THE FESTIVAL OF DEATH

ON THE ROAD TO DOON WELL.

We resume our journey, and after some rough and steep climbing reach the plateau head. Loch Nalughraman, a deep pool of mountain water, lies to the east of us, shimmering in the grey morning light. All around is bogland, of a dull red colour, and soaking with rain. We make through this, jumping from tuft to tuft, and from hummock to hummock, as best we can, going over the shoe-mouth occasionally in slush. In an hour or so we come on a bridle-path of white limestones, set ontheir flat in the spongy turf. We follow this for a while, and in time reach the poor village of Laguna. Entering into one of the houses I greet the bean-a’-tighe in Irish. She rises quickly from her seat by the hearth where she has been spinning—a crowd of very young children clinging to her skirts. She is a dark woman, with mellow breasts, and fine eyes and teeth. She is barefooted, as usual, and wears the coloured head-dress of her kind, curtseying to me modestly as I approach. She answers me in Irish—the only language she knows—and bids me come in. “Beir isteach,” she says. A young man of five-and-twenty or thereabouts is weaving in the room beyond. (I recognised the heavy click-clack, click-clack, click-clack of the loom as I entered.) Hearing my enquiry he rises up from his seat, drops his setting-stick, and offers to guide us as far as the southern edge of the hill. “You will see the Glen road below you,” he says, coming out in his bare feet into the open, and speaking volubly, like one used to good speech. “Look at it beyond,” he says, “winding from the Carrick side. Keep south, and you will strike it after two miles of a descent.” The woman brings a bowl of goat’s milk to my sister. She drinks it readily, for she is thirsty after her climb. Then, thanking the poor people for their hospitality, we say, “Slán agaibh,” and press forward on our journey to Glen-Columcille.

We reach the high-road in about half-an-hour, near a school-house, shining white in the sun, and busy with the hum of children singing over their lessons. Things lookmore familiar now. We pass many houses, with fleeces of dyed wool—green and blue and madder—drying on bushes outside the doors, and men busy stacking turf and thatching. Here and there on the road flocks of geese lie sunning themselves, head-under-wing. As we draw near they get up and face us with protruding necks, hissing viciously. Dogs bark at us occasionally, but not often. (I had heard ill accounts of the Donegal dogs from travellers, but on the whole, my experience of them has not been quite so bad as I had been led to expect.) Slieve League rises on our left, a dark, shadowy bulk of mountain, shutting off the view to the south. All around is moorland, with a stream in spate foaming through a depression in it, and little patches of tilled land here and there, and the inevitable brown-thatched cabin and the peat-reek over it. After some miles’ travelling we come on a little folk-shop by the road—a shop where one might buy anything from a clay-pipe or a lemon to Napoleon’s Book of Fate. The window looks tempting, so we go in. The shopkeeper is a quiet-mannered little man, not very old, I would think, but with greyish hair, and eyes that look as if they were bound round with red tape—burnt out of his head with snuff and peat-smoke. We ask him has he any buttermilk to sell. He hasn’t any, unfortunately—he is just run out of it—so we content ourselves with Derry biscuits, made up in penny cartons, and half a dozen hen-eggs to suck on the way. Some people may shiver at the idea of it, but raw eggs are as sustaining a thing as one could take on a journey! Wepay our score, and get under way again. At a bridge where the road forks we sit down and eat our simple repast. A bridge has always a peculiar fascination for me—especially in an open country like this where one’s horizon is not limited by trees and hedges—and I could spend hours dawdling over it, watching the play of sun and shadow on the water as it foams away under the arches. Here there is a delightful sense of space and quietness. The heather-ale is in our hearts, the water sings and the wind blows, and one ceases to trouble about time and the multitude of petty vexations that worry the townsman out of happiness. Did I say one ceases to trouble about time? Even here it comes, starting one like a guilty thing. We reach Meenacross Post-office at four-thirty, and an hour later see the Atlantic tumbling through rain on the age-worn strand of Glen-Columcille.

I metan old man on the road, and his face as yellow as dyer’s rocket. “Walk easy past that little house beyond,” says he in a whisper, turning round and pointing with his staff into the valley. “There’s a young girl in it, and she celebrating the festival of death.”

Throughblown rain and darkness I see the Atlantic tumble in white, ghost-like masses on the strand. Beevna is a shadow, the crosses shadows. Only one friendly light burns in the valley. The patter of rain and the dull boom of the surf ring ceaselessly in myears. The hills brood: my thoughts brood with them. I stare into the sunset—a far-drawn, scarlet trail—with mute, wondering eyes. Remoteness grips me, and is become a reality in this ultimate mearing of a grey, ultimate land.

I haveoften heard it said that what passes for folk-lore is in reality book-lore, or what began as book-lore got into the oral tradition and handed down through the generations by word of mouth. A young Ardara man, a poet and dreamer in his way, told me that poetry most frequently came to him when he was near water; wandering, say, by the edge of Lochros, or looking down from Bracky Bridge at the stream as it forced its way through impeding boulders to the sea. I asked him had he ever read “The Colloquy of the Two Sages(1)”? He said that he had not. I told him that in that MS. occurred the passage:ar bá baile fallsigthe éicsi dogrés lasna filedu for brú uisci,i.e., “for the poets thought that the place where poetry was revealed always was upon the brink of water.” Nettled somewhat, he confessed that he got the idea from his father, aseanchaidhe, since dead, who knew something of Irish MSS., and who perhaps had read the “Colloquy,” or at all events, had heard of it. But apart from the fact of the thing having been given him by his father, he felt that it was true in his own experience—that poetry always came to him more readily when he was near water.

NEAR ALTON LOCH.

A dark, wet morning, with the mist driving in swaths over the hills. I met an old man on the road. “There’s somebody a-hanging this morning,” says he. “It’s fearful dark!”

Thereis a lot of the wanderer in me, and no wonder, I suppose; for I have the swallow-mark—a wise man once showed it to me on my hand—and that means that I must always be going journeys, whether in the flesh or in the spirit, or both. “The swallow-mark is on you,” says he. “You will go wandering with the airs of the world. You will cheat the Adversary himself, even that he drops his corroding-drop on you!” And as I am a wanderer, so the heart in me opens to its kind. I love a brown face, a clear eye, and an honest walk more than anything; if in a man, good; if in a woman, better. And why people look for the cover of a roof, and the sun shining, I never can make out. Sunshine and the open, the wind blowing, travelling betimes and resting betimes, with my back to the field and my knees to the sky, a copy of Raftery or Borrow in my pocket to dip into when the mood is on me—and I am supremely happy!

I seethree women by a river: they are so close to me that I can hear them talking and laughing. One of them is an oldish creature, the other two are young and dark. They are on their knees on thebank, beetling clothes. One of them gets up—a fine, white-skinned girl—and tucking her petticoats about her thighs, goes into the stream and swishes the clothes several times to and fro in the brown-clear water. Then she throws them out to her companions on the bank, and the beetling process is repeated—each garment being laid on a flat stone and pounded vigorously until clean. The women do not see me (I am standing on a bridge, with a rowan-bush partly between them and me), so I can watch them to my heart’s content.

Thesea is one of those things you cannot argue with. You must accept it on its own terms, or leave it alone. And I like a man to be that way: calm at times, rough at times, kind at times, treacherous at times, but at heart unchanging:not to be argued with, but accepted. Is not the comparison apter than one thinks? Is not a man and his passions as divine and turbulent as anything under the sun?

A ballad-singerhas come into Ardara. It is late afternoon. He stands in the middle of the Diamond—a sunburnt, dusty figure, a typical Ishmael and stroller of the roads. The women have come to their doors to hear him, and a benchful of police, for lack of something better to do, are laughing at him from the barrack front. The ballad he is singing is about Bonaparte and the Poor Old Woman. Then he changes his tune to “The Spanish Lady”—a Dublin street-song:

As I walked down thro’ Dublin cityAt the hour of twelve in the night,Who should I spy but a Spanish lady,Washing her feet by candlelight.First she washed them, and then she dried themOver a fire of amber coal:Never in all my life did I seeA maid so neat about the sole!

As I walked down thro’ Dublin cityAt the hour of twelve in the night,Who should I spy but a Spanish lady,Washing her feet by candlelight.

As I walked down thro’ Dublin city

At the hour of twelve in the night,

Who should I spy but a Spanish lady,

Washing her feet by candlelight.

First she washed them, and then she dried themOver a fire of amber coal:Never in all my life did I seeA maid so neat about the sole!

First she washed them, and then she dried them

Over a fire of amber coal:

Never in all my life did I see

A maid so neat about the sole!

A STREET IN ARDARA.

Finally he gives “I’m a Good Old Rebel,” a ballad of the type that became so popular in the Southern States of America after the Civil war:

I’m a good old rebel—that’s what I am,And for this fair land of freedom I don’t care a damn;I’m glad I fought agin it, I only wish we’d won,And I don’t want no one-horse pardon for anything I done.I followed old Marse Robert for four years nigh about,Got wounded in three places and starved at Point Look-Out:I cotched the rheumatism a-campin’ in the snow,But I killed a chance of Yankees, and I’d like to kill some moe.Two hundred thousand Yankees is stiff in Southern dust,We got two hundred thousand before they conquered us:They died of Southern fever and Southern steel and shot—I wish it was two millions instead of what we got!And now the war is over and I can’t fight them any more,But I ain’t a-goin’ to love them—that’s sartin shor’;And I don’t want no one-horse pardon for what I was and am,And I won’t be reconstructed, and I don’t care a damn!

I’m a good old rebel—that’s what I am,

And for this fair land of freedom I don’t care a damn;

I’m glad I fought agin it, I only wish we’d won,

And I don’t want no one-horse pardon for anything I done.

I followed old Marse Robert for four years nigh about,Got wounded in three places and starved at Point Look-Out:I cotched the rheumatism a-campin’ in the snow,But I killed a chance of Yankees, and I’d like to kill some moe.

I followed old Marse Robert for four years nigh about,

Got wounded in three places and starved at Point Look-Out:

I cotched the rheumatism a-campin’ in the snow,

But I killed a chance of Yankees, and I’d like to kill some moe.

Two hundred thousand Yankees is stiff in Southern dust,We got two hundred thousand before they conquered us:They died of Southern fever and Southern steel and shot—I wish it was two millions instead of what we got!

Two hundred thousand Yankees is stiff in Southern dust,

We got two hundred thousand before they conquered us:

They died of Southern fever and Southern steel and shot—

I wish it was two millions instead of what we got!

And now the war is over and I can’t fight them any more,But I ain’t a-goin’ to love them—that’s sartin shor’;And I don’t want no one-horse pardon for what I was and am,And I won’t be reconstructed, and I don’t care a damn!

And now the war is over and I can’t fight them any more,

But I ain’t a-goin’ to love them—that’s sartin shor’;

And I don’t want no one-horse pardon for what I was and am,

And I won’t be reconstructed, and I don’t care a damn!

He howls out the verses in disjointed, unmusical bursts. He acts with head and arms, and at places where he is worked up to a particular frenzy he takes a run and givesa buck-jump in the air, blissfully unconscious, I suppose, that he is imitating the manner in which theballistea, or ancient dancing-songs, were sung by the Romans. At the end of each verse he breaks into a curious chanted refrain like: “Yum tilly-yum-yum-yum-yum-yum”—and then there are more sidlings and buck-jumps. Some of the women throw him money, which he acknowledges by lifting his hat grandiosely. Others of them pass remarks, quite the reverse of complimentary, about his voice and ragged appearance. “Isn’t it terrible he is!” says one woman. “Look at him with the seat out of his trousers, and he lepping like a good one. I could choke him, I could!” Another woman comes out of a shop with a crying child in her arms, and shouts at him: “Will you go away, then? You’re wakening the childer.” “Well, ma’am,” says he, stopping in the middle of a verse, “you may thank the Lord for His mercy that you have childer to waken!” The ducks quack, the dogs howl, the poor ballad-singer roars louder than ever. I listen for a while, amused and interested. Then I get tired of it, and pass on towards Bracky Bridge.

Unlessyou have seen the sun you cannot know anything. Sunlight is better than wisdom, and the red of the fairy-thimble more than painted fans.

Inthe Lochros district, when the weather begins to take up, about the middle of May, the farmers repair to the moss on the north side of the Point, and start cutting the banks.The turf is then footed (sometimes by girls) along the causeway ditches, and when properly seasoned—say about the middle of July—is piled in stacks on high ground convenient to the moss, and covered on top with a lot of old mouldering “winter-stales,” to keep the rain off it. “Winter-stales” are sods that have been left over from the previous season’s cutting—the wet setting in and leaving the bog-roads in such a state that no slipe or wheeled car could get into them. Of course, most of the carrying in Donegal is done by creel or ass-cart; but in the Lochros district turf is scarce, and the farmers on the Point are obliged to keep horses to draw the turf in from the moss on the north side of the Owenea river, some miles off, and over roads that are none too good for wheeled traffic. In some cases I have noticed the “winter-stales” built up in little beehive-shaped heaps on dry ground, to be carted or creeled away as soon as the weather begins to mend. But it is only the more provident farmers who do this.

“Myold mother’s ailing this twelvemonth back,” said a man to me to-day. “I’m afeard she’ll go wi’ the leaves.”

A dayof wind and light, blown rain, with the sun shining through it in spells. Aighe river below me, brown and clear, foaming through mossed stones to the sea. Trout rising from it now and again to the gnats that skim its surface. Glengeshmountain in the middle distance—a black, splendid bulk—dropping to the Nick of the Bealach on the left. Meadows in foreground bright with marigolds, with here and there by the mearings tufts of king-fern, wild iris and fairy-thimble.

Tolie on one’s loin in the sun is all very well, but walking is better. It isoverthe hill the wonders are.

FALLING WATER.

Saturday.It is about half-past seven o’clock in the evening. The rain, which kept at it pitilessly all the afternoon, has cleared off, and we have left the little whitewashed inn at Glen-Columcille refreshed, and in high fettle, for the further six miles that has to be done before we reach Carrick, where we mean to spend the night. We had arrived at Glen two hours before in a weary enough condition physically after our tramp over the hills from Ardara, and we had almost resolved on the advice of the hostess of the inn—a slow, deliberate, slatternly sort of woman—to put up with her for the night; but it is wonderful what a rest and a meal and, incidentally, a slatternly hostess does, and so we finally decided to go on to Carrick. We follow the road up by the telegraph posts, and after a stiffish climb of half a mile or more, reach the plateau head. We are now about five hundred feet over sea level. Turning round to have a last look at the place, we see the chapel—a plain white cruciformbuilding, with a queer detached belfry—the little grey, straggling village street (some of the houses with slate roofs, some with thatch), the crosses standing up like gallan-stones on every side of it, the deep valley-bottom green as an emerald, Ballard mountain silhouetted against the sunset, and the vast Atlantic tumbling through mist on the yellow strand beyond. The air smells deliciously of peat. In Donegal one notices the smell of peat everywhere; in fact, if I were asked to give an impression of the county in half a dozen words I should say: “Black hills, brown rivers, and peat.” The road is fairly level now, and we continue our course in a south-easterly direction. A wild waste of moorland stretches on every side of us, brightened here and there by little freshwater lakes, out of which we see the trout jumping in hundreds—Loch Unshagh, Loch Unna, Loch Divna, and another quite near the road, where we got, at the expense of wet feet and knees, some lovely specimens of thelilium aureum, or golden lily, which grows, I think, on every little shallow and flat and bywater in South Donegal. After an hour of pleasant walking the road begins to drop and the rain to fall again. Slieve League is on our right, but we can only see the lower slopes of it, for the cairn is completely covered with driving mist. The wind has risen, and the rain beats coolingly on our cheeks, and exasperatingly, at times, down our necks. We pass a shepherd on the road making for Malin Mór, a shawled figure with a lantern, and several groups of boys and asses with creels bringing turf into the stackers; and fartheron a side-car zig-zagging up hill on its way to the Glen. There are two occupants, a priest—presumably the curate of Glen parish going over for Sunday’s Mass—and the driver. It is quite dark now, and the rain increases in intensity. Tramping in a mountainy country is a delightful sport—none better! But it is on such a night and at the end of such a journey as this that one begins to see that it has a bad as well as a good side to it. The rain is coming down in sheets, our clothes are soaked through, the darkness is intense, the roads are shockingly muddy, we are tired out walking, and still we have another stiff mile to go before we see the friendly lights of the inn at Carrick. Two of us—R. M. and myself—stop at a bridge to have a look at the ordnance sheet which has stood us in such good stead all through our journey. Torrential rain beating on a map—even a “cloth-mounted, water-proofed” one like ours—doesn’t improve it; but we have qualms about our direction. We think we should have arrived at Carrick ere this, and we just want to make sure that our direction is right, and that we haven’t taken a wrong turning in the darkness. After some trouble we manage to get a match lighted. The first misfires on the damp emery, the second blows out, the third is swallowed up in rain pouring like a spout through the branches overhead, the fourth . . . . “Carrick! Carrick! Carrick!” The frenzied cries of the advance guard tell us that the town is in view. We put up our map resignedly, shaking great blabs of water out of it, and push ahead. In five minutes we have passed the chapel, withits square tower looming up darkly in the fog, and in another two we are safe in the inn parlour, enjoying a supper of hot coffee, muffins, and poached eggs.

Noonof a summer’s day. I see a man in the fields—a wild, solitary figure—the only living thing in sight for miles. He is thinning turnips. Slowly a bell rings out from the chapel on the hill beyond. It is the Angelus. The man stands up, takes off his hat and bows his head in the ancient prayer of his faith. . . . The bell ceases tolling, and he bends to labour again.

I meta woman up Glengesh going in the direction of the danger-post. She seemed an old woman by her look, but she more than beat me at the walking. When we got to the top of the hill I complimented her on her powers. “’Deed,” says she, with a deprecating little laugh, “and I’m getting old now. I’m fair enough yet at the walking, but I’m going grey—going fast. A year ago my hair was as black as that stack there”—pointing to a turf-stack out in the bog—“but now it’s on the turn. And I tell you there’s only two things in the world that won’t go grey some time—and that’s salt and iron.”

I seea green island. It is hardly an island now, for the tide is out, and one might walk across to it by the neck of yellow-grey sand that connects it with the mainland. It is held in rundal by a score oftenants living in the mountains in-by. Little patches of oats, potatoes, turnips, and “cow’s grass” diversify its otherwise barren surface. There are no mearings, but each man’s patch is marked by a cairn of loose stones, thrown aside in the process of reclamation. The stones, I see, are used also as seaweed beds. They are spitted in the sand about, like acheval de frise, and in the course of time the seaweed carried in by successive tides gathers on them, and is used by the tenants for manure.

“Whatare these?” I asked an old woman in the fields this morning, pointing to a cluster of what we in the north-east corner call paddock-stools, and sometimes fairy-stools. “Well,” said she, “they’re not mushrooms, anyway. They’re what you call Púca-piles. They say the Púca lays them!”

Bogand sky: a boulder-strewn waste, with salt lochs and freshwater lochs innumerable, and a trail running up to a huddle of white clouds.

BOG AND SKY.

Death, as they say, has taken somebody away under his oxter! I was coming into Ardara this morning from the Lochros side, and as I came up to the chapel on the hill I heard the bell tolling. That, I knew, was for a burying: it was only about ten o’clock, and the Angelus does not ring until midday. Farther on I met the funeralprocession. It was just coming out of the village. The coffin, a plain deal one covered with rugs, was carried over the well of a side-car, and the relatives and country people walked behind. The road was thick with them—old men in their Sunday homespuns and wide-awakes, their brogues very dusty, as if they had come a long way; younger men with bronzed faces, and ash-plants in their hands; old women in the white frilled caps and coloured shawls peculiar to western Ireland; young married women, girls and children. Most of them walked, but several rode in ass-carts, and three men, I noticed, were on horseback. The tramping of so many feet, the rattle of the wheels and the talk made a great stir on the road, and the movement and colour suggested anything but a funeral. Still one could see that underneath all was a deep and beautiful feeling of sorrow, so different to the black-coated, slow-footed, solemn-faced thing of the towns. As the coffin approached I stood into the side of the road, saluted, and turned back with it thetri céimeanna na trocaire(three steps of mercy) as far as the chapel yard.

Anold man came dawdling out of a gap by the road, and he stopped to have a word with me. We were talking for some time when he said: “You’re a young man, by the looks of you?” I laughed and nodded. “Och,” says he, “but it’s a poor thing to be old, and all your colt-tricks over,” says he, “and you with nothing to do but to be watching the courses of the wind!”

Summerdusk. A fiddle is playing in a house by the sea. “Maggie Pickens” is the tune. The fun and devilment of it sets my heart dancing. Then the mood changes. It is “The Fanaid Grove” now, full of melancholy and yearning, full of the spirit of the landscape—the soft lapping tide, the dove-grey sands, the blue rhythmic line of hill and sky beyond. The player repeats it. . . . I feel as if I could listen to that tune forever.

Darkness, freshness, fragrance. Donegal fascinates one like a beautiful girl.

Ithas been said before that there is “too much peasant” in contemporary Irish literature, especially in the plays. The phenomenon is easily explained. Ireland is an agricultural country, a country of small farms, and therefore a nation of peasants; so that a literature which pretends to reflect the life of Ireland must deal in the main with peasants and the thoughts that peasants think. And peasants’ thoughts are not such dead and commonplace things that I, who have learnt practically all I know from them, can afford to ignore them now. The king himself is served by the field. Where there is contact with the unseen in this book, with the mysteries which we feel rather than understand, it is because of some strange thought dropped in strange words from a peasant’s mouth and caught by me here, as in a snare of leaves, for everyone to ponder. Impressions, with something of theroughness of peasant speech in them and something of the beauty, phases of a moment breathless and fluttering, the mystery of the sea, the thresh of rain, the sun on a bird’s wing, a wayfarer passing—those are the things I sought to capture in this book.

Wewere talking together the other evening—an old woman and myself—on a path which leads through the fields from Glengesh mountain to Ardara wood. We had got as far as the stream which crosses the path near the wood when she stopped suddenly. She looked west, and scratched her eyebrow. “I’ve an insleep,” says she. “I hadn’t one this long time!”

Whatis more beautiful than water falling, or a spray ofslán-luswith its flowers?

Theheat increases. The osmunda droops on the wall. The tide is at full ebb. A waste of sea-wrack and sand stretches out to Dawros, a day’s journey beyond. I see two figures, a boy and a girl, searching for bait—the boy digging and the girl gathering into a creel. The deep, purring note of a sandpiper comes to me over the bar. It is like the sound that air makes bubbling through water. I listen to it in infinite space and quietness.

I wastalking with a fiddler the other evening in a house where there was a dance, up by Portnoo. I happened to mention the name of another fiddler I had heard playing a night or two before in Ardara. “Him, is it?” put in my friend. “Why, he’s no fiddler at all. He’s only an old stroller. He doesn’t know the differs between ‘Kyrie Eleison’ and ‘The Devil’s Dreams’!” He became very indignant. I interrupted once or twice, trying to turn the conversation, but all to no purpose; he still went on. Finally, to quiet him, I asked him could he play “The Sally Gardens.” He stopped to think for a while, fondling the strings of his instrument lovingly with his rough hands; then he said that he didn’t know the tune by that name, but that if I’d lilt or whistle the first few bars of it, it might come to him. I whistled them. “Oh,” says he, “that’s ‘The Maids of Mourne Shore.’ That’s the name we give it in these parts.” He played the tune for me quite beautifully. Then there was a call from the man of the house for “The Fairy Reel,” and the dancers took the floor again. The fiddlers in Donegal are “all sorts,” as they say—farmers, blacksmiths, fisher boys, who play for the love of the thing, and strollers (usually blind men) who wander about from house to house and from fair to fair playing for money. When they are playing I notice they catch the bow in a curious way with their thumbs between the horsehair and the stick. At a dance it is no uncommon thing to see a “bench” of seven or eight of them. They join in the applause at the end of each item, rasping theirbows together on the strings and stamping vigorously with their feet.

MOUNTAINY FOLK.

A poorwoman praying by a cross; a mountain shadowed in still water; a tern crying; the road ribboning away into the darkness that looks like hills beyond. Can we live every day with these aspiring things, and not love beauty? Can we look out on our broad view—as someone has said of the friars of the monastery of San Pietro in Perugia—and not note the play of sun and shadow? Nature is the “Time-vesture of God.” If we but touch it, we are made holier.

Itis Sunday. The dawn has broken clear after a night’s rain. The sunlight glitters in the soft morning air. The fragrance of peat, marjoram, and wild-mint hangs like a benediction over the countryside. A lark is singing; the swallows are out in hundreds. The road turns and twists—past a cabin, over a bridge—between fringes of wet grass. It dips suddenly, then rises sheer against a wisp of cloud into the dark bulk of Slieve League behind. I see the mountainy people wending in from all parts to Mass. I am standing on high ground, and can see the hiving roads—the men with their black coats and wide-awakes, and the women with their bright-coloured kerchiefs and shawls. Some of them have trudged in for miles on bare feet. They carry their brogues, neatly greased and cleaned, overtheir shoulders. As they come near the chapel they stop by the roadside or go into a field and put them on. The young girls—grey-eyed, limber slips from the hills—are fixing themselves before they go in of the chapel door. They stand in their ribboned heads and shawls pluming themselves, and telling each other how they look. The boys are watching them. I hear the fresh, nonchalant laugh and the kindly greeting in Irish—“Maidin bhreagh, a Phaid,” and the “Goidé mar tá tú, a Chait?” The men—early-comers—sit in groups on the chapel wall, discussing affairs—the weather, the crops, the new potato spray, the prospects of a war with Germany, the marrying and the giving in marriage, the letters from friends in America, the death and month’s mind of friends. The bell has ceased ringing. The men drop from their perch on the wall, and the last of them has gone in. The road is quiet again, and only the sonorous chant of the priest comes through the open windows—“Introibo ad altare Dei,” and the shriller response of the clerk, “Ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam.”

Wewere talking together, an old man and myself, on the hill between Laguna and Glen. The conversation turned on ages—a favourite topic with old men(2)—and on the degeneracy that one noticed all over Ireland, especially among the young. “And what age would you takemefor?” said he, throwing his staff from him andstraightening himself up. “Well, I’m a bad hand at guessing,” said I, “but you’re eighty if you’re a day.” “I’m that,” said he, “and more. And would you believe it,” said he, “the night I was born my mother was making a cake!”

Thelusmór, or “great herb”—foxglove,

That stars the green skirt of the meadow,

is known to the peasantry by a variety of other names, as for example,sian sléibhe, “sian of the hills” (it grows plentifully on the high, rough places);méarachán, “fairy-thimble”;rós gréine, “little rose of the sun”; andlus na mban-sidhe, “herb of the elf-women, or witch-doctors,” etc., etc. It is bell-shaped, and has a purplish-red colour. As Dr. Joyce observes, it is a most potent herb, for it is a great fairy plant; and those who seek the aid of theDaoine Maithe, or Good People, in the cure of diseases or in incantations of any kind, often make use of

Drowsy store,Gathered from the brightlusmór,

Drowsy store,

Gathered from the brightlusmór,

to add to the power of their spells. It is a favourite flower in Highland, otherwise Gaelic Scotland; and the clan Farquhar, “hither Gaels,” have assumed it for their badge.

Donegalis what I call “county-proud.” Speaking of Derry—the marching county—an old woman said to me the other day: “Och, there’s no gentility about the Derry people. They go at a thing like a day’s work!”

I wasgoing along the road this evening when I came on a clock (some would call it a black beetle), travelling in the direction of Narin. The poor thing seemed to have its mind set on getting there before dark—a matter of three miles, and half an hour to do it in! The sense of tears in me was touched for the clock, and I stooped down to watch it crawling laboriously along in the dust, over a very rough road, tired and travel-stained, as if it had already come a long way; climbing stones (miniature Errigals) twenty times as high as itself; circumventing others, falling into ruts headlong, and rising again none the worse for its awful experience; keeping on, on, on, “with a mind fixed and a heart unconquered.” I couldn’t help laughing at first, but after five minutes I felt a sort of strange kinship with the clock—it was a wayfarer like myself, “a poor earth-born companion and fellow-mortal”—and I stood watching it, hat in hand, until it disappeared out of view. The last I saw of it was on the top of a stone on rising ground, silhouetted against the sunset. Then it dropped over . . . and I resumed my journey, thinking.

Here there is quiet; quiet to think, quiet to read, quiet to listen, quiet to do nothing but lie still in the grass and vegetate. The water falls (to me there is no music more beautiful); a wayfarer passes now and again along the road on his way into Carrick; the sea-savour is in my nostrils; the clouds sail northward, white and luminous, far up in the sky;their shadows checker the hills. If the Blue Bird is to be found this side of heaven, surely it must be here!

A WAYFARER.

I wastalking to a stonebreaker on the road between Carrick and Glen when a shuiler passed, walking very fast. “A supple lad, that,” says the stonebreaker. “The top o’ the road’s no ditch-shough to him. Look at him—he’s lucky far down the hill already.” He dropped his hammer, and burst into a fit of laughing. “He’s as many feet as a cat!” says he.

Oneof the gruesomest sights I ever saw in my life—turkeys roosting among the branches of the trees at a house above Lochros. You would think they were birds with evil spirits in them, they kept so quiet in the half-darkness, and looked so solemn.

A partyof tinkers on the high road—man, wife, children, ass and cart. A poor, back-gone lot they are surely. The man trails behind carrying one of the children in a bag over his back. The woman pushes on in front, smiling broadly out of her fat, drunken face. “Oh, God love ye for a gentleman,” she whines in an up-countrybarrógwhich proclaims her a stranger to the place. “Give us the lucky hand, gentleman, and may the Golden Doors never be shut against ye. Spare a decent poor body a copper, and I’ll say seven ‘Hail Mary’s’ and seven ‘Glorybe to theFather’s’for ye every night for a week. Give us the lucky hand, gentleman.” I throw her a penny, not so much out of charity as to get rid of her, and the cavalcade moves on. Over the hill I hear her voice raised in splendid imprecation on the husband. Such coloured speech one only hears from peasants and strolling folk, who are in touch with the elemental things—the wonders and beauties and cruelties of life.

Itis a lovely summer’s day, warm and fragrant and sunny. We have just come from Mass at Carrick chapel, and are following the road that leads south by the harbour up to Teelin village. Numbers of people are on the road with us—mostly women and girls, for the men have remained behind to smoke and to talk over the week’s happenings in the different ends of the parish. The groups go in ages—the old women with the old women, the marriageable girls with the marriageable girls, the younger girls with the girls of their own age. There is a crowd of little boys, too—active as goats, dressed in corduroys or homespuns, and discussing in Irish what they will do with themselves in the afternoon. Some will go bathing in the harbour, others will go up to the warren by Loch O’Mulligan to hunt rabbits, others will remain in the village to watch the men and bigger boys play at skittles in a cleared space by the high road. I pick up with a quiet-eyed lad—the makings of a priest or a scholar, by his look—and in a short time I am friendswith the crowd. If one could see me behind I must look like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, so many children have I following alongside me and at my heels. They come to know by my talk that I am interested in Irish—an enthusiast, in fact—and they all want to tell me at once about the Feis at Teelin, and about the great prizes that were offered, and how one out of their own school, a little fellow of eight years, won first prize for the best telling of a wonder-tale in the vernacular. The quiet-eyed lad asks me would I like to see Bunglass and the great view to be had of Slieve League from the cliff-head. I tell him that I am going there, and in an instant the crowd is running out in front of us, shouting and throwing their caps in the air—delighted, I suppose, at the prospect of a scramble for coppers on the grass when we get to the end of our journey. For boys are boys the world over, let the propagandists carp as they will! and when I was young myself I would wrestle a ghost under a bed for a halfpenny—so my grandmother used to tell me, and she was a very wise and observant woman. We have come to Teelin village—a clean, whitewashed little place on a hill, built “all to one side like Clogher”—and from there we strike up to the right by a sort of rocky, grass-covered loaning which leads to the cliffs. We pass numbers of houses on the way, each with a group of gaily-dressed peasants sunning themselves at the door. The ascent is gradual at first, but as we go on it gets steeper, and after a while’s climbing we begin to feel the sense of elevation and detachment. The air isdelightfully warm, and the fragrance of sea and bracken and ling is in our hearts. In time we reach Carrigan Head, with its martello tower, seven hundred feet odd over the Atlantic. Southwards the blue waters of Donegal Bay spread themselves, with just the slightest ripple on their surface, glinting in the warm sunlight. In the distance the heights of Nephin Beag and Croagh Patrick in Mayo are faintly discernible, and westwards the illimitable ocean stretches to the void. From Carrigan Head we follow a rough mountain trail, and in a short time reach Loch O’Mulligan, a lonely freshwater tarn, lying under the shadow of Slieve League. Back of the loch a grassy hill rises. We climb this, the younger boys leading about fifty yards in front, jumping along the short grass and over the stones like goats. Arrived at a point called in IrishAmharc Mór, or “Great View,” a scene of extraordinary beauty bursts on us. We are standing on Scregeighter, the highest of the cliffs of Bunglass. A thousand and twenty-four feet below us, in a sheer drop, the blue waters of Bunglass advance and recede—blue as a sapphire, shading into emerald and white where they break on the spit of grass-covered rock rising like asceilg-draoidheachta, or “horn of wizardy,” out of the narrow bay. Right opposite us is Slieve League, its carn a thousand feet higher than the point on which we stand. In the precipitous rock-face, half-way up, is a scarped streak calledNead an Iolair, or the Eagle’s Nest. The colouring is wonderfully rich and varied—black, grey, violet, brown, red, green—due, onewould think, to the complex stratification and to the stains oozing from the soft ores, clays, and mosses impinging between the layers. We step back from the cliff-edge, and sit down on a flat slab of stone, the better to enjoy the view, and the boys spread themselves out in various attitudes over the short grass before and behind us. They are conversing among themselves in Irish, speaking very rapidly, and with an intonation that is as un-English as it can possibly be. The thickened l’s and thrilled r’s are especially noticeable. To hear these children speak Irish the way they do makes one feel that the language of Niall Naoi Giallach is not dead yet, and has, indeed, no signs of dying.

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