD AND SPINSTERDOM"

   "ANCIENT WIDOWHOOD AND SPINSTERDOM"

In the twilight of the December morning
they came by twos and threes, fluttering up
the avenue, looking, with their long dark
cloaks and thin red legs and feet, like the
choughs that used to breed in the neighbouring
cliffs.  Upon the wet grass on the way
round to the stable yard they squatted in a
gabbling row, waiting for the coming forth
of the master, and chaffing Jer Sullivan for
having joined the ranks of ancient widowhood
and spinsterdom, with the unquenchable
spirit that lurks in the oldest and most forlorn
Irish peasant woman.  On this occasion, Jer,
having exhausted his stock of repartee,
planted himself on the hall-door steps.

"Is the granddada comin'?" he called
through the window to us, assembled in
the hall.  His face, wrinkled and grizzly,
was pressed against the glass, his filmy eye
was full of unutterable things.

"I have a present for ye!" he said, as
soon as we had opened the door.

To expect a begging petition, and instead
of it to be threatened with a gift, is something
disconcerting, but we were young, too young
to know the mental and financial wear and
tear involved by a present from such as Mr. Sullivan.

"What would you be sayin' to a nate little
pony?" went on Jer, with a beguiling smile
that was staked out by four huge yellow
teeth.  "Sure a friend o' mine has him below
at the gate.  Wait awhile now——"

He paused, with an artist's knowledge of
effect, and strayed away down the avenue in
the indefinite manner of beggar men.

The ceremonial of the gifts pursued its
usual course.  The Master moved down the
row, a silence of expectation before him, a
cackle of blessings behind him; as each
received her dole she gathered her ragged
plumage about her and flitted away, blessings
still flowing from her as the steam-clouds trail
out behind a train.

To us again, after breakfast, returned Jer
Sullivan, and, incredible sight, he was leading
a small pony.  It was about thirteen hands
high; in colour, dirty white, with a very wild
eye, a figure like a toast rack, and a long tail.

"Sure your Honour knows the breed of
him well.  His dam was by the Kerry
Diamond, the same as your Honour's coach-horses,
the grandest horses in the globe of
Ireland!"

Jer took a pull, and the Master eyed the
pony in deep silence; the pony eyed us and
snorted apprehensively.

"Sure the granddam of that one," resumed
Jer, "was no loftier size than himself, an' she
took a load out o' Banthry, an' a woman, an'
three bonnives, an' two bundles o' spades,
an' seven hours was all she took comin' to
Tragumena Strand."

"What do you want for him?" said the
Master.  To say that our hearts leaped in us
at this approach to business, is to put the
thing very mildly.  They rolled and rioted
like porpoises in a summer sea, what time
the Master, and Jer, and Jimmy Hosford, the
coachman, who had joined the action
irrepressibly, moved round and round in the
slow orbits of the deal.  The fiction that the
pony was a present had been abandoned,
the thing had narrowed to a duel between
Jer Sullivan and Jimmy Hosford.  The
Master had made his offer—£5, I believe—and
had strolled away.

"There isn't as much condition on him as'd
bait a hook," said Jimmy Hosford.

"Oh, Jimmy!" we screamed as one man,
"he's a lovely——"

"Ah, God help ye!" said Jimmy Hosford,
washing his hands of a bargain in which he
had to suffer such collaborators.

"My darlin' childhren," said Jer in a hoarse
whisper to us, "don't mind for he bein' a
small bit thin an' wake in himself; it's
what ails him"—the whisper deepened and
thickened—"he was ridden—by nights!" he
paused awfully; "wouldn't I find him in the
mornings bate out an' sweatin'; an' signs on
it, the world wouldn't make him cross
runnin' wather!"

"Who rode him?" said we, thrilling to the
implied mystery.

Jer looked right and left over his shoulders.

"Those People!" said he.

A fairy-ridden pony!  It needed but that
touch of romance.  The pony was bought.
£5 and a weakling heifer calf were the
terms finally agreed to.  The explanation
offered subsequently by Old Michael that it
was the Tragumena boys that took the pony
by nights for blagyarding, and to ride him
in the tide, was dismissed with deserved
contempt; the pony was called Fairy, and a
better never bolted in a snaffle, or kicked its
rider over its head when invited to jump a
stream.

Those who have in any measure dipped
below the surface of stable yard politics, can
hardly fail to have become aware, even in a
minor degree, of the subtle relations existing
between the house dogs and the yard cats.
That an understanding, almost amounting to
a treaty, obtains, there can be no reasonable
doubt.  That the dogs are ashamed of it
is certain; that the cats are not, is a fact
bound up in the character of cats, who are
never ashamed of anything.  But yesterday,
unsuspected and unseen, I viewed a typical
instance of the strange and chilly truce that
holds in the ashpit when the house dogs, the
yard cats, the turkey cock, and, most
implacably hated of all by all, the *pensionnaire*
hound mother and her brood, feasted horribly
and illicitly among cinders and refuse.  The
house dogs, furtively and hurriedly, with ears
laid back, and guilty pauses in mid-bone;
the hound mother grossly and jealously,
something disposed to truculence; the turkey
cock contemptibly, with sunken tail, and
wattles of faded pink, prepared to skip four
times his own length if the hound mother so
much as looked at him.

Of the whole party the hound puppies and
the cats alone showed to any advantage.
The puppies, jovially unaware of the
momentousness of each instant, sprawled and
croaked over the woolly shin bone of a lamb;
the cats were unalterably dignified, nibbling
with deliberate daintiness the remains of a
long-interred cod-fish.  A millennial peace
rested upon the scene.

It was possibly half an hour later, when
those ineffable snobs, the house dogs, basking
in the smiles of the aristocracy, had their
attention drawn to the creeping grey form
of the yard Tom, making fowling observations
in the shrubbery.  Like twin bolts from
a thunder-cloud they sped on the chase; two
highly connected white fox-terrier ladies,
shrieking shrill threats at the intruding
vermin.  No wonder the yard Tom galloped.
Yet the close observer could not but notice
that as soon as the distance from the quarry
had been reduced to some three or four feet,
it remained fixed at that.  In that nicely
maintained interval was embodied one of the
most immutable clauses of the treaty.

The treaty, however, and all connected
with it, were of the most artificial and trifling
to that child of nature, the hound mother.
She, like her many predecessors, pretended to
no higher sphere of operations than the
stable yard.

"The care of my children and the surveillance
of the ashpit," she seemed to say, "are
all I demand."

But, like her predecessors, a more
accomplished and wide ranging thief never jumped
on to a kitchen table, or smirked hypocritically
outside a hall door on the chance of
making a dash upon the dining-room.  It is
not long since that history, for the twentieth
time, repeated itself.

"The ham! the ham!" wailed from the
dining-room the voice of the mistress.
"Niobe has stolen the ham!"

The sequel was given by the laundry-woman,
herself long versed in the ways of
the stable yard, and of hound mothers.

"I was west in the field spreading the
clothes, when I seen herself sthretched above
on the hayrick.  Divil blow the stir that was
out of her!  I knew by her she was at
something!  An' afther that I dunno why she
wouldn't bursht with all the wather she
dhrank!  She has the divil's own inside!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`"IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH"`:

.. class:: center large bold

   "IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH"

.. vspace:: 2

When I first heard these words I was not
highly impressed by them, or by anything at
the moment except the redness of the
bridegroom's nose, and the surprising manner in
which one of "the young ladies'" dresses
had been coerced into fitting the bride.  The
solemnities of the service passed, in every
sense, over my head, which was then not
much higher than the table at which the
priest stood; indeed, it was only by putting
forth the fullest wriggling powers of
childhood that I was able to gloat in comfort on
the bride's blushes from a loophole between
the turf-flavoured folds of her mother's
Galway cloak and the repressive elbow of
my elder brother.  Why the ceremony
should have taken place in the vestry I
cannot say, beyond that it was a custom in
the little Roman Catholic Chapel of which I
write; just as it was in those friendly days a
custom with us to go to the marriages of the
tenants, and to take our share of the blessing
and the sprinkled holy water.

The accustomed gold, silver, and copper
were laid on the book by the bridegroom,
the portentous words were spoken, with
the melancholy Galway accent adding its
emphasis to them, and at the next interval
the priest opened the window behind him.

"Run down to Mick Leonard's for a coal,"
he said in Irish to some one outside, and
then proceeded with a most sound and
simple exordium to the newly married pair.

In a few minutes there appeared in the
open window a hand holding a live coal of turf
in a bent stick.  I can see it yet, the pale fire
in the white ash of the sod, thrust between
us and the blue sky, and the priest's hand put
out to take it, but I cannot remember now
what was its mission, whether to light a
candle or incense.

After this came a sprinkling with holy
water with something that nearly resembled
a hearth-brush.  A drop fell into my open
mouth as I stood gaping with the detestable
curiosity of my age, and its peculiar, slightly
brackish flavour is always the impression that
comes first when I recall that day.  There
was a long business of hand shakings and
huggings, and the wedding party squeezed
itself out of the narrow vestry doorway, with
hearts fully attuned to the afternoon's
entertainment.

At the gate some shaggy horses were tied
up, and having clambered on to one of these,
much as a man would climb a tree, the
bridegroom hauled his bride up behind him,
and started for home at a lumbering gallop.
Shouting and whooping, the other men got on
their horses and pursued, and the whole
clattering, bumping cavalcade passed out of
sight, leaving us transfixed in admiration of
the traditional "dragging home" of the
bride.  For me the only remaining recollections
of the day are of a surfeit in the
bedroom of the bride's mother, where in
gluttonous solitude I partook of hot
soda-bread, half a glass of luscious port, and a
boiled egg; while the less honoured guests
in the kitchen outside harangued and sang
songs, and drank the wine of the country in
its integrity.  My wedding garment was, I
recollect, a Holland "waggoner," loosely girt
by a shiny black belt with a brass serpent
buckle.  At no subsequent wedding breakfast
have I been as enjoyably dressed, and, as a
natural consequence, at none have I eaten as
much.

As my first distinct glimpse into matrimony
it stands far back and detached; after it, in the
Bayeux tapestry of childhood, horses, dogs,
and baffled governesses moved on in untiring
confusion, for periods of unmeasured time,
before the subject again presented itself.

There lives in my memory a Sunday
morning in spring, when the little beech
leaves were poised like pale green moths
among the bare branches, and the northerly
showers whipped the lambs into shelter.  The
servants had gone in a body to early mass,
leaving the preparations for breakfast in the
hands of Tom Cashen, a trusted friend and
counsellor, whose ordinary business it was to
attend to the affairs of the yard and its pigs.

There was soda-bread to be watched in the
oven, there were saucepans and kettles
resolved upon untimely boiling, there was
porridge to be stirred, and there was also
Tom Cashen's dog, a hungry, furtive thing,
capable at any moment of clearing the table
of all that was upon it.  The moment came,
as it comes to those who wait with complete
attentiveness, and Tom Cashen's dog did not
let it slip.  It was during the retributions of
justice that the bread burned in the oven, the
coffee boiled over on the range, and the
porridge adhered massively to the bottom of
the saucepan.

"I'd sooner be digging the clay from
morning till night," said Tom Cashen, after
a long and prayerful imprecation, "than to be
at this kind of work.  There isn't a man in
the world without getting married but he's
sure to die quare, and no wonder, from the
work that's within!"

Translated into our inferior English this
aphorism sets forth the opinion that a
bachelor who has to do his own household
work is bound to end his days in a lunatic
asylum.  This view of matrimony had not
before been heard by me, and it seemed to be
wholly reasonable.  For one thing, the men
in the yard were always right in our eyes,
and always full of just complaints against the
kitchen; in any case, the Work that was
Within—the arduous triflings with saucepans
and sweeping-brushes—was certainly
contemptible as compared with the realities and
the fascinations of the stable and the
hay-cart.  The point of view of Mrs. Tom Cashen
was not touched upon; I think I realised
that she was not likely to have one.

She was described at the time of her
marriage as "fine and fair and freckled, and
a great warrant to fatten turkeys," and she
walked two miles every day, with a basket on
her back, to carry Tom Cashen's dinner to
him—potatoes and boiled eggs, kept hot in a
clean towel.  Later on the dinner was carried
by two barefooted little boys; from thenceforward,
during many years, there was always
a barefooted little boy or two to carry it,
whereat the heart of Tom Cashen was glad,
and so, in a modified degree, was the heart
of Mrs. Tom Cashen, combating hourly, in a
swarming cabin, with the Work that was
Within.

Some time afterwards, when a spare son
or two had betaken themselves, weeping
direfully, to America, it fell to my lot to sit
by the fire in the Cashen household, and to
read aloud a letter from one of them, for the
enlightenment of his parents, who were not
skilled in the finer arts.  It was a most
affectionate letter, inquiring in turn for all
members of the family, and it enclosed an
order for two pounds.  It concluded as
follows:

"I think, my dear father, I will not see
you again, because you are very old and you
will soon die, but when I come home I hope
to have the pleasure of visiting your grave
and crying my stomachful over it."

On receiving these cheering assurances the
gratification of Tom Cashen was enormous;
it was more to him, he said, than the two
pounds itself, and, in his own words, he "had
to cry a handful."

There came a day when the words of the
letter recurred in their extremest force.
Within sight of the Chapel, spoken of further
back, stands a ruin, with the ground inside
and outside of it choked with graves; mound
and crooked headstone and battered slab,
with the briar wreathing them, and the
limestone rock thrusting its strong shoulder up
between.  In the last light of an October
afternoon I found myself there, in a crowd
that huddled and swayed round one intense
point of interest—a shallow grave, dug with
difficulty, where was laid in its deal coffin the
quiet body left behind by the restless spirit
of Tom Cashen, at the close of a companionship
that had always been interesting and generally happy.

The parish priest was ill, and his substitute
was late; the matter was proceeded with in
a simplicity that was quite without
self-consciousness or embarrassment.  Tom Cashen's
eldest son, grieved, as was well known, to
his gentle heart's core, had in a newspaper
earth that had been blessed (by whom I know
not), and from the newspaper it was shaken
by him upon the coffin.  Holy water was
poured into the grave from a soda-water
bottle, and the bottle itself thrown in after it;
then followed the shovelling in and stamping
down, and the tender twilight falling in
compassion on the scene.

The crowd became thin and dispersed, and
as I walked away meditating on things that
had passed and things that had endured during
an absence of many years, a woman kneeling
by a grave got heavily on to her feet and called
me by my name.  A middle-aged stranger in
a frilled cap and blue cloak, with handsome
eyes full of friendliness; that was the first
impression.  Then some wraith of old association
began to flit about the worn features, and
suddenly the bride of twenty-five years ago
was there beneath the cap frill.  Five minutes
told the story: ill-health, an everlasting pain
"out through the top of the head," sons and
daughters in profusion, and baskets of turf
carried on the back in boggy places.  "Himself"
was pointed out among the crowd.  His
nose glowed portentously above a rusty grey
beard, and beneath a hat-brim of a bibulous
tilt.  The introduction was not pressed.

The sunny Shrove Tuesday in early March
lived again as she spoke, the glare of sunshine
upon the bare country brimming with imminent
life, the scent of the furze, already
muffling its spikes in bloom, the daffodils
hanging their lamps in the shady places.
How strangely, how bleakly different was the
life history summarised in the melancholy
October evening.  Instead of the broad-backed
horse, galloping on roads that were
white in the sun and haze of the strong
March day, with the large frieze-clad waist
to meet her arms about, and the laughter and
shouting of the pursuers coming to her ear,
there would be a long and miry tramping in
the darkness, behind her spouse, with talk of
guano and geese and pigs' food, and a perfect
foreknowledge of how he would complete, at
the always convenient shebeen, the glorious
fabric of intoxication, of which the foundation
had been well and duly laid at the funeral.

The possessor of these materials for discontent
was quite unaware of any of them.  Her
husband was as good as other people's, and
seldom got drunk, except at funerals,
weddings and fairs, or on the Holy days of
the Church, and that was no more than was
natural.  Anything less would be cheerless,
even uncanny.  She introduced her daughter,
"the second eldest, and she up to twenty
years, and she having her passage paid to
America with all she earned in the lace
school."  The young lady up to twenty years had her
hair down her back, and wore a long coat
with huge buttons, and a whole Harvest
Festival in her hat, from which wisps of
emerald grass drooped over the fierce fringe
below it.  To be very young, even childish,
is the aim of her generation.  The battle has
been waged, even to weeping, by the ladies
of the Big House, with a "tweeny" of
seventeen, who, on every descent to the
populous regions of the yard and kitchen,
plucked the hairpins from her orange mane,
and allowed it to flow forth in assertion of
her infant charms.  The previous generation,
superior in this as in many other ways, grows
old as unaffectedly as animals; it is a part of
its deep and unstudied philosophy.

"I'm very old now, sure," said the matron
of twenty-five years' standing, with a comfortable
laugh, "I think I must be near forty-five years."

Had she said sixty it would not have
seemed much above the mark, and she
would have said it with equal composure.  I
looked the conventional incredulity, and
realised that it was thrown away.  She, in
return, assured me that for my part she had
often read of beauty in a book, but had
never till now really seen it, that my face
was made for the ruin of the world, and that
she'd know me out of my father's family by
the two eyes and the snout.  All was
accepted with fitting seriousness, and the
piece of news that had been held back with
difficulty during these ceremonial observances,
was at length given the rein.  Had
I not heard of how her sister's daughter,
down in Drohorna, had that morning
brought three children into the world,
daughters, unfortunately, but still a matter
reflecting much lustre on the parish, and on
that Providence that had singled it out from
the Diocese for the honour.

The conversation abruptly closed, as the
priest who was to have performed the
Funeral Office scorched up on his bicycle,
scarlet-faced, and half an hour late.  As if
the sight of him set the seal of the irrevocable
upon what had been done, the widow of Tom
Cashen broke into hoarse wailing; she was
arduously consoled and taken away, and her
husband was left behind in the solitude, he,
who hated to be alone, and was afraid to pass
the churchyard at night.

A discussion raged as to the opening of
his strong box, the men who stamped down
the earth on the grave using the action as an
emphasis to their assertions.  At length the
churchyard emptied, the evening wind was
raw, and in the gloom the white chapel on
the hill stared with its gaunt windows, impervious
to the life histories of its own making
impossible as an accessory to sentiment.

.. _`"*WHAT HAVE YE ON YER NOA-SE*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-151.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "WHAT HAVE YE ON YER NO-ASE?"

   "WHAT HAVE YE ON YER NO-ASE?"

Obvious duty has seldom gone more
suavely hand-in-hand with perfect enjoyment
than in the attendance of the parish,
practically *en masse*, at the levée held next day,
and for many succeeding days, by the
Triplets.  A grey road runs north and south
past their cabin door, level on the level face
of the bog for a shelterless half-mile, and
neither wake nor "Stations" could have
commanded a more representative gathering
than went and came upon it in those moist
autumn afternoons.  The gander who lorded
it over the nibbled strip of grass in front of
the cabin yard was worn down to amiability
by a hundred assaults on new comers and an
equal number of glorious returns to the
applause of his family; the half-bred collie,
coiled under a cart, closed his cunning eyes
to aggressions that were beyond all barking;
a five-year-old boy with tough tight curls
of amber, and an appallingly dirty face,
regarded me from the doorstep with brazen
*sang froid* as I approached, and said in a loud
and winding drawl: "What have ye on yer
no-ase?"  Praise is seldom perfected in the
mouth of the babe and suckling.  I removed
my pince-nez, and passed with difficulty into
a doorway filled with people, the blue smoke
from the interior filling up the crevices.  The
father of the Triplets, a lanky young man,
in the Sunday clothes in which he had just
returned from making his application for the
King's Bounty, was according an unchanging,
helpless grin to the shafts of felicitation that
beset him, the most barbed being screamed
in Irish by the old women, to the rapture of
the audience.

Behind this unequal strife the Triplets
held their court, in a cradle by the fire,
canopied with coarse flannel, and rocked
unceasingly, one would say maddeningly, by
a female relative with an expression of pomp
befitting the show-woman.  It suggested the
bellringer who said, "We preached a very
fine sermon to-day."  The wicker walls
rolled creakily.  The rockers were uneven, so
was the earthen floor beneath them, and each
oscillation contained three separate jerks.  In
this bewildering world, composed of sallow
blankets and an unceasing earthquake, the
three brand new souls reposed as best they
might; the show-woman's grimy hand parted
their firmament of flannel, and revealed three
minute faces of the pallor of lard, dome-like
in forehead, with tiny and precisely similar
features, wonderfully absorbed in sleep.
The infant of a day old appeals unfailingly
to the compassion, but its most impassioned
adherent must admit that it is out of drawing.
The light from the open door struck
suddenly into the cradle, as some one clove a
path through the assemblage; one of the
absorbed faces worked in vexation, elderly,
miserable vexation.  Tears, too, angry and
pitiful; the long slit of opening eyelid was
full of them, the unseeing disc of dull blue
within swam in them, the stately bald head
turned to terra-cotta.

.. _`"*SHE'S THE LIVELIEST OF THEM, GOD BLESS HER!*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-153.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "SHE'S THE LIVELIEST OF THEM, GOD BLESS HER!"

   "SHE'S THE LIVELIEST OF THEM, GOD BLESS HER!"

"She's the liveliest of them, God bless
her!" said the show-woman, in high admiration,
"but as for the little one-een next the
fire, she'll never do a day's good.  'Twasn't
hardly making day this morning when I had
a pot of water on the fire for her."

Being interpreted, this meant that the little
one-een by the fire had in the cold autumn
dawn retraced her way so far into the white
trance of the unknown that all was made
ready for washing and laying her out.  She
lay like a doll made of pale puckered wax,
her sleeping lids had a lavender tone, and
the shadows about her mouth were grey.
Next morning the cocks had crowed but once
when the pot of water simmered again over
the turf fire, and the weak and lonely combat
with death ended in defeat.

The life that she was not to share moved
on about her in leisurely squalor; the smoke
from the turf fire strayed languidly up the
sooty wall, and blundered against the broad
mouth of the chimney till the rafters were
lost in the blue and settled obscurity.  The
walls were yellow with smoke; it was easy
to imagine its flavour in the bowl of milk
that stood on the dresser, ready for the
invalid in the inner room.  Obscure corners
harboured obscure masses that might be
family raiment, or beds, or old women;
somewhere among them the jubilant cry of a hen
proclaimed the feat of laying an egg, in
muffled tones that suggested a lurking-place
under a bed.  Between the cradle and the
fire sat an old man in a prehistoric tall hat,
motionless in the stupor of his great age; at
his feet a boy wrangled with a woolly puppy
that rolled its eyes till the blue whites showed,
in a delicious glance of humour, as it tugged
at the red flannel shirt of its playmate.

"God save all here," said a voice, very
dictatorially, at the door; a black-haired old
woman shoved her way to the cradle, and
parted the blankets with a professional air.
She was a Wise Woman from the mountain,
and foreknowing the moment when she
would spit, for luck, in the faces of the
helpless trio in the cradle, I jostled my way to
the bedroom of their mother.  It had an
almost conventual calm.  Moderate as was
the light that struggled through a hermetically
sealed window of eighteen inches by
twelve, it was further baffled by an apron
pinned across the panes; the air was heavy,
reinforced only by the draughts and the
smoke that entered hand-in-hand from the kitchen.

In one of two great beds the invalid lay in
the twilight, with her hand pressed to her
head.  She was collected, well-bred, and
concerned for the welfare of the visitor, and of
all the visitor's relations, mentioned in due
order of seniority.  The glory of her position
burned in two spots of excitement on her
high cheek bones, but it could not eliminate
her good manners.  Her sister loudly recited
the facts that she was using no food, only
sups of milk and water, that as for puddings
or any little rarities, if you ran down gold in
a cup she wouldn't let it to her lips.

"There's nothing in the world wide I
could fancy," said the sick girl, feebly, "unless
it'd be the lick of a fish's tail."

The entry of the Wise Woman, with a
stentorian benediction, here drove me forth
like a bolted rabbit, and having skirted the
evil-smelling morass in front of the house, I
breathed the large air of the bogs with
enthusiasm.  The evening was speechless
and oppressive; it held like a headache the
question whether it is useful to be sorry for
those who are not sorry for themselves, and,
unrepining, grope out their lives in the dark
house of ignorance; and whether discontent
with one's lot is not the mother of good
cooking and other excellent things.

A week afterwards an emissary brought to
the Big House the intelligence that the
mother of the Triplets had in the interval
been at the point of death, and had been
anointed, had an impression on her chest,
and could give "no account of the pain she
had in her side, only that it was like a person
polishing a boot, and there to be lumps in
the boot, and he having a brush in his hand."  From
out of these symptoms was distilled the
fact that she had had pleurisy, acquired while
walking barefoot in the yard to feed the
calves.  She entreated the gift of a pair of
boots, and the emissary added, as a rider,
the fact that the Colonel's boots would be
just her fit.  The Colonel was away, but the
main body of his boots stood in battalions in
his room.  A pair of the dustiest was snatched,
in a heat of philanthropy, and bestowed, and
proved, we were given to understand, an
invaluable adjunct to the feeding of the calves.
It is worth mentioning that the Colonel, on
his return next day, was by no means as
gratified as had been hoped; they were, he
said, the one and only pair of patent leather
boots in which he could walk with comfort
and credit in London, and the moving
circumstance of Triplets had no power to allay
his bitter and impotent wrath.  His only tall
hat had already been sold at a Jumble sale,
and he did well to be angry.  The cook, who
had been sceptical throughout as to the
necessity for the gift, tactfully reported that
the Colonel's boots were too tight for That
One, and brought from Second Mass the
comfortable tidings that they had preyed on
her feet.

The cook, always lenient, after the manner
of her kind, to the Colonel and all his sex,
was at that time much preoccupied with
matrimonial affairs.  It was soon afterwards
that a strange young man in Sunday clothes
appeared at intervals in the yard, and melted
like a wraith into dark doorways in the
kitchen passages.  He was found eating trifle
in the servants' hall, and in the evenings he
fished on the lake.  He was, we discovered,
the cook's brother, arrived from Loughrea to
investigate the position of the swain whom
the cook wished to marry.  On the fourth
day he passed imperceptibly out of the
establishment, and the cook fought loudly
and venomously with all who crossed her
path.  It transpired that the brother had
visited the home of the aspirant, and had
found, she said, that it was a backwards
place, and a narrow house, and he wouldn't
let her go in it.  She had twice at Mass
seen the candidate for her hand, she informed
us, lamentably, and he was a nice young man,
foxy in the face, and she got a good account
of him.  That it was remarkable, or at all
unpleasant, to marry a perfect stranger was a
point quite outside her comprehension.  She
had never spoken to him, she admitted, but
what signified, so long as she got a good
account of him.  It was afterwards discovered
that the lover had been rejected because his
family had been broom-makers, and that no
self-respecting girl would look at him on that
account.  The point of social etiquette here
touched remains still dark, but it was
insuperable, and the cook eventually married the
gentleman whose lofty calling it was to drive
the butcher's cart.

The day before the marriage the battle
was waged in the usual manner between
the Loughrea brother and the bridegroom;
greasy pound notes were slapped down on
the table, the bride's savings were vaunted
above the bridegroom's heifers and position
as heir to his mother's bit of land, and with
swaggering and bluff and whiskey drinking
the bargain was concluded.  Nothing could
have been more frankly commercial; nothing,
apparently, could have given more satisfaction.
The cook departed, and lived in a
cabin with a variety of her husband's relatives,
who were by no means overjoyed at the
circumstance; potatoes for dinner, and stewed
tea morning, noon and night were her diet;
the hens roosted above her bed, she weeded
turnips and "spread" turf, she grew thin
and pale, but never, so far as is known, did
she repine, or regret the print dresses and
the flesh-pots.  The butcher's driver was
"a quiet boy," better than most husbands;
had it been the broom-maker, foxy in the
face she would have made him an equally
good wife.  In a community where old
maids are almost unknown, the only point
worth considering was that she was married
and had a "young son," and every man and
woman in the country would have said that
she was right.  In traversing the point we
should run our heads against a wall of
primeval instinct.

Writers of novels, and readers of novels,
had better shut their eyes to the fact, the
inexorable fact, that such marriages are
rushed into every day—loveless, sordid
marriages, such as we are taught to hold in
abhorrence, and that from them springs, like
a flower from a dust heap, the unsullied,
uneventful home-life of Western Ireland.  It
is romance that holds the two-edged sword,
the sharp ecstasy and the severing scythe
stroke, the expectancy and the disillusioning,
the trance and the clearer vision.

It is even more than passive domestic
toleration that blossoms in the cramped and
dirty cabin life, affection grows with years,
and where personal attraction never counted
for much, the loss of it hurts nobody.

"Their hearts were within in each other,"
was said of an elderly couple, who, thirty
years before, had been married in the priest's
kitchen on the last night of Shraft; married
as a happy thought, and by the merest
chance.  The lawful bride had taken her
place by the bridegroom, but, changing her
mind at the last possible moment, sprang
from her knees, and declined the ceremony.
As her betrothal was probably an affair of
that afternoon it was not so dramatic an
action as might be assumed, nor did it cause
any hitch in the proceedings.  The priest
looked round the well-filled kitchen.

"Here, Mary Kate!" he said to his
servant, "come on you, and marry the man!
Sure you wouldn't let him go away, and he
after walking five miles in the rain!"

Mary Kate knelt down by the bridegroom.
We do not hear of remonstrance on her part,
and thirty years afterwards, when their
children were married or gone to America, it
was said that this couple's "hearts were
within in each other."  It was said with
perfect perception of the ways and the deeps
of devotion; but the absence of it at their
wedding was not worthy of remark, and in
these things is the essence of the Irish nature,
that keenly perceives sentiment, and
contentedly ignores it.

"She isn't much, indeed," said a farmer of
exceeding astuteness, when questioned about
his matrimonial intentions, "but she's a nate
little clerk."  By this was delicately conveyed
the fact that she could read and write, and
that he could not.  The marriage was highly
successful.

Years afterwards a friend said to him in
congratulation, "Well, James, I hear you
married your daughter well."

"I did, sir, and I got him cheap."  Then
in a whisper, "He was divilish owld."

The computation by which the years of
the bridegroom were set against the purchase
money—in other words, the bride's dowry—must
have been an intricate one, involving,
one would say, the tables of insurance, and
the best skill of the nate little clerk.

Congratulations, not unmixed with some
genial surprise, were proffered to another
parent on the marriage of his daughter, a
person by no means in her first youth, and
possessed of but one eye.

"Sure I had to give him ten pounds agin'
the blind eye," explained the father of the
bride, with unimpaired cordiality.

There is here no material, of the accepted
sort, for a playwright; no unsatisfied yearnings
and shattered ideals, nothing but remarkable
common sense, and a profound awe for the
Sacrament of Marriage.  Marriage, humourous,
commercial, and quite unlovely, is the
first act; the second is mere preoccupation
with an accomplished destiny; the last is
usually twilight and much faithfulness.  The
dialogue is a masterpiece throughout,
epigram, heart-piercing pathos, with humour,
heavenly and inveterate, lubricating all.
Perhaps the clue to success lies here, in the
mutual possession of agreeability and the
good nature that goes with the best
agreeability; certain it is that with a command of
repartee that makes fighting an artistic
enjoyment, their conjugal battles are
insignificant.

The two-fold heart of the race beats
everywhere in the confusion; gross worldliness,
and a matrimonial standard clear and
unquestioned as the stars; Love the negligible
quantity, and attachment the rule.  It is
for us, more singly bent on happiness, to
aim at rapture and to foreknow disappointment.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`HORTICULTURAL`:

.. class:: center large bold

   HORTICULTURAL

.. vspace:: 2

I admit that I hesitate at the thought of
pressing into the elect company of those who
have discoursed upon gardens.  From Lord
Bacon down to the Poet Laureate, from the
Poet Laureate up to that self-sufficing and
yet voluble "Elizabeth," of whose German
Garden all the craft have read, there seems
no inch of garden sod that has been left
unturned.  I ask myself: Have I any original
suggestions on, for example, The disbudding
of 'Mums? (a term of horrid familiarity that
I have seen applied to Chrysanthemums).
Any high thoughts on Manures?  Any
special convictions in the matter of mulches?

My conscience, far from admitting ability
to treat of these solemn things, reminds me
that but little more than a year ago I should
scarcely have been entrusted with the weeding
of a gravel path, and hints at that Affair of
the Coltsfoot.  It is, in fact, the Coltsfoot
Affair that decides me.  I cannot be a guide
or a sign-post, but I can be a scarecrow.
I would say a moral scarecrow, though it
may be conceded that the costume of the
gardening amateur often lends itself to the
more practical *rôle*.

I was not at all aware of being in the
movement when I found myself snatching at
my weekly copy of *Gardening Illustrated* in
preference to the daily paper, and brooding
heavily upon delphiniums when I might have
been profiting by the sermon.  It was only
by degrees, as I went about the world, that I
noted how quick and strong would beat the
answering conversational pulse at the
mention of a garden, at the sighing reference
to the arrangement of a herbaceous border.
It seemed that every second person I met
was as much of a gardener as I was, in the
matter of enthusiasm, and, as they might
easily be, something more in the matter of
practice.  This discovery revolutionised
society for me.  It has doubtless done so
for many another.  The most penal afternoon
visit may have its alleviations in a
valuable hint on "the desire of the rose"—not
for the star—but for the cleanings of the
scullery drain; the most inveterate dowager
may be found to be a man and a brother,
profoundly versed in daffodils, full of lore
about "Alpines."  How astonishing it is to
find oneself cheerfully, even ardently,
assenting to what would once have been regarded
as the hideous proposal to "Walk round the
garden!"  Such a walk has ceased to be
a penance; it has become something, not
quite a scouting expedition, not quite a
(herbaceous) border-foray, not quite a
"beggar's lay"; but it has something in it
of the charms of all three.  Which element
preponderates depends on the character.
There are moss-troopers born, who will
twitch off a cutting, and filch a seed head,
uncontrollably.  There are heaven-endowed
mendicants who will yearn and flatter the
filling of a flower bed into a knotted pocket
handkerchief.  It is a useful principle to
accept everything, regardless of the accident
of the seasons.  There are many other
accidents of far higher importance to be
considered—lapse of memory on the part of
the giver, for instance, or repentance.  In the
amenities of gardeners, as in love, the advice
to "Take me when I'm in the humour," is
sound, and a cutting in the hand is well
worth six in or on the bush, when the bush is
another's.

I believe it is the gambling element that
gives to gardening so potent a charm—that,
and the seedmen's catalogues.  One of my
first adventures was in response to a
singularly seductive advertisement—"Humulus
Lupulus," it said, "The finest creeper in the
world.  Grows forty feet in a single night.
Massive clusters of yellowish blossoms.
Beautiful; Healthy."  I have the constitutional
misfortune to believe, unquestioning,
the printed word.  Even now I find it hard
to discount the flights of fancy of that poetic
idealist, the advertising nurseryman.  I
despatched eighteenpence by the next post;
received by return an undemonstrative
bundle of little roots, planted them
prayerfully in a choice place, and then, as it
happened, left home for a time.  On my
return to my garden I found the usual
crop of catastrophes and compensations, but
disregarding all alike I sped to the site of
the Humulus Lupulus.  There had been
near the same spot a highly esteemed rose,
"Climbing Captain Christie."  The first
thing that greeted me was the wan, indignant
face of a Captain Christie, who, having
climbed for all he was worth, was none the
less overtaken, and was now gazing at me in
strangled pallor from the depths of a thicket
of common hops.  The Poetic Idealist had
triumphed.

I have never been able precisely to
ascertain to what extent Bat Whoolley found
me out in the Affair—already alluded to—of
the Coltsfoot.  Bat is my gardener, and I
value his opinion highly, almost as highly as
he does himself, though possibly with more
limitations.  Winter Heliotrope was what
my neighbour called Coltsfoot.  I felt there
was something not quite sound in the lavish
way she pressed it upon me.  She said there
was nothing like it for covering bare places,
and that I might dig it up for myself and
take all I wanted.  That specious permission
might have warned me; so also might the
singular fact that my neighbour's shrubbery
had for undergrowth naught save the curving
leaves of the winter heliotrope.  None the
less, I planted out two or three colonies of it
on the outskirts of the rock garden.

One morning, at the turn by the pine tree
(one of my colonies had been unostentatiously
planted in a bare place behind the pine tree),
I met Bat.  His face was redder than usual,
and there was something very searching in
his eye.  Mine did not meet it.

"Look at that!" he said.

He held up a handful of long white roots,
and brandished it, much as Jupiter is
represented brandishing a handful of lightning.
"Look at that dam-root"—he pronounced
the words as one pronounces beet-root—"that
some"—here a powerful variant on
the usual definition of fool—"is after
planting in your honour's consarns!  See here!
If ye left no more o' that in the ground than
as much as ye couldn't see itself, it'd have
the place ate up in one fortnight!  I gave
the morning to it, an' if I give the day itself
it's hardly I'll have it all dug—Divil's cure to
the—"  (Here more variants in connection
with the imposter.)

Something wavering in Bat's eye, even
while the denunciation proceeded, made me
conscious of the smirch of suspicion.  I
remained silent as the grave.  Secretly I
visited the other colonies, and found that one
of them was already swinging an enveloping
wing round the rearguard of the Iris
Kaempferi, and that another had flung
outposts into the heart of the helianthemums.
At a bound I ranged myself with the opposition.

"Bat," I said, "the Dam-roots are in the
garden!"

That night a fair-sized bundle of winter
heliotrope was restored to my generous
neighbour.  Bat threw it over the wall.

I am slowly acquiring some insight into
my gardener's likes and dislikes.  He
despises anything that he suspects of being a
wild flower.

"'Sha! that's no good!  That's one of the
Heth family!  The hills is rotten with it."

But on the other hand, he will lavish such
a wealth of attention upon potatoes as would,
if bestowed on the despised daughter of
Heth, cause it to blossom like the rose.
There are, in his opinion, but three flowers
really worthy of cultivation.  Red geraniums,
blue lobelias, and yellow calceolarias.  With
these, had he his will, should all my garden
be glorious.  I never buy them; I never see
them in their earlier stages, but suddenly, in
the herbaceous border, the trio will appear,
uttering a note of colour only comparable to
the shriek of a macaw.

"Why then, there isn't a gentleman's
garden in Ireland but thim have the sway in
it!" Bat says, when he finds me brooding
over a shattered ideal.  "There was
Mr. Massy's was the grand place!  The garden
steps big slobs of marble, and the gate
lodges dashed and haberdashed, and the
gardens fit to blind yer eye by the dint o'
thim!"

What "haberdashed" may mean I cannot
say, but "thim" meant the combination so
dear to his heart that a stouter than mine
would be needed to abolish it, even from a
herbaceous border.

Sometimes, chiefly on Sunday afternoons,
I am visited by compunction in the matter
of the prohibited "calcies" and "lobaylias,"
for it is on Sundays that Bat is "at home"
to three favoured enemies of his own
profession.  They move, very slowly, and, for the
most part, silently, from bed to bed, like
doctors making a clinical inspection at a
hospital; at intervals they put a horny finger
under a patient's chin and gravely study his
complexion, or, wishing perhaps to show
generosity to a rival, they pick off some
malign bug or caterpillar, and squash it
between an unhesitating finger and thumb.
It is at such times that I feel how far my
garden in its lack of that gorgeous trio lags
behind that of any other gentleman in
Ireland.

But my gardener has his alleviations.
There was one bright day which, having
begun with the funeral of a relative, culminated
in a visit as prolonged as it was satiating
from the chief mourner.  King Solomon did
not exploit his Temple more thoroughly for
the discomfiture of the Queen of Sheba than
did Bat his gardens for the Chief Mourner.
The latter, a "mountainy man from back in
the counthry," paced heavily round after
Mr. Whoolly, his hands folded on the apex of his
back under the voluminous skirts of his blue
frieze coat, a stick hanging from them like a
tail.  The deep silence of his native hills was
on him; he suffered his emotions without
expression until the tour of the kitchen garden
was made, its climax—fortunately stage-managed
by Bat—being "a bed of greens."  There
is that in such a bed that, in such a
nature, touches an even more vibrating chord
than potatoes.

"And cabbages!" said the mountainy man,
almost in a whisper.

.. _`"*AND CABBAGES!" SAID THE MOUNTAINY MAN*`:

.. figure:: images/img-176.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "AND CABBAGES!" SAID THE MOUNTAINY MAN

   "AND CABBAGES!" SAID THE MOUNTAINY MAN

The Queen of Sheba herself was not a
more gratifying audience.  Mr. Whoolley
seems to have observed the parallelism of the
cases, and assuming that the visitor, in spite
of the funeral, had no more spirit left in him,
the couple adjourned to a convenient public
house and were no more seen.

On the whole, I think I may say that I
give Bat satisfaction.  He is generous in
judging rather by intention than achievement,
and he sees the advantages of fostering a
disposition to weed.  Only once has he been
tried too high, and that was when I planted
out a bed with what he calls "pushoch-bui,"
a most pestilent weed whose English equivalent
is, I fancy, charlock.  To me he passed
over the error in a very handsome manner,
but I heard him the same afternoon say to
the subordinate who was making good my
misdoing:

"Is it that one!  Sure he's no more good
than a feather!"

Another act of folly of mine, however,
carried with it more serious consequences.
I was so far left to myself as to give permission
to a Sunday School excursion of unknown
dimensions to disport itself in my domains.
Dates were discussed, and times arranged, and
then a sponge of kindly oblivion wiped the
affair from my mind.  It was a couple of
months afterwards—I was inspecting my wall
fruit in the kitchen garden at eleven o'clock
in the morning, and being eaten by midges in
a way that foretold immediate rain, when
there was a sound of thunderous driving on the
avenue.  Just then the rain began to fall, and
almost at the same moment there arrived to
me a rushing messenger from the house saying
"there were ladies in the drawing-room."

I am a lone man, and there is no one to
share with me the brunt of such a moment.
I hurried in, and was confronted as I neared
the hall door by four huge yellow brakes, full
of children, and roofed with umbrellas.  Two,
already empty, were emulously pressing
towards the yard, one taking a short cut
across a strip of lawn, and two more were
disgorging their burdens at large.  I went
into the drawing-room and found it lined
with ladies in black.  It was explained to me
that on account of the rain the party, which
comprised the Patrons, Teachers, and Pupils
of four Sunday Schools, had "taken the
liberty of coming to the house for
shelter."  Even as they spoke a strange murmuring
sound arose from beneath my feet—the hum
as of an angry hive.  The house, like many
old country houses in Ireland, stands upon a
basement storey, and I realised that its
cavernous recesses were being utilised as a
receptacle for the Amalgamated Sunday Schools.

I cannot clearly recall the varied events of
that day of nightmare.  I remember finding,
at one juncture, one of my subordinates
stemming the rush of the Sunday Schools up
the back-stairs with the kitchen table and
an old driving whip.  At another, my
honoured presence was requested in a cave-like
place, once a laundry, wherein a shocking
meal was being partaken of.  I noticed a
teacher with a "cut" of cold salmon, wrapped
in newspaper.  She ate it with her fingers,
quaffing raspberry vinegar the while.  Kettles,
capacious as the boiler of a man-of-war,
steamed on the ancient fireplace; the air
reeked of damp children and buns.  Later
on it cleared, and I led a company of female
patrons forth to see the garden.  Already the
sward of the tennis ground looked like
Epsom Downs on the day after the Derby,
and an animated game of Hide-and-Seek
was in progress among my young rhododendrons.
I averted my eyes.  In the flower
garden the usual amusement of leaping the
beds had taken place, with the usual results
of chasm-like footprints in the centre of each.
The first endurable incident of the day was
the discovery that Bat had locked the kitchen
garden gate, and that my strollings with the
patronesses were perforce ended.  But even
as I was expressing my regrets (coupled,
mentally, with a resolve to raise Mr. Whoolly's
wages) there arose from within the walls
cries of the most poignant, accompanied by
roars comparable only to those of a wounded
tiger.  On the top of the wall, just above us
there shot into view the face of a boy, a face
scarlet with exertion, vociferous in lamentation.
Quickly following it there appeared
down the length of the wall other faces,
equally agitated, while from within came a
sound as of the heavy beating of carpets.
Other sounds came also.  Sounds of indignation
too explicit to be printable.  I blushed
for the patronesses.  None the less I endorsed
every word of it as I realised that my best
peach trees were being used as ladders by
the Amalgamated Sunday Schools.

I think that was about the last act in the
tragedy.  Not long afterwards, in a yellow
glow of late, repentant sunlight, the four
brakes drove—with further cuttings of grassy
corners—up to the hall door.  The Sunday
Schools were condensed into them, each
child receiving an orange as it took its seat,
and thin cheers arose in my honour.
Simultaneously the brakes snowed forth orange
peel upon the gravel; the procession swept
out of sight, still cheering, still snowing
orange peel.

For reasons darkly and inextricably mixed
up with the Sunday School excursion, dinner
that night was served at nine o'clock, and as I
was aware that every servant in the house was
in a separate and towering passion, I refrained
from inquiry.

Yet, even through the indigestion following
on this belated repast, I was upheld by the
remembrance of Bat's face, as he glared at
me through the bars of the kitchen garden
gate, and said:

"Thanks be to God, I'm after breaking
six pay-sticks on their backs!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`OUT OF HAND`:

.. class:: center large bold

   OUT OF HAND

.. vspace:: 2

Soldiers were there to keep the peace.  The
redcoats and the bayonets moved in a rigid
line through the crowd that blocked the two
streets of the town.  They guarded a small
body of voters that had come across Lough
Corrib, and was making its way to the
polling-booths, headed by a Galway landlord,
on whose arm leaned an old man, decrepit,
and unnerved by the storm of opposition
through which they passed.

Another Galway landlord was ranging
through groups of men who turned their
backs on him, and hid behind each other,
his tenants, personal friends all of them, who,
for the first time on record, had voted in
opposition to his wishes.

"Every one of them!" he said, while the
atmosphere that surrounds suffering and
strong emotion made itself felt, "all but two
or three.  They have all gone against me."

It was a memorable election, marking the
new departure in Irish politics, and it broke
the hearts and practically ended the lives of
two at least of the Galway landlords.  Till
that time the landlords took their tenants to
the poll *en masse*; thenceforward they were
to advance under the banner of the Church.

The epoch that here found its close was
memorable, too, in its way.  It held, far back
in it, the brave days when the Galway
elections lasted for a month, and the actual
voting for a week, days to which the pages
of Lever bear witness.  As that week of
delightful warfare strove on the electors
became more fastidious about their drinks,
and would accept nothing less aristocratic
than mulled port and claret.  These restoratives
were brewed in fish-kettles on the big
fireplaces of the ballroom in Kilroy's hotel,
an agreeable incident, not, we think,
commemorated by Lever.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1



Twenty years afterwards a Galway village
lay mute in the sunshine, drowsy with
respectability, assertive of rectitude in every
slant of its slate roofs.  To view it thus from
the waste altitudes of the moor above it, on a
Sunday morning of July, with the call of a
cock straining up through the silence, was to
endue it with all the stillness and strictness
of the day itself, even to credit it with a
Presbyterian rigour of Sabbaticism that was
at variance with the traditions of the County
Galway.  Down on its own level, and
approaching it through the aisle of shade
that lay between broken demesne walls and
under the lofty embrace of demesne trees,
the glare of its whitewash closed the vista
blatantly, and with a self-righteousness that
suppressed the romantic as a thing of
libertine irrelevance.  Therefore, to an eye
accustomed, during many Sundays, to the
recognition of the barren street, with its
strings of ducks in moody reverie about the
unremunerative gutters, and its dogs asleep
outside the closed doors, it was startling
beyond the merit of the occasion to be
confronted with a staring crowd of people that
filled the street loosely from end to end.
Every face was turned towards the
new-comer, till the whole slope of the hill was
flushed with them; then it darkened, as the
people realised that nothing worthy of further
notice was occurring, and turned their heads
again towards Galway.

The crowd was a representative one.
Wizened old men in swallow-tailed coats and
knee-breeches, degenerate youth in check
suits and pot-hats, tanned women in
deep-hooded cloaks, girls with shawls over their
heads, freckled and ubiquitous children—all
smelling heavily of turf smoke, some
modernised with the master smell of hair-oil.
The anti-Parnellite candidate was expected
to arrive at any moment from Galway, to
address those who had come to the village
for Mass; and though the people had now
been out of chapel for an hour there seemed
to be no wish to disperse, or any sign of
impatience.  They even appeared to be
enjoying themselves as thoroughly as was
compatible with the fact that the public-houses
had not yet been opened.  Anything
so fascinating as a little political excitement
was worth waiting for, especially while
Providence was liberal of fresh arrivals on
outside cars, and invention failed not of the
personal allusion wherewith to greet them;
so that time passed healthfully, and expectation
was no more than pleasantly ripe when
outposts on the hill heralded at length the
approach of the candidate.

A blended roar of execration and
encouragement went out to meet him—a
greeting sustained on every note of the
human compass in a savagely inarticulate
mass of discord.  He seemed to cleave his
way through it as he passed, his figure
moving pompously along on its car above the
shoulders of the people, in black coat and
white waistcoat, while a deft hand manipulated
a tall hat in recognition of every crumb
of welcome.  He passed on down a by-road
towards the chapel, followed by a few dozen
people, and by the booing and hooting of the
rest of the assemblage.  Clearly the materials
for the meeting were elsewhere.

It was not far to the chapel, four hundred
yards or thereabouts of dusty road, that lay
hot and quiet between loose stone walls,
dropping to a hollow and rising again to the
low height where stood the unmistakable
building that is the heart and fountain of
parish politics, its plaster and whitewash
veiled a little by the kindly churchyard trees,
and the stone cross on its gable standing
strong and keen under the melting sky.

On nearing the churchyard the candidate's
voice was audible through the trees in fluent,
opening sentences, each point duly weighted
with a "Hee'rr, hee'rr!" as businesslike as
the "Amen" of the parish clerk.  His car
was waiting outside in the shade, and the
carman, who was perhaps a little *blasé* in the
matter of speeches, was smoking an
unemotional pipe beside it.

"Indeed, you may say the town of Galway
is in a quare way," he said, putting his hand
to a cheek that was just perceptibly more
purple than the other.  "Look at meself, the
figure I am, that wasn't spakin' a word to a
Christhian, good nor bad, and lasht night a
fishwoman comes down to me in the sthreet
this ways"—squaring his elbows and
strutting—"'Hi for Lynch!' says she, hittin' me a
puck in the jaw with her skib (basket).  The
Lord save us! 'tis hardly I ran from her before
she had the town gethered afther her.  Begob,
the women's the most that'd frighten ye!"

At the churchyard gate a couple of long-tailed
colts were tied up, saddle-horses
evidently, but bare-backed, and bridled with a
halter, their bodies bloated with summer
grass out of all proportion to their long legs,
and their countrified ears pricking occasionally
at the cheers that did not by the blink of an
eyelid affect the doze of the Galway car-horse.
The company inside was a small one as compared
with that in the street, and had in it a
much larger proportion of women and old
men, to which was perhaps due the superior
calm of the proceedings.  The churchyard
was a spacious one, depressingly roomy indeed
for the present occasion, for which any
suburban back garden would have sufficed.
Most of the audience had mounted on the
tombstones, great slabs of limestone that
formed the lids of the boxes placed over the
more distinguished dead, blackish grey, and
ringing under the hobnailed-boots like metal.
The candidate stood on the highest tombstone,
and all around him leaned and clung
these strange groups of men and women,
looking like the wooded islands in the lake
close by; while between them the quiet
background of the graveyard was visible, with its
bent and musing trees, and array of low
head-stones gazing blindly at the concourse.

The bald top of the candidate's head
formed the focus-point of the gathering,
giving back the sun's glare like glass as it
swung and jerked with the flow of oratory,
and beside it the immense shovel-hat of the
old priest moved occasionally in accord,
italicising for the benefit of the flock such
phrases as seemed especially edifying.  The
curate was nowhere to be seen; rumour said
that his political theories were not formed on
those of his superior.  A remembrance
recurred of meeting, that morning, a severely
contemplative young priest, walking alone
and away from the village, with the green
flicker of the leaves overhead playing
strangely across the gloom of his sallow face.

.. _`*THE CANDIDATE*`:

.. figure:: images/img-192.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: THE CANDIDATE

   THE CANDIDATE

The candidate's speech seemed, indeed, to
require a little driving home.  It was, for the
most part, an explanation to his constituents
of the reasons that made it necessary for him
to forego the happiness of acquainting
himself with them in any intimate degree.  He
was, he said, in his temperately florid manner,
closely connected with a large firm in England
and, deplorable to relate, his income depended
on his living in the bosom of the English
firm.  "Sure we know that—we know that!"
yelled the half-dozen most chosen supporters,
crushing precariously round the candidate on
the edge of the tombstone platform, with
their wild, combative faces pressing, all on
fire, towards him.  Perhaps he might yet be
roused to say the right things about the rival
candidate, the things that would wring forth
a cheer in reply to those distant ones that
came maddeningly at intervals from the
crowd in the street.

But the speaker kept his eloquence well in
hand, confining himself to such blind alleys
of assertion as the remarkable success of his
own career, his confidence that his
constituents would re-elect him, and his desire
to benefit them in some immeasurable way if
they did so.  A permissive cynicism curved
the wrinkles on the faces of the old men who
stood on the grassy graves behind him, with
their hands under their coat-tails, and their
grizzled chins sunk in their shirt-collars; they
knew how they were going to vote, and their
own powers (matured in the sale of many a
heifer and rood of bog) of taking a part and
sustaining it, with a perfectness that would
deceive the elect, made them sceptical as to
the ends of speech-making.  The women
were tittering and whispering under their
shawls; but were certainly impressed by the
candidate's Sunday attire, his well-kept grey
moustache, and his affable way of saying
"ladies and gentlemen" every now and then.

The speech ambled to its close, through a
peroration of an uncertain conversational
tone, assisted at critical points by one or
other of the supporters, who would
ungovernably supply the needed word out of
the bursting fulness of his own repertoire.
It was the sole outlet for their enthusiasm,
except for the cheer that caught at the
ravelled edge of the final sentence, as the
candidate put on his hat and bowed himself
from the tombstone.

"Be prayin' for the meetin', gerrls," said
the old priest, leading the way to the vestry,
with rusty skirts floating widely.  The door
closed on him and his protégé, the clumps on
the tombstones fell apart, mingling in a
laughing and talking stream towards the
churchyard gate, and the prayers of the
young ladies were apparently deferred to a
more convenient season.

The chapel door stood open, showing the
barren squareness of the interior; a zinc tub,
half-full of Holy-water, stood in the porch,
with the flags all round it wet from the splash
of dipping hands; the altar gleamed gaudily at
the further end; and a tall confession-box
stood solitary in the seatless expanse of floor,
fraught with the inseparable mystery and
suggestiveness of its kind, and holding
within its curtained rails the knowledge of
what things are counted for unrighteousness
in that twilight place, the conscience of the
Western peasant.  The air inside was warm,
and still laden with the smell of frieze coats
and stale turf smoke; but, except for this
furnishing, the blankness was complete.
Sunday and its Mass were over and done
with for a week, and priest and congregation
were striving factors in the carnal toils of
election.

The people dispersed slowly, discussing
the absorbing topic of the day, some in their
native tongue, but for the most part in
English, so pronounced as to be in the
distance scarcely distinguishable from the
liquid and guttural flow of Galway Irish.

.. _`"*A MAN MUST WOTE THE WAY HIS PRIEST AND BISHOP 'LL TELL HIM*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-195.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "A MAN MUST WOTE THE WAY HIS PRIEST AND BISHOP'LL TELL HIM"

   "A MAN MUST WOTE THE WAY HIS PRIEST AND BISHOP'LL TELL HIM"

"Sure, a man must wote the way his
priest and bishop'll tell him," says a tall
supporter, with the air of a person repeating
a truism.

"Well, meself'd say," says another, whose
handsome eyes shone in the shadow of his
soft felt hat, while his hands helped out his
words with picturesque gesture, "the man I'd
have a wish for to wote for him, is the man
that'd rise out o' his bed in the night and give
hay and oats to yer horse, and yerself fotever
ye'd ax, when any one else'd leshen (listen) in
their bed if ye were battherin' there till
mornin'."

This argument referred to the well-known
good nature of the Parnellite candidate, a
general dealer and publican in a neighbouring
village.

"Well, indeed, he's no scholar, I suppose,"
says a young fellow, still in reference to the
Parnellite.  "He has no learnin' nor way of
spakin' no more than meself, but becripes! he's
a fine sthrong man, and he'll be well able
to fight and box in Parliament."

This was said in entire good faith, and was
listened to with respect.

"Come on back the road!" bawls a
supporter, beckoning authoritatively from the
distance, "let yees come on now, the whole
o' yee, the way we'd be before the car and it
going up!"

The reason for this manoeuvre was presently
apparent, on returning to the village
street.  As the candidate's car left the
chapel the Parnellite crowd thronged the
corner by which it must pass; a battery of
threatening faces, waiting with unknown
purpose; a gauntlet to run or to run away
from.  The car came slowly up the hill,
preceded by a party of supporters; the candidate
on one side, looking anxious the old priest
on the other, bare-headed, and looking still
more anxious, but waving his hand as if in
greeting, while the interwoven yells became
a thrilling mass of sound.

It was well for the candidate that his
companion was one of the oldest and most
popular of the Galway priests.  That
prestige had shielded the churchyard meeting
from disturbance, and but for its influence
now the future M.P. might have returned to
England with an appearance not
advantageous to the firm of which he was a
member.  A forest of clenched fists and
sticks seemed to leap up towards him, the
scream of hatred never took breath, and
there was entreaty in the face of the priest
as his wrinkled hands waved repressively
above the tumult.  There was a long
moment of uncertainty, but in the next the
car was through in safety, and was gone in
the twinkling of an eye, the supporters
running in its wake till the last waving
gleam of the candidate's silk hat had been garnered.

It was then that things began to look, to
an Irish eye, most promising and attractive.
The supporters turned, formed into a solid
body of perhaps forty men and boys, and
marched with inimitable swagger straight
back into the crowd, all together, in a kind
of chant, shouting, "To hell with ——!" (the
rival candidate) at the utmost strength of
their lungs.  The theme was a simple one,
but magnificently vocalised, and was
instantly replied to in the *tu quoque* manner
by the opposite party.  Sticks went up, the
women rushed outwards for safety, looking,
with their floating shawls, like a flock of
frightened turkeys; and at this point the
four constabulary men who represented that
force made themselves felt.  The dangerous
moment yielded easily and unresentfully to
these judicious hands, and the excitement
sputtered out in a little bragging and
hustling, without so much as a black eye
to commemorate it.  In half an hour the
ducks were again waddling in line along
the empty street, and a muffled hum
proceeding from the shuttered public houses,
told that the *bonâ fide* travellers had at
length reached their journey's end.  It was a
lamentable falling off from the days of the
fish kettles and the mulled port of Kilroy's Hotel.

The episode had expired in the way that
might have been expected, and was at best
an indeterminate, shapeless thing, full of
unripe revolt that it was too childish to
express.  But that moment when the little
flame first flickers in the gorse, feeling its
naked way among the thorns and affluent
blossom, has a wonder of birth in it that is
forgotten when the blazing hillside jars the
noonday, and the smoke rolls monotonously
from strongholds of conflagration.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A RECORD OF HOLIDAY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   A RECORD OF HOLIDAY

.. vspace:: 2

Of summer holidays it may at least be
contended that they involve two periods of
undiluted enjoyment; the time of anticipation,
and the calm—if sometimes chastened—season
of retrospect.

I am glad; now that the mice are nesting in
my trunks, and the spiders weaving fresh
straps round my hold-all, that I have been to
Switzerland, that the greasy Visitors' books
of several West of Ireland hotels hold my
name.  Also, I remember how very cheerful
it was to study a scarlet-hued Bradshaw, and
to reflect that, with certain financial
restrictions, the Continent of Europe lay smiling
before me.  (I remember also, that I lent
that entertaining work to an American friend,
and found the utmost difficulty in recovering
it from him.  It was only restored, indeed,
on the morning of my departure, and my
friend mentioned that he had sat up all night
reading it, "Just to see how it ended," he
said.)

Between, however, these seasons of
satisfaction, there stretches the actual time of
holiday, and as I reflect upon it, I am struck
by the fact that its more salient features are
misfortunes.  From a literary point of view
this has its advantages; the happy traveller
has no history.  If the converse is true it
would need Gibbon or Macaulay to deal
with our transit from the County Cork to
that Alpine fastness for which we had
trustingly, fearlessly labelled our luggage.

It began with fog in the Channel—the
Irish Channel—solid, tangible fog, through
which our bewildered steamer stumbled,
uttering large, desolate cries of distress,
stopping every now and then to bellow like
a lost cow, sometimes, even, going astern,
while muffled hootings told of another
wanderer who had drawn nearer than was
convenient.

"When I heard 'em giving the signal to go
astern," said a sailor officer of high degree, next
morning, as he gobbled a belated mouthful
of breakfast, "I thought it was about time to
get up and put on my clothes.  Said nothing
about it to m' wife, though!"

I wonder if he has realised yet why everyone
smiled.

In London, rain; in Paris, blinding heat.
Dizzily we staggered round the elder Salon,
and through its innumerable small square
rooms, with their lining of flagrant canvases;
it was like exploring the brain-cells of a fever
patient in delirium.  One healing instant was
ours, when at the public baths in the
Boulevard Mont Parnasse, the waters of a "*Bain
Complet*" closed over the exhausted person;
but that, even, was speedily poisoned by the
discovery that towels and soap, being extras,
were not left in the *Cabinet de Bain*, and
the bather, having with dripping hands
explored the pocket for the needed coins, had
then to tender them to the attendant through
a difficult slit of doorway, receiving in
exchange a small fragment of slightly scented
marble and a gauze veil.

After that, the night journey to Geneva.
Heat, sardine-like proximity of fellow
travellers, two dauntless English ladies, who
turned the long night into one unending and
clanking tea-party; a nightmare interlude of
*douaniers*, then, when a troubled sleep had at
length been bestowed, Geneva; and all the
horrors that attend the finish of a long train
journey.

At breakfast, at our hotel, a survey of
what we had hitherto endured in the pursuit
of pleasure stung us to a brief revolt.  This
was a holiday, we told ourselves, why hurry?
Fortified by a principle, theoretically
unassailable, we strolled about Geneva.  It
was cold and very wet; still, in our newly
realised leisure, we made a point of strolling.
On our return to our hotel most of the staff
were on the pavement, seemingly very much
excited.  A *voiture*, laden with our luggage,
stood at the door.  It appeared that our
steamer left for Villeneuve in eight minutes.
I imagine that the hotel staff's agitation arose
from the fear that we should not have time
to tip them all.  This was, alas, unfounded.

The driver took us first to the wrong
steamer.  He then turned his machine too
short, and locked the fore carriage.  Then he
shambled across the long bridge to the other
steamboat quai, while we sat forward, like
the coxswains of racing eights, in sweating
agony, watching our boat getting up steam
and preparing for instant departure.

We caught the boat by springing, like
Spurius Lartius and Herminius, across the
widening chasm between her deck and the
shore, and therewith fell into a species of
syncope.  Mists shrouded the mountains; a
chilled rain swept the lake.  For our parts,
slowly recovering, we kept the cabin, and
swept the tea-table.  It was almost our first
moment of enjoyment.

The Alpine fastness, already alluded to,
was not gained for a further couple of days,
during which an awakening distaste for
Switzerland slowly grew in us, though it did
not thoroughly mature till mellowed by a
mule ride up a mountain.  Reticence in
narration is a quality that I endeavour to
cultivate.  It becomes a necessity in treating
of the village and its surrounding slums from
and through which our start was made.
Having, in a state nearing starvation, been
offered the sole refreshment available, namely,
concentrated essence of typhoid in the guise
of glasses of milk, and having retained
sufficient self-control to refuse them, we
started on mule-back for the mountain.
Traversing, as I have every reason to believe,
the open main drain of the village, our
animals proceeded to totter up a narrow and
precipitous watercourse.

"*La voie la plus directe*," explained the
mule-driver, lashing his ancient cattle in a
general way, and without animosity.

The cloud that accompanied our wanderings,
as in the case of the Israelites, did not
fail of its usual office.  Even through the
crown of a Panama straw hat the rain
attained to my skin.  Thence it descended,
enveloping me, as it were an inner garment.
Twice my mule fell down.  I could not
reproach it.  Indeed, nothing but the fact
that one of its parents had been an ass
explained its readiness to pick itself up and
go on again.  It had, however, an incentive,
supplied in the rear by its proprietor; we had
naught save the fetish of Holiday to goad us
onward, and its potency was beginning to
weaken.

One week of the mountain hotel was as
much as we were able to endure.  The usual
"exceptional" weather prevailed.  How
familiar is the formula, and how entirely
unworthy of credence!

"For seventeen years"—the Landlord
calls heaven to witness—"it has never been
so wet, or so cold, or so stormy at this time.
If Monsieur or Madame, had come but three
weeks ago—or would wait but three days
longer——"

There was a time when the glamour of
holiday might have induced belief, might even
have beguiled a further endurance of the
age-long *table-d'hôte* repasts, of the aggressive
muscularity of the English schoolmaster, who,
during the progress of the *ménu* from the
watery soup to the acrid Alpine strawberry,
faced us, boasting at large and in detail; of the
German bride, who practised the piano for four
hours daily (her head upon her bridegroom's
shoulder, his faithful arm round her waist).
These things, though unattractive in
themselves, might once have been submitted to as
elements of the theoretical holiday (in
Switzerland), as mere inevitable crumples in
the rose-leaf.

But, on this occasion—it is possibly one of
the compensations of advancing years—we
found ourselves endowed with a juster sense
of proportion.  The close of the eighth day
saw us heading for home with a speed that
almost amounted to rout.  The mule-driver's
maxim, "*la voie la plus directe*" seemed good
common sense; we drew neither breath nor
bridle, Geneva, Paris, London were but
names in the night, till we found ourselves
facing America from the front doorstep of
a certain remote hostelry in the far west of
Connaught.

.. _`*FACING AMERICA*`:

.. figure:: images/img-210.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: FACING AMERICA

   FACING AMERICA

Then, and not till then, did something of
the largeness, the leisure, the absurdity, the
unconventionality, that should enter into all
true holiday, begin for us.

I have said hostelry, and undoubtedly the
words "Seaview Hotel," in letters large and
green, were inscribed upon its pink-washed
walls, but without this clue I do not think
the closest observer would be able to detect
its walk in life.  It had but one storey; a
dark and narrow passage led from the
entrance to the kitchen, and therein, at (as
subsequent experience showed us) any time
of the day or night, the entire establishment
might be found, massed, talking as though
they had not met for years, and were to
separate in an hour.

Thus we, led by our carman, an *habitué* of
the house, found them, and thus, with but
brief intervals, they continued during the
period we spent among them.

"What is it, Mike?" this to the car-driver
from a very stout lady, whom we rightly
assumed to be the proprietress.  "Oh—the
sitting-room," she exhibited a natural annoyance,
having been interrupted in a pronouncement
on, I gathered, the feeding of pigs.
"Here!  Mary Kate, show the sitting-room!"  She
re-addressed herself to her subject.

Mary Kate, a charming slattern with a
profusion of fair hair, "showed" the sitting-room.
It was small, but not unclean, and, in
addition to the normal outfit of table and
chairs, was remarkably equipped with a large
double perambulator, whose use as a sideboard
was sufficiently indicated by the fact
that a cruet stand and a loaf of bread occupied
one seat, while a piece of cold beef reclined
on the other.  The bedrooms, if I may quote
a French guide-book's remarks upon the
retreat of a hermit, "excited I know not
what emotions of religious terror;" emotions
that were not allayed by the suspicion, that
deepened to certainty, that, in the absence of
visitors, they were occupied by the staff.

"Hot wather?  O *cerr*tainly!" said Mary
Kate, kindly.  "Beg your pardon—" she
crushed past me to the chimney-piece, and
proceeded to grope behind photograph frames
and a crowded multitude of glass and china,
*objets d'art*.  "I left me hat pins—" here she
giggled confidentially, while, so intimate was
the arrangement of the *objets d'art*, that several
of them fell off at the farther end of the
chimney piece.  "Ah! what matther!  Sure they're
all a little broke!" said Mary Kate, wedging
them into their places again, and thrusting the
recovered hat pins into her redundant locks.
"Ye'll be wanting somethin' to eat now, I
daresay," she went on, "I'll send granne'ma in
to ye."

A brief interval ensued, during which we
furtively examined the bedclothes, and
indulged in disturbed conjecture as to the
substance that stuffed the pillows.  Their smell,
though curious, offered no basis for theory.

There came a creeping sound without, and
low down, a panel of the door was dealt a
single blow.

I said "Come in!" not without a slight
recurrence of religious terror.

A very little and ancient woman stood
there, with the trade marks of soot and
grease thick upon her.  When she curtseyed
she seemed to merge in the door mat, so
small was she and so dingy.

There was reassurance in the discovery
that she seemed as much in awe of us as we
of her.

"How would I know what the likes o' ye
would fancy?" she said, almost with despair,
and went on to hope that our visit might
prove an education into the ways of the
aristocracy of which she had long stood in
need, but she coupled the admission with a
warning that she "was very owld and very
dull."

It was a high responsibility, this position
of exponents of an unknown type, and it is
much to be regretted that we were forced to
leave our venerable disciple under the
impression that the upper classes usually
cook their own food at hotels.  It should
here be said that this expedition had not
been entered upon without a certain
foreknowledge of what it was likely to involve,
and amongst other precautions were
provisions of a portable sort.  These included
sausages, and the sausages we confided to our
old lady.

We sat in the parlour enjoying the appetite
for dinner that is one of the bright features
of a genuine holiday.  After a delay of about
half an hour, Mary Kate's head was thrust
through a narrow opening of the door.

"Granne'ma says will the little puddings
be split?"

Had the answer been Yes, and that it was
usual to serve them with cream and sugar, I
feel sure that grandmamma would have
complied.  As it was, after instructions to Mary
Kate, of a lucidity unrivalled by Mrs. Beeton,
the sausages appeared, pale, tepid, raw, in a
pie-dish, just a-wash with luke-warm water.

The holiday appetite quailed at the sight,
and the *chef* was summoned from the
conversazione still raging in the kitchen.  A
single glance at the guests told her of failure,
and, with a masterly grasp of the position,
she hurried back to the kitchen and returned
with the frying-pan.

"Keep it now yersels," she said.  "Didn't
I say to ye I was too owld?"

From that time the parlour grate led a
sullied life, but—which may have consoled
it—a thoroughly useful one.  We re-cooked
the sausages upon it; the perambulator
yielded its increase, toast, grilled beef,
sausages, who could reasonably ask for more?

We spent two days and two nights there;
days of perfect weather, spent in exploring
a coast as wild and beautiful as the heart of
holiday maker could desire, nights strangely,
almost desolately devoid of the entomological
excursions and pursuits usual to village inns,
and, in spite of the peculiarities of the
pillows, sleep was not difficult.  Or rather,
in candour it should be said, was difficult
only after the rising of the sun.  For with
the dawn, a vagrant population was astir in
the village; a street Arab community of
hens, dogs, geese and donkeys, incessant and
clarion-toned in their addresses to morn and
to each other; creatures who slept under
carts and in stray corners; who treated life
as a lounge, and regarded their owners as
suzerains merely, to whom occasional allegiance
was to be rendered, or a tributary egg
or two laid in an inaccessible place.

On the whole, the donkeys are those of
whom I can speak least temperately.  They
had, for want, possibly, of other employment,
adopted the position of town-criers to the
village, or perhaps were its prophets, perhaps
its Cassandras, and they uplifted their
testimony from sunrise till nightfall with a
poignancy that rent the very skies.  Standing
one evening on one of the low hills that
hemmed the village into its corner by the
sea, I counted easily, and with half a glance,
four of these enthusiasts, planted each on a
commanding rock or mound, and sending
his wild voice abroad over the valley.  It
was a sunny evening, after a day of sad and
opalescent beauty, and the sea had brightened
into blue and silver; the white-washed gables
and a far white lighthouse were radiant with
recovered cheerfulness, but the jackasses
were as despairful and implacable as Jeremiah.

There was but one disaster during our
brief sojourn at the Sea View Hotel.  A few
sausages and a tin of sardines remained,
"spared," as Mary Kate said, from the first
repast.  These she proposed to store, for
safety and coolness, in one of our bedrooms.
The idea not being well received, she finally
deposited them in the Post Office, which was
attached to the hotel.  But even this hiding
place was not improbable enough to hoodwink
that skilled tactician, the hotel cat, and
he, in some dark hour of the night, found and
feasted on them with, no doubt, all the
ravishing joy of a new experience.

.. _`*IN WEST CARBERY*`:

.. figure:: images/img-217.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: IN WEST CARBERY

   IN WEST CARBERY

We could not but sympathise with him.
Thanks to the Sea View Hotel that subtle
joy was also ours.

I began by saying that of the Summer
holidays the times of anticipation and of
retrospect were the times of truest pleasure.
Yet I can remember long September days
beside a sea of Mediterranean blue, the sea of
Southern Ireland, when the perfect present
asked nothing of either past or future.  The
long creek wound, blue-green as a peacock's
breast, between deep woods.  High places
of rock and heather were there, where you
could lie, "ringed with the azure world," and
see the huge liners, yes, and hear them too,
as they went throbbing and trampling along
the sun's path westward.

Those who know this place of holiday are
comparatively few, but there is at least one
distinguished name of the company—Dean
Swift, no less.  A couple of hundred years
or so ago, he spent a summer in West
Carbery, (an ivy-covered ruin, known as
Swift's Tower, testifies to the fact,) and he
forthwith made a poem about it, a Latin
poem, addressed to the Rocks of Carbery.

One gathers that it was of the nature of an
encomium, though the points selected for
description are not those that would tempt
the effete holiday maker of to-day.  Possibly
it was the Dean's majestic eighteenth-century
manner of thanking his host for "a very
pleasant visit."  I came upon it in the house
of a descendant of that host, reverently
quoted in a copy of Dr. Smith's history of the
County Cork, dated 1749.  Thanks to the
sympathetic scholarship of a contemporary
divine, the Revd. Dr. Donkin, who made a
translation of it, I am able to give some
quotations from it.  Dr. Smith thinks that
"the Dean's descriptions are as just as his
numbers are beautiful."  It is not for me to
disagree with him.  Let them—or some of
them—dignify these unworthy pages.

   |  "Lo!  From the top of yonder cliff, that shrouds
   |  Its airy head amidst the azure clouds,
   |  Hangs the huge fragment, destitute of props,
   |  Prone on the waves the rocky ruin drops.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1

..

   |  Oft too with hideous yawn, the cavern wide
   |  Presents an orifice on either side;
   |  A dismal orifice, from sea to sea
   |  Extended, pervious to the god of day.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1

..

   |  High on the cliff their nests wild pigeons make,
   |  And sea calves stable in the oozey lake ...
   |  When o'er the craggy steep without controul,
   |  Big with the blast, the raging billows roll, ...
   |  The neighbouring race, tho' wont to brave the shocks
   |  Of angry seas and run along the rocks,
   |  Now pale with terror, while the ocean foams,
   |  Fly far and wide, nor trust their native homes.
   |  The goats, while pendant from the mountain top,
   |  The wither'd herb improvident they crop,
   |  Wash'd down the precipice with sudden sweep,
   |  Leave their sweet lives beneath th' unfathomed deep."
   |

I am sorry to say that in these degenerate
times the improvident goat has lost his
ancient skill and is no longer pendant, and
the oozey lake and stabling sea calf (the
latter possibly a lingering survivor of the
Deluge) may no more be found.  None the
less, I can confidently commend the scenes
of these catastrophes to the holiday maker
of to-day.

Even now, when the sunshine of last
September has faded to a memory, and that of
next September is too far away to be even a
hope, I can still feel the soft lift of the
western wind, still hear the booming of the
waves in the deep and riven heart of the cliff.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`LOST, STOLEN, OR STRAYED`:

.. class:: center large bold

   LOST, STOLEN, OR STRAYED

.. vspace:: 2

"I couldn't find your apron, Ma'am," said
the "Why not," imported a month before,
with bare feet and a forelock like a Shetland
pony.  She belonged to the drift-weed of the
household, and would, perhaps, now be
ranked as a "tweeny"; her class derived its
title from its genial habit of replying "Why
not?" to any given order, without considering
or knowing whether such were its business.
The "Why not" was at present flushed with
long search, and with that sub-resentment
and assumption of being suspected that all
servants run up like a flag when valuables
are missing.

"There isn't one in the house, but I'm
afther axing about it.  It must be it was
waylaid."

It may scarcely be necessary to explain
that she meant mislaid, but in her limited
skill in English she had expressed the real
trend of the things in the establishment.
They were not, as a rule, lost, nor in the
strict sense of the word were they stolen;
they were waylaid, snatched from their own
walk of life and applied to some pressing
necessity of the moment.  The apron might
have been taken to clean a bicycle, or to stay
the flow of spilt ink, or to bandage the foal's
leg, and the "Why not" probably had been
a party to its fate.

It is on record that in past ages a punt,
used by the master for his own pleasure, was
waylaid after it had been suitably laid up in
the coach-house for the winter.  When
Spring came, and the time of the singing of
birds and the painting of boats set in, the
punt was not.

It was "gone this long time;" it was "as
rotten as that the boards was falling out of it
undher the people's feet."  "You couldn't
tell what thim women in the laundhry would
catch hold of when they'd be short of fire,
an' God knows a person's heart would be
broke that'd have to be lookin' for sticks for
them."

Having arrived at the fact that his boat
had been burned, the Master yielded to the
inevitable.

"Begad!" he said, regarding the culprits
through his spectacles, "I believe you'd burn
myself if I'd light!"

The march of education has merely added
scope to the art of waylaying.  We have in
the West of Ireland "heavy showers and
showers in between," as an old woman put
it when describing a wet day.  In the course
of one of the in-betweens a party from the
Big House took refuge in a wayside cabin,
and although it is not desirable or polite
to observe too curiously the environment in
wayside cabins, a glimpse of a green
morocco-bound volume on a shelf, between a
salt-herring and a hair-brush was too much for
the visitor's good breeding.  Averting our eyes
from the hair-brush we identified the volume
as a copy of Byron's "Marino Faliero," which
had long since disappeared from the drawing-room
book-case in which it had been wont to
stand in the decorous neglect which, I
imagine, is not uncommonly its portion.

No one knew anything about the book.
It had apparently flown like a storm-beaten
bird to the cabin door, and, out of pure
compassion, was given house room.  From
internal evidence it would seem to have
inspired considerable interest in a family of
the name of Sweeny, whose autographs
profusely adorned its wide margins.  Later
on we heard that one, Patsey Sweeny, when
dying, had asked for the solace of a book.
The Big House had been applied to for
something suitable.  We shall never know
what influenced the "Why not" in her
selection of "Marino Faliero;" we shall
never know anything in that, or in any
similar matter, with any certainty, but we do
not expect certainty in the West of Ireland.
"Marino Faliero" returned to its fellows,
importing a rich odour of tobacco and turf
smoke, but otherwise, unfortunately, dumb to
its adventures.

.. _`*PATSEY SWEENY*`:

.. figure:: images/img-226.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: PATSEY SWEENY

   PATSEY SWEENY

Subsequently a daughter of the house of
Sweeny showed much aptitude in the art of
waylaying.  A Confirmation was in prospect
at the chapel, at which Miss Julia Sweeny,
aged eleven, was to be presented as a
candidate, the occasion requiring that she
should be dressed in purest white from her
oily curls to her nimble and naked feet.
When the day of transformation arrived, the
Young Ladies from the Big House turned
out to view it, and as the candidate knelt in
angelic decorum in the chapel, the youngest
of the Young Ladies made the gratifying
discovery that her new white canvas tennis
shoes were on the feet of Miss Sweeny.  On
such a day it would have been a gross want
of taste to have mentioned the matter, and
that evening the tennis shoes re-appeared
unostentatiously in their owner's room.  No
comment was made on either side, but with
the sensitive perception of the clinical
thermometer, the Sweeny family remained invisible
for several weeks, after which Mrs. Sweeny
arrived with a score of eggs as a present for
the youngest Young Lady, and both sides
felt that a disagreeable estrangement had
been handsomely closed.

.. _`*MRS. SWEENY*`:

.. figure:: images/img-227.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: MRS. SWEENY

   MRS. SWEENY

The adventures of the Gravy Spoon were
of the simpler household variety, inexplicable,
disconnected, yet following in a certain order
a track familiar to all Irish householders.
The gravy spoon was antique, slender of
curve, and delicately ornamented along its
graceful handle.  Every servant connected
with the spoon will now testify that the
handle was cracked from the day it was
made.  One even asserts that "When ye'd
strike it agin anything there'd be a roaring
in it," which, of course, leaves no more to be
said.  That its prolonged absence from the
table should have been unnoticed was well
in the character of things: several months, in
fact, passed before the lady of the house
observed the cook skimming cream with a
singular and dwarfish weapon, which proved to be
the bowl and one inch of the handle of the
gravy spoon.  The explanation opened with
the formula, "Sure that was broke always,"
followed almost inevitably by the statement
that "it was broke when the young gentlemen
was home."  From the mouth of a third
witness came the information that "Master
Lionel broke it one day at luncheon helping
curry."  History was silent as to the
composition of this remarkable curry.  The cook
entered no protest.  Memory was not at any
time her strongest point, judging at least
from her own guileless confession on one of
the many occasions when dinner was very late.

"Sure I mislaid the pudding, and there I
was hunting the house for it, and where
would it be afther all but in the oven!"

The search for the keys was, of course, a
mere commonplace of every day.  The storeroom
was carefully locked up, and the bunch,
an enormous and for the most part obsolete
collection, was then taken severely upstairs
and secreted.  The next event was, usually,
the departure beyond ken or call of the person
who had secreted the keys, followed, at a
greater or less interval, by the crisis when
they became essential to the progress of
things, by the opening scenes of the hunt,
and its gradual broadening to full cry
throughout the house.  During this part of the
comedy the servants, who were perfectly
acquainted with every known hiding-place,
remained coldly intent on their business, and
the hunters deferred as long as possible the
humiliating moment when their co-operation
must be invited.  When it came, the keys
came with it.

To the lost and strayed the ashpit in the
yard occasionally offered harbourage, where,
among the hot turf ashes and evil smells,
oblivion came quickly.  Sometimes, when
search ran high, as lately in the case of three
errant postal orders, the ashpit was placed
under martial law, and yielded strange spoils
to its inquisitors.  Instead of the postal
orders came forth in the first instance a
letter, dated 1805, from an historical
personage, once Chief Justice of Ireland.  The
letter itself, in remarkably good preservation,
described in choice and flowing English a
fortnight spent in Bath, an experience in
remarkable contrast to the ashpit.  The
second trophy was a cheque for eight pounds,
recent and uncashed.  The third was a tea
cosy, of old gold and peacock blue satin,
somewhat scorched by turf ashes, but new,
and preserving in its quilted interior the label
with which it emerged from its parent bazaar.
There was other booty of an inconsiderable
sort, but the postal orders were not found.
The net result of the investigation was that
every servant in the house hovered on the
verge of giving warning, till the day when
the postal orders arrived as stowaways in a
letter from South Africa.  The writer made
no mention of their presence in the envelope,
nor has he since been able to account for it,
nor, to this hour, has any reasonable theory
been brought forward to explain their wanderings.

Lest any hasty judgment should here be
formed as to the conduct of Irish households,
it is well to mention that other households,
not Irish, have had experiences as remarkable.

A family of my acquaintance, blameless in
domestic life and even notable in virtue, has
established what must be, I think, a singular
renown at Scotland Yard in the matter of
lost valuables.  During a stay of two nights
under that hospitable roof, three several and
severe disasters passed like winds through
the establishment, causing much mental and
physical stress, and a vast amount of cab hire.

The first was the loss of a diamond star,
to recover which Scotland Yard, much
concerned, put forth detectives and established
a network of theories.  It was subsequently
found under the owner's bed.  The second
was less showy but more acute, a purse lost
while shopping.  Scotland Yard (not perhaps
without a memory of the diamond star) was
guarded, but still sympathetic.  Several
purses had been brought in; would the
owner describe hers?  The owner now asks
us to believe that on being confronted with
this question she found herself unable to
remember what her purse was like.  Then
perhaps she could mention the sum of money
it contained?  Lamentable to relate, on this
point also memory was a blank.  After so
flagrant a breakdown the ordinary individual
would have ended the interview in the lockup,
but the claimant of the purse, in addition
to being young and lovely, was by no means
ordinary.  As a matter of fact she was
invited to try again, and this time was enabled
to say that she believed the purse had a hole
in it.  Further details of the interview were
withheld, but we were given to understand
that though the purse was not restored, the
excellent relations with the officials remained
unimpaired.

The third catastrophe was the loss of a
dressing-bag, containing much of value, and
forgotten, in the customary way, in a cab.
This was a trifling matter; a mere occasion
for a morning call at Scotland Yard, where
the officials, with the special and protective
smile reserved for this family, produced the
bag.  It was taken airily home in a hansom,
its recovery was announced to an admiring
luncheon table, and the peculiar success of
the family with Scotland Yard was discussed.

"But where is the bag?"

And even with the words came the grey
dawn of the discovery that the bag had once
more been left in the hansom.

To follow the subsequent events would be
an unkindness.  It is enough to indicate that
even Scotland Yard and its special smile were
on this occasion of no avail.

To lose things by accident is, as we all
know, calamitously easy, to lose them
designedly is not only difficult but takes nerve
and, at the right moment, want of principle.

There was once a red silk parasol, of the
genus known to the trade as an *en tout cas*,
which, literally translated, meant that in
sunny weather it was cumbrous and heavy,
and that during showers it wept tears of
indelible maroon upon its possessor.  It
passed through an unloved youth into an
abhorred middle age, with a crooked nose, a
swelled handle, and a mottled complexion,
unfit for society, yet not sufficiently decayed
for a jumble sale.  I and another went to
Dublin for a week, and on starting found
that the red umbrella had been put on the car
by the servants, who held it in high esteem.
We did not give it a thought; it would, of
course, return upon the car to its lair in the
back hall.  As the train moved out into
sunlight the red umbrella revealed itself, looming
upon us through the netting where a careful
porter had placed it.  Not as yet recognising
the hand of Fate, we lightly regarded it, and
determining that it should be left in the
train, straightway forgot its existence until
an equally attentive porter placed it
respectfully in our cab in Dublin.  Had we kept
our heads we should have offered it to him,
murmuring something about having no
change.  Like most inspirations, this,
unfortunately, did not occur to us till some five
minutes later, but it suggested the idea of
giving it to a housemaid, and on this
understanding it accompanied us to our destination.
During a week it disgraced our host's
umbrella stand, and during that week we
discovered that the housemaid, who, from
the first, was quelling, was a Plymouth
Sister, and would probably have regarded
such a gift as an attempt to sap her religious
convictions.  When, on departure, it was
deliberately forgotten, it was the Plymouth
Sister who snatched it from the umbrella
stand and breathlessly hurled it into our cab.
It was obvious that to throw it out of the
window in streets crowded with traffic would
merely have involved a heavy fee to an inevitable
rescuer; we reserved it for the window of
the train, confidently, even enjoyably.  Yet,
such was its inveteracy, in the train the
spell of forgetfulness again held us.  The
moments when it was remembered were
precisely when the train stopped at stations,
or the windows were blocked with fellow
passengers, who would probably have pulled
the communication cord to retrieve it.  As
we neared the long bridge of Athlone a
final resolve was made.  The network of big
girders glided by, the broad Shannon glittered
far below.  The red umbrella shot like a spear
through the girders and dropped out of sight.
"So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur—"

The train crept into Athlone Station and
there entered upon a prolonged wait among
roomy and silent platforms.  We exulted at
leisure over the reel umbrella.  A hurrying
foot was distantly heard; doors opened and
shut in rapid succession down the length of
the train.  We disinterred our tickets.  The
door of our carriage was opened and a heated
boy put in his face.

"Did anny one here lose a red umbrella?"

It was the supreme moment in a duel with
Destiny.

I replied to his question with a firm and
simple negative.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHILDREN OF THE CAPTIVITY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHILDREN OF THE CAPTIVITY

.. vspace:: 2

The road to Connemara lies white across
the memory, white and very quiet.  In that
far west of Galway, the silence dwells pure
upon the spacious country, away to where
the Twelve Pins make a gallant line against
the northern sky.  It comes in the heathery
wind, it borrows peace from the white cottage
gables on the hill side, it is accented by the
creeping approach of a turf cart, rocking
behind its thin grey pony.  Little else stirs,
save the ducks that sail on a wayside pool to
the push of their yellow propellers; away
from the road, on a narrow oasis of arable
soil, a couple of women are digging potatoes;
their persistent voices are borne on the
breeze that blows warm over the blossoming
boglands and pink heather.

Scarcely to be analysed is that fragrance of
Irish air; the pureness of bleak mountains is
in it, the twang of turf smoke is in it, and
there is something more, inseparable from
Ireland's green and grey landscapes, wrought
in with her bowed and patient cottages, her
ragged walls, and eager rivers, and intelligible
only to the spirit.

Over in England there are clustered
cottages half buried in rich meadows, covered
with roses to the edge of their mellow roof
tiles, shaded by venerable and venerated
trees, pleasant resting-places for the memory.
From one of them comes forth a mild-faced
elderly woman in a mushroom hat, the
embodiment of respectability and hard work.
If you talk to her you will be impressed by
her sincerity, her reticence, her reverence for
cleanliness, and further, as the conversation
progresses, by her total lack of humour, and
her conscientious recital of details not
essential to the story.  You will admire and
like her, and she will bore you; so will her
husband, with the serious face and sober blue
eyes, and you will be ashamed of being
bored.

.. _`"*IN A LONELY COTTAGE*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-241.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: IN A LONELY COTTAGE

   IN A LONELY COTTAGE

Approach one of these lonely cottages on
a Connemara road, and you will find it
crooked without quaintness, clumsy, dirty,
distressful; yet there will come forth to you
round the manure-heaps in front of the door
a human being, probably barefooted, and
better skilled in Irish than in English, who
will converse with you in the true sense of
the word, that is to say, with give and take,
with intuition, and with easy and instant
sense of humour.  While you talk to her you
can observe two elderly women in red petticoats
and black cloaks advancing on the long
road from Galway, carrying heavy baskets
from the market: their eyes are quick, their
faces clearly cut and foreign-looking.  Were
it in your power to listen to what they are
saying, you would be entertained as you have
seldom been, by highly seasoned gossip,
narrative, both humorous and tragic, and
wide and exhaustive criticism.  A cart
lumbers by, loaded with men and women,
their teeth, one would say, loosened in their
heads by the clattering and jolting, but their
flow of ideas and language unshaken.  The
two women in the cloaks have arrived at a
juncture at which they must stand still in the
ecstasy of the story; the narrator shoots out
a spike of a thumb, and digs her auditor in
the chest to barb the point of the jest as it is
delivered.  The recipient swings backward
from the waist with a yell of appreciation,
they hitch their cloaks on their shoulders, and
enter on the Committee stage of the affair as
they move on again.

One might safely say that this bare and
still country carries an amount of good talk,
nimble, trenchant, and humorous, to the
square mile, that the fat and comfortable
plains of England could never rival.  It has
been so for centuries, and all the while the
sons and daughters of Connemara have
remained aloof and self-centred, hardly even
aware of the marching life of England, least
of all aware that Ireland holds the post of
England's Court Jester.  Others of their
countrymen, more sophisticated, more astute,
probably less agreeable, have not been slow
to realise it.  Perhaps they would have
refused the Cap and Bells had they known
the privilege entailed.

"As for our harps," said the Children of
the Captivity, "we hanged them up upon
the trees that are therein."  That was when
the songs of Zion were required of them in
the strange land, and the strong Euphrates
saw their tears.  The sympathy of all
the centuries has been theirs for that
poignant hour; yet, as far as can be known,
they were spared an extremer pang.  It is
nowhere recorded that the people of the
strange land made any attempt to sing the
songs of Zion to the Children of Israel.

When the Children of Erin hang up their
harps in the Babylon of to-day, the last
thing they wish to emulate is that passionate
silence of the Israelites.  They hang them
up as those do who enter in and possess the
land, and the songs of Zion have not faltered
on their lips.  A captive race they may be,
but their national desire to "take the floor"
has remained unshaken.  They have
discovered that an Irish brogue has a market
value, and the songs of Zion have gone
through many editions and held many
audiences, since the days when Tom Moore
exploited his country in London drawing-rooms.
The moment of bitterness is when
the English become fired with the notion of
singing them for themselves.

Perhaps it comes about from English love
of a theory, especially an hereditary theory,
that has been handed down to them,
well-thumbed by preceding generations.  They
have established a theory for the Irish,
and particularly and confidently for Irish
humour, and from owning the theory there
is but a step to becoming proprietors also
of the humour.  Myself, when young, was
nourished upon a work named "Near Home,"
and in the edition current at the time, I
remember that the Irish were indulgently
described as "a merry people, and fond of
pigs."  The hereditary theory could hardly
have been better summarised.  The average
Englishman owns an Irish story or two, and
is genially certain of his ability to tell it,
with all necessary embellishment of accent
and expression.  As often as possible he
tells it to an Irishman.

Elusive as running water is the brogue
of the Irish peasant; hardly attained even
by those who have known its tune from
childhood.  They, at least, know how it
ought to be, and with this knowledge in
their hearts, they have to sit in dreary
submission while the stage Irishman convulses
the English audience; they must smile,
however galvanically, when friends,
otherwise irreproachable, regale them with the
Irish story in all its stale exuberance of Pat
and the Pig, or expound for their benefit
that epitome of *vieux jeu*, the Saxon
conception of an Irish Bull.

As to Irish Bulls, it could be explained,
were it of any avail, that they convey a
finer shade of meaning than the downright
English language will otherwise admit of.

"If ye were to be killed crossing a fence
ye'd be all right!" said a looker-on to one
whose horse had turned head over heels in
the middle of a level pasture, "but if ye
were killed on the flat o' the field ye'd never
hold up your head again!"

Here was the effort of the true impressionist
to create an effect regardless of
the means.

"Jerry was a grand man.  When he'd be
idle itself he'd be busy!"

Had the author of this commendation
merely said that Jerry's industry was
unceasing, he would have been unassailable as
to diction, but he would have left his
audience cold.  It is a melancholy fact that
the English mind contrives to miss the
artist's intention, and fastens unalterably on
the obvious contradiction of terms.

As in converse, so, and with deeper
disaster, is it in literature.  There is scarcely
a week in the life of the English comic
papers that is guiltless of some heavy-handed
caricature of Irish humour, daubed with false
idiom and preposterous spelling, secure in its
consciousness of being conventional.  It is
better to accuse a man of having broken a
commandment than to tell him that his sense
of humour appears to you defective, so, leaving
that branch of the subject open, I will only
mention that there are alive many excellent
people who will never, on this side of the
grave, be convinced that the Irish peasant
does not say "indade" for "indeed,"
"belave" for "believe," or "swape" for
"sweep."  Inborn and ingrained knowledge of
such points is essential; if, among many
anomalies, a rule can be found, it seems to be
that in an Irish brogue the diphthong "ea"
changes to "a," as in "say" for "sea," while
the double e remains untampered with; thus
you might hear a person say "I was very
wake last week."

Writers of fiction have done much that is
painful in dealing with Irish people.
Thackeray's Captain Costigan spoke like a
stage edition of a Dublin car-driver, which is
not what one would expect in a gentleman
who, according to his own account, "bore his
Majesty's Commission in the foighting
Hundtherd and Third," and his introduction
of Arthur Pendennis as "a person of refoined
moind, emiable manners, and a sinsare lover
of poethry" is not convincing or even very
amusing.  It is strange that the error of
making Irish ladies and gentlemen talk like
their servants should to this hour have a
fascination for novelists.  It is not so very long
since that, in a magazine, I read of a
high-born Irish Captain of Hussars, who, in
a moment of emotion, exclaimed: "Howly
Mither av Hiven!"

Dealing with present day writers is
treading on delicate ground, and it is with
diffidence that one arraigns one of the most
enthralling of living story-tellers.  Few of
his works have been more popular than
"Soldiers Three," yet to me and others of
my country, it is the narratives of Private
Mulvany that give least pleasure.  "Gurl"
for girl, "Thimber" for timber, and "Quane"
for Queen, are conventions that have
unfortunately proved irresistible; they are
taken from a random page or two, and there
is no page free of such.

But, after all, right or wrong, pronunciation
and spelling are small things in the presentment
of any dialect.  The vitalising power is
in the rhythm of the sentence, the turn of
phrase, the knowledge of idiom, and of,
beyond all, the attitude of mind.  A laborious
system of spelling exasperates the reader,
jades the eye, and fails to convince the ear.
If, in illustration, I again quote Mr. Kipling,
it is because of the conspicuousness of his
figure in literature; he can afford to occupy
the position of target, indifferent alike to miss
or bull's-eye.

Stripped of its curious and stifling
superfluities of spelling, a sentence of
Mulvaney's runs thus:

"Oh, boys, they were more lovely than
the like of any loveliness in heaven; ay,
their little bare feet were better than the
white hands of a Lord's lady, and their
mouths were like puckered roses, and their
eyes were bigger and darker than the eyes
of any living women I've seen."

.. _`*CHILDREN OF THE CAPTIVITY*`:

.. figure:: images/img-249.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: CHILDREN OF THE CAPTIVITY

   CHILDREN OF THE CAPTIVITY

With the exception of "the like" there
is nothing in the wording of this panegyric
that would even suggest it had been uttered
by an Irishman.  To stud the page with "ut"
and "av" instead of "it" and "of" is of no
avail.  Irish people do not say these things;
there is a sound that is a half-tone between
the two, not to be captured by English
voices, still less by English vowels.  The
shortcoming is, of course, trivial to those
who do not suffer because of it, but want of
perception of word and phrase and turn of
thought means more than mere artistic
failure, it means want of knowledge of the
wayward and shrewd and sensitive minds
that are at the back of the dialect.

The very wind that blows softly over
brown acres of bog carries perfumes and
sounds that England does not know: the
women digging the potato-land are talking
of things that England does not understand.
The question that remains is whether
England will ever understand.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`SLIPPER'S A B C OF FOX-HUNTING`:

.. _`*SLIPPER'S A B C OF FOX-HUNTING*`:

.. class:: center large bold white-space-pre-line

   SLIPPER'S A B C OF
   FOX-HUNTING

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`A is for Alphabet`:

.. figure:: images/img-253.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: A is for Alphabet

   A is for Alphabet

   |  "A is for Alphabet.
   |    Faith!  I'm in dhread
   |  It's hardly I'll battle it out up to Z."

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`B is for Buck`:

.. figure:: images/img-254.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: B is for Buck

   B is for Buck

   |  "B is for Buck.
   |    Your best howlt is the spurs,
   |  And make sure they're dhruv home
   |    When ye're goin' through furze."

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`C is for Check`:

.. figure:: images/img-255.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: C is for Check

   C is for Check

   |  "C is for Check.
   |    If ye go any faster
   |  Ye'll be apt to be dhrawn into chat,
   |    With the Master."

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`D was the Dhrain`:

.. figure:: images/img-256.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: D was the Dhrain

   D was the Dhrain

   |  "D was the Dhrain that the fox got inside in.
   |    Bad luck to the cowardly shkamer for hidin'!"

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`E came from England`:

.. figure:: images/img-257.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: E came from England

   E came from England

   |  "E came from England, and wanted no guide.
   |    Now he's larning the lie o' the bogs,
   |  From inside!"

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`F is Full Cry`:

.. figure:: images/img-258.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: F is Full Cry

   F is Full Cry

   |  "F is Full Cry.
   |    And it's hard to say which
   |  This lad or the hounds
   |    Lets the powerfullest screech!"

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`G stands for Geese`:

.. figure:: images/img-259.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: G stands for Geese

   G stands for Geese

   |  "G stands for Geese.
   |    Look at Gollagher now,
   |  And himself in the thick of a Family Row!"

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`H is for Horn`:

.. figure:: images/img-260.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: H is for Horn

   H is for Horn

   |  "H is for Horn.
   |    The few that can blow it
   |  Are born to the thrick,
   |    Just the same as a poet!"

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`I is meself`:

.. figure:: images/img-261.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: I is meself

   I is meself

   |  "I is meself.
   |    No great shakes, as you see,
   |  But there's more than one gerr'l
   |    Is wishin' for me!"

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`J is Jog Home`:

.. figure:: images/img-262.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: J is Jog Home

   J is Jog Home

   |  "J is Jog Home.
   |    A dhry misht from the say
   |  Very often comes on,
   |    Just to soften the way!"

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`K is the Kick`:

.. figure:: images/img-263.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: K is the Kick

   K is the Kick

   |  "K is the Kick that killed Kinahane dead.
   |    I'd be sorry to mention
   |  The words that he said!"



.. _`M is the Master`:

.. figure:: images/img-264.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: M is the Master

   M is the Master

   |  "M is the Master,
   |    Blaspheemious of habit;
   |  If you would catch hardship
   |    Cheer hounds to a rabbit!

   |  "And L is the Lep
   |    That he threw in the passion.
   |  Be cripes!  But thim dogs
   |    Got their 'nough of a thrashin'!"

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`N was a Nanny-goat`:

.. figure:: images/img-265.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: N was a Nanny-goat

   N was a Nanny-goat

   |  "N was a Nanny-goat up on the hill.
   |    Faith!  Some o' thim puppies
   |  Is hunting her still!"

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`O's the Obstackle`:

.. figure:: images/img-266.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: O's the Obstackle

   O's the Obstackle

   |  "O's the Obstackle
   |    Tim met in the way.
   |  But the mare being free
   |    He got no great delay."

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`P was the Price`:

.. figure:: images/img-267.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: P was the Price

   P was the Price

   |  "P was the Price of a nate little bin
   |    That the foxes ate over and over agin.
   |  And bedad! if it comes to a Quarrel,

   |            (that's Q)
   |  I'll back Biddy Burke
   |    To out-hucksther a Jew!

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`R is for River`:

.. figure:: images/img-268.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: R is for River

   R is for River

   |  "R is for River.
   |    Young Reilly kept cool.
   |  If ye give him fair warning
   |    Young Reilly's no fool.

   |  "And S was the Saxon
   |    That gave him the warning.
   |  I'm thinkin' he'll hardly be dhry
   |    Before morning."


.. vspace:: 3

.. _`T is a Tenant`:

.. figure:: images/img-269.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: T is a Tenant

   T is a Tenant

   |  "T is a Tenant
   |    About to vacate
   |  The site once well filled by his
   |    Family Sate.

   |  "And U's the Umbrella
   |    That spilt the poor fella.
   |  What call have owld women
   |    To want an Umbrella?"

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`V's the Vet`:

.. figure:: images/img-270.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: V's the Vet

   V's the Vet

   |  "V's the Vet.
   |    A nate surgeon, he'll 'knife it and chance it'!
   |  And he'll 'cut out the work'
   |    Without using his lancet!"

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`Here's the Wrecker`:

.. figure:: images/img-271.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: Here's the Wrecker

   Here's the Wrecker

   |  "Here's the Wrecker, and Earth Stopper,
   |    Bowld Willy Roche.
   |  Sure they say a fried egg's the one thing
   |    He can't poach!"

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`X is the finish`:

.. figure:: images/img-271.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: X is the finish

   X is the finish

   |  "I sthruggled this long time
   |    And couldn't find one
   |  Dacent, sportsmanlike word
   |    That thim letters begun.

   |  "But at all events X is the finish of Fox.
   |    His Y Z ye can't see
   |  He's to ground in the rocks!"

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center small

*Printed by Ballantyne & Co. Limited, London*

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 3

.. _`*BY THE SAME AUTHORS*`:

.. class:: center large bold

   *BY THE SAME AUTHORS*

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH R.M.
    With 31 Illustrations by E. OE.
    SOMERVILLE.  Crown 8vo, 6s.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

ALL ON THE IRISH SHORE:
    Irish Sketches.  With 10 Illustrations
    by E. OE. SOMERVILLE.  Crown 8vo, 6s.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

THE REAL CHARLOTTE
    Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

THE SILVER FOX
    Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

AN IRISH COUSIN
    Crown 8vo, 6s.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

SLIPPER'S A B C OF FOX-HUNTING
    By E. OE. SOMERVILLE, M.F.H.  With
    Illustrations in Colour by the Author.
    4to, boards, 10s. 6d. net.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center

   LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

.. vspace:: 6

.. pgfooter::
