With deep affection and recollectionI often think of the Shandon bells,Whose sounds so wild would, in the days of childhood,Fling round my cradle their magic spells.On this I ponder where'er I wander,And thus grow fonder, sweet Cork, of thee,—With thy bells of Shandon, that sound so grand onThe pleasant waters of the River Lee.
Of course we wanted to see St. Anne Shandon and to hear the bells, so, with some difficulty, we persuaded our driver to put his horse at the ascent. The streets rising up that hill are all slums, with little lanes more slummy still ambling away in various directions; and all of them were full of people, that afternoon, who hailed our advent as an unexpected addition to the pleasures and excitements of the day, and followed along, inspecting us curiously, and commenting frankly upon the details of our attire. The impression we made was, I think, on the whole, favourable, but there is a certain novelty in hearing yourself discussed as impersonally as if you were a statue, and after the first embarrassment, we rather enjoyed it. At last we reached the church, and stopped there in the shadow of the tower until the chimes rang. They are very sweet and melodious, and fully deserve Father Prout's rhapsody.
The wife of the inspector we met at Glendalough had told Betty of a convent at Cork where girls were taught lace-making, and had given her the names of two nuns, either of whom, she was sure, would be glad to show us the school. It is in the convents that most of the lace-making in Ireland is taught nowadays, and of course we wanted to see one of the schools, so Monday morning we sallied forth in search of this one. We found it without difficulty—a great barrack of a building opening upon a court. Both nuns were there, and I do not remember ever having received anywhere a warmer welcome. Certainly we might see the lace-makers, and Sister Catherine took us in charge at once, explaining on the way that there were not as many girls at work as usual that morning, because one of their number had been married the day before, and the whole crowd had stayed up very late celebrating the great event. And then she led us into a room where about twenty girls were bending over their work.
They all arose as we entered, and then I sat down and watched them, while Sister Catherine took Betty about from one girl to the next, and explained the kind of lace each was making. Some of it was Carrickmacross, of which, it seems, there are two varieties, appliqué and guipure; and some of it was needle-point, that aristocrat of laces of which one sees so much in Belgium; and some of it was Limerick, and there were other kinds whose names I have forgotten, but all of it was beautifully done. The designing is the work of Sister Catherine, and, while I am very far from being a connoisseur, some of the pieces she afterwards showed us were very lovely indeed. Then we were asked ifwe wouldn't like to hear the girls sing, and of course we said we would, so one of them, at a nod from the Sister, got to her feet and very gravely and earnestly sang John Philpot Curran's tender verses, "Cushla ma Chree," which is Irish for "Darling of My Heart":
Dear Erin, how sweetly thy green bosom rises!An emerald set in the ring of the sea!Each blade of thy meadows my faithful heart prizes,Thou queen of the west! the world's cushla ma chree!Thy gates open wide to the poor and the stranger—There smiles hospitality hearty and free;Thy friendship is seen in the moment of danger,And the wanderer is welcomed with cushla ma chree.Thy sons they are brave; but, the battle once over,In brotherly peace with their foes they agree;And the roseate cheeks of thy daughters discoverThe soul-speaking blush that says cushla ma chree.Then flourish forever, my dear native Erin,While sadly I wander an exile from thee;And, firm as thy mountains, no injury fearing,May heaven defend its own cushla ma chree!
It is a very characteristic Irish poem of the sentimental sort, and it has been set to a soft and plaintive air also characteristically Irish, and it took on a beauty which the lines by themselves do not possess as we heard it sung that morning, with the girls, bending to their work, joining in the chorus. Then we were shown over the convent, and finally taken to the parlour, where Sister Bonaventura joined us, and where we had a very pleasant talk.
The convent's chief treasure is the great parchment volume in which its history is noted from day to day. How far back it goes I have forgotten, but I think to the very founding of the institution, and it is illuminated throughout very beautifully, while the lettering is superb. The great events in the life of every nun are recorded here, and those events are three: when she became a novice, when she took the final vows, and when she died. Those are the only events that concern the community, except that sometimes when death followed a painful and lingering illness, it was noted how cheerfully the pain was borne. Occasionally some delicate woman found the hard life more than she could endure, and then she was permitted to put aside her robes and go back into the world.
I spent half an hour looking through the book, and Sister Bonaventura showed me the record of her own entry into the convent. It was in the year in which I was born, and I shivered a little at the thought that, during all the long time I had been growing to boyhood and manhood and middle age, she had been immured here in this convent at Cork; during all the years that I had been reading and writing and talking with men and women and knocking about the world, she had been doing over and over again her little round of daily duties; but when I looked at her bright brave face and quiet eyes, and listened to her calm sweet voice, I wondered if, after all, she hadn't got farther than I!
It would be a mistake, however, to think of these nuns—or of any I ever met—as pious, strait-laced, lachrymose creatures. They were quite the reverse ofthat; they were fairly bubbling over with good humour and with big-hearted blarney. Some one had given them a victrola, and it was evidently the supreme delight of their lives.
"We can't go to the opera," they said; "but the opera comes to us. We have a concert nearly every evening, and it's sorry we are when the bell rings and we have to go to bed."
They showed us their austere little chapel, after that, and introduced us to the Mother Superior, a very delicate, placid, transparent woman of more than eighty, who reminded me of the sister of Bishop Myriel; and I am sure they were sorry when we had to say good-bye.
We went down to Monkstown by rail, that afternoon, to see Queenstown harbour. The line runs close to the river, passing Passage, whose charms have been celebrated by Father Prout, and finally reaching Monkstown, on the heights above which stands the famous, four-square castle which cost its owner only fourpence. The story goes that, in 1636, John Archdeckan marched away to the war in Flanders, and his wife determined to surprise him, on his return, by presenting him with a stately castle. So she gathered a great number of builders together and gave them the job on the condition that they would buy all their food and drink and clothing from her. When the castle was done, she balanced her accounts and found that she had expended fourpence more than she had received.
At Monkstown, we took a boat and ferried across the harbour, past many grey men-of-war which lay atanchor there. Very beautiful it is, with the high, green-clad hills pressing about it on all sides, and shrouding the entrance so completely that one might fancy oneself in a landlocked lake. Queenstown is built on the side of one of these hills, and is dominated by the great, white cathedral, which has been building for fifty years, and is not yet finished.
It is a curious coincidence that the two ports of Ireland by which most visitors enter and leave it should be named after two people whom the Irish have little reason to love. In 1821, when George IV embarked at the port of Dunleary, just below Dublin, he "graciously gave permission" that its name might be changed to Kingstown in honour of the event. In 1849, Queen Victoria paid one of her very few visits to Ireland, and sailed into the Cove of Cork. As she herself wrote, "To give the people the satisfaction of calling the place Queenstown, in honour of its being the first spot on which I set foot on Irish ground, I stepped on shore amidst the roar of cannon and the enthusiastic shouts of the people." Forty years later, when the Irish had come to realise that the Queen had no interest in them, they had the dignity and good sense to put aside the servility to which they have sometimes been too prone, and to refuse to take part in the celebration of her Jubilee. But Queenstown is still Queenstown.
The town consists of a single long street of public houses and emigrant hotels and steamship offices facing the water, and some steep lanes running back up over the hill, and the day we were there, it was crowded with emigrants, Swedes and Norwegians mostly, whohad been brought ashore from the strandedHaverford, and who spent their time wandering aimlessly up and down, trying to find out what was going to happen to them. There were many sailors and marines knocking about the grog-shops, as well as the crowd of navvies and longshoremen always to be found lounging about a water-front. This water-front is one great landing-stage, and it is here that perhaps a million Irish men and women have stepped forever off of Irish soil.
We climbed up the hill presently to the cathedral, which owes not a little of its impressiveness to its superb site. Its exterior is handsome and imposing—good Gothic, though perhaps a trifle too florid for the purest taste; but the effect of the interior is ruined by the absurd columns of the nave, made of dark marble, and so slender that the heavy structure of white stone above them seems to be hanging in the air.
We had hoped to go by rail to Youghal and take steamer up the Blackwater to Cappoquin, and from there drive over to the Trappist monastery at Mt. Melleray; but we found that the steamer did not start until the fifteenth of June, so most regretfully that excursion had to be abandoned. Those who have made it tell me it is a very beautiful one. Cloyne is also perhaps worth visiting; but we were tired of Cork and hungering for Killarney, and so decided to turn our faces westward next day.
THE SHRINE OF ST. FIN BARRE
Thereare two ways of getting from Cork to Killarney, one by the so-called "Prince of Wales Route," because the late King Edward went that way in 1858, and the other by way of Macroom. Both routes converge at Glengarriff and are identical beyond that, and as the best scenery along the route is between Glengarriff and Killarney, I don't think it really matters much which route is chosen. The "Prince of Wales Route" is by rail to Bantry, and then either by boat or coach to Glengarriff, which is only a few miles away. The other route is to Macroom by rail, and from there there is a very fine ride by coach of nearly forty miles to Glengarriff. We chose the Macroom route because of the longer coach ride and because it touches Gougane Barra, the famous retreat of St. Fin Barre. I think, on the whole, it is the more picturesque of the two routes; but either is vastly preferable to the all-rail route. Indeed, the visitor to Killarney who misses the run from Glengarriff, misses some of the most beautiful and impressive scenery in all Ireland.
It was shortly after nine o'clock that our train pulled out of the station at Cork, and at first the line ran between small, well-tilled fields, each with its cosy cottage. The whole country-side had an air of contentand passable well-being; every wall was gay with the yellow gorse, and in the fields the green of potato and turnip was just beginning to show above the dark earth of the ridges in which they were planted. These ridged fields, which we were to see so often afterwards in the west of Ireland, tell of a ground so soaked with moisture that it must be carefully and thoroughly drained before anything will grow in it. The ridges, which run with the slope of the land, are usually about eighteen inches wide, and are separated by ditches a foot wide and a foot deep to carry off the excess moisture. There is always a trickle of water at the bottom of these ditches, and the task of keeping them open and free from weeds is a never-ending one.
Presently on a high rock away to the left, appeared the tower which is all that is left of the old stronghold of the Barretts, and farther on are the green-clad ruins of Kilcrea Abbey, and near by is another great keep marking an old castle of the McCarthys. And then the train skirts the wild bog of Kilcrea, and then there are more ruins, and still more; and at last the train stops at its terminus, Macroom.
The motor-coach was awaiting us, and we were relieved to find that, so far from being crowded, there was only one other couple, Americans like ourselves, to make the trip. The season had opened only the day before, and, after we got started, the driver confided to us that this was the first time he had ever been over the road. Even if he hadn't told us, we should soon have had every reason to suspect it.
The road follows the valley of the Lee, which is not here the single clear and shining stream which we sawabove Cork, but is broken into a score of channels between islands covered with low-growing brush—a sort of morass, of a strange and weird appearance. Here and there an ivied ruin towers above the trees, for this was the country of the O'Learys and these are the strongholds they built to defend it against the aggressions of their neighbours; and then we rattled down the street of a little village, and the driver brought the coach to a stop before the door of an inn, told us that this was Inchigeelagh and that there would be ten minutes for refreshments, and then disappeared in the direction of the bar.
I suppose he got his refreshments for nothing, as a reward for stopping there. At least I can think of no other reason for stopping, since Inchigeelagh is only half an hour from Macroom, unless it was to give the nerves of the passengers a chance to quiet down a little. For we had already begun to realise that our driver was a speed-maniac. He had struck a hair-raising gait from the start, had sent the lumbering bus down grades and around turns at a rate that was decidedly disconcerting, and while there had been no especial danger except to the people we met—for the road was bordered by high earthen walls—the rattle and jar of the solid tires had been enough to make the teeth chatter.
So we were glad when the racket stopped, and we could get down and stroll about a little; and we soon found that Inchigeelagh is a very quaint village. We walked down to the bridge over the Lee, and looked at Lough Allua stretching away to the west; and then we stopped at a tumbledown cottage to talk to an old woman who was leaning over her half-door; and sheinvited us in and asked us to sit down. It was my first glimpse of the interior of an Irish cottage of the poorer class, and it opened my eyes to the cruel lot of the people—and there are many, many thousands of them—who are compelled to live in such surroundings.
There was just one room, perhaps eight feet by fifteen, lighted by two little windows about eighteen inches square, one on either side the door. The doorway was just high enough to enter without stooping, and ran from the ground right up to the eaves. The floor was of clay, and the walls inside had been daubed with mud to fill up the cracks and then whitewashed, but the damp had flaked the whitewash off in great leprous-looking blotches. The ceiling was formed by some rough boards laid on top of the joists overhead, so low that one feared to stand upright, and I suppose the dark space under the thatch was used as a sleeping-room, for there was a ladder leading to it, and I saw nothing in the room below which looked like a bed. There may have been a bed there, however, which, being new to rural Ireland, I did not recognise as such.
At one end of the room was an open fireplace in which a few blocks of turf smoked and flared, with that pungent odour which we had already come to like, but which, at such close quarters, was a little over-powering. A black and battered pot hung on a crane above the fire, and some sort of mess was bubbling in it—potatoes I suppose. There was a rude table, and two or three chairs, and all sorts of rags and debris hung against the walls and piled in the corners, and a few dishes in a rough home-made dresser, and an old brush-broom, and some boxes and a lot of other indescribabletrash. Three or four bedraggled chickens were wandering in and out, and I glanced around for the pig. But there was no pig—this family was far too poor to own one.
It seemed impossible that a human being could live for any length of time in a place so bare of comfort, and I looked at the old woman, who had sat down across from us, and wondered how she managed to survive. I suspect she was not half so old as her wrinkled face and sunken eyes and shrivelled hands indicated. She lived there with her husband, she said, and had for many years. He was a labourer, and, in good times, could earn ten shillings a week; but most of the time it was impossible to find any work at all. She had no relatives in America to turn to, and neither she nor her husband was old enough to get a pension, so that it was a hard struggle to keep out of the workhouse. But theyhadkept out thus far, glory be to God, though the struggle was growing harder every year, for they were getting older and their rheumatism was getting worse, and neither of them could work as they once could.
All this was said quite simply, in a manner not complaining, but resigned, as if accepting the inevitable. Her philosophy of life seemed to be that, since Fate had chosen to set herself and her husband in the midst of circumstances so hard, there was nothing to do but struggle on as long as possible, with the certainty of coming to the workhouse in the end. No doubt they would be far more comfortable in the workhouse than they had ever been outside of it, and yet they had that horror of it which is common to all Irish men andwomen. The horror, I think, is not so much at the abstract idea of receiving charity as at the public stigma which the workhouse gives. The Irish have been eager enough to draw their old age pensions, and many of them, who shrink from the workhouse as from a foul disgrace, do not hesitate to beg a few pennies from the passing stranger.
A COTTAGE AT INCHIGEELAGHA COTTAGE AT INCHIGEELAGHTHE SHRINE OF ST. FIN BARRE
The old woman at Inchigeelagh, however, did not beg, nor intimate in any way that she desired or expected money, but she did not refuse the coin I slipped into her hand, after I had taken the picture of her and of her cottage, which you will find opposite this page. Perhaps she would have liked to do so, but the little coin represented a measure of potatoes or of turnips, and so a little less hunger, a little more strength. How many of us, I wonder, would be too proud to beg if we could find no work to do, and our backs were bare and our stomachs empty?
The tooting of the horn warned us that our bus was ready to go on again, and we were soon skirting the shore of Lough Allua, with picturesque mountains closing in ahead. And then our driver crossed the bridge over the Lee, and made a wrong turning, and didn't know it until somebody shouted at him and set him right; and this small misadventure seemed completely to wreck his self-control, so that, when he got back to the main road, he rushed along in a manner more terrifying than ever. The fearful racket heralded our approach, else there must have been more than one bad accident; and I can yet see wild-eyed men leaping from their seats and springing frantically to their horses' heads, while the white-faced women seatedin the carts peered out at us under their shawls as we brushed past, and no doubt sent a malediction after us. Geese, chickens and pigs scurried wildly in every direction, and that we did not leave the road strewn with their dead bodies was little less than a miracle. The road ran between high hedges, so that we could see only a little way ahead, and we got to watching the curves with a sort of fascination, for it seemed certain that wemustrun into something at the next one.
We had been mounting gradually all this time, often up gradients so steep that they kept the driver busy with his gears, and the view had gradually widened and grown in impressiveness. Then we turned off a narrow road at the right, and I thought for a moment our driver had gone wrong again.
"We're going to Gougane Barra," he explained, seeing my look, for I sat on the seat beside him, and in a few minutes we were skirting a narrow lough, hemmed in, on the north, by a range of precipitous mountains, with gullied sides patched with grey granite and dark heather, as bare and desolate as a mountain could be.
There is an inn by the lake shore, and the bus stopped in front of it. The driver showed us with a gesture the little island containing the shrine of St. Fin Barre, and then hastened away into the inn. We four started for the island, and presently we heard heavy steps behind us, and an animated scarecrow armed with a big stick came running up and shouted something in an incomprehensible tongue, and waved the stick above his head, and proceeded to lead the way. He was evidently the guide, so we followed him along the border of the lake, and across the narrow strip ofland which now connects the island with the shore, and all the time our guide was talking in the most earnest way, but not a word could any of us understand. It sounded remotely like English, and he evidently understood English, for when we asked him to repeat some particularly emphatic bit, he would do so with added emphasis, but quite in vain. I shall never forget how earnestly he would look in our faces, raising his voice as though we were deaf, and pointing with his stick, and gesturing with his other hand, in the effort to make us understand.
We persuaded him to go and sit down, after awhile, and then we had a chance really to look about us. There is something indescribably savage and threatening about that dark sheet of water, shadowed by gloomy cliffs, bare of vegetation, and torn into deep gullies by the cataracts which leap down them. Through the hills to the east, the water from the lake has carved itself a narrow outlet, and the stream which rushes away through this gorge is the beginning of the River Lee. No place so grand and desolate would be without its legend, and this is Gougane Barra's:
When the blessed Saint Patrick gathered together all the snakes in Ireland and drove them over the mountains and into the western sea, there was one hideous monster which he overlooked, so well had it concealed itself in this mountain-circled tarn. It was a winged dragon, and it kept very quiet until the Saint was dead, for fear of what might happen; but, once Patrick was gathered to his fathers, the dragon fancied it might do as it pleased. So it issued forth, all the more savage for its years of retirement, and started tolay waste the country. The frightened people appealed to their saints to help them, and among those who put up prayers was a holy man named Fineen Barre, who had a hermitage on an island in the lake, and so knew the dragon well. And the saints in heaven looked down and saw the distress of the poor people and pitied them, and they told Fineen Barre that they would give him power to slay the dragon on one condition, and that condition was that he should build a church on the spot where the waters of the lake met the tide of the sea.
Fineen accepted the condition gladly, and went out and met the monster and slew it and threw its body into the lake, and its black blood darkens the water to this day. And when that was done, he set off down the river, and at the spot where its waters met the tide, he built his church, and the city of Cork grew up about it. And then in place of the church, he built a great cathedral, and when he died his body was placed in a silver coffin and buried before its high altar. Then the city was plundered by the Danes, who dug up the coffin and carried it away, and what became of the Saint's bones no one knows.
But the little island where he first lived has been a holy place from that day to this, and on the anniversary of his death, which comes in September, crowds of pilgrims journey here to say their prayers before the thirteen stations set apart by tradition, and to bless themselves with water from the Saint's well.
The well is just at the entrance to the island, and its water is supposed to possess miraculous power. Our voluble but ununderstandable guide invited us by urgentgestures to test its efficacy, but the water looked scummy and dirty, and we declined. A few steps farther on is a small, stone-roofed chapel, built in the likeness of Cormac's chapel on the Rock of Cashel, and in it services are held during the days of pilgrimage to the shrine. There are also some remains of an old chapel, supposed to have been Saint Fin Barre's own; but by far the most interesting thing on the island is the stone enclosure within which the pilgrims say their prayers.
The enclosure, which is surrounded by a heavy wall of stones laid loosely on each other, after the ancient Irish fashion, is about thirty feet square, and its level is some feet below that of the ground outside, so that one goes down into it by a short flight of steps. In the centre of the enclosure a plain wooden cross stands on a platform of five steps. On the flagstone at its foot is an inscription telling in detail how the "rounds" are to be performed on the vigil and forenoon of St. Fin Barre's feast-day. In the enclosing wall, which is fourteen feet thick in places, under heavy arches, are eight cells, which may be used as places of retreat by those undergoing penance. The Stations of the Cross are set in the upper portion of the wall, but are ugly modern plaster-casts. I took a picture of the place, which will be found oppositepage 144, and which gives a fairly good idea of it.
In the middle of a scrubby grove, a little way from the enclosure, is a wishing-stone, which had evidently been much used, I hope to good purpose, for the stone itself was covered with trinkets and the bushes round about were hung thickly with rags and hairpins androsaries and other tokens. I picked up somewhere, perhaps from the jargon of the guide, that this wishing-stone is the altar of Fin Barre's old chapel, but I haven't been able to verify this, and it may not be so; but the game is to put up a prayer to the Saint, and make your wish, and leave some token to show you are in earnest, and the wish will surely come true. Of course we made a wish and added some half-pennies to the collection on the altar. In turning over the trinkets already deposited there, we were amused to find two bright Lincoln cents.
On the shore just opposite the island is a little cemetery held in great repute because of the holy men who are buried there. For the island has been the home of a succession of hermits from the time St. Fin Barre left it to build his church at Cork, and there are many legends of their saintly lives and wonderful deeds. When they died, they were buried in the cemetery, where there is also a cross to the memory of Jeremiah Callanan, a poet native to the neighbourhood, who celebrated the shrine in some pretty verses beginning:
There is a green island in lone Gougane Barra,Where Allua of songs rushes forth as an arrow;In deep-valleyed Desmond—a thousand wild fountainsCome down to that lake, from their home in the mountains.
But the wild honking of the horn told us it was time to go; our guide realised this, too, and was back at our heels more voluble and inarticulate than ever; not too inarticulate, however, to sell a knobby shillelagh to our companions and to accept with thanks the pennies I dropped into his hand. He tried to stay, hat in hand,until we departed, but the strain was too much for him, and after a moment he made off for the bar of the inn.
Our chauffeur was evidently vexed that we had lingered so long at the shrine of the Saint, for he hurtled us down the rough by-road at a great rate, whirled into the smoother highway on two wheels, and then opened his throttle wide and pushed up his spark and let her rip. The road mounted steadily, with the view to the south opening more and more, and a rugged range of hills ahead coming closer and closer, until they lay flung right across the road, and then we swept around a sharp turn and entered the Pass of Keimaneigh.
The guide-books assert that no pass in Europe exceeds it in grandeur, but this is a gross exaggeration—it is not nearly so fine, for instance, as the Pass of Llanberis; and yet it is wild and savage and very beautiful—a deep gorge cut right through the mountains by a glacier, which has left the marks of its passage on the rocks on either side. There is just room between the craggy precipices for a narrow road and the rugged channel of the rushing stream which drains the mountains. The pass is most picturesque near its eastern end, for there the cliffs are steepest, and the overhanging crags assume their most fantastic shapes. In every nook and cranny of the rocks ferns and heather and wild-flowers have found a foothold, the feathery plumes of London-pride being especially noticeable. Here in Ireland it is called St. Patrick's Cabbage, and no doubt there is a legend connecting the Saint with it, but I have never happened to run across it.
As we plunged deeper into the pass, the walls oneither side closed in more and more, great boulders dislodged from the heights above crowded the road so closely that more than once it was forced to turn aside to avoid them; the greenery of fern and colour of flower gave place to the sober hue of the heather and the dark green of the bog-myrtle; and then we were suddenly conscious that the stream by the roadside, which had been flowing back toward Cork, was flowing forward toward Bantry Bay, and we knew that we had reached the summit of the watershed dividing east from west. And then the hills fell back, and there, far below us, stretched a great rugged valley, with a tiny river wandering through, and white threads of roads curving here and there, and Lilliputian houses scattered among the fields.
The car paused for an instant on the edge of this abyss and then plunged into it. At least, that was the sensation it gave its passengers. I do not know that I have ever travelled a steeper road, or one which wound more threateningly near the unguarded edges of precipices—certainly not in a heavy motor-bus hurtling along at thirty miles an hour. Perhaps the brakes were not holding, or perhaps the driver had had a drink too much; at any rate, we bounced from rock to rock and spun around sharp turns, only a foot or two from the edge of the road, which there was absolutely nothing to guard and which dropped sheer for hundreds of feet. But at last the more hair-raising of these turns were left behind, the road straightened out along the side of the hill, and then, far ahead, we saw opening out below us the blue waters and craggy shores of Bantry Bay.
Down and down we dropped, with new vistas opening every minute, until we were running close beside the border of the bay, and for ten miles we followed its convolutions. Then we swung away between high hedges, and Betty nearly fell out of the bus—for the hedges were of fuchsias, ten feet high and heavy with scarlet flowers!
That was the crowning delight of that wonderful drive. We ran between high rows of fuchsias for perhaps half a mile; then we turned through a gate into beautiful grounds; and a moment later we were climbing out in front of the hotel at Glengarriff—half an hour ahead of schedule time!
A TRIP THROUGH WONDERLAND
Youmay well believe that, with such variegated loveliness all about us, we did not linger in the hotel a moment longer than was necessary, but made a hasty tea and sallied forth to explore the neighbourhood. First of all, Betty must pick some fuchsias, so we went back to the road, and climbed over a wall into a field surrounded by high hedges of the gorgeous flower. It was a new experience for Betty to reach up overhead and break off great branches which were simply masses of scarlet bells, until she had her arms full, and I suspect she went a little wobbly over it; but she was to have the same experience many times thereafter, for the fuchsia grows in great profusion throughout southern and western Ireland.
I saw but one variety, however, the flower of which has a dark blue trumpet and scarlet bell, but this is perhaps the most showy of all, and nothing could be more gorgeous than a hedge in full bloom. In the woods, or in gardens where they are left untrimmed, the bushes will grow into veritable trees, twenty-five or thirty feet high.
We went back to the hotel, when Betty had gathered all she could carry, and she sent the flowers up to our room by a maid who laughed sympathetically—I fancy she had seen such attacks of madness more than once before—and then we started along a winding pathwhich led through the woods down to the shore of the bay. And we soon found that fuchsias were not the only things which grow to giant proportions here, for the path was hedged with ferns four or five feet high—great, lordly fellows, standing stiffly upright as though on parade. Ferns were everywhere, even on the trees overhead, for the trees are padded with moss, and in this the ferns have found a foothold. And there were holly trees still scarlet with last year's berries, and hawthorn fragrant with bloom; and over everything the English ivy ran riot—rather in the same fashion, I thought as I looked at it, in which England herself has run riot over Ireland.
We got down to the shore of the bay, at last, and I quite agree with Thackeray that it is a world's wonder, with its rock-strewn shore and emerald islands and pellucid water, framed in, all about, by rugged mountains. We wandered along its edge, gay with sea-pinks, for an hour or more, and then spent another hour loitering in the woods, and finally walked on, between the flaming hedges and fern-draped trees, to the little village, which we could smell, long before we came to it, by the tang of peat-smoke in the air. It is a mere huddle of low, thatched houses, and I judge that, even amid these gorgeous surroundings, life can be as hard and sordid as anywhere in Ireland.
A little distance from the village was a pretty, two-storied villa, covered with roses and climbing vines, and with a large garden beside it, blazing with a great variety of gorgeous bloom. We stopped to look at it over the gate, and the gardener espied us and came hurrying forward to ask us in to see the flowers. Andone of the plants he showed us most proudly was a single, sickly-looking stalk of Indian corn, about a foot high, growing in a pot. When we told him that, in the state we came from, Indian corn filled thousands and thousands of acres every summer, and grew from eight to ten feet high, he looked as though he scarcely believed us. But that little stalk of corn brought home to me, as perhaps nothing else could have done, the fact that my own particular corner of the earth is divinely favoured, too, in ways unknown even to Glengarriff.
I had a most improving conversation, that night, in the smoking-room of the hotel, with a Catholic priest and a salesman for the British Petroleum Company. The priest, who must have been at least sixty-five, had the typical long, thin Irish face, and was intensely Nationalist. The salesman was younger and rather rubicund, and I judge that he was an Englishman and a Unionist. It was the priest who did most of the talking about Home Rule, after I got him started, and he protested earnestly that Ulster's fears of unfair treatment were utterly unfounded. The Catholics, he said, didn't want supremacy; all they wanted was equality, but theydidwant that, and felt they were entitled to it. England, he admitted, had made great strides within the past ten years toward atoning for her old injustice to Ireland, and was evidently trying hard to do what was right.
"Yes," broke in the salesman; "she's going altogether too far. What with old age pensions and the purchase act and poor relief and railway building andputting up labourers' houses and what not, she's spending twice as much on this country as she gets out of it. It won't do; it has got to stop."
"I don't believe England spends more on Ireland than she gets out of us," said the priest quickly.
"Here it is in black and white," and the other triumphantly slapped the paper he had been reading. "Imperial expenditures for Ireland, 1912-13, £12,381,500; received from Ireland, £10,850,000; deficit, £1,531,500—that would be about seven and a half million dollars," he added, for my benefit. "Over a million and a half pounds sterling that England has made Ireland a present of in the past year! What do you think of that?" and he turned back to the priest.
"The figures may be true," said the latter, slowly, "and then again they may not. I have been told that England burdens Ireland with many expenditures which don't belong to us. But in any event, I agree with you that charity does us no good—it does us harm. We don't want charity."
"Hm-m-m!" grunted the salesman sceptically.
"I'll admit," went on the other, "that there are and always have been many Irishmen only too eager to take alms—more shame to them. There have always been many ready to sell themselves for a good position under government, and to sell their country too, if need be. We have our share of patriots, but we have more than our share of traitors, I sometimes think. But it isn't by them the country should be judged. What true Irishmen want is the right to stand alone like men and fight their own battles, and in fighting them, the north and south will forget their foolishquarrel and become friends again as they should be. They aren't half as far apart, even now, as some would have you believe. Most of this talk about Ulster is the black work of men who make their living out of it, who care nothing for Ireland, and take advantage of every little by-election to stir the fire and keep the pot bubbling."
I remarked that this ceaseless agitation over elections was unknown in America, where all the elections were held on one day, after which there were no more elections for a year.
The priest stared at me in astonishment.
"Did I understand you to say," he asked, "that the elections all over your country are held on the same day?"
"Yes," I said; "on a day early in November, fixed by law."
"I don't see how you manage it."
"It isn't hard to manage—it's really very simple."
"But where do you get enough police?"
"Enough police?"
"Yes. Here in Ireland, when we have an election, we have to send in the police from all the country round to keep the peace. If we tried to have all our elections on one day, there would be riots everywhere."
"What about?" I asked.
"I don't know—the people wouldn't know themselves, most likely; but there's many of them would welcome the chance for a shindy, if the police wasn't there. Isn't it the same in America?"
I told him I had been an election officer many times, but had never seen any serious disorder at the polls.
"Aren't there many riots next day?" he asked.
"Why," I said, "the day after election is the quietest day in the year. Everybody goes to work as though nothing had happened."
"I don't think there is much danger of riots," put in the salesman, "but we couldn't have your system over here because with us a man has a right to vote wherever he owns property and pays taxes, and if all the elections were held on one day, he couldn't get around."
"Ah, yes," nodded the priest; "I did not think of that. How do you manage it in America?"
"With us," I explained, "every man has one vote and no more."
Again his eyes goggled.
"Would you be telling me," he gasped, "that your millionaires, your men of vast properties, have no more votes than the poor man?"
And when I told him that was so, I think he was by way of pitying our millionaires, as men deprived of their just rights—as, perhaps, in some respects, they are.
And then the salesman told me that he had been to America, as far west as Kansas, where he had visited some friends. He had gone over, he said, with that sort of good-natured contempt for everything American so common in England, but he had come away convinced that there was no country on earth to match it.
"The only thing I saw to criticise in America were the roads," he added. "Why don't you take a leaf from Lloyd George's book? He has put a tax of three-pence a gallon on gasoline used by pleasure cars,and this tax goes into a fund for the upkeep of the highways, proportioned according to the number of cars in each county. Gasoline used in commercial cars pays a tax of three-ha'-pence a gallon. A great sum is collected in this way, and the upkeep of the highways is thrown upon the people who do them the most damage. If you'd do the same in America, your roads would soon be as good as ours; and nobody could complain that the tax was unjust."
I agreed that it was a clever idea, and I hereby call it to the attention of our lawmakers.
"Well," said the priest, who had been listening attentively to all this, "I am glad to know the truth about this tax. I had heard of it, and had thought it another English exaction laid upon Ireland. Now I see that I was wrong; for, as you say, it is a just tax."
And then he told us some stories of the old days, of famine and persecution and eviction, of the hard fight for life on the rocky hillsides, while the fertile valleys were given over to grazing or ringed with high walls and turned into game preserves. There were lighter stories, too, of the humorous side of Irish character, and one of them, though I suspect it is an old one, I will set down here.
The southwest coast of Ireland, of which Bantry Bay forms a part, is one of the most dangerous in the world, because of the rugged capes which stretch far out into the ocean and the small islands and hidden reefs which lie beyond. It is just the sort of coast where fish abound, and so little villages are scattered all along it, whose men-folks fish whenever the weather lets them, and at other times labour in the tiny potatopatches up on the rocky hillsides. Naturally they are familiar with all the twists and turnings of the coast, and are always on the lookout to add to their scanty incomes by a job of piloting.
One day the crew of a fishing-boat perceived a big freighter nosing about in a light fog, rather closer inshore than she should have been, and at once lay alongside and put a man aboard.
"Will you be wantin' a pilot, sir?" he asked the captain, who was anxiously pacing the bridge.
The captain stared a moment at the dirty and tattered visitor.
"Who the devil are you?" he demanded, at last.
"Me name's McCarthy, sir. I'm a pilot, sir."
"A pilot!" and the captain looked at McCarthy again. "I don't believe it."
"'Tis the truth I'm tellin' you, sir," protested McCarthy.
"Well," said the captain, "if it's the truth, you can easily prove it. Let me hear you box the compass."
McCarthy was nonplussed. More than once, sitting over a pot of ale in some public house, he had heard old sailors proudly rattle off the points of the compass, but, though he remembered how the rigmarole sounded, he had no idea how to do it, nor even any very clear idea of what it meant.
"Faith, I can't do it, sir," he admitted.
"Can't do it?" roared the captain. "Can't box the compass! And yet you call yourself a pilot."
McCarthy did some rapid thinking, for he saw a good job, which he could ill afford to lose, slipping through his fingers.
"It's like this, sir," he said, finally, "in our small place, it's the Irish we would be using, niver a word of English, and all the English any of us knows is just the little we might pick up from bein' after the ships. I can't box the compass in English, but I can box it in the Irish, sir, if that will do."
The captain looked into the speaker's guileless eyes and also did some rapid thinking. He knew no Gaelic, but he needed a pilot badly, and he reflected that, in any language, it ought to be possible to tell whether the compass was being boxed correctly, because the words would have to follow each other with a certain similarity of sound, as north, north-and-by-east, north-north-east, north-east-by-north, and so on.
"All right," he growled, "go ahead and let's hear you."
"My father," McCarthy began solemnly in his homely Gaelic; "my grandfather, my grandfather's grandmother, my grandmother's grandfather, my great grandfather, my great grandfather's grandmother, my great grandmother's great. . . ."
"Hold on," shouted the captain, quite convinced. "I see you know how. Take charge of the ship!"
And McCarthy thereupon proved he knew how by getting the vessel safely past Cape Clear!
It was pouring rain, next morning, a steady, driving rain, which looked as though it might last forever, and we were confronted by the problem which so often confronts the traveller in Ireland, whether to go or stay. To go meant the possibility of having the most beautiful drive in Ireland obscured in mist; to staymeant a dreary day at the hotel, with no assurance that the next day would be any better, or the next, or the next. At last we decided to go.
Never after that was the problem so difficult, for we soon realised the folly of permitting Irish rain to interfere with any plan. In the first place, the rain is not an unmixed evil, for it is soft and fresh and vivifying, and it adds mystery and picturesqueness to the most commonplace landscape; and in the second place, it is very fickle, begins unaccountably, stops unexpectedly, and rarely lasts the day through. In fact, the crest of any ridge may take one into it, or out of it, as we were to find that day.
So when, about ten o'clock, the bus came puffing up to the door, we climbed aboard. The road, for a little way, wound up the valley of the Glengarriff River, and then, striking off into the mountains, climbed upward at a gradient that tested the power of the engine. Almost at once we were in the mountain mist, soft and grey, eddying all about us, whirling aside for an instant now and then to give us tantalising glimpses down into the valleys, and then closing in again. Up and up we went, a thousand feet and more, and at last we came to the crest of the mountain range which divides County Cork from County Kerry. The road plunges under the crest through a long tunnel, and then winds steeply down into the valley of the Sheen.
Again there was a series of sharp and unprotected turns, just as on the day before, and this time with the added complication of a slippery, sloppy road; but I have never ridden with a more careful or more accomplished driver than we had that day, and he nursedthe heavy bus along so quietly and with such easy mastery that no one thought of danger. Gradually the mist lightened and cleared away, until we could see the wide valley far below, with the tiny winding river at the bottom, and the walled fields and midget houses. There was a succession of such valleys all the way to Kenmare, and we finally rolled up before the big hotel there just in time for lunch.
We walked down into the village, afterwards, and found it more bustling and prosperous than any of the other small villages we had seen. This is due partly perhaps to the tourist traffic, for Kenmare is a famous bathing and fishing resort; but homespun tweeds are manufactured there in considerable quantities, and at the convent scores of girls are employed at lace-making, Celtic embroidery, wood-carving and leather-work. The school is said to be one of the best managed in Ireland, and I was sorry that we did not have time to visit it. We saw, however, some of the Kerry girls in the street, and they were fully handsome enough to give colour to the doggerel: