^^•. 
 
 TMt <HVRg.tr iP-LAveK. 
 
RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
AN OLD SLAVE. 
 Drairn and coloured by yac\^ 'B, Teats. 
 
RAMBLES IN 
 IRELAND 
 
 ROBERT LYND 
 
 A 
 
 author of 
 'home life in Ireland" "irish and English" 
 
 WITH FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR 
 
 BY JACK B. YEATS 
 AND TWENTY-FIVE FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 
 
 BOST0N COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 CHESTNUT HILL MASS. 
 
 BOSTON 
 DANA ESTES & COMPANY 
 
Published igj2 
 
 Copyright in the British Empire of Mills & Boon Ltd. , London, iqi2 
 Printed by Morrison & Gibb Ltd., Edinburgh 
 

 TO 
 ANNIE LYND 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 I HAVE to thank Mr. J. B. Atkins as author, and 
 Mr. John Murray as publisher, for permission to 
 quote the ghost story, near the beginning of 
 Chapter IV., from the admirable " Life of Sir 
 William Howard Russell." I am exceedingly 
 grateful, too, to Mr. Jack B. Yeats for per- 
 mission to make use of some of his illustrations 
 of " Life in the West of Ireland," and to Mr. 
 Paul Henry for allowing me to reproduce his 
 
 " Old Age Pensioner." 
 
 R. L. 
 August 1 912. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 Galway of the Races . . . . -13 
 
 CHAPTER n 
 The Path to Cong . . . . .61 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 Through Lisdoonvarna . . . . .95 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 The Cliffs of Moher to Killarney . .115 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 Puck Fair . . . . . . .146 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 Tourists in Kerry . . . . . 168 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 KiNSALE . . . . . . .182 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 Cork and Mallow . . . . .213 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 Cashel of the Kings ..... 238 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 The Man from Thurles .... 256 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 Dublin ....... 264 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 IN COLOUR 
 
 The Hurley Player 
 
 Cover of Book 
 
 An Old Slave 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 
 FACING PACE 
 
 The Treason Song 
 
 . 44 
 
 The Sportsmen . 
 
 . 54 
 
 The Ballad Singer 
 
 . 162 
 
 IN HALF-TONE 
 (Photographs by Lawrence, Dublin) 
 
 Lynch's House, Galway. 
 
 Cong. 
 
 Cong Abbey 
 
 The Old Age Pensioner. (Fi 
 Paul Henry) 
 
 On the Coast of Clare 
 
 The Cliffs of Moher . 
 
 Scatter Y Island . 
 
 The Treaty Stone, Limerick 
 
 King John's Castle, Limerick 
 
 rom the Painting by 
 
 21 
 
 77 
 86 
 
 102 
 112 
 119 
 127 
 136 
 139 
 
12 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Puck Fair .... 
 
 Valentia Harbour, Co. Kerry 
 
 O'CoNNELL's Birthplace, Cahirciveen 
 
 Hotel Grounds in Glengariff 
 
 Glengariff, Co. Cork . 
 
 A View of Kinsale 
 
 St. Patrick's Bridge, Cork 
 
 Shandon Steeple, Cork 
 
 The Mardyke, Cork 
 
 Mallow 
 
 The Rock of Cashel 
 
 CoRMAC's Chapel, Cashel 
 
 Kilkenny . 
 
 Kilkenny Cathedral 
 
 Old Parliament House, Dublin 
 
 O'Connell Street, Dublin 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 164 
 169 
 
 175 
 179 
 188 
 212 
 216 
 218 
 225 
 238 
 246 
 256 
 261 
 266 
 292 
 
RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 GALWAY OF THE RACES 
 
 Galway is a grey city set among abounding 
 waters. It gives the impression, at any rate, of 
 a stony permanence that refuses to be destroyed 
 though the tides of sea and river swirl about it 
 and, as you cross the outer bridge, seem to be 
 rushing through its foundations and gushing out 
 of its walls. Historians of the old-fashioned 
 sort tell you that Galway is not an Irish city. It 
 is true enough that it first appears in the records 
 after the Normans had come to it with their 
 energetic genius for towns and systems. But 
 nothing remains of the Normans now save dust 
 and stones. It was in vain that they wrote up on 
 the western gate of this medieval fortress of theirs 
 the fantastic prayer : " From the fury of the 
 O'Flaherties, good Lord, deliver us." The 
 
14 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 O' Flaherties, or what the O' Flaherties stand for, 
 are its supreme distinction now. 
 
 I do not mean that the Irish have made Galway 
 a positive expression of their genius, an imaginative 
 and symbolic city. Fortune has seen to it that 
 that was impossible. But I do mean to say that 
 amid the solid ruins of this city, amid this scene 
 of abandoned greatness, the Irish have found their 
 most interesting encampment on a large scale. 
 Galway is Irish in a sense in which Dublin and 
 Belfast and Cork and Derry are not Irish but 
 cosmopolitan. Its people, their speech, their 
 dress, their swarthy complexions, their black hair, 
 their eyes like blue flames, excite the imagination 
 with curious surmises. Galway city — technically, 
 it is only Galway town — is to the discoverer of 
 Ireland something like what Chapman's Homer 
 was to Keats. It is a clue, a provocation, an 
 enticement. 
 
 Not that it has preserved itself inviolate from 
 respectability and shoddy and the invasions of 
 twentieth-century commonplaceness. There are 
 plenty of dull shops in it, besides the older houses 
 with the towering grey walls, severe in their 
 ruins. The main street through which the creep- 
 ing tram winds is, in spite of an occasional piece 
 of surviving majesty, unimpressive enough. And 
 I am sure that besides dull shops and dull streets 
 Galway has its share of dull people. One hears a 
 good deal of the petty social snobbishness that 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 15 
 
 divides the genteeler part of the inhabitants into 
 rival clubs in which, as a local man put it to 
 me, " twopence looks down on three-halfpence," 
 after the manner of the civilised. 
 
 Many travellers, I am afraid, are disappointed 
 in Galway when they arrive and find it so full of 
 houses one might see anywhere and people one 
 might see anywhere. It does not meet one with 
 the open -bosomed generosity that one had 
 learned to expect from descriptions of it as an 
 historic Spanish city with streets of courtly 
 marble houses. It is a " wild, fierce, and most 
 original town," said Thackeray ; but, when you 
 visit it, you find that it is wild, fierce, and original 
 only in pieces, and those not the most immediately 
 obvious pieces, and you have at first a feeling 
 of disenchantment. You look round you again, 
 eager to see those wonderful-looking people of 
 whom Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall wrote : " The 
 dark features and coal-black hair of the people 
 indicate their Spanish descent ; and they are, 
 for the most part, so finely formed, so naturally 
 graceful, that almost every peasant girl might 
 serve as a model for a sculptor." Ah, well ; you 
 turn your eyes to the wrinkled old woman who 
 sits huddled in her shawl on the pavement by her 
 basket of dulse and halfpenny oranges, and you 
 see that she has very little hair of any sort at all, 
 and that her figure is as graceful as the gnarled 
 body of a tree. And the next woman you meet 
 
i6 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 is a barefoot pedlar who tries to sell you cockles 
 or, in default of that, to joke a beggar's penny out 
 of you, and you notice that the skin of her face 
 is inflamed, that she breathes spirits, and that 
 her teeth are yellow. The next moment, a young 
 woman passes you, and she is so respectable that 
 her clothes seem like a uniform : if she has coal- 
 black hair, there is no beauty in it, for she has 
 made herself as lifeless, as empty of glow, as a 
 wooden figure. And so, though pretty women 
 are numerous here above most towns, you go 
 from depth to deeper depth of disappointment. 
 Such is the penalty of living in an age of realism. 
 If one woman in a thousand is beautiful, if one 
 street in a city channels some tide of loveliness 
 and colour, philosophers learn to be grateful and 
 to say that the world is good. 
 
 When last I arrived in Galway it was the day 
 after a bank holiday and the day before the races. 
 Our reception at the railway station was certainly 
 such as was likely to give strangers the impression 
 that they had arrived at a " wild, fierce, and most 
 original town." It was one of those scenes of 
 indiscipline which are common in a country where 
 the people are not allowed to make law and order 
 for themselves, and therefore seem to look on 
 law and order as a foreign and superfluous thing. 
 We got out of the train into a crowd where men 
 were pushing hither and thither with the turmoil 
 of cattle in a panic. To attempt to reach the 
 
GAL WAY OF THE RACES 17 
 
 luggage where it had been pitched on to the 
 platform was like thrusting one's way into a 
 football scrimmage. Tall wild men — self-con- 
 stituted porters — battled over to it with sticks, and 
 English visitors shoved towards it with damnings 
 and indignant faces. One of the tallest and wildest 
 of the men managed to tug our luggage out of the 
 middle of the fight, and, calling up an ally to 
 take one of the bags, he set off ahead of us for 
 the hotel where we intended to put up. 
 
 At the door of the hotel stood a stout man in a 
 cap, a sociable-looking man with a grey moustache, 
 obviously the landlord. 
 
 " Go mbeannuighidh Dia dhuit," said I, as he 
 nodded to us ; " teastuigheann seomra uainn." 
 
 " Eh ? " he said, bending his head forward and 
 looking uncomfortable ; " eh ? " 
 
 " Teastuigheann seomra uainn," I repeated : 
 " nach bhfuil Gaedhilg agat ? " 
 
 His eyes shifted nervously, as though he would 
 have liked to escape. 
 
 " I don't know much Irish," he muttered in an 
 absent-minded way ; and, looking down the hall, 
 called, " Mary ! The fact is," he went on, " I'm 
 not sure — I never like to turn away a Gaelic 
 Leaguer — it's the week of the races, do you see, 
 and we have to charge extra for the rooms. 
 Mary ! " again ; then to the men who were 
 carrying our bags, "Put those down a minute. 
 We'U see what can be done, Mr. ." He 
 
1 8 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 raised his voice inquisitively to learn my name. I 
 told him ; then he went off to see what could be 
 done. In a minute or two he came back and told us 
 that if we were willing to pay something extra — I 
 forget how much — we might send our bags upstairs. 
 
 The hotel had not yet become a house of con- 
 fusion. It was filling rapidly, however, mostly 
 with muscular young men in caps, who went 
 upstairs into the dusty air of the dining-room 
 and waited patiently, reading dusty old numbers 
 of illustrated papers, till one of the girls in 
 the house would bring in an overloaded tray of 
 ham and eggs and fresh bread and jam and tea. 
 Our luggage was taken up to one of a row of 
 box-bedrooms arranged along a passage — boxes 
 divided from each other by thin wooden parti- 
 tions, and with doors that would only keep 
 shut if you put a chair or a bag up against them. 
 The bed was in need of clean sheets. The room 
 gave the impression that a minimum of labour 
 and of thought had been wasted upon its bareness. 
 Probably it would not be in use, except during 
 the time of the races, from one year's end to the 
 other. From the festal untidiness of bedroom 
 and eating - room we soon escaped into the 
 dusty streets — the dustiest in Ireland — with their 
 sprinkling of hands-in-pockets expectant idlers. . . . 
 
 St. Nicholas' Church seemed the best place of 
 refuge from the immediate century. Grey and 
 stumpy, and aspiring to no beauty save that of 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 19 
 
 age, crowned with a belfry capriciously set there 
 like the final ornament on a child's house of 
 bricks, it looked like a little Thibet of challenge 
 to the explorer approaching its ring of rubble wall. 
 From inside the church came the sound of a 
 harmonium. Not a sacred or even a sentimental 
 sound, but the sound of a harmonium being used 
 as a toy, or at least as a puzzle. Two little girls in 
 wide-brimmed hats moved a yard or two away 
 from the instrument self-consciously when we 
 entered, and a small lively man, wrinkled and 
 merry-eyed like a sailor, ceased lifting mats and 
 dusting pews and came over to us. Like other 
 people, I often resent the insistent friendliness 
 of sextons. But in St. Nicholas' the sexton is 
 a boon. Without him one would miss a good 
 many of the significances of the place. Not that 
 there is not a great deal of public and accessible 
 history in the stones of the building. In so far 
 as it is the mortuary of the Tribes, for instance, 
 he who runs may read. Everybody knows how, 
 soon after Galway was walled in about 1270, it 
 was settled in by a number of exclusive families 
 and came to be called after them the City of the 
 Tribes. The names of the tribes, Norman and 
 Welsh and Saxon in origin for the most part, 
 are immortalised in the unmusical and un- 
 imaginative rhyme — 
 
 Athy, Blake, Bodkin, Browne, Deane, Darcy, Lynch, 
 Joyce, Kirwan, Martin, Morris, Sherrett, French. 
 
20 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 Here in this bare old church is a house of monu- 
 ments to these long-since Irishised families. Them 
 you can see for yourself, even without the presence 
 of the sexton, with his running commentary of 
 " the antiquaries say." But, rich as they are, these 
 are not the secret treasures of the church. 
 
 Of all the tombs which the sexton points out 
 to the stranger, the most interesting to me are 
 the flagged graves let into the floor, where the 
 dead business-men of a more bustling Galway are 
 buried with the emblems of their trade or of the 
 Resurrection — scissors and boots and crowing 
 cocks — carved on the stones. For most of these 
 you have to look under the mats where, on Sundays, 
 the feet of the infrequent worshippers tread. 
 Look at them closely, for they are one of the 
 vindications of Ireland. Politicians try to per- 
 suade us that Belfast is the only part of Ireland 
 where industry and commerce are natural. This 
 is, of course, not true, as the visitor to historic 
 Galway will soon discover. The enterprise, the 
 spring-time vigour, of Belfast are splendid. But 
 we must remember that Belfast and the neigh- 
 bouring part of Ulster are the only places in Ireland 
 where enterprise and spring-time vigour were not 
 suppressed by law. If Belfast linen had been 
 put under the same penalties as Galway wool, 
 we should have had no populous thriving Belfast 
 to praise to-day. There is an idea abroad among 
 those who do not know Irish history, that the 
 
LYNCH'S HOUSE, GALWAY. 
 
 \^Laivreiue. 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 21 
 
 Gaelic Irishman is born without the virtues which 
 enable a man to labour and to "pay his bills. So 
 persistent has been the defamation of Ireland, 
 indeed, that even since Mrs. Green has given us 
 the facts, in her great study of the medieval 
 civilisation of Ireland, The Making of Ireland 
 and its Undoing, people go on writing as though 
 Ireland had never produced a race of craftsmen 
 and merchants of her own, but had been a mere 
 precinct of religion and cattle-thieving except 
 for the industrious invaders who settled behind 
 the walls of her towns and created beautiful and 
 useful things, to make the name of the country 
 known in every port of Europe. . . . Well, the 
 industry of the invaders was soon suppressed, 
 from London, too. But Mrs. Green has proved 
 very clearly that the old Irishman and the new 
 Irishman fell in an equal ruin in Galway and the 
 other towns when the great Imperial laws against 
 work were put into operation. 
 
 The one world-famous man whose bones lie 
 in the Church of St. Nicholas was not an old 
 Irishman, but a new Irishman, and his memory 
 lives not because he was a great trader but because 
 he slew his son. This was Mayor James Lynch 
 Fitzstephen, a commercial prince of the fifteenth 
 century, by whose labours trade and hospitality 
 were greatly increased between Galway and 
 Spain. He would probably have lived unknown 
 to history if he himself had not made the voyage 
 
22 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 to Spain and brought back with him a young 
 Spanish gentleman, the son of one of his hosts, 
 on a visit to Ireland. Lynch had a son of his own, 
 impulsive and riotous. Between the latter and 
 the Spaniard a jealous quarrel broke out about 
 some woman, and it ended with young Lynch 
 giving a stab to his rival, so that he died. He at 
 once surrendered to justice, and his father was 
 the magistrate who tried him and sentenced him 
 to death, in spite of the prayers of the towns- 
 people, who seem to have liked the young man 
 well. Nor was this the whole of the elder's iron 
 righteousness ; for, when no one could be found 
 in Galway to carry out the sentence. Lynch hanged 
 the boy with his own hand. 
 
 On the wall which encloses the churchyard, a 
 stone marks the spot where this ancient piece of 
 justice was done. It is aptly carved with a 
 death's-head and crossbones, and under these the 
 motto : " Remember Deathe, Vaniti of Vaniti. 
 And Al Is But Vaniti." 
 
 If you let the sexton take you up to the bell- 
 tower and show you Galway and its streets from 
 that height, you will as likely as not get the im- 
 pression that you are looking out upon a city 
 where the very houses are death's-heads. Skulls 
 of lofty mansions, the windowlessness of which 
 gives an appearance as of empty eye-sockets, line 
 the streets in graveyard ruin. Other buildings 
 lie in stony masses, like bones heaped and mixed 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 23 
 
 together in an old tomb. No one who has not 
 seen Galway from a height like this can realise 
 to the full what an air the place has of a town 
 awaiting a blessed resurrection. Little of the 
 grand life has been left here. Emptiness sits 
 in the places of abundance. Tall and smokeless 
 chimneys rise everywhere, giving the town at 
 noonday the appearance that other cities have 
 at dawn. So hollow of joy and vigour does this 
 grey town look from the tower of St. Nicholas 
 that it has been likened fitly enough to a scooped- 
 out egg-shell. Flour-mills, factories — how many 
 were there even thirty years ago that are now silent 
 behind cobwebs and broken windows ! The 
 old sexton gave us figures, and they stay in my 
 memory — for unhappily I have not the genius 
 for note-taking — as a ratio of about twenty to 
 three. As he told us of the decline of the popu- 
 lation of the town, Catholic and Protestant alike, 
 a funeral procession moved across the bridge by 
 the gaol, with mourners riding after it on slow 
 horses under the branches of the trees. 
 
 When we came down from the tower, we went 
 round some of the ruined streets, past many a 
 modern house with an old stone bearing some 
 tribal coat-of-arms let into the wall over the door, 
 and climbed the steps of an ancient broken 
 castle, in which a man and a small boy were busy 
 among cases of type, setting up the pages of a 
 weekly newspaper. But, as I have said before, I 
 
24 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 do not want to give any one the impression that 
 Galway is all dead. There are tobacconists' 
 shops and grocers and drapers and public -houses, 
 and a book-shop where you can buy Jane Eyre 
 (in a sixpenny edition) and the novels of Mrs. 
 Henry Wood. . . . 
 
 In the evening the hotel became a house of 
 crowds, and crowds within crowds. As each 
 new train arrived, ones and twos and threes of 
 men and women, with their coats and sticks 
 and baggage, seemed every minute to be projected 
 into the already overcrowded dining-sitting-room, 
 with the air of bewildered sheep. They sat down, 
 as they came in, at the disordered tables, where 
 pieces of broken bread, knives, forks, spoons, 
 empty unwashed glasses, stains, bottles of sauces, 
 and the remains of earlier meals gave the ap- 
 pearance of a battlefield where hunger had been 
 worsted, but not without casualties. Pots of tea, 
 bottles of stout, glasses of whisky, — or rather 
 bottles of whisky, for the guest was decently 
 given the bottle to help himself, — rashers of bacon, 
 fragments of fowl, steaks, loaves, jam-dishes, 
 rattled in on loaded trays as the new guests 
 arrived, and at each of the tables and corners of 
 tables a mumbled conversation would begin. 
 
 In crowded hotels — at least in some parts of 
 Ireland — the conversation often begins in this 
 muttering shyness. Here and there a loud voice 
 rises courageously, from the first bite, but, as a 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 25 
 
 rule, people are too self-conscious — too conscious, 
 rather, of the presence of neighbours with a 
 possible gift for satire — to talk freely till their 
 blood has been warmed. Even excited and angry- 
 arguments are carried on, with an infinity of 
 facial expression and gesture, in the voices of 
 conspirators. Thus, in an Irish hotel, a stranger 
 often might well feel that he was in the midst of 
 a plot — that each corner of the room was con- 
 spiring against him : for though every one resents 
 the curiosity of his neighbour's ears, his own 
 eyes are continually darting glances of curiosity 
 all round him. Solitary persons occasionally 
 come and look through the door, and shy of so 
 many eyes, slip quietly off to the less dreadful 
 discomfort of their bedrooms. 
 
 For myself, I am always in these places wishing 
 the floor would open and swallow me. ... It 
 is an awful thing to go to bed at ten. But amid 
 the murmuring plots of a hotel sitting-room it 
 may be even a more trying ordeal to sit up. 
 One had to fly somewhere out of that prison 
 of constraint and low voices. Consequently, to 
 bed — to bed in the little wooden box where the 
 door would not keep shut. 
 
 To bed, but not to sleep. Everywhere, as well as 
 in the sitting-room, these mumbled conversations 
 seemed to be going on, broken now and then by 
 the voice of some confident fun-poking young 
 man, a girl's titter, and little bass growls of 
 
26 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 laughter. People stopped just outside one's door 
 and entered into conversations that seemed to last 
 for hours. The clock struck, the clock struck 
 again, and still the house was a house of subdued 
 narratives, excited as a school that is going to 
 break up the next day for the summer holidays. 
 As time wore on, we would hear good-nights 
 interchanged, and a last call of " See you in the 
 morning," and the leap of heavy boots up the 
 stairs, or their tramp along a corridor would be 
 the preliminary to a lull. But new sturdy ghosts 
 would arrive, and the conversations would go on. 
 Gradually, towards the small hours, the good- 
 nights increased in frequency, and with each of them 
 one seemed to be let down another step towards 
 silence. Where men mumbled before they now 
 spoke in whispers. Soon the creaking of boards 
 under huge boots became a startling interruption. 
 It affected the imagination like the tramping of 
 the warder past a corridor of prison cells — a 
 tramping and banging to an end of silence. One 
 ceased to hear the whispers save as the fall and ebb 
 of little, lulling waves. Tramp, tramp, tramp, 
 tramp. Door-bang. Again the little, lulling 
 waves, waves. Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp. 
 Door-bang. The little waves are lapping my 
 face. They are rising above my ears. The tide 
 
 is nearly full. Tramp, tramp, tr Even 
 
 Galway ghosts can keep me awake no longer. 
 Next morning was filled with sun. It was one 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 27 
 
 of those happy, gold mornings when the farmer's 
 daughter dresses in white. Galway rose to greet 
 it in a garment of dust. Her streets, Sabbatic- 
 looking with all the principal shops closed, had 
 none the less a certain keen vitality, as country- 
 people came in to view them before going to the 
 races, and young racing enthusiasts ran about 
 looking for a newsagent's or a barber's. Within a 
 few minutes of the arrival of the Dublin train, 
 there was hardly a paper to be had. Small 
 energetic boys refused to sell you an Independent 
 for a halfpenny to-day. It was Galway's one 
 chance in the year of selling in the dearest market ; 
 and even the halfpenny paper was raised to a 
 penny. Near the newsagent's shop a barber's 
 pole slanted out over the pavement, and with a 
 file of other bearded pards I went in to get shaved. 
 Every chair in the place had already an occupant 
 being violently lathered or scraped in front of a 
 mirror. The long bench against the wall was 
 filled with young men, smoking and reading 
 papers or yawning post-alcoholic yawns, and at 
 the far end of the form, in contrast to us all, sat 
 a peasant in a tam-o'-shanter, lean-faced, dark, 
 wind-inured, with long hair pouring over his 
 ears — a man from the Aran Islands, I think, in 
 an ungainly grey homespun coat and yellowish- 
 grey trousers — a man who, with his eagle nose and 
 his thrust-out chin, had a curious look of Dante. 
 As I sat waiting, I was especially fascinated by one 
 
28 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 of the five or six barbers who were performing 
 their lightning labours with more energy than 
 skill or gentleness on the faces of their patients. 
 He was a stout, round man who, as he set to his 
 work with his shirt sleeves rolled high up, looked 
 more like a blacksmith than a barber. Or per- 
 haps I should say like a butcher. Or perhaps a 
 stableman. Possibly he did actually belong to 
 one of these professions, and had only taken to 
 barbering in order to meet an emergency. Any- 
 how, he used the soap-brush and the razor like 
 a man who was playing a mischievous game 
 rather than a professional. If he pushed the soap 
 into a nose or eye or ear, he began to shake with 
 cheerfulness : his puffy red cheeks, his big rough 
 moustache, his comfortable stomach, all appeared 
 to be sharing in some secret merriment. As for 
 the razor, he used it as though he were currying 
 a horse. He made one drag across the face from 
 ear to chin, and another drag down the throat, 
 and after about four drags sponged off the soap 
 and the blood and said " Fourpence, please ! " 
 with a genial twinkle, as though you, being a 
 sportsman, could feel no offence because of a 
 few wounds contracted in honourable battle. 
 One young man rose from the chair and looked 
 in the mirror at the torn skin of his cheek and the 
 blood pouring from a great gash in his chin. 
 
 " I'll remember you this day month," he said 
 to the barber, as he wiped his face with a towel. 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 29 
 
 " What do you mean ? " said the jolly fat 
 barber. 
 
 " I say I'll remember you this day month," 
 repeated the other grimly. " You've left your 
 mark, never fear." And he paid the barber what 
 he owed him and probably a little more. 
 
 " No offence," said the barber gaily, pocketing 
 the money ; " thank you, sir," and the young 
 man went out. " Bloody fool ! " said the barber, 
 looking round us with a laugh. 
 
 I will confess that I did not laugh. My own 
 turn had not arrived yet, and I dreaded to come 
 under the razor of this good-humoured butcher 
 as I would dread being charged down and mutilated 
 by Cossacks. As a matter of fact, when my turn 
 did come, and this particular barber said, " Next, 
 please ! " invitingly, I was dishonest enough to 
 look the other way while an impatient stable-boy 
 unscrupulously dashed for the empty chair. I 
 am afraid he was pachydermatous and did not 
 suffer as he ought for his greed. 
 
 Meanwhile a lean young barber at the other 
 end of the room was looking with dismay at the 
 shaggy mane of the Aran man. 
 
 " Hair-cutting's sixpence to-day," he said 
 warningly, wishing probably neither to cut the 
 islander's hair nor to let him in for the double 
 prices of the day. 
 
 The islander twisted his gloomy, beaked face 
 into an " Eh ? " 
 
30 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 " Hair-cutting's sixpence to-day," repeated 
 the barber in deliberate tones, as though speaking 
 to a deaf man or to one who did not understand 
 English. 
 
 " Sixpence ? " the other repeated, a puzzled 
 and threatening look coming into his face ; 
 " go ahead," and he settled himself, a little 
 offendedly, into his chair. 
 
 After that, luckily before the stout barber had 
 finished with his last victim, another chair was 
 empty, and a little spry barber was apologising 
 to me and asking for the loan of my paper " just 
 for a second," before beginning to shave me. He 
 was an averagely good barber — as good as could 
 be expected when one is being shaved, as it were, 
 in a tumult. But when I got out into the air 
 again I breathed deeply and gladly, like a man 
 who has escaped from a tight corner. 
 
 Galway was by now filling with cars from the 
 ends of the earth. Everybody was getting ready 
 to go to the races. Youths in caps stood round 
 the steps of our hotel and welcomed noisily 
 any new friend who came up to join their group. 
 One youth, with his cap over his eyes, would scrim- 
 mage into the group on his toes, like a footballer, 
 while his arms embraced all the necks near him, 
 and he demanded musically — " Has anybody 
 here seen Kelly — K — E — double L — Y?" 
 Then another figure, hands in pockets, would 
 come up to shouts of " Paddy ! " " Hilloa, 
 
GAL WAY OF THE RACES 31 
 
 Padd)^ ! " " Where the bloody hell have you 
 been, Paddy ? " And Paddy, closed in by 
 questioning faces, like the examinee in the game 
 of Oranges and Lemons. w^T'ld confess with a grin 
 of imitation shame : '' '^ •„ I haven't been 
 
 sober for a week." 
 
 His confession would be received with mighty 
 interest and chaffing interrogations on his ad- 
 ventures, until Billy hove in sight. Then the 
 cry of the pack would go up : " Billy ! " " Hilloa, 
 Billy ! " " Where the bloody hell have you 
 sprung from, Billy ? " And so ancient friend- 
 ships would be exuberantly renewed and old 
 meetings on half the racecourses of Ireland be 
 recalled. 
 
 Everybody was now flying or making ready to 
 fly to the racecourse, which is about two miles 
 to the east of the town. Every man who owns 
 a vehicle of any sort in that part of Ireland, even 
 if it is only a dilapidated and out-of-fashion 
 side-car inherited from a long dead great-grand- 
 father, brings it to Galway at the time of the 
 races and excitedly sells seats on it for as much as 
 he can get for them. Monstrous brakes that 
 must date from the old days before railway trains, 
 and that appear never to have had the dust and 
 mud taken off them since — the very reins and har- 
 ness seeming to be an affair of patches and pieces 
 of string — rumble into Eyre Square at one corner 
 and out again at another. Little low dirty cars 
 
32 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 with sloping backs, and drawn now by a horse 
 from the plough, now by some old pensioner from 
 the stable, with all its bones showing, follow in 
 the dusty procession, and are as sure of clients 
 as the brisker cars with the well-fed and sinewy 
 animals. Endless seems the line of these vehicles 
 that marches down the hill, while the hoofs of 
 walking horses kick up the white dust from the 
 broken road, and drivers, cars, and horses, one by 
 one, get to look as if they had come from the yard 
 of a busy flour-mill. 
 
 Thinner and thinner became the population of 
 the town as holiday-makers with excited eyes, 
 after shouting bargains with the extemporised 
 jarveys, leaped on the long chain of cars or 
 scrambled into the brakes. The air was full of 
 thrills. Aged paupers leaned against the railings 
 of the Square gardens, twisted sticks propping 
 them up or tucked under their arms, and watched 
 the bold youths and the gay white maidens drive 
 off, a multitudinous pilgrimage to a multitudinous 
 paradise. My landlord, standing on a doorstep 
 and making introductions like a master of cere- 
 monies, looked out on the gaiety of it all, contented 
 as a pigeon watching a river go by. He wasn't 
 going to the races himself, but all his family 
 was going. 
 
 " You're driving to the field, Mr. Lynd ? " 
 he asked me. 
 
 I told him we were. He nodded intelligence. 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 33 
 
 " I'd advise you, Mr. Lynd," he said in a kindly 
 voice, " to get a seat on one of them brakes. 
 There's less chance of accidents. A horse in a 
 car would be more apt to stumble." 
 
 One could certainly imagine the horses in the 
 cars stumbling or bolting or playing any sort of 
 wild destructive tricks in those exciting streets. 
 Many by this time had made the circuit to and 
 from the course several times already, and patterns 
 of sweat were showing on their bodies under 
 the harness, and the wind was roaring in a few 
 broken specimens as in the throat of an old man. 
 Our only chance of getting a car — for our land- 
 lord's luxurious gloom was not to intimidate us — 
 was to go and meet the vehicles as they came into 
 the town. 
 
 " How much ? " a bristly-chinned man in a 
 white coat would ask an approaching driver, who 
 would lean over, his face thrust forward greedily, 
 and say — 
 
 " A half-crown apiece." 
 
 " Guess again," the man with the bristly chin 
 would reply, his eyes wandering to the next car. 
 
 " I'll take you for two shillings," the driver 
 would offer. 
 
 " I wish you may get it," says the man with 
 the bristly chin, and turns to his haggling with 
 the next carman. 
 
 We got on the side of a car and began our rush 
 for the field. We stopped to take other passengers 
 3 
 
34 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 up before long, and soon even the well of the 
 the car had a young man with a briar pipe sitting 
 on it. Off we dashed out of the town and up 
 the long hill after all the horsed vehicles of 
 Connacht, swaying and swinging past the stone 
 walls of the fields and the grassy roadsides thick 
 with a low rain of dust. Our speed was only 
 limited by the speed of the car that went before. 
 It was our glory to come so near it that our horse's 
 mouth would be within biting distance of the 
 hindmost occupant of it. If possible, we refrained 
 from passing it — just kept the horse's muzzle 
 boastfully threatening the dangling legs of some 
 poor fellow who dare not take his eyes off it even 
 for a moment's look at the scenery. Now and 
 then, to be sure, a motor-car would toot by, and, 
 following a bad example, we too would pass a 
 less impetuous neighbour ; but on the whole we 
 followed the ancient fashion of politeness till we 
 arrived at a gap in a wall which admitted us across 
 a quarter of a mile of fields to the racecourse. 
 
 The racecourse, with its grandstand and its 
 hurdles and banks and wall-jumps, lies, a crooked 
 loop, on a hillside. It is a very beautiful world 
 of grey and blue that you see from it — grey of 
 stone and gull and cloud, blue of sky and hill- 
 bound bay with the white island lighthouse 
 rising among the waters. Going over the fields, 
 one sees a long line of emptied cars along the 
 sky-line returning to Galway by another route. 
 
GAL WAY OF THE RACES 35 
 
 and the clear air is full of the murmur of holiday 
 — of bookmaker and fruit-seller and showman 
 with cocoanut-shies and Aunt Sallies. Some 
 cars drive over the fields and take up their stand 
 near the bookmakers opposite the winning-post. 
 Here high iron railings cage the democracy on 
 one side of the course, while on the other side the 
 grandstand is full of the movement of fashion 
 and field-glasses. About a hundred yards from 
 this, at the bottom of a slope, the cheap lemonade 
 sellers and mirth-providing showmen have pitched 
 their tents, and between this and the course 
 itself constant rivers of the aimless, the older men 
 in tail-coats and wideawakes, are wandering. 
 The bookmakers who have fixed up their stands 
 like a thousand auctioneers in a clump near the 
 railings draw all eyes and a good many pockets 
 as the time for a race approaches. They are on 
 the whole a serious and business-like-looking set 
 of men. There are none of the comedian sort 
 of bookmakers here such as I have seen on an 
 English course. They do not, however, avoid 
 checks in the pattern of their clothes, and they 
 have, most of them, the air of men who take a 
 materialistic and cunning view of life. 
 
 " Six to four against Marcella ! Six to four 
 against Marcella, and five to one bar one ! " rose 
 the clamour from them, like the barking of dogs 
 round a pond ; and, as the clerk registered 
 each innocent bet in his long ledger, the odds 
 
36 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 against the favourite would come down, and the 
 master-bookie would make a change on the board 
 of prices with a bit of chalk. " Five to four against 
 Marcella ! I'm giving five to four against Mar- 
 cella ! " he would drone monotonously, allowing 
 himself no quirks of humour or fancy. 
 
 One of the bookies, a big round-whiskered man 
 with a crimson face, check trousers, a coachman's 
 broad black hat, and with a case of field-glasses 
 slung round his shoulders, bawled the words 
 apoplectically. Another, narrow of temples, dull 
 of eye, with a fan of sallow nose intensifying the 
 lean appearance of his solemn face, contrived 
 to speak the words with almost no expression at 
 all : he was more colourless than his dust-coat, 
 much more so than his pale brown hat. Another, 
 at once respectable and boozy-faced, with a pink 
 flower in his velvet-collared coat, offered the odds 
 sulkily but energetically from his fat mouth. 
 And country boys moved in and out among them 
 smilingly but withholdingly, having no florins 
 to risk on blood horses. An occasional lady, 
 masterful in a tweed hat and jacket, came forward 
 and got a receipt for a bet, and the population 
 of the town billiard-rooms nipped up by ones and 
 twos and backed their own cunning against the 
 cunning of the furtive-eyed bookies. When the 
 horses came out and began cantering down the 
 course with little swift trial thuds, the bookies 
 raised their voices to a higher note and began 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 37 
 
 shouting feverishly like prophets. It was as 
 though they were calling to the crowd to repent 
 while there was yet time. 
 
 Out would come a jockey in a costume, half 
 cherry-coloured and half blue, with an orange- 
 peaked, chocolate-coloured cap, and would bolt 
 down the course with head lowered on the back 
 of a huge bay. The crowd began to rush to the 
 railings to get commanding positions, to look 
 over hats and shoulders, to struggle into rifts 
 in the human mass, to leap on to the few cars 
 that had come up there, to fly from the bookies 
 who clamoured like a lot of gulls as they offered 
 a last chance of a bet. 
 
 " Evens on Marcella ! I'll take evens on 
 Marcella ! " they shouted, as though the end 
 of the world might happen the next moment and 
 it would be a good thing to have put money on 
 Marcella before you died. Red, yellow, orange, 
 blue, green, indigo, violet — purple, mauve, maroon, 
 grey, black, white, brown — stars, stripes, bars — 
 jockeys in costumes of every colour and every 
 pattern now flocked on to the course, looking like 
 a school of circus boys, and, after a preliminary 
 breather, ambled back up the hill with humped 
 shoulders. Then, as grey - shawled women 
 elbowed their way forward to the railings and 
 old men in tam-o'-shanters with smiles on their 
 wrinkled faces made room for them, the animals 
 gathered at the starting-post and curveted and 
 
38 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 champed and turned their heads, waiting till 
 the bell rang. 
 
 The bell rang. The horses broke away like 
 a whirl of autumn leaves and swept past us 
 thunderously. As soon as the bell rang, the 
 clamour of the bookies died away like a sound in 
 a dream or like a wave that had broken. It was 
 as though the world were filled suddenly with an 
 intense silence, though now and then, as Marcella 
 leaped a bank with the grace of a hare or Jumping 
 Jehosaphat, bundling in her wake, scrambled 
 over a stone wall, you would hear a grunt, a sort 
 of stenographic soliloquy, coming out under the 
 field-glasses of some bookie, and buzzing arguments 
 would begin and cease among the crowd as to 
 whether it was Marcella that was leading after 
 all, or whether it was Lame Duck, whose 
 rider and Marcella's wore scarcely distinguishable 
 colours. Ten thousand eyes clung to the leaders 
 of the straggling line of horses that galloped the 
 ups and downs of the long course, clearing gate 
 and bank and green-branched hurdle, lessening 
 in number as an occasional rider might despair 
 and fall out, disappearing from sight behind some 
 hillock, coming into view again in a new and 
 exciting order, a royal line of gay colour and lovely 
 movement. It was through a crowd intent like 
 this upon thrilling events that a barefooted 
 woman moved with a basket of fruit on her arm, 
 offering plums for sale in the shyest voice im- 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 39 
 
 aginable. She was sad-faced under her shawl. 
 " Anny plums ? " she intoned in a singsong voice, 
 her eyes moving from indifferent face to in- 
 different face ; " anny plums ? " 
 
 It was a note of sweet music in the buzzing 
 atmosphere. It was business, but, like the selling 
 of sweet lavender in the streets of London, it 
 was business to a tune. " Anny plums ? " she 
 almost whispered, as though it were possibly 
 indecent — and it was — to suggest that a man 
 might want to eat plums while the fate of his 
 half-sovereign hung in the balance. Then she 
 was out of sight in the crowd. But still, ever 
 and anon, her " Anny plums ? " rang out like 
 a little muted bell. Then it was drowned in 
 the rising growl of a crowd shouting the names of 
 horses near the winning-post into the air. Or 
 rather I should say of the sporting minority of 
 the crowd, for the average Galwayman — at least, 
 the Galway peasant — is little ruffled by the excite- 
 ments of a flash-past of horses whose names he has 
 learned for the first time from a neighbour's 
 racing-card. He watches it critically as he might 
 look at a neighbour's pig. He seems to bring his 
 quiet subliminal self, not his tumultuous surface 
 self, to the contemplation of these steeplechasing 
 circus boys. And it is no wonder, for, with the 
 big cage of railings in front of him and a dis- 
 appearing racecourse to right and to left of him, 
 he can only follow a race in fragments. That is 
 
40 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 why so many of the crowd gradually get tired 
 and dander down the slope towards the booths 
 and stands of the uproarious showmen. 
 
 Here tents had been set up with a two-days' 
 licence to sell liquor. Other stalls were heaped 
 with halfpenny cakes with a snow of red and 
 white caraway seeds on them, rocks of vile 
 yellow sweet-stuff, penny packets of biscuits — 
 such biscuits ! — penny bottles of lemonade, and 
 all those other gaieties of the stomach which are 
 only tolerated because they are associated with 
 holiday. While we were standing at one of these 
 places buying biscuits, a dirty-cheeked baby leaned 
 over from the arms of a beggar woman and held 
 out a half-chewed pig's foot towards the mouth 
 of my companion. 
 
 " Ah, ma'am," said the mother, with a proud 
 smile, " he's mad for mate. You could never 
 tire him giving him mate. Tell the lady," she 
 said, giving him a hugging shake, " what a terror 
 you are for mate, Michael." 
 
 I confess to a certain squeamishness as I watched 
 the baby filthying its mouth with that odious 
 piece of carnality, but at the same time by an 
 irresponsible association of memories the latter 
 called up a summer day ten years before when on 
 a Twelfth of July holiday I had marched with the 
 Belfast Orangemen (not as one of them, alas, but 
 as a stranger !) out to the field of assembly, and 
 there, amid the colours and excited din of 
 
GAL WAY OF THE RACES 41 
 
 loyalty, had seen a stall of trotters bearing the 
 motto : " Liberty, Equality, and Pigs' Feet." 
 After that, I looked more tolerantly on the infant 
 and the pig's foot it was sucking. 
 
 There were pitches of recreation as well as 
 refreshment on the Galway racecourse. Painted 
 wooden images of men rose in little companies 
 in front of a screen of sacking and leered in- 
 vitation at one, while viragoes with red faces, 
 thick necks, and touzled lint - coloured hair 
 screamed at all present to come and have a shy 
 at the wooden figures, which collapsed at the 
 hinged middle if struck hard with a ball between 
 the eyes. If you have never seen a tinker woman 
 scream, you can have no idea what a grotesque 
 symbol of hubbub she makes. She begins by 
 throwing her lawless head back, with her hands 
 on her hips, and shouting " Ha ! ha ! ha ! " 
 — not as a laugh, but as three distinct heaven- 
 splitting syllables — or hell-splitting, if you like, 
 for it sounds like the mirth of the damned. 
 " Ha ! ha ! ha ! " she yells ; " ha ! ha ! ha ! 
 Come on, come on, come on. Come on, all you 
 Galway blazers and sportsmen. Three shots a 
 penny. A penny for three shots. Here you are, 
 young gentleman ! " she goes on, never lowering 
 her voice, as a country boy takes three balls from 
 her hand. " Here you are. Three shots at the 
 old man's cocoanut. And mind the baby ! " 
 
 One really has to underline the woman's humour 
 
42 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 in order to give an impression of its hysterical 
 shrillness. 
 
 " Ha ! ha ! ha ! you're a divil at it ! Ha ! 
 ha ! you're a divil at it," she keeps yelling as the 
 balls begin to fly. " One shot more, and a man's 
 down ! And mind the baby ! Ha ! ha ! you're 
 a divil at it ! Ha ! ha ! ha ! " 
 
 No doubt this pseudo - frenzy produces its 
 effect. If you have from half a dozen to a dozen 
 women and men howling at you in rivalry the 
 information that you're a divil at something or 
 other, and appealing to you with wild cries to 
 mind the baby, you can scarcely help being drawn 
 into a little ring of excitement, and, once you 
 are there, a terrific show-woman will as likely as 
 not either blandish or shame you into trying 
 to knock down her painted dolls and win her 
 poisonous cigars. 
 
 But there were other games besides the various 
 sorts of Aunt Sallies and the kindred cocoanut- 
 shies. There were card games and trick-o'-the- 
 loop games, and there was the game in which 
 you throw rings at a stand full of walking-sticks 
 and attempt to win one of the latter as a prize. 
 
 The game around which the greatest crowd 
 had gathered was one that I had never seen before. 
 Here a man knelt on the grass a few yards from 
 you, his face disguised in blackness and grins, 
 his head stuck with feathers, like a cheap imitation 
 of a Red Indian, and allowed you to throw things 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 43 
 
 at him at two shots a penny. His friend, a dark- 
 faced little fellow with a twinkling eye, in a 
 peaked cap, took the money and gave you the 
 balls to throw while he tried to keep too enthusi- 
 astic sportsmen from overstepping the mark. I 
 do not think the balls in question were anything 
 harder than roUed-up stockings, or that the game 
 was more cruel than a pillow-fight. But I have 
 seldom seen a game enjoyed more furiously. 
 Two sportsmen were allowed to throw at a time, 
 and it was the black man's duty by dodging and 
 ducking and catching the balls in his hands to 
 prevent his face from being hit. The crowd, 
 gathered up into the shape of a tortoise, swayed 
 and swung round the combatants and laughed 
 uproariously as a blow just missed the feather- 
 surrounded face. Occasionally the throwers, 
 getting excited, would run in over the mark and 
 attempt to punish the man at close quarters. 
 But the little smiling fellow in the peaked cap 
 always brought them back in the best of humour 
 with the phrase, " Fair's fair," and, as soon as 
 either of the balls was out of play, he thrust it 
 at some one in the crowd, saying : " Come on, 
 boys, come on. Keep the divilment going." 
 
 He was the only showman in the place who was 
 not shouting. As he stooped, picking up the 
 balls, in the thick of the eager crowd, he seemed 
 to be giving the impression that we were playing 
 a secret game which might be stopped by the 
 
44 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 police at any moment. He contrived in this 
 way, as he bounded about after the balls with 
 constantly bubbling laughter, to make his 
 innocent game as exciting as cock-fighting. He 
 seldom winked up with a " Keep the divilment 
 going ! " but some victim fell into his merry 
 snare. 
 
 Not far off, in a space between two tents, an 
 old countryman in a faded high hat was the 
 centre of a group of boys who seemed to be 
 getting ballads out of him. Unfortunately, he 
 was rather drunk, and they were beginning to be 
 tipsy too, so that there was more handshaking 
 than singing done. He sang to them mournfully 
 in Irish, and they shook hands with him and 
 with each other over that. He sang — or rather 
 alternately moaned and skirled — a scarcely 
 recognisable version of " The Boys of Wexford," 
 and at the end of almost every line he had to stop 
 to shake hands with the young fellows one after 
 the other in an exaggeration of the country 
 fashion. As soon as he had slobbered one song 
 out of his scraggy and ulcerous face, a volley of 
 demands for a dozen other songs showered down 
 on him. One big, square-headed boy, with red 
 hair and freckled face, remains in my mind with 
 especial vividness, as he kept insisting with self- 
 conscious awkwardness to the singer : " Give us 
 ' The Men of the West.' Give us ' The Men of 
 the West.' " 
 
''.jATUi^ thouoh tht-y sl<*p in du-n^eorts deep. Ijl/ 
 
 TSft felons of our la>ict 
 
 fitiii//lliMlliliAlf//(( 
 
 jjiiyuj^iij^iiiii^^ 
 
 ;ri«yifiH» 
 
 THE TREASON SONG. 
 Draivn and coloured by Jack B, Teats. 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 45 
 
 I do not wish to give the impression, however, 
 that Galway was a scene of much drinking on 
 the day of the races. I never saw a soberer holiday- 
 crowd anywhere. Compared with a bank-holiday 
 crowd on Hampstead Heath, for instance, it 
 was almost Sabbatarian in its decorousness. In 
 Ireland, however, one drunk man is as con- 
 spicuous as a thousand sober ones. Drunk, he 
 forgets his shyness ; he asserts his individuality. 
 But he is, comparatively speaking, a rare bird and 
 an exception for all the show he makes. I stress 
 this point because the next scene to which we 
 moved on had another tipsy man for its central 
 figure. 
 
 He was a middle-aged farmer in a blue tail-coat 
 and a bowler hat, and a long reddish beard seemed 
 to connect him with respectability. He was 
 standing at one of the Aunt Sally pitches where 
 sticks were used instead of balls to hurl at the 
 figures, and when the showman, red-nosed and 
 whitened like a clown, but in an ordinary bowler 
 hat and blue suit, went in his shirt sleeves to 
 collect the used sticks at the back of the stand, 
 the farmer signalled to him with imperative 
 good-humour to remain where he was and become 
 a living target. The showman got behind one 
 of the figures and grimaced out provocatively. 
 The farmer flung a stick at him ; the head ducked 
 and bobbed out, a second after, all smiles. The 
 farmer went to the corner of the roped-in pitch 
 
46 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 and made faces and threatening gestures at the 
 showman, who put his five fingers to his nose 
 insultingly. Two sticks were swiftly and suc- 
 cessively hurled from this point of vantage, the 
 clown just escaping the second by the skin of 
 his teeth — or rather by the skin of the tip of his 
 ear. The farmer, highly delighted to have come 
 so near his aim, bought some more sticks from the 
 showman's wife, who looked a little uneasy and 
 disinclined to give them to him, and he then 
 began a new policy of lobbing them up into the 
 air so that they might drop on the man at the 
 other side of the figures. At this the showman 
 twisted his face into more exaggerated con- 
 tortions than ever. Putting his thumbs into the 
 arm-holes of his waistcoat and getting down into 
 a sitting posture, he hopped in and out among 
 the figures like a dancing dog. The farmer, with 
 a childish laugh, stepped over the cord, and he, 
 too, got into a sitting posture and hopped like a 
 dancing dog towards his enemy, his coat-tails 
 dragging on the grass. The showman hopped 
 towards him, grinning, and put his hands above 
 his ears like the horns of a cow and wagged them. 
 The farmer, with a drunken imitation of the 
 other's grin, also gave himself a pair of horns or 
 donkey's ears — or whatever his hands were meant 
 to represent — and wagged them. In this way, 
 they hopped, one hop at a time, round and round 
 each other, till the farmer took the showman's 
 
GAL WAY OF THE RACES 47 
 
 hat off, as though he were doing a funny thing, 
 and the showman took the farmer's hat off, as 
 though he were doing a funnier thing still. After 
 this, the farmer got excited, and it was time for 
 the friends of both parties to step in and prevent 
 a quarrel. 
 
 When we came away, they were both standing 
 in the middle of a clutching crowd, the farmer 
 gesticulating wildly and the showman parodying 
 each excited gesture in an extravagant way that 
 amused everybody but the farmer, who was 
 certainly hard to please. 
 
 By this time most of the crowd were straggling 
 back to various points beside the course in order 
 to see the race for the Galway Plate, which is, 
 I believe, the great race of the meeting. Priests 
 in their rook-black garments moved among 
 peasants in their grey tail-coats or white woollen 
 jackets — bawneens, as they are called — and horsey 
 men in leather gaiters hurried with whisky-bitten 
 faces past slow-moving country-women in heavy 
 grey and brown shawls. Ordinary people like 
 you and me made for our places, a many- 
 coloured mob in all sorts of overcoats and serges 
 and tweeds and bowlers and straw hats and slouch 
 hats and caps. We gathered in knots on every 
 little prominence on the hillside, and got our 
 foreheads tight up against the high bars of the 
 railings, or hung and hustled on the backs of those 
 who had in good time seized the front places 
 
48 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 near where the bookies bellowed. Here men, 
 women, and children now darted in every direction 
 and cross-direction, like flies in the sun, one to 
 lay a bet, another to whistle and push after a 
 friend, another to get a place. The bookies 
 were once more screaming like seagulls. The big 
 round-whiskered man with the crimson face and 
 the check trousers alone did not seem to have 
 redoubled the vehemence and shrillness of his 
 shouting. It was not for want of will, however. 
 He was still apoplectically offering odds with a 
 facial earnestness worthy of a better cause. He 
 was redder than ever and, as he addressed the 
 crowd, he kept clenching and swinging his fist in an 
 angry gesture of helplessness. But, struggle as he 
 might, he no longer brought forth a huge moun- 
 tain of a voice as he had done earlier in the day. 
 His " I'll take six to four ! I'll take six to four ! " 
 had dwindled into a little hoarse husky squeaking 
 mouse. You saw it rather than heard it as it 
 issued from that labouring, perspiring, check- 
 breeched frame. " I'll take six to four ! I'll 
 take six to four ! " It was like a whisper, a 
 death-bed saying, a strangled confession. No 
 one, having seen the slow martyrdom of the man, 
 could ever afterwards look on bookmaking as an 
 idle trade. The other bookmakers, however, 
 hurled a stormy sea of voices about us to make 
 up for the soundlessness of this one. Beggars, 
 slipping through the clamour and bustle, would 
 
GAL WAY OF THE RACES 49 
 
 beg you for a penny for the love of God, and 
 fruit-sellers still sought a market for their plums 
 and oranges with modest voices. One of the 
 beggars in especial, a woman with Gorgon locks 
 of iron-grey hair flaunting on a head that had once 
 been black as night, made herself noticeable. 
 Her shoulders covered with a brown Galway 
 shawl, she had a hard though beautiful face and 
 the evil eye of the insane. Her skin was yellowish- 
 brown and weather-softened. As she begged, 
 she had a voice as gentle as the light in a church, 
 and it was as good as being in church to hear her 
 mingling her thanks with holy names. But a 
 gauche big farmer's son in a white coat, with 
 a party of two young women and a boy watching 
 the races from a car, had strode past her roughly 
 on his way to a shouting bookmaker's, and had 
 answered her without manners as he pushed his 
 way back past her insistent " I ask your honour 
 in the name of God to help a poor woman." I 
 do not know what he grunted at her under his 
 ill-tempered moustache, but it brought the evil 
 out in her face very markedly, and she began to 
 abuse him in many words I do not remember and 
 many others I dare not print. It was the very 
 pollution of a disordered mind that she poured 
 over him as he stood sheepishly and resentfully 
 at the side of the car and damned her into himself 
 and said nothing. Crooking two of her fingers, 
 she put them into her mouth and cast a spittle 
 4 
 
50 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 at him with a gesture, cursing him, turning a 
 tributary stream of abuse on "the lady on the car," 
 and winding up with shrieking what seemed to 
 be either an accusation or a prophecy of grossly 
 immoral conduct on the part of the young farmer. 
 Luckily, the bookies were making such a noise 
 that you couldn't have heard all that was going 
 on unless you had had a thousand ears. Even so, 
 when the woman moved away from her victim, 
 muttering and shouting by turns, and came up 
 against me, and asked me in a gentle voice for a 
 penny, I consulted my safety and bought her 
 silence. It only encouraged her, however. She 
 began to praise my personal appearance loudly, 
 in the most embarrassing way, and then she began 
 to praise the personal appearance of my companion 
 too. She shrieked out a most damaging compari- 
 son, on the score both of good looks and generosity, 
 between the young farmer and his friend on the 
 one hand and my companion and me on the 
 other. I confess I am as greedy of flattery as any 
 man living, but this witch was not using the other 
 man as a pedestal for me : she was using me as a 
 knobby stick for the other man. I was rejoiced 
 when the horses in the big race came out on the 
 course and were the signal for a feverish up- 
 roar among the bookmakers, who were ravenous 
 for the last bets before the horses started. So 
 many things were being growled, shouted, whanged 
 and husked at this time, that you could hear none 
 
GAL WAY OF THE RACES 51 
 
 of them distinctly at all. Amid the noise and 
 shock of the cavalcades of shouting, the crimson- 
 faced man in the check trousers could no longer 
 be heard even as a whisper. He was now simply 
 an inflammation and a death-rattle. 
 
 I will not attempt to describe the race that 
 followed, because it did not mean anything to 
 me. There were about a dozen horses in it, and, 
 as to which was which, before I would have been 
 able to learn the marks and the jockey-colours 
 of half of them, the race could have been run 
 twice over. The only way in which I have ever 
 been able to get any plan or sense in a race is to 
 back some one horse and to follow its fortunes 
 single-mindedly till the winning-post is reached. 
 It is only by doing this that I have ever been able 
 to appreciate the logic as opposed to the aesthetics 
 of horse-racing. As I was an observer, not a 
 gambler, at the Galway races, I missed this 
 interest. The race was to me simply like the 
 bolting of a number of horses with curiously- 
 coloured boys on their backs. 
 
 Ah no. That is not quite true. I loved the 
 beating of the ground under their hoofs as they 
 swept past from the starting-place. I was excited 
 enough a minute later, when one of the curiously- 
 coloured boys lost his seat and tumbled to the 
 ground with a skelter of hoofs flying away from 
 him. I was sick with alarm as half a dozen men 
 ran out and gathered the boy up and half carried 
 
52 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 him, half helped him to limp, towards the grand- 
 stand. " They say he's never sober," I heard a 
 voice beside me commenting. " He's destroying 
 himself with drink," said another contemptuously. 
 " Divil the smarter jockey in Ireland," con- 
 tinued the chorus, " if he could keep off the 
 drink." When the jockey had been taken into 
 the enclosure and the gates shut after him, and 
 we could turn our attention to the race again, his 
 horse, rid of its burden, had dashed in front of its 
 rivals, and was leading the way nobly. Whoop, it 
 was over a fence, and galloping like a hare towards 
 the next jump. One by one the others rose and 
 fell in its wake, up and down like little dark, silent 
 waves, and off at the gallop after their riderless 
 leader. People began to jeer, to cheer. Was it 
 going to finish the course by itself and come 
 in first in the race ? Another hurdle was leapt. 
 Then, before it had galloped much farther, the 
 horse seemed to question itself. It broke into a 
 trot ; it looked about it ; it turned ; it questioned 
 the world. It began quietly to trot back in 
 the direction from which it had come, till some 
 one ran out, caught it by the bridle, and led it 
 back to the stable. 
 
 As for the other horses, they bounded past us 
 this time with a fiercer thunder, the race being 
 twice round the course. It was then a case of 
 Amber Dick and PoUyooUey getting ahead of the 
 rest, and tugging turn by turn into the first place, 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 53 
 
 like squalls overtaking each other on a rough 
 sea. Or you might compare Amber Dick, as he 
 shot ahead, to a wave's tongue darting up the 
 strand. And you might think of PoUyooUey as 
 sweeping after him remorselessly like an argument 
 that is better than another. The one took 
 his jumps, clawed up like a crab ; the other, 
 sprawling. They were only the same in hanging 
 on to each other's breaths breathlessly, down the 
 slopes, along the levels and up the hills. Then 
 they disappeared round a corner, a clump of seven 
 other horses rolling at their heels. When next 
 they came into view they were making straight 
 for the winning-post, and the excited elements 
 of the crowd had poured like a sudden froth out 
 of the enclosure, out of the stand, and over the 
 bar to meet them. They were like an advance- 
 guard of ancient Britons rushing out wildly to 
 challenge a Roman legion. They were shouting, 
 waving hats, standing on one foot, cramping up 
 their bodies as though the straining of their 
 sinews could give speed to their favourites. They 
 had their arms in the air ; they had their mouths 
 open, yelling. One of them, a cane in one hand 
 and a bowler hat in the other, had his arms 
 stretched out to their full extent, and beat a kind 
 of frenzied time with them like the leader of 
 an orchestra. If frogs exercised with dumb-bells, 
 they might, I imagine, go through some of the 
 same sawing, circling, and squatting movements 
 
54 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 as did this young man's arms and body. Then 
 suddenly his hat was flung high, and he was lashing 
 the ground with his stick, as a shrill shout went 
 up into the air and drove all the larks helter- 
 skelter half a county away. It was a roar as from 
 a relieved city. Amber Dick had won, and amid 
 disconsolate jockeys, sweating horses, and tem- 
 pestuous friends, was mobbed, gravely pacing to 
 his stable. 
 
 Then began the rush to the bookmakers for 
 payment of debts, and the hurry across the fields 
 to where two dusty cavalcades of vehicles were 
 preparing to take us back along either of the rocky 
 roads to Galway at a considerable reduction on 
 the fare for the outward journey. 
 
 Car swung after car down the ruts in white 
 clouds, and brake thundered slow thunder after 
 brake, while ragged children stood in the ditches 
 and cheered us as we went by. It would be in 
 keeping with the traditional accounts of such 
 occasions if I described the procession bolting 
 down the road to Galway at breakneck speed, but 
 it would not be true. The cars did not drive 
 particularly fast for Irish cars. They jolted 
 along at an honest pace enough, and if any of the 
 horses were apt to stumble, it must have been 
 through weariness or age, not through reckless 
 driving. 
 
 We were in the advance-guard of those who got 
 back to the town. Most of the people seemed to 
 
THE SPORTSMEN. 
 Draivn and coloured hy Jack -fi. Tdits. 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 55 
 
 be staying for the last race, and, if we hurried 
 away, it was only because we loved food more and 
 sport less than the vast majority of the men and 
 women who went to the races on the hillside. 
 When we got back to the hotel, a squinting 
 woman with a handkerchief round her head and 
 with a bulging wet sack lying on the ground at 
 her feet was beginning a heated argument with 
 the landlord. It seemed that she had sold a 
 two-stone bag of cockles to an English visitor at 
 the hotel, who, having indulged a little too freely 
 in the wine of the country, had flushed into a 
 generous mood and had bought the entire sack 
 from her. This done, however, he had bumped 
 precipitately up the stairs to bed, leaving her 
 to store the cockles where she could. She, of 
 course, was for setting them down in the hall 
 of the hotel. But the landlord, rightly surmising 
 that an Englishman sober might have some diffi- 
 culty in finding a use for an enormous load of 
 cockles that he had bought when drunk, sent her 
 off to the railway station, advising her to put the 
 sack in the gentleman's name in the left-luggage 
 office. She trudged off, sickle-shaped under her 
 dank load, but apparently the clerk in the station 
 eyed her load with the same suspicion as the land- 
 lord, for ten minutes later she was back at the 
 hotel, a trader doing her best under difficulties 
 to deal honestly by a client. 
 
 " Well, would he not take them ? " said the 
 
56 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 landlord in apparent surprise as the cockles were 
 once more flung on his doorstep. 
 
 " It's perishable goods he says they are," replied 
 the woman in the high voice of a fishwife. " It's 
 no use, sir, I'll have to leave them here. There's 
 no other way out of it." 
 
 " And what — what reason did he give for 
 refusing to take in the cockles ? " asked the 
 landlord, dumbfounded by the railway company's 
 insolence. 
 
 "Amn't I after telling you," retorted the 
 woman, " that he said cockles was perishable 
 goods ? ' It's no use,' says he, and he seemed 
 to think it was trying to play a trick on him I 
 was. ' I'm not going to have them here,' says he, 
 ' for to go bad on me and raise the divil's own smell 
 through the whole station.' An' that's the way 
 it is, your honour. If I can't leave them here, 
 I don't know what to do. Ah, now, there's room 
 plenty in the hotel," she went on, picking the 
 bag up and making towards the door with it. 
 
 " Wait, wait ! " cried the landlord, putting up 
 his hand. He looked back along the hall and up 
 the stairs as though half expecting to see help 
 coming from that quarter. " I don't know, 
 I'm sure," he muttered. Then, half to himself 
 and half confiding to me : " It's an English 
 gentleman," he said, *' who has come to Galway 
 for to see the races. The fact is, he has been 
 enjoying himself — ^he has — he's a little bit fresh. 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 57 
 
 I can't for the life of me make up whatever he 
 bought these cockles for. Maybe it's a taste for 
 cockles he has — for by all accounts they have a 
 taste for a strange lot of things in England that 
 we wouldn't put up with in Ireland — or maybe 
 he'll have forgotten all about it by the time he 
 wakes up, and then I'll have to get a young lad to 
 carry the stuff off the Lord knows where, for 
 it's not so easy as you might think to get rid of a 
 sack of cockles that would be going worse every 
 minute." 
 
 " It was a fair purchase," the woman broke in 
 shrilly. " Call the gentleman out and ask him 
 wasn't it a fair purchase." 
 
 The landlord took a step or two out, and looked 
 up into the blue sky where wings of cloud were 
 gathering. 
 
 " Didn't I tell you," said he, with his eye on the 
 clouds, " that the gentleman required a little 
 rest after his long journey ? " 
 
 " Ah, well," observed the woman resignedly, 
 " he paid for the cockles anyway, and I'll leave 
 them here for him." And she flung them against 
 the wall of the hotel. " I'm tired looking at 
 them," she said. 
 
 The landlord was an obliging man and capi- 
 tulated on terms. If the woman would carry the 
 cockles inside, and leave them at the back of the 
 kitchen door, he would see what could be done. 
 So we made way, and the woman once more took 
 
58 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 up her wet burden, and dragged it up the step 
 and down the hall and out of sight. And what 
 the last end of those cockles was I do not know 
 under heaven till the present day. 
 
 Soon, cars and brakes were unloading themselves 
 all around us, and young men and maidens were 
 promising to see each other again at some church 
 bazaar, announcements of which were swinging 
 on scrolls across the streets. For ourselves, we 
 decided, when we had had a heteroclite meal, to 
 go out on the tram to Salthill- — the watering- 
 place suburb which lies about two miles along the 
 north side of Galway Bay. It was not an easy 
 job to get on to the cars, however. Everybody 
 who was not going to the bazaar or going home 
 was going to Salthill. Each tram as it came up 
 was seized by a lawless crowd, and, though there 
 was a great notice in the windows, — in order to 
 
 PREVENT OVERCROWDING IN THESE TRAMS, WHICH 
 IS CONTRARY TO LAW, DURING THE GALWAY RACES 
 THERE WILL BE NO FARE LESS THAN 3D. BY ORDER, 
 
 everybody took for granted that the tramway 
 company was only putting up its prices like all the 
 other concerns in the town as a matter of good 
 business, and we broke the law in such regiments 
 that it is a wonder we did not break the horses' 
 backs too. 
 
 In Salthill itself, when you get there, there is 
 little to do. There are new stuccoed houses in 
 it and a long cement walk above the sea where the 
 
GALWAY OF THE RACES 59 
 
 wind can blow mighty cold after the sun has 
 gone down. The chief distinction of the place 
 is the number of old women who sit out under the 
 gable-ends of some of the houses in companies. 
 They look like some scene of Dutch life as they 
 take the evening air in their wealth of petticoats and 
 dark knitted shawls, sewing, talking, getting amuse- 
 ment out of some broken-down singer who pauses 
 to sing them inappropriate songs. These clumps 
 of old people are, I believe, not residents, but 
 country folk who come from all parts to get 
 health from the waters and the briny air of 
 Salthill. I do not know whether Salthill is now 
 the resort of all classes to the extent to which 
 it used to be, but the poor still seem to flock to it. 
 Miss Callwell,in Old Irish Life, tells of the martyr- 
 doms that used to be undergone in order that the 
 ailing poor might be brought to this health- 
 giving shore. " One poor man," she writes, 
 " carried his wife, who was recovering from a 
 severe illness, nearly fifty miles upon his back, 
 to bring her to the sea, supporting her and the 
 children who accompanied them by begging 
 from house to house along the road. ' Och, 
 but he dearly earned me,' said the wife afterwards, 
 when happily she was restored to health and 
 strength," Salthill looks as though to some of 
 its pilgrims such heroisms were still possible. . . . 
 It was wet and windy enough that night to kill 
 anybody but a confirmed invalid. . . . We crowded 
 
6o RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 inside the tram on our way home. A man at the 
 far end became violent against the conductor, 
 who wanted to prevent him from smoking his 
 pipe. The conductor was young and nervous, 
 as well as officious, and gave in. . . . 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PATH TO CONG 
 
 The second day of the races was in a sense a 
 wasted day. It was a day on which we tried 
 hard to get to Cong, and we did not succeed in 
 getting to Cong. According to the railway- 
 guides, a steamer left Galway for Cong every 
 afternoon some time about three o'clock, so we 
 dawdled away the morning looking over bridges 
 and sauntering past the Claddagh, that ancient 
 thatched village of fishermen about whose suc- 
 cession of kings all the world has heard, and 
 revisiting the old streets of grey steep houses — 
 idling cheerfully, in fact, till three o'clock should 
 come round. It was difficult to find any in- 
 habitant of Galway who had ever been to Cong 
 or who knew where the Cong boat started from. 
 There was a small boy in the hotel, however, 
 who knew all about it and who arranged to take 
 our luggage to the boat on a wheelbarrow in 
 good time. Consequently, we settled ourselves 
 down to contentment, taking a long noon's 
 enjoyment out of the dusty and deserted town. 
 
 6i 
 
62 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 Practically everybody else had gone to the 
 races again. We did not dare. As I have said, 
 it was our one purpose in life to catch that three- 
 o'clock boat to Cong. 
 
 It was about half an hour before the boat was 
 due to start that we set off from the hotel ac- 
 companied by a small boy wheeling a great load 
 of bags on a barrow. It was only a step to the 
 river. There was no sign of life when we came 
 within view of it. It lay still as a deserted lake 
 in the palace grounds of some sleeping beauty. 
 Rather it moved stilly on its way to the weir, 
 after which, no doubt, it plunged and gushed 
 like a young thing towards the sea. 
 
 The only trace of man to be seen was a distant 
 high-kneed figure lying back against the white 
 wall of a house, smoking and enjoying the sun. 
 As we passed on our way to the landing-stage for 
 the Cong boat, this figure suddenly busied itself 
 to its feet and hailed us across a little quad- 
 rangular inlet of water. 
 
 At first we could not hear what the man said : 
 he was simply a vain shout and a pipe waved 
 vigorously in the air. Then we caught the 
 words — 
 
 " Are yous for the boat ? " 
 
 We told him we were. 
 
 " There'll be no boat to-day," he told us. 
 " There's no boat leaves here till to-morrow." 
 
 We refused to believe such a thing after all 
 
THE PATH TO CONG 63 
 
 those hours of waiting and with the barrow of 
 luggage beside us. What was the matter ? we 
 asked him. 
 
 " The captain's gone to the races," he called 
 back, " and there'll be no boat leave here till 
 to-morrow." 
 
 We protested that no public announcement 
 of this earth-shaking change had been made in 
 the time-table of the Cong steamer. 
 
 " Well," declared the man, who had evidently 
 no sympathy with our indignation, " they always 
 stop work for the races. You'll see wonders if 
 ever you see the Cong boat leaving and the races 
 going on." 
 
 In case the man with the pipe might be suffering 
 from hallucination, we bade the boy wheel the 
 barrow on as far as the landing-stage, where a 
 sort of a tug was lying as if awaiting the last 
 trump. One could go aboard her and walk up 
 and down and shout down every hole or hatchway, 
 but there was not even an echo of response. It 
 was as eerie as examining a derelict. It was no 
 occasion for artistic emotions, however. With 
 the feelings that most people translate into oaths 
 we turned and marched back with the small boy 
 and the wheelbarrow to the hotel. 
 
 I felt in the mood for writing a pamphlet. It 
 would have traced back the inertia of the Cong 
 boat during the race-meeting to Strongbow's 
 invasion of Ireland. Here, I told myself, was the 
 
64 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 culminating incident of seven hundred years' 
 disorganisation of national habits and culture. 
 For the successors of Strongbow were able almost 
 to destroy a civilisation in Ireland, but they 
 never were able to build a new one in its place. 
 Event followed event in confirmation of the theory 
 elucidated in that unwritten pamphlet. First, 
 when we went to the railway station to make 
 inquiries about other ways of reaching Cong, 
 we were told that the only way we could get 
 there even by the early part of the next day 
 was to take a train away back into the heart 
 of Ireland to Athlone, then to take another 
 train up towards Roscommon, to change some- 
 where into yet another train for Ballinrobe, 
 where we would arrive in time for bed, and from 
 which we could take a car to Cong the next 
 morning. It was an extravagant way of getting at 
 Cong, but we were desperate. We had by now 
 developed a passion for reaching Cong which 
 would not be gainsaid. So we bade the girl at the 
 booking-office write out our tickets. The guard 
 examined them before the train left and at once 
 informed us that we were going on an un- 
 necessarily roundabout journey. Why hadn't 
 we booked via Athenry to Ballinrobe — which 
 was very much shorter and cheaper ? 
 
 I felt that the girl in the booking-ofiice, who 
 had told us that the only way to Ballinrobe that 
 evening was by Athlone, was a serpent. I dared 
 
THE PATH TO CONG 65 
 
 not leave my seat to tell her so, however. If I 
 had, the train would have gone on without me. 
 When we were getting near Athenry, I suggested 
 to a ticket collector that we might change at 
 Athenry and go to Ballinrobe by the rational way, 
 but he assured us that, if we did, we would have 
 to get new tickets, and pay extra, for a different 
 company owned that part of the line. I have 
 always believed in the nationalisation of the 
 Irish railways, but never quite so fiercely as at 
 that moment. I sat in the train, indeed, and 
 damned private property in railways till I began to 
 feel quite cheerful again. " Oh for one hour of 
 Sidney Webb ! " I cried to the stones in the fields. 
 But perhaps Sir Horace Plunkett is better still. 
 He stands above all for organisation, whether it 
 is organisation of business or organisation of social 
 life. And it is exactly organisation that foreign 
 influence has killed in the west of Ireland. Senti- 
 mental people are apt to become enthusiastic 
 over this disorganisation when it appears in the 
 life of peasants. It is regarded as peculiarly 
 picturesque and Irish. When it expresses itself 
 among the middle classes, however, as bad business 
 and bad manners, we all lose our tolerance. . . . 
 But it may be that the affair of the tickets made 
 me unusually resentful of that young man with 
 the little cap and the black pompom of hair falling 
 over his lean face and the abounding black bow 
 and the knickers and the yellow boots, who lit 
 5 
 
66 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 his race-meeting cigar without asking any of the 
 women in the carriage (which was not a smoking 
 carriage) if they objected. 
 
 There were chocolates at Athlone, and an old 
 bright-eyed man with scanty white hair who 
 could speak Irish was in the carriage on the way 
 to Claremorris with his young wife and his 
 amazingly young child. He was an old child 
 himself to look at — not a patriarch at all, but a 
 happy child. Then there was a ruddy-faced 
 conversational man in checks and a dust-coat who 
 got into the train that took us from Claremorris 
 to Ballinrobe. He had just got back from Galway 
 races, and told us how much he had made at them. 
 Not only this, but how reasonably, considering 
 the crush, the hotel had charged him — how much 
 for supper, how much for bed, how much for 
 breakfast. He brought out his bill to show us 
 the details. He was more interesting when he 
 began to talk about the industrial revival in that 
 part of the country, and how many thousands 
 of pounds' worth of Irish homespun and friezes 
 went from factories in the neighbourhood — 
 to Selfridge's, I think it was. . . . 
 
 Ballinrobe Station, when we arrived there, 
 seemed to be the porch of the outer darkness. 
 We had been given the name of a hotel, and, 
 when we mentioned it, a lean giant fell out of 
 the darkness upon our luggage and marched us 
 off into a night that was without stars or peep 
 
THE PATH TO CONG 6-] 
 
 of any lamp. He said the hotel wasn't far and 
 that there was no horse at the station, so off we 
 walked with him, stumbling in the ruts of an 
 unseen road, until the sound of running watei 
 close to us and the murmur of trees stirring 
 overhead made us wonder if we were not being 
 conducted on some fearful errand to a castle in 
 the heart of a bloody wood. Suddenly, however, 
 a gate was dashed backwards, and we were passing 
 through a dimly lit hall into a room adorned 
 with huge imitation fishes in glass cases and all 
 the other symbols of a hotel for anglers. 
 
 Here was quietness and even luxury after 
 Galway. Here was the silence of comfort, not 
 the silence of desolation. ... If I were a 
 fisherman, I should certainly find my way back 
 to Ballinrobe and the hotels for anglers in that 
 part of the world. There is a great deal of 
 nonsense talked about the discomforts and bad 
 cooking of the hotels of Ireland. The worst 
 Irish hotels, of course, are adventures in the 
 unspeakable. But then the worst are very rare, 
 and they are seldom to be found, so far as my 
 experience can be trusted, in the fishing districts. 
 
 Ballinrobe, indeed, is a fine bright town, as 
 we discovered the next morning when, having 
 deliberately missed the early morning mail-car 
 to Cong, we strolled out in its sunny streets with 
 their pleasant house-fronts washed in manycolours. 
 Not that there are not banks and other worthy 
 
68 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 institutions to dignify the place, but the occa- 
 sional house-fronts that, instead of being white- 
 washed, are yellow- washed or blue -washed, 
 seemed to me to give it its distinctive note. It 
 looks prosperous enough, but, like most Irish 
 towns, it is only a relic of its old self. I see from 
 a guide-book that it has now 1544 inhabitants. 
 Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, 
 which was published in 1851, gave the population 
 at that time as 2604. That is a measure of the 
 way in which the towns of Ireland have managed 
 to progress backwards under the Union. 
 
 It was a muscular man with cheeks as red as a 
 lobster and hair cropped close to the skull who 
 came to drive us to Cong. He was a dark man, 
 and his Adam's apple hung like a dewlap under 
 his blazing face. He wore a peaked cap down on 
 his over-white eyes, and his wide mouth curved in 
 obliging, if somewhat cynical, smiles. More than 
 middle-aged, he had seen the world and could not 
 help feeling discontented at the fate which had 
 ended in making him a jarvey among these fields of 
 slumber. As he drove, he kept spitting into his 
 hands each time he gave a tug at the reins, and 
 shaking his head over the condition of Ireland. 
 
 Out on the high road our car sailed along, a 
 fly in the sun, and gave us every moment a larger 
 view of the bluebell-coloured mountains piled 
 up in beauty on the far side of Lough Mask. It 
 was a country to evoke enthusiasm, but the driver, 
 
THE PATH TO CONG 69 
 
 spitting vigorously into his hands, did not find 
 it so. 
 
 " There's a heap of money going about," he 
 declared, with a wink which was half a grimace, 
 as he offered his personal diagnosis of the condition 
 of Ireland — " a heap of money that nobody knows 
 where it comes from. Did you ever read any 
 Irish history, sir ? I've often heard them tell 
 the story that seven or eight hundred years ago 
 the English Queen Elizabeth sent over one of her 
 biggest generals to this part of Ireland to bate 
 the Irish. But the Irish were the best soldiers 
 in the world then, and, good and all as he was, the 
 Englishman could do nothing against them, and 
 they slewed him. Well, that makes Elizabeth 
 angry, and she sends over her next best general, and 
 they slewed him. And the next best after that, 
 and they slewed him, till in the end of the story 
 the Queen says till herself, says she : ' It's no 
 use. England's done,' says she. ' We may as 
 well admit we're bet.' With that, the cleverest 
 Englishman that was living at that time 
 ups and says he can tell the Queen a most 
 potient way for dealing with the Irish. ' I know 
 Ireland well,' says he, * and it's no use your trying 
 to bate them at fair fighting. There's only one 
 way,' says he. ' Let you send me over among 
 them with an odd bag of gold,' says he, ' and I'll 
 dash a bit of money about amongst them, and see 
 if I don't have them fighting like a lot of game 
 
70 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 cocks in less than no time ! ' Well, that was the 
 first Englishman that ever knew how to bate the 
 Irish, and he was made a Duke or an Earl for it. 
 ' Dash a bit of money about amongst them,' says 
 he, and be damned if they have been doing 
 anything else ever since." 
 
 I suggested that it was robbery, not bribery, 
 from which Ireland had suffered most. 
 
 " Well," said he, spitting rapidly into one hand 
 after the other, " say what you like, but there's 
 queer goings-on. I tell you there's men going 
 about here and there all over the County Mayo, 
 and some people gets money, and some gets none, 
 and the money must come from somewhere. Oh, 
 there'll be exposures one of these days, sir," said 
 he, with a leer of satisfaction, " and don't forget 
 I told you. There's money slipping from this 
 hand to that, I tell you, this present day just 
 the same as ever there was." 
 
 Even the bluebell-coloured hills which lured us 
 from beyond the low-lying lake paled in com- 
 parison with this gorgeous version of Irish history. 
 And yet, though it had the form of a fairy-tale, 
 it had, like so many fairy-tales, an indubitable soul 
 of fact. Was it not Bacon who commended the 
 " princely policy " of Elizabeth in weakening 
 the Irish by " dividing the heads " ? As for the 
 modern corruption of which the driver spoke, 
 I imagine he was thinking of some spending 
 institution such as the Congested Districts Board 
 
THE PATH TO CONG 71 
 
 — one of the Balfourian inventions for killing 
 Home Rule with doles. If these were what his 
 mind was in such jumbled revolt against, I agree 
 with him. Much good as they have un- 
 questionably done, they have done it in the way 
 which least encourages the spirit of self-reliance 
 and independence among the people. But then 
 I think the whole system which makes the people 
 turn their eyes to London instead of to themselves 
 for help is an incitement to servility. 
 
 Most people would conclude from the driver's 
 conversation that he must be something of an 
 extreme Nationalist. But the truth is, he had no 
 more politics than the horse, and his phantas- 
 magoric beliefs and prejudices were quite in- 
 dependent of any logical creed. I found this out 
 when I asked him about Captain Boycott, the 
 land-agent whose name gave a new word to the 
 English language thirty years ago owing to his 
 bad relations with the tenantry in this neigh- 
 bourhood. The circumstances of the Boycott 
 affair are, perhaps, worth recalling. Parnell 
 had advised the tenant-farmers at a great 
 ■ meeting in Ennis in the summer of 1880 to 
 cease to pay rack-rents to the landlords, but to 
 offer them what they thought was a just rent 
 instead. Captain Boycott, who was agent for 
 the Earl of Erne, got into some trouble with the 
 labourers and tenants at the time, and took steps 
 to evict the latter for their impudence. Parnell, 
 
72 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 however, in his speech of a month before, had 
 suggested a new method for countering evictions. 
 This was to put into Coventry, as the English 
 say, any man who " grabbed " or took possession 
 of an evicted tenant's farm. This system was 
 now put in operation against Captain Boycott. 
 His labourers fell away from him. His servants 
 escaped from his house as though he had been 
 a leper. Blacksmiths, shopkeepers, washerwomen 
 — everybody suddenly found some excuse for 
 refusing to have any dealings with him, and he 
 and the British Constitution were left like two 
 little cockleshells in peril amid the tumultuous 
 seas of agrarian war. The Orangemen of the 
 north, who have so often been misled into be- 
 lieving that the Irish of the south and west are 
 criminals of the rack and thumbscrew order, 
 resolved to do battle for a land-agent who was at 
 least a Protestant, and fifty of them boldly set 
 off to Mayo to gather in the crops of Captain 
 Boycott, and to raise the banner of the Lord 
 against the idolators once more. 
 
 I confess I like to think of that little band of 
 Orangemen. They were as wrong as anybody, 
 Protestant or Catholic, who ever fought for 
 sectarianism instead of liberty, but they had at 
 least the courage of their wrongness. They were 
 fighting in a lost cause, however, and though, 
 with the help of an army of police and redcoats, 
 who threatened the countryside with their 
 
THE PATH TO CONG 73 
 
 field-pieces, they saved the Captain's crops to 
 the value of ;^35o, they did so at a cost of ten 
 times that amount, and Captain Boycott, finding 
 the game not worth the candle, at last packed 
 his trunk for England. It is said to have been the 
 local priest. Father John O'Malley, who invented 
 the verb " to boycott " as a help to an American 
 journalist who could think of no word but the 
 pallid " ostracise " to describe what was being 
 done in the neighbourhood of Lough Mask. 
 
 " That was a man was never treated fair," the 
 carman assured us, when we asked him about 
 Captain Boycott's Castle. " There was no justice 
 in the way he was used at all." 
 
 But he could give no reasons for his opinion 
 except in such vague phrases as that the Captain 
 was " a nice gentleman." 
 
 Frankly, I think that boycotting is a very 
 questionable weapon. It is so capable of abuse 
 in the hands of men who have personal, not social, 
 ends to serve. But, before we become self- 
 righteous in condemning it, we must remember 
 that Parnell proposed it, not as you propose a 
 desirable law, but as the alternative to the 
 horrors of crime which make land wars bloody 
 like Imperial and religious and civil wars. Op- 
 pression breeds crime in a normal human society 
 as surely as filth breeds pestilence. Parnell 
 wished to reply to the crimes of oppression, not 
 with other crimes of retaliation, but with a 
 
74 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 militant trade union of the Irish farmers. Look- 
 ing at the whole business impartially as a piece of 
 history, we can only say that his methods were 
 successful and his ideals such as most men have 
 come to think right. Both the English political 
 parties have conceded as much — the Liberals in 
 Mr. Gladstone's Land Act of 1881, and the 
 Conservatives in Mr. Wyndham's Land Act of 
 1903. Both of these Acts were simply adaptations 
 of the policy of the Land League. 
 
 " I'm surprised to hear you praising Captain 
 Boycott so much," I said to the driver at the 
 end of his tirade of praise. " Do you not think 
 Michael Davitt was a finer character ? " 
 
 " Ah, Davitt was a fine man, too," he replied. 
 " If it wasn't for Davitt where would the poor 
 farmer be ? Will you tell me this — who has a 
 better right to a farm than the man that farms it ? 
 And wasn't it Davitt that made it worth a 
 farmer's while to be living at all ? I tell you 
 what it is, we need another Davitt badly." 
 
 And he proceeded indignantly to relate how 
 some one had refused to sell him a small field that 
 he wanted for his horse, and he seemed to think 
 that, if Davitt were alive, he would bring in a 
 law compelling the other man to make the sale. 
 
 " And I tell you who was another fine man," he 
 went on, nodding dogmatically over his reins — 
 " Sanders." 
 
 " Who was he ? " I asked. 
 
THE PATH TO CONG 75 
 
 " Sanders. He was a Member of Parliament. 
 He was from the north." 
 
 " You don't mean Colonel Saunderson, the 
 Orangeman ? " said I. 
 
 " That's the man," he declared. " He was 
 a fine man, that." 
 
 Really, I could not hope to keep pace with 
 politics so elusive and swift-footed, and I was 
 relieved when he drew our attention to a curious 
 stone structure — a thing like a grandstand of 
 stone slabs with a sign or weathercock of some 
 sort on the top — standing behind the wall of 
 an estate. 
 
 " Do you know what that is ? " he asked us. 
 
 I guessed it was some funeral monument. 
 
 " Not at all," he said contemptuously. " That's 
 where they used to sit and watch the cock- 
 fighting — ah, it would be seven hundred years 
 ago, maybe." He had a taste for good stiff 
 numbers. 
 
 He then began to question us as to our visit 
 to that part of the country, and lamented when 
 he heard that we were the merest birds of passage. 
 If we had been staying any length of time, either 
 he could have put us up himself or could have 
 introduced us into some nice country cottage in 
 the district. 
 
 " The mistake everybody makes," he told us, 
 " is going to them robbing hotels. Sure, what 
 attraction is it for visitors when, every time they 
 
^e RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 go to bed and sit down to their breakfast it means 
 maybe half a sovereign or more out of their 
 pockets ? That's a nice hotel you were staying 
 in, but what's the use of paying pounds when 
 shillings would do. If ever you're coming back 
 this way, sir, let you send me a postcard and I'll 
 find you a nice clean room where you can have all 
 you want for fifteen shillings a week — there or 
 thereabouts — is that too much, ma'am ? Of 
 course, it would be simple cooking — a chicken or 
 a piece of roast-beef, or maybe a salmon out of 
 the lough, and an apple pie or a rhubarb pie to 
 follow. Plain, simple cooking, ma'am, and no 
 dhrawin'-room dishes, but maybe you'd be better 
 without them." 
 
 And so he flowed on and on and on, shaking his 
 head and jigging the reins and spitting into his 
 hands, as the car rattled us on down towards 
 one of the very capitals of Irish history. As we 
 came to a modern stone gateway just outside the 
 entrance to the little town, he turned round and 
 pointed his whip at the place. 
 
 " Many's the stone you and me helped to put 
 into that wall, ma'am," he said with a grin. 
 
 " Oh ? " said my companion, rather puzzled. 
 
 " That's Lord Ardilaun's place," he explained, 
 enjoying his joke — " him that owns Guinness's 
 brewery. Everything you see there was once 
 bottles of stout. Hupp, horse ! " 
 
 And it was not very long now till we were 
 
THE PATH TO CONG ^^ 
 
 mounting past the dumpy little stone cross that 
 guards the middle of the main street of Cong, 
 and alighting stifHy at the door of the something- 
 or-other Arms. 
 
 Here in this grey and green land between the 
 waters of Mask and Corrib is a scene of many 
 significant memories for Ireland. It was on the 
 great plain of Moytura outside Cong that, nineteen 
 hundred years before Christ, and two hundred 
 years before the Gaelic Irish had set foot in 
 the country, the fair godlike race of the Tuatha 
 De Danaan contested with the short dark Firbolg 
 people for the sovereignty of Ireland. The 
 Firbolg (or Bagmen, as their name has been 
 translated) had been rulers of the country for 
 less than half a century. They had come from 
 Greece where the Greeks had used them as slaves 
 and had, says the legend, compelled them to 
 carry clay in leathern wallets on their backs 
 up the terraces of the rocky hills to make them 
 fertile and rich. Escaping to Ireland, they 
 had but a short reign of triumph there, for they 
 met with more than one conqueror. 
 
 But even to-day, it is said, it is the children of 
 the Firbolg, not the children of the Gael, whom 
 you see in the poorest stretches of the west, 
 guarding their little fields of stones with a tenacity 
 of affection which company-promoters and the 
 other efficient children of civilisation do not 
 understand. One hears it said, too, that it is 
 
78 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 among these small, swarthy, blue-eyed people, 
 with the prominent Adam's apples, that the only 
 really Celtic element in the population of Ireland 
 is to be found. On questions like this I can speak 
 with no authority, but I believe it is a growing 
 opinion among students of race that the Gaelic 
 Irish, though speaking a Celtic language, are 
 not a Celtic people — that they are a northern 
 people, indeed, akin to the Germanic races, and 
 that they came from the shores of the Baltic and 
 the region of the Elbe. 
 
 As for the Tuatha De Danaan (" the Hosts of 
 the Gods whose mother was Dana ") who over- 
 threw the Firbolg on the plain outside Cong, 
 they were a tall, fair, and beautiful people, who 
 are also said to have dwelt in Greece, where they 
 were famous as magicians. Some say that they 
 reached Ireland by way of Scandinavia, Scotland, 
 and the north-east of Ulster, alighting " in the 
 midst of dark clouds, so that the sun was hidden 
 for the space of three days and for three nights 
 also." Others, however, have declared that the 
 Danaan people came direct to Ireland from heaven. 
 " They had no vessels. . . . No one really knows 
 whether it was over the heavens, or out of the 
 heavens, or out of the earth that they came. 
 Were they demons of the devil . . . were they 
 men ? " Whatever they may have been by 
 birth, they too, it seems, have survived on 
 into modern Ireland. For, when they finally 
 
THE PATH TO CONG 79 
 
 went down before the Gael at Teltown in County 
 Meath, they betook themselves under the hills, 
 where they dwell in palaces that the eye cannot 
 see, and drink the ale of youth and feast upon 
 immortal dishes, and men speak of them as the 
 Good People, the Gentry, and the Fairies (or 
 Sidhe). Their golden presences, moreover, have 
 never ceased to flash out into the business of the 
 world when Ireland has gone out to battle or 
 been in straits. And their descendants are said 
 to be among us also in the grosser human form. 
 " Every one," MacFirbis has declared, " who is 
 fair-haired, vengeful, large, and every plunderer, 
 professors of musical and entertaining per- 
 formances who are adepts of Druidical and magical 
 arts, they are the descendants of the Tuatha De 
 Danaan." 
 
 Naturally, those who like their history and 
 legend moralised translate the ancient conflict 
 between the two peoples on the stony fields of 
 Cong as a battle between intellect and ignorance. 
 This interpretation, however, hardly fits in with 
 the fact that Eochaidh (Yohee), the Firbolg 
 king (the place of whose fall and death was till 
 recently marked by a cairn many miles to the 
 north of the battlefield^), was the ruler who first 
 
 ^ Eochaidh fled northwards ; "but was overtaken and slain on the 
 great strand of Trawshelly near Ballysodare in the County Sligo. . . . 
 He was buried where he fell, and a cairn was raised over him on the 
 strand. This cairn stood till the year 1858 ; and, though it did not 
 rise high over the level of the strand, the tide never covered it, and 
 
8o RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 introduced law into Ireland. " He reigned ten 
 years," says M. D'Arbois de Jubainville ; " during 
 his time there was no rain or tempestuous weather 
 in Ireland, the land being watered by dew. In 
 his reign law made its first appearance. No year 
 passed without judgment being given ; all war 
 ceased, and spears, being no longer of any use, dis- 
 appeared from the land." It was the herald of 
 a peacful people, then, who went out from the 
 camp of the Firbolg to demand of the Tuatha 
 De Danaan the cause of their coming to Ireland, 
 and we are told that his two spears were pointless, 
 while the two spears of the Danaan herald were 
 sharp-pointed and light as javelins. The heralds 
 talked together in Irish and exchanged spears, 
 and, before they parted, the herald of the new- 
 comers made a proposal that Ireland should be 
 divided in two, and that the Firbolg should take 
 one-half and the Tuatha De Danaan the other. 
 Peace-loving though they were, the Firbolg 
 refused, and the others, being alarmed at the 
 sight of the heavy pointless (and, as they thought, 
 superior) spears of the enemy, made a precipitate 
 retreat, but were overtaken on the Plain of 
 Moytura. Nuada of the Silver Hand, the Danaan 
 king, again proposed the division of the island 
 between the two races, but once more Eochaidh 
 
 never could, as the old records had it, and as the peasantry firmly 
 believed till the last day of its existence." — See Dr. P. W. Joyce's 
 Wonders of Ireland. 
 
THE PATH TO CONG 8i 
 
 would not hear of such a thing. Consequently — • 
 for they were a gentlemanly people in those days — 
 Nuada asked them when they would be ready for 
 the battle which must follow. 
 
 " We must have time," replied the others, 
 " to make, ready our spears, and burnish our 
 helmets, and sharpen our swords ; then we 
 should require spears like yours, and you, also, 
 spears like those we have." 
 
 So both sides agreed to an armistice of a hundred 
 and five days, after which — another brave incident 
 — they decided to settle the business, not by a 
 stupid conflict between huge and impersonal 
 armies, but by a series of daily combats between 
 equal numbers of chosen warriors. They fought 
 in this way for four days, beginning on the 5th 
 of June, and each day the Danaan champions won. 
 On the fifth day, the Firbolg proposed that three 
 hundred warriors on each side should meet in a 
 final engagement, and whichever side won should 
 be accounted the victor. To this suggestion 
 the Tuatha De Danaan replied by offering to 
 leave the whole of Connacht to the Firbolg 
 as their kingdom. The Firbolg wisely accepted 
 this arrangement and gathered into the west out 
 of the other provinces. It was the Firbolg, by 
 the way, who first divided Ireland into provinces 
 and gave them their names. It is also worth 
 noting, before we pass on from the battle of 
 Moytura, that it was on this occasion that Nuada 
 6 
 
82 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 of the Silver Hand earned his name. His hand 
 having been cut off in the fight, one of the 
 magical craftsmen who were so numerous in his 
 camp made him a new hand of silver. He was to 
 lead the Tuatha De Danaan some years later to 
 another great victory on another Moytura — the 
 victory over the Fomorian savages and pirates 
 on Moytura of Sligo. 
 
 Those who are susceptible to fairy influences 
 or imaginings will do well to wander by Lough 
 Corrib. For myself, I confess I am too much of 
 a sceptic, and perhaps too little adventurous, to 
 have any traffic with this phantom population 
 of the air. So, while I was in Cong, I sought the 
 traces not of these warrior ghosts — ghosts for 
 whose objective reality an enthusiastic American, 
 Mr. Evans Wentz, has recently advanced some 
 plausible arguments — but of kings and saints and 
 such opaque creatures. One cannot go to that 
 grey bleached ruin of the Abbey hidden so gently 
 from the world down there by the quiet water 
 without getting the reflection of a vision of the 
 old scholarly and missionary Ireland which built 
 its little cities in almost every beautiful nook 
 of the four provinces. The Abbey has to 
 some extent been restored in the last century ; 
 honestly restored, however, and only sufficiently 
 to keep its ruined fragments from falling in a 
 heap. 
 
 Hither to this secret garden, still one of the 
 
THE PATH TO CONG 83 
 
 greenest places in the world, as the ivy springs 
 from it up over the face of the old church, and 
 as its high trees give a shadow to the birds that 
 sing victories over the ancient graves, Rory 
 O'Connor, the last King of Ireland, came in 
 search of pious forgetfulness, when the hosts of 
 the Irish broke against the mailed fist of the 
 Normans. There had been a church here for 
 five hundred years before that, a church founded 
 by St. Fechin, and as recently as a century and a 
 half before Rory O'Connor, the penitential bed 
 of the saint had been the scene of a miracle, for 
 out of the earth beside it in the hour when 
 Brian Boru died after his victory over the Danes 
 on the shores of Dublin Bay a well of blood 
 suddenly poured. 
 
 It was King Rory, according to some authorities, 
 who brought to Cong Abbey the beautiful 
 cross of many metals which has made the name of 
 Cong famous wherever people care for the art of 
 the Middle Ages. The Cross of Cong, which is 
 now in the National Museum in Dublin, is said 
 to enshrine a fragment of " the Cross on which 
 the Founder of the World suifered," but that 
 is not the reason why people nowadays speak of 
 it with enthusiasm. It is treasured chiefly because 
 in its golden traceries, in its delicate beauty of silver 
 and copper and enamel and bronze, is a challenge to 
 all the world to consider the civilisation that Ireland 
 had built up within herself before the Normans 
 
84 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 had ever set fire to a church within her shores.^ 
 It announces the culture of medieval Ireland to 
 us as surely as a statue of Pheidias announces the 
 culture of Periclean Athens. It is only a tiny 
 instance, of course, of the many remains of the 
 medieval arts and crafts that have come down to 
 us, and to me, at least, who am no professor of 
 jewellery, it means a good deal less than a story 
 or even an illuminated manuscript. Still, even 
 if the old civilisation had been wrecked to such 
 an extent that nothing had survived out of it 
 but the old processional Cross of Cong, we would 
 still have a proof that it was no territory of 
 barbarians that the Normans set out to loot in 
 the twelfth century. 
 
 The present Abbey of Cong, I believe, goes 
 back to that century. We know that an older 
 Abbey was burned in 1114, and it was to the new 
 monastery which was built after the fire that 
 King Rory withdrew from his defeats. Though 
 he died here, however, he does not lie in the 
 Abbey graveyard, for his body was taken to 
 Clonmacnoise, and a sadly inexact inscription 
 written over it : " Rory O'Connor, King of all 
 Ireland, both of the Irish and English." 
 
 If the shadow of the old monkish king still 
 paces these cloisters, muttering over the tale of 
 his sins and weighing each of them in turn against 
 
 ^ Not that the Gael always behaved like a twentieth-century Sunday- 
 school teacher. 
 
THE PATH TO CONG 85 
 
 the throne from which he was an exile, he does so 
 under the eye of Lord Ardilaun, or, at least, of 
 Lord Ardilaun's attendant. For Lord Ardilaun 
 has undertaken to look after the ruin which his 
 father repaired with excellent national spirit, and 
 a locked bridge now connects the Abbey and 
 Lord Ardilaun's grounds, while a paid attendant 
 of his tracks you round the ruin as though he 
 suspected you would be robbing the tombs. I 
 do not resent unduly the presence of caretakers 
 in churches and such places, but I hold that they 
 should be something better than detectives, and 
 should have some ornament of eloquence or 
 humour or learning, however inaccurate, in keep- 
 ing with the atmosphere of the place. Perhaps the 
 silent and rather somnolent boy who guarded the 
 Abbey when we visited it was only a temporary 
 substitute. Whether this is so or not, he was 
 utterly immune from the romance of the place : 
 one might as well have tried to get sad stories 
 of the death of kings from a stone. He was as 
 unatmospheric as a guide-book, and he did not 
 seem to know even bare guide-book facts. I 
 would suggest to Lord Ardilaun, and to all others 
 indeed who have charge of ancient monuments, 
 that they should institute an examination in 
 myth and history and natural raciness for would- 
 be caretakers. Every caretaker who is not some- 
 thing of a talking book by nature ought to be 
 locked up in a library for at least an hour a day 
 
86 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 till the resurrection of the dead world and the 
 dead imagination becomes an accomplished fact 
 in him. 
 
 Indeed, there is no reason that I can see — if 
 this is not too much of a digression — why these 
 caretakers should not develop into the librarians 
 of the villages, and become much-needed centres 
 of learning and imaginative revival. 
 
 It was a hospitable friend from the village and 
 not the official caretaker who led us to the ivied 
 tower of the Abbey, and to the chamber that is 
 heaped high with bleached skulls and thigh-bones 
 — I wonder why no one buries them — and who 
 showed us the isolated and wired-off grave of 
 some one who had, if I remember right, been 
 wicked, but may really have only been unpopular. 
 And it was he who took us to the little ruin of the 
 Monks' Fishing Lodge which runs out into the 
 water, a tiny jetty, and where I lay and smoked 
 and watched the trout jumping out of the smooth 
 running water through the long sunny hours of 
 an afternoon. I do not think that I have ever 
 seen a more beautiful solitude than this. The 
 place breathed retreat. The robin in the high 
 willow sang silence. The trout that leaped out 
 of the water every now and then with a little 
 silver flash seemed like a visitor to the very 
 confines of the world's stillness. The water 
 scarcely murmured as it flowed past the jetty — 
 only an echo of a whisper against the stones. I 
 
THE PATH TO CONG 87 
 
 tell you I almost envied King Rovy brooding over 
 his sins and defeats, as I lay there while the sun 
 blazed down out of a blue sky and the trees hid 
 us from the hills. Here, I felt, I too could have 
 discovered holy and comforting thoughts as I 
 caught my Friday's dinner. Here amid men who 
 wrought a new beautyinto the pages of the Gospels 
 in gold and colour, and who praised the Lord with 
 crafts and with learning between bell and bell, 
 even a kingdom might come to seem but a little 
 unstable eminence like a wave in the sea. But, 
 all the same, Rory, I'm sure that you must often 
 have wished that your prayers were swords, and 
 that you might have borne your cross as Brian 
 did at the head of an army, and have seen your 
 enemies going down before you like the trees 
 in a burning wood. 
 
 I pray I may survive to visit Cong again, and 
 on a propitious day. I am afraid the Abbey 
 proved too charming to us to allow us to see much 
 else of the place. Of course, we could not avoid 
 seeing the foolish, dry, boulder-strewn bed of the 
 canal that was cut to connect Lough Mask and 
 Lough Corrib more than half a century ago — the 
 canal which, after it was made, was found to be 
 unable to hold any water owing, as the guide- 
 book says, to " the porous and permeable character 
 of the stone " — but monuments of ineptitude 
 like this are one of the least inspiring features of 
 modern Ireland. It was at the time of the 
 
88 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 Great Famine that this canal was begun,^ and, 
 though the scheme was such a failure, it was at 
 least more sane in its intention than those other 
 Manchesterised methods of relief, according to 
 which starving peasants were told off to dig 
 holes in the ground and fill them up again for 
 fear more useful work might compete with the 
 private enterprises of men of capital. 
 
 I have heard it said that good engineering might 
 even yet make something of the canal, but I 
 know nothing about that. At present. Lough 
 Mask pours itself into Lough Corrib through a 
 chain of underground caverns, where, to judge 
 from the descriptions of others, there are some 
 pleasant weird sensations to be had. But we 
 could not tear ourselves away from the Abbey to 
 visit them, and, when we did at last get back 
 to the hotel, we were sun-surfeited, and, besides, 
 there was a tipsy knickerbockered commercial 
 traveller with an eye like a fish at the same table 
 with us for tea, whose conversation would not 
 come to an end. 
 
 In the evening, to make up for an hour of 
 
 balderdash But I can give you no impression 
 
 of the hospitable evening we spent in that pleasant 
 house on the top of the hill, where we talked of 
 the Fenians, and the Wildes, and the Dublin 
 poets, and all things and persons between heaven 
 
 1 According to one authority, but I have heard it contradicted on 
 better. 
 
THE PATH TO CONG 89 
 
 and Ireland. It was strange out here in a little 
 burning centre of Nationalism to meet those who 
 had known Oscar Wilde in his Irish days and 
 remembered his charm, and it was stranger still 
 to think that Wilde could have lived among these 
 enchanted lakes and hills — ^his father, Sir William 
 Wilde, famous as an antiquary, had a house not 
 far out of the village — and could have missed 
 finding here the true Greece of a modern Irishman. 
 It has been suggested that, if he had been born 
 twenty years later, the Irish literary revival 
 would have given his genius a foundation upon 
 which to build imperishable things beyond any- 
 thing he succeeded in fashioning in his idle exile. 
 This seems to me to be scarcely disputable. But 
 then I am a bigot on the matter of nationality 
 and genius. 
 
 Next morning broke with a thin shivering 
 sun, and it was a cold drive we had down to the 
 pier where the Galway steamer — the steamer 
 that should have brought us from Galway two 
 days before — was waiting to take us down 
 Lough Corrib with its long family of islands. 
 We had heard strange rumours of the lake. 
 It was said to be so shallow in parts that the 
 steamer had a way of running its nose on banks 
 of mud, whereupon all passengers would be 
 ordered to the stern so as to seesaw the bow into 
 the air while the boat was backed into safety. 
 There were tales of unknown rocks, too, that 
 
90 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 jagged black spires up towards the surface of the 
 water. Certainly, the Lilliputian steamer looked 
 an adventurous craft to trust to the chances of 
 nearly forty-five thousand acres of islands and 
 water. Out we beat, however, under a captain 
 who seemed bigger than the boat he commanded, 
 and I would not ask a pleasanter voyage than 
 along the marked and winding channel of the 
 lake on a golden day. It had turned grey now, 
 unfortunately. Even with the islands and the 
 distant hills and broken castles in lonely fields 
 here and there guarding the memories of the 
 shore, there was little beauty in the day. Cong 
 itself might have seemed a mere affair for an 
 antiquary on such a day as this. I was hoping — 
 for I had studied my map badly — to see the famous 
 Hen's Castle, said to have been built by a cock 
 and a hen in a single night, on our way out of Cong, 
 but this old foundation, as we learned, lies in the 
 water along another of the northern arms of the 
 lake. Here are memories, not only of King Rory, 
 but of Grace O'Malley — Granuaile, as we call 
 her — the woman admiral of Clew Bay, who was 
 ready to face the fleets of Queen Elizabeth, and 
 who was damned as a pirate and a thief for her 
 genius. Lady Wilde has left it on record that 
 Hen's Castle (or, in Irish, Caislean na Circe) is 
 also a place of ghostly influences. " Strange lights 
 are sometimes seen flitting through it, and on 
 some particular midnight a crowd of boats gather 
 
THE PATH TO CONG 91 
 
 round it, filled with men dressed in green with 
 red sashes. And they row about till the cock 
 crows, when they suddenly vanish, and the cries 
 of children are heard in the air. Then the people 
 know that there has been a death somewhere in 
 the region, and that the Sidhe (fairies) have been 
 stealing the young mortal children, and leaving 
 some ill-favoured brat in the cradle in place of the 
 true child." 
 
 Inchagoill — Inis an Ghaill Chraibhtigh, or 
 the Island of the Pious Foreigner — is another of 
 the many islands that attracts at least by the 
 romance of its name, and it lies not many miles 
 out from Cong with its dismantled churches and 
 its trees. But the steamer is a business, not a 
 pleasure, venture, and did not offer to stop here. 
 Inchagoill is said to contain the gravestone of 
 Lugnath, who was Patrick's sister's son and a 
 mariner. But whether the Lugnath who is 
 buried there is the saint's nephew or not seems 
 to be a debated matter. 
 
 It began to rain before we had achieved many 
 of the twenty-seven miles of the lake, and tail- 
 coated farmers and grey and brown and black- 
 shawled women with egg-baskets and umbrellas 
 stood in huddled groups like the fowl in a farm- 
 shed on a wet day on the several piers at which 
 we stopped with groaning sides, and pushed their 
 way aboard us till the captain would cry out to 
 some distracted woman, who seemed to want to 
 
92 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 be ashore and on the steamer at the same time, 
 " If you can't behave yourself more quietly, I'll 
 not take you at all." 
 
 And so we went through the islands — as in so 
 many Irish lakes, there is said to be exactly an 
 island here for every day in the year — and collected 
 the countryside for the Galway market. Here 
 from an island which was a tuft of pines a boat 
 would push out with a man and a crooked stick 
 for us, and there half a village of people would be 
 waiting for us on the pier. One would wonder 
 where so lively a population could come from on 
 these deserted shores. Probably there were few 
 people in the boat who did not speak Irish. There 
 was a fashionably dressed priest talking volubly in it 
 with a little group around him at the back of the 
 boat. In obedience to one of the ten command- 
 ments of the Gaelic League — " Dheamhan acht 
 Gaedhilg ins an nGaedhealtacht," which, being 
 translated, is " Nothing but Irish in the Irish- 
 speaking districts " — we too were dumb in any 
 language but this — no small piece of self-denial 
 to one who is so poor a linguist as I am. 
 
 On a box beside us an old farmer was sitting, 
 his hands gathered on the top of his stick, a drip 
 on the end of his nose, and, as the rain poured 
 down upon him, overcoatless as he was, he gazed 
 into emptiness with a twinkle in his eyes, and indeed 
 all over his lean and ill-shaven whiskered face. 
 He found great amusement in the way in which 
 
THE PATH TO CONG 93 
 
 a red, shy, foxy-faced neighbour kept ducking 
 here and there behind boxes and people and trying 
 to light his stump of a clay pipe out of the wind. 
 And the scraps of Irish he heard from us served 
 for his entertainment in the intervals during 
 which the other man in exhaustion gave up his 
 efforts. Then, borrowing the other's pipe and 
 smoking it quite successfully for himself, he 
 began to tell stories of how he once caught out a 
 Gaelic League priest. He had asked the priest 
 to tell him what was the Irish for Galway, his 
 idea in doing so being that, as in some places 
 it is pronounced " Galyiv " and in others " Galye," 
 he would be able to tell the priest he was wrong, 
 no matter which answer he gave, and to hold up 
 the other pronunciation as the right one. He 
 looked back on that victory over the priest with 
 great satisfaction. Then he gave us another 
 anecdote at the expense of the Irish revival. 
 There was a man from his part of the country — a 
 piper, I believe — who was taken to Dublin to 
 play at an Irish concert there. And before it 
 began the man of the concert said to him : " We 
 want you to give us a keen." ^ " Well," replied 
 the Mayo man, " let you bring a corpse and lay 
 him down before me, and I'll keen him for you. 
 What would be the sense of keening without a 
 corpse ? " Thus the old man garrolled on, 
 getting a deal of amusement out of the Irish 
 
 ^ Lament. 
 
94 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 revivalists, though, like most of the country- 
 people nowadays, he agreed with their aims. 
 
 He was especially interested to know what they 
 called various things like telegraph-poles, and 
 even in Irish he knew no word but " steamer " 
 for a steamer. I told him the word I had got out 
 of a grammar — " galtan." " That is it," he said, 
 nodding agreement ; " ' gal ' is smoke or steam. 
 ' Galtan ' — I never heard that word before, but 
 I know it's right." 
 
 And, careless of the rain and of the scenery 
 that was blotted out of all colour and wonder, 
 we talked on through the crooked straits that 
 connect the two great spaces of the lake, and 
 across the second great space till we made direct 
 for what seemed an impenetrable forest of tall 
 rushes, and found the mouth of the river Corrib, 
 from which we steamed down past Menlough 
 Castle, which had a short time before been burnt 
 one disastrous night, and, a little weary of all the 
 stoppages and the wet air and the crowded deck 
 of the steamer, we were soon carting our bags 
 down a grey street of Galway again in the end of 
 a little procession of ambling women with egg- 
 baskets and farmers in weather-beaten hats of 
 grotesque shapes — all making towards the settle- 
 ment of carts and donkeys and pigs and noisy 
 hens that to them for the day was Galway. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THROUGH LISDOONVARNA 
 
 It was the merest accident that we went to 
 Lisdoonvarna. Our ambition was to get from 
 Spiddle (a little desolate village about ten miles 
 outside Galway, where we had been attending 
 the opening of a summer school of Irish) to 
 Killorglin, which is in County Kerry, in time 
 for Puck Fair. As we left Spiddle on Monday 
 morning and the Fair (according to the railway- 
 guide) began on Wednesday, there would be little 
 time except for jolts on cars and other jolts in 
 railway trains in the interval. If we made the 
 journey by Lisdoonvarna, it was partly because 
 this involved the passage of Galway Bay by 
 steamer to Ballyvaughan — for who can resist 
 these little local steamers on a holiday ? — and 
 partly because a clerk in a ticket office had ex- 
 patiated on the beauties of the Cliffs of Moher, 
 which are the wonder of County Clare as Slieve 
 League is the wonder of County Donegal. It 
 had not often occurred to me before that time to 
 go anywhere in Ireland purposely to see what is 
 
96 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 called scenery. I do not like that ticketed and 
 public sort of beauty. Going to see scenery 
 always seems to me to be like taking an intro- 
 duction to some famous man, not for the sake of 
 a reasonable conversation, but for the sake of 
 having met him. Perhaps it v^as just because I 
 was full of all these prejudices that the clerk's 
 suggestion seemed like the offer of a novel ex- 
 perience. And as it involved that sea-journey 
 across Galway Bay, car- journeys across half (or 
 what looked like half) of the County Clare, and 
 made possible another long voyage on a local 
 steamer up the mouth of the Shannon from 
 Kilrush to Limerick, we yielded as a child yields 
 to a bribe of sweets. 
 
 We reached Galway from Spiddle — we seemed 
 to have been doing nothing but reaching Galway 
 for a week past — in time for lunch. Then there 
 was an hour for a smoke and a talk with the 
 landlord of the hotel, who had boasts of knowing 
 Mr. T. P. O'Connor, an old Galway student, 
 and who before long was taking my address and 
 promising to send me a box of shamrock on the 
 next St. Patrick's Day — a box of shamrock, alas ! 
 which, as we journalists say, never materialised. 
 Comfortably sighing out memories and promises, 
 our host then accompanied us down to the quay, 
 and, kindly, stout, conversational and sad under 
 his little grey cap, he made the pace as easy 
 as possible, always chiding our nervous desire to 
 
THROUGH LISDOONVARNA 97 
 
 hasten with a " Plenty of time, plenty of time ! " 
 that made one feel that one was in a land of 
 lullaby. 
 
 Just as we left the hotel — at least it seemed like 
 that — the air grew curiously still. It was as 
 though all the winds had suddenly paused on 
 tiptoe to hear a watch tick, or some other tiny 
 sound. High up in the west, images of clouds 
 like ghosts of the Brocken were mounting, ashen 
 and here and there golden-edged and of the colour 
 of dirty water. There was silver in the air, but 
 no sun shining, at least not openly. The light 
 dazzled one, and at the same time there was no 
 genuine brightness in it. One had an eerie feel- 
 ing that terrible things were trying to burst out 
 upon the world. At one moment it was as though 
 goblins had been at work turning all the metals 
 into a multifarious liquid brew, and yonder in 
 the sky we had a great molten sea of the stuff 
 washing the feet of unearthly towers. The next 
 moment it was as though all the colours except 
 the colours of the rainbow had broken loose and 
 occupied the heavens. In other words, it was 
 one of the weirdest days you could see. No 
 wonder that our host, hand in pocket, gazed at it 
 in a kind of awe and said : " That's a curious sky. 
 Surely, Mr. Lynd, that's a curious sky. I don't 
 ever remember seeing a sky like that before. It's 
 a curious sky, a curious sky. I wonder what it 
 means." 
 7 
 
98 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 That was the plain prose of it. 
 
 " I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it thun- 
 dered," he went on ; " you know, I wouldn't be a 
 bit surprised if it thundered. It's a curious sky. 
 I wonder what can be the meaning of it at all. 
 
 I hope to God " And then he suddenly 
 
 checked himself, as though what he hoped to God 
 were something too terrible to mention. After 
 a moment's pause, " I must ask the captain," he 
 said, with decision. And, in a heavy silence, our 
 eyes fixed on the horror of that looming sky, we 
 arrived at the quayside. 
 
 I do not know whether he asked the captain or 
 not. If he did, he was much too considerate to 
 communicate the result to us. Or, perhaps, it 
 was that he had left very little time for parting 
 sighs. In a few minutes, the prelude of shouts 
 and banging gangways and bells was over, our 
 good-byes spoken and our little two-decked tub 
 of a steamer churning out into the desolate bay. 
 Here, as we made our way out through the be- 
 calmed fishing-smacks, it was even stranger than 
 on land. Under the sunless light the water 
 was still and white, like an immense lake of milk 
 — a lake of milk, however, in which reflections 
 were curiously clear. Every tarry ship stood 
 upon an image of itself, which hung down into 
 the water as black as judgment. There were 
 reflections from the land, reflections from the 
 buoys in the water. Galway Bay was a mirror 
 
THROUGH LISDOONVARNA 99 
 
 of the fears that day. Then, suddenly, a mon- 
 strous piece of blackness broke through the surface, 
 and, sailing a little triangular fin, made for us, 
 and disappeared. Everybody on the boat began 
 asking about it. " It's a porpoise," said one. 
 " I never saw a porpoise in a calm like this," said 
 another. And a fisherman, with a jacket over 
 his blue jersey, spat into the sea, and said : " It's 
 a shark." Then in another moment there was 
 the same rising of the shape out of the water, 
 only a little nearer this time, the same pirate 
 fin, the same retreat under the sea, leaving us 
 with the feeling that some sinister unknown 
 power had been casting the evil eye on us. I 
 understood then the superstition of sailors who 
 believe that for a shark to follow a ship portends 
 the death of some one aboard. That beast, as 
 it came after us, seemed as inevitable as doom, 
 breaking as it did into the stilly world in which 
 our boat was the only thing that moved. . . . 
 It was with some relief that we ultimately shook 
 ourselves free of it and saw it swerving off towards 
 the fishing-smacks, among which it could be seen 
 rising now and then upon its peeping inky games. 
 And then we saw no more of it. . . . Behind us 
 slumbered Galway, grey and without smoke : 
 out at sea the Aran Islands were black stains at 
 the mouth of the bay : across in County Clare, 
 whither we were going, the rocky hills rose from 
 the water, scarred and barren and forbidding. . . . 
 
TOO RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 On the quay at Ballyvaughan a row of wagon- 
 ettes and cars was standing ; they could have 
 found room for at least thirteen times as many 
 people as the steamer had brought across. Nearly 
 all of them seemed to come from the hotels at 
 Lisdoonvarna, which was ten miles off by the 
 nearest road. We had already picked our hotel 
 at a guess from a list we had seen in a railway- 
 guide, and after some shouting we found the car 
 that was connected with it. Then we got up 
 and drove off till we came to the first public -house. 
 It seems to be a ritual with drivers of cross-country 
 cars to stop at the first public-house, or the one 
 after, even if it be only a few yards away. All 
 the cars and wagonettes pulled up either here or a 
 door or two farther on. Then we started on our 
 journey up into the grey and gloomy hills. One 
 of Cromwell's generals is said to have declared of 
 this part of the county — the barony of Burren, as 
 it is called — that it didn't contain wood enough 
 to hang a man, water enough to drown him, or 
 earth enough to bury him, and certainly these 
 introductory rocks reach an extreme pitch of 
 desolation and wildness. Grey as a dead fire, they 
 rise in the imagination as the field of old battles 
 of the Stone Age, when small men rushed from 
 their hiding behind the boulders and swung their 
 little axes with murderous cries above the heads 
 of their enemies. Corkscrew Hill, as the road is 
 called which winds right and left, and left and 
 
THROUGH LISDOONVARNA loi 
 
 right, and right and left, till one is finally safe on 
 the great plateau which absorbs so much of the 
 county, is, so far as my experience goes, one of 
 the wonderful roads of Ireland. To go along it 
 in the dark, I imagine, would be to wander among 
 the companies of the disembodied. The majority 
 of people leave the cars to tug along on the round- 
 about way, and themselves take short-cuts across 
 the rough grassy patches that lie between bit 
 and bit of the road up the face of the hill. Here 
 at every step up the terraced slopes we seemed to 
 be getting farther into a world of twilight and 
 hilly mysteries. The greatest of the heights about 
 us lay upon the land like the huge boss of a Titan's 
 shield, a round of greyness. 
 
 Then, on the upper plain, we got on to the car 
 again, and listened to the discourse of the red- 
 whiskered driver on the demerits of the country, 
 the foxes that creep among the unfenced hills, 
 and the ancient stories of the County Clare. 
 " Did you ever hear of Maighread Ruadh ? " he 
 asked. " She was a terrible woman. She lived — 
 do you see the hill yonder in a line with the white 
 house I'm showing you with the whip ? Well, 
 it's near that she had her castle, and there was a 
 cross-roads near it, and they say she kept a gate 
 at it, and, any traveller that came that way, she 
 wouldn't let him past till he had paid her a toll 
 of all she asked him. And, if he wouldn't pay, 
 she would string him up : she would give him a 
 
102 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 terrible doing, anyway. Well, for all she was cruel, 
 there was one was crueller, and that was her 
 husband. However it came about, one man 
 wouldn't do her, and when the husband was 
 away one time, what did she do but bring her 
 lovers, twelve of them, into the castle, and had 
 them waiting on her at the table dressed up as 
 young girls. That went on till the husband got 
 wind of it, and after that he hurries home and kills 
 the twelve of them, and he takes Maighread 
 Ruadh and — ah, he was a devil — ah, ma'am, 
 begging your pardon, he cuts the breasts off her. 
 Maybe it's only a story that's in it, but I always 
 heard it told as a true story. They say it's 
 hundreds and hundreds of years since that 
 happened. . . ." 
 
 And with such stories of a medievalism that 
 seems to have put forth its crimes and its sanctities 
 abundantly in Ireland as elsewhere, the road 
 slipped behind us. Here on the plateau the 
 country stretched away mile after level mile with 
 nothing to be seen on either hand but purple 
 bogland silent and pathless, and no moving 
 thing but the cars stringing out on the road ahead 
 and behind us. Evening was deepening. We 
 were soon caught in the fringes of slowly moving 
 clouds, and rain began to patter. The clouds 
 trailed over the hills, now coming lower, now 
 parting and revealing to us faintly a square- 
 shaped mountain far off on our left, Slieve 
 
THE OLU-AGE PEXSIOXER. 
 From the falnling by Paul Henry. 
 
 BOST0N COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 CHESTNUT HILL, MASS. 
 
THROUGH LISDOONVARNA 103 
 
 Callan, which, the driver assured us, could be 
 seen from any part of the County Clare. Mile 
 after mile we jolted on through the solitude, 
 till darkness had fallen and only a faint reddish 
 light showed in the west. Then the road began 
 to descend sharply. The horse stepped more 
 briskly. Sudden lights appeared in the blackness, 
 and with a sense of discovery we rattled down the 
 hill into the settlement of hydropathics and hotels 
 which is Lisdoonvarna, dropped into the twisted 
 hollow of the town, and climbed a last little hill 
 that took us to the hotel we had chosen so casually. 
 When we got off at the door, it was as though 
 we had landed into the beginnings of a house- 
 party — a house-party in which nearly every guest 
 was a priest. The grey-haired lady in black 
 who received us in the hall seemed more like the 
 hostess of a country-house than the proprietor of 
 a hotel ; and, indeed, though there was business 
 intelligence as well as the spirit of welcome 
 marked in her face, it was as a hostess rather than 
 a business woman that she went among her 
 boisterous guests while we were there. We 
 arrived just in time to get the last room in the 
 hotel, and Justin time for tea — for thearrangement 
 of the meals here, like everything else, was in the 
 correct Irish fashion, with tea instead of dinner 
 in the evening. Priests were in crowds in the 
 hall and passed one on the stairs, one humming 
 a tune, another talking nonsense to a lot of 
 
I04 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 girls, another aloof and quietly smiling and 
 entering into the high spirits of the place by 
 proxy, like the elderly ladies from Limerick who 
 sat with their knitting in the corners and looked 
 on. The two or three boys who were there 
 were romping about among the priests' legs, 
 tugging at sticks with them, and playing all 
 sorts of noisy scrimmaging games. Girls in 
 high-necked blouses chattered, not with each 
 other, but with groups of the clergy, in every 
 square yard of the place, and the male laity in 
 the persons of a few young men were thrust into 
 a wallflower loneliness. 
 
 The gong for tea sounded, and we went in and 
 sat down at one of the tables. In to the same 
 table, a few minutes afterwards, came two young 
 priests, one of them stout and tra-la-laing till he 
 sat down, whereupon he stopped suddenly and 
 said " Good evening." He guessed before long 
 that we had not come to Lisdoonvarna to drink 
 the waters. " I'm sure I don't know who does," 
 he said, as he covered his bread thickly with jam. 
 " They say there are more people ruin their 
 health than get it back at Lisdoonvarna." 
 " How's that ? " said I. " Diversion," he replied. 
 " Lisdoonvarna's a terrible place for diversion. 
 Croquet and other exhausting games all day, and 
 dancing and gaiety all night — I tell you, after a 
 fortnight of Lisdoonvarna, it's only the strongest 
 constitutions can do without a holiday." " WeU," 
 
THROUGH LISDOONVARNA 105 
 
 said the other priest, " the last time I was in 
 
 Lisdoonvarna I stayed at the ," naming one 
 
 of the other hotels, " and it was about as dull a 
 place as I ever knew." " That's true," said 
 
 Friar Tuck ; " down at the they do seriously 
 
 try to cure their rheumatism and old age with 
 doses of sulphur." " They're a stiff, formal lot," 
 said his companion. " I never knew anybody to 
 go there twice," Friar Tuck admitted. " Now 
 nobody ever comes to this hotel that doesn't 
 want to come back again. This is known as 
 Liberty Hall — Liberty Hall," he repeated, 
 rattling the knife on the edge of his plate to call 
 the attention of the maid-servant and get her to 
 bring round the teapot and fill his cup. 
 
 Naturally, it was only a matter of minutes 
 till he discovered that we were Gaelic Leaguers. 
 
 " Ah ! " he said. " Bo— a cow : I got that 
 far. It's a terrible hard language. Do you 
 think will it ever be spoken again ? Bo — a cow. 
 Hilloa, here's your man," he exclaimed, as a fair 
 boyish priest came and sat down at the other side 
 of us. " Here are two Gaelic Leaguers, Father 
 
 , and I haven't a word for them but 
 
 bo — a cow." 
 
 I do not think it was merely because he was a 
 Gaelic Leaguer, or because he knew some of my 
 
 friends, that I liked Father so warmly from 
 
 the first. Nor was it altogether because he had 
 so much the air of a liberal-minded young 
 
io6 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 Presbyterian minister (though, I will confess, I 
 counted that to him for a virtue). But he was 
 one of those men who radiate character ; he was 
 at once intensely human and a fighter for ideas, 
 as it were, with his fist. When you get a young 
 Presbyterian minister like that, you usually find 
 him struggling under the dead hand of his elders. 
 When you get a young Catholic priest like that, 
 it is not improbable that he is struggling under 
 the dead hand of his Bishop. Our new friend 
 with the bright hair and the boyish eyes was one 
 of the victims of the war of a few years ago 
 between the Bishops and the Irish people on the 
 question of the place of Irish in the National 
 University. The people, it may be remembered, 
 demanded in ardent public meetings and through 
 their County Councils that the Irish language 
 should be an essential part of the curriculum in the 
 new University. The Bishops, who apparently 
 wanted the University to be a Catholic institution, 
 attracting Catholic students from all parts of the 
 English-speaking world, issued a decree through 
 their Standing Committee in favour of leaving 
 Irish an optional subject. Everywhere over the 
 country the younger priests had been joining 
 with the people in demanding fair treatment 
 for a language which was known to at least a 
 thousand times as many of the inhabitants of 
 the country as any other language except English. 
 The Bishops, who had declared the subject 
 
THROUGH LISDOONVARNA 107 
 
 a matter for fair argument, now began nearly 
 everywhere to muzzle the pro-Irish priests. Dr. 
 O'Hickey, the Professor of Irish at Maynooth, 
 who championed the popular side, was requested 
 to resign, and, when he refused, he was dismissed 
 from his post. Those who talk about Ireland 
 being Rome-ridden, if they were open to con- 
 viction, would see in this war between the 
 Hierarchy and the Irish people and in the ultimate 
 victory of the latter the clearest disproofs of their 
 theory. Unfortunately, though the cause won, 
 the priests who had fought for it did not. Many 
 of them were not only temporarily silenced, 
 but either lost promotion or were transferred to 
 less important positions. Something like this 
 had happened to our neighbour. Probably the 
 officialdom of the Church did sincerely regard 
 him as a crank, a hothead, and an unsafe person : 
 official churches cannot be expected to look on 
 ideas and enthusiasms except with suspicion. The 
 young priest did not, on the other hand, put it 
 that way. He was as merry as a saint, and was 
 much too busy reviving games and education 
 in his new district to grumble. 
 
 In so mysterious and desolate a countryside it 
 was natural that the conversation should turn at 
 one time or another on the supernatural beings 
 with which the human imagination peoples such 
 regions — on fairies and ghosts and those who have 
 seen them or who believe they have seen them. 
 
io8 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 It was while we were discussing ghosts, and the 
 question whether ghosts are ever audible and 
 visible at the same time, that the priest told us 
 about the only ghost he had ever seen — and heard. 
 This had been at a funeral at which he had noticed 
 a curious little grey priest in the procession. And 
 this little sad-faced man had come and stood at 
 his elbow by the graveside, and he had been struck 
 by the beautiful silver tone of his voice and the 
 melancholy expression of his features, as well as 
 by the rather shabby clothes he was wearing. 
 When the service was over, he turned to another 
 priest and asked him who it was had been standing 
 beside him at the grave. 
 
 " It was I was next to you," said the other in 
 surprise. 
 
 " No," he had declared ; " I mean the little 
 grey-headed priest who was standing between 
 us." 
 
 And when he described the latter, he was told 
 that there had been no priest answering that 
 description at the funeral, but that the last priest 
 of the parish in which they were had looked 
 and spoken exactly like that, but he had died some 
 time previously. The priest could not make up 
 his mind whether he had seen a ghost or not. . . . 
 
 It was only weariness that kept us from going 
 down into the village to see a travelling circus 
 that evening. But this hive of gay priests, this 
 black garrison of the clergy on their holidays. 
 
THROUGH LISDOONVARNA 109 
 
 was, as it turned out, worth a hundred such 
 conventional pleasures. Personally, I had long 
 known something of the merriments of the clergy 
 of other denominations when they gather in 
 companies round a fire and set their pipes going. 
 But I had never before seen the Catholic clergy- 
 disporting themselves en masse, as it were. Here 
 they were like a crowd of boys on a holiday. One 
 of them walked up and down the hall flirtatiously 
 with a girl on each arm, a challenge to the laughter 
 of the others, who smoked him for a playboy. 
 Others, no less flirtatious, jested and gesticulated 
 on the crowded sofas to the immense admiration 
 of laughing groups of girls and benign old ladies, 
 who smiled on the fun from their corners. 
 Another, a little man with a face like a laughing 
 moon, who rose on the tips of his toes as he walked 
 with an exaggerated straight back, tried to chase 
 the laity into the drawing-room, where they were 
 to dance and to have songs. We allowed ourselves 
 to be driven in through one of the two doors that 
 led out of the hall into the drawing-room, and 
 found ourselves on a settee in the middle of the 
 room. The little laughing priest before long got 
 enough girls together for a set of lancers, and then 
 he went out in search of young men to be their 
 partners. Two shy youths, a tall and a short one, 
 both in flaming yellow boots, he dragged in by 
 the sleeves, but still he had not enough men. 
 Then, for the second time, he besought me to do 
 
no RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 my duty. He got down on one knee and spread 
 his arms in supplication. I, however (being in- 
 competent), was obdurate. He made a gesture 
 of despair. 
 
 " Girls in dozens pining to dance, and no boys 
 to dance with them," he exclaimed, as though 
 the end of the world had come. " And this — 
 is — Lisdoonvarna ! " 
 
 He succeeded in rooting another young man 
 out from somewhere, however, and soon the 
 lancers were going, and the two shy young men 
 in yellow boots were losing all their shyness ; 
 indeed, they went through the galloping and 
 whirling parts of the dance later on as riotously 
 as they had before been timid. 
 
 The dance ended, the little moon-faced priest 
 brought in another little stout priest, who was 
 the melancholy double of himself, to sing a song. 
 And of all the songs on the earth, what do you 
 think he chose to sing ? " Scenes that are 
 Brightest ! " You know the thing. 
 
 " Scenes that are brightest ^ 
 
 Ma-a-ay la-ast 
 A-a-a whi-ile." 
 
 He sobbed that song. He poured it out of his 
 bosom like an old-fashioned operatic tenor with 
 his eyes fixed on the ceiling. He was crimson 
 with emotion. He rose into the air with it on 
 the high notes. At length, I dared look at him 
 no more. I watched instead the old ladies with 
 
THROUGH LISDOONVARNA in 
 
 their knitting, beaming entranced. I watched the 
 crowds of young priests standing in and behind 
 the doors, and they too smiled as though they 
 were enjoying themselves. Then when it was all 
 over, we all clapped our hands and said " Thank 
 you," and the little stout priest took his broken 
 heart over to a chair near the wall and sat down. 
 And I, in dread that this might be followed by 
 " We met — 'twas in a Crowd " or " She wore a 
 Wreath of Roses," slipped out of the room. 
 
 If I went to the bar, it was not because the song 
 had depressed my spirits beyond ordinary remedies, 
 or because I was particularly thirsty, or because 
 I am not in theory and largely by habit a tee- 
 totaller. I went there simply because there was 
 such a crowd of cheerful people in the hall, and 
 I felt a nervous stranger among them. 
 
 When I got into the bar. Friar Tuck was there, 
 discoursing with another curate. 
 
 " You'll have a drink with me," he greeted me. 
 " What will you have ? " 
 
 I told him I would have a small Jameson. 
 
 He looked round till he saw a bottle of Jameson, 
 took it down from the shelf, made the barmaid 
 give him a corkscrew, put the bottle between his 
 knees, and opened it, and in a minute was flooding 
 whisky into a tumbler for me as though I could 
 drink it by the half-pint. 
 
 " Easy," I told him. " I said a small one." 
 
 " Ah," he observed knowingly, continuing to 
 
112 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 fill my tumbler till it was as full as he thought was 
 good for me, " there's one good reason for drink- 
 ing small whiskies : you can take more of them." 
 When I got back into the hall again, the priests 
 were still crowding about the drawing-room 
 doors, not dancing themselves, for apparently they 
 are not allowed to do that, but encouraging, nay, 
 compelling, everybody else to dance. Irish priests 
 are pictured by a good many of their modern 
 critics as a saturnine company. Perhaps there is 
 something in the air of Lisdoonvarna which turns 
 them jovial. Perhaps stern human nature here 
 takes a little holiday of irresponsible gaiety as it 
 did in the Middle Ages when the Abbot of 
 Unreason, or Lord of Misrule, was so important 
 a figure in the Church year. Certain it is that in 
 this hotel, set in the middle of the bogs of Ireland, 
 a whole host of Father O'Flynns were foregathered 
 as if determined to live up to the portrait in Mr. 
 Graves's song. Soon the dance was ended, and 
 I went out into the air, and a priest's voice 
 reached me through the window, roaring a 
 comic song to the other priests and the beaming 
 Limerick ladies. And, as behind two little town- 
 boys who were amusing themselves out in the 
 moist darkness I tried to peep past the sides of 
 the blind into the golden light of the room, I 
 caught snatches of lines like — 
 
 ** Oh, boys, oh, my heart is growing grey ; 
 I'm the hardest- featured man in Petravore." 
 
THROUGH LISDOONVARNA 113 
 
 Then there was another dance. I was dragged 
 in to see it because it was an Irish dance — some 
 kind of a jig — the Lord knows I know nothing 
 about dancing. After this everybody came into 
 the coolness of the hall again, and crowded the 
 seats. But they were not so crowded that a 
 blooming young lady with clusters of chestnut 
 hair and a sea of joy in her eyes and lips could not 
 find room on a sofa, as with a challenge of " Make 
 way for the Kilkee gang ! " she plumped herself 
 down in the middle of its occupants. The few 
 children of the place still played violent eel-like 
 games among the legs of their elders. 
 
 Suddenly a hush fell. Some one inside the 
 room had begun to sing " Sing me to Sleep," to 
 sing it as though her soul was in the singing. 
 The Kilkee girl kept silent, too, till it came to the 
 chorus. Then she announced to the entire hall, 
 " That song always makes me feel sea-sick," and 
 she began buzzing a kind of bass accompaniment. 
 She was an irreverent girl. Then, just as we 
 were getting back into the hush of sentiment, a 
 little chit of a girl, who was trying to tug a 
 walking-stick from a decorous middle-aged priest, 
 broke the spell again with a loud, " Ah, Father 
 Healy, you're a terrible tease ! " I think a waltz 
 came after that — a wretched London musical- 
 comedy waltz. I am afraid I agree with Byron 
 about the waltz, though the young men in the 
 yellow boots unquestionably danced it with the 
 
114 RAMBLES IN IRFXAND 
 
 greatest discretion. Then my fellow-traveller 
 sang. An Irish country song. When she had 
 finished, the moon-faced priest, who was master 
 of the ceremonies, came up to me where I was 
 standing at the door and .grasped my arm eagerly. 
 " Is that your good lady ? " he asked. " It 
 is," I said. " You should be proud of her," he 
 declared, reaching up and patting me en- 
 thusiastically on the shoulder — " you should be 
 proud of her." " I am," said I. And with that 
 he was off into the room again and standing beside 
 the piano, with rosy face, singing " Believe me, 
 if all those endearing young charms " with all 
 his muscles, till the sweat came out in beads on 
 his round smooth brow. ... By the time the 
 song was over, old priests, middle-aged priests, and 
 young priests, with a few inconspicuous laymen, 
 were flapping their mackintoshes and closing their 
 umbrellas and wiping their feet on the mats in 
 the porch. Some of them apparently had been 
 to the circus. " Rotten," declared one grizzled 
 holiday-maker. " That was the worst clown 
 I ever saw," observed another. " It was a poor 
 show," said a third. " Ah ! " exclaimed a young 
 man, embracing the whole population of the hall 
 in his glance, " you had good sense not to stir 
 from the hotel, so you had." 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 
 
 If you want to get out of Lisdoonvarna, you must 
 do it hy car — unless you have an unnatural taste 
 for walking. If you take a direct cross-country 
 road you will fall in with the County Clare 
 railway system — it is far more like a steam-tram 
 system — at Ennistymon, about nine miles away. 
 But if you want to see the Cliffs of Moher which, 
 says the leading guide-book, " form some of the 
 most sublime objects of the western coast," you 
 will have to go a long roundabout journey and 
 join the train farther on at Lahinch. 
 
 There are benches alongside the ditches near 
 Lisdoonvarna, and valetudinarian ladies were 
 sitting out on them with their restive grand- 
 daughters as we drove out of the village. Burly 
 parish priests were exercising their constitutions 
 by tramping along the roadsides. There was a 
 gigantic peace over the land. Compared with 
 Galway, this seemed to be a county of flowers 
 peeping out among the grass — mostly grass, of 
 
ii6 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 course, but wild flowers instead of stones. Like 
 the day before, it was a day of curious light. 
 When we came near the coast and, looking out 
 over the sea, saw the Aran Islands lying to the 
 north-west, they were still but dull shadows of 
 islands, unromantic rocks. The car-driver, an 
 intelligent, practical young fellow, with a sandy 
 moustache, was, rather to my surprise, an Irish 
 speaker, and I am afraid I lost some good con- 
 versation by listening in that language instead of 
 allowing myself a day off in easy-going English. 
 I felt something of a hypocrite, indeed, when, on 
 reaching a field-path, he told us to get down, and 
 gave us directions as to how to reach the cliffs 
 and join him about a mile farther on down the 
 road. For I had only gathered the vaguest 
 impression of his story of easts and wests when we 
 broke away from him and out of sight across the 
 grass towards the cliffs. 
 
 The mist had come down in walls over the 
 sea : the cliffs themselves rose an immense wall 
 of blackness, at the foot of which a greenish- 
 black tide broke in a thousand whitenesses and 
 made a far noise, a noise as distant as an echo. 
 Those who measure their admiration with a foot- 
 rule will tell you that the precipice of Moher, 
 being 668 feet high, is only a trifle compared with 
 the cliffs of Achill and the cliffs of Donegal. 
 But the Cliffs of Moher are sufficiently excit- 
 ing. I think most people will feel a strange in- 
 
CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 117 
 
 toxication, a strange terror almost, as they stand 
 near the edge of the cliff and look down at the 
 sea-gulls flying about its hard breast with tiny, 
 distant cries. I do not think I ever saw rocks of 
 so pitchy a blackness as the sea washes against 
 here. Perhaps the weird light was the cause of 
 it, and the contrast of that brood of sea-gulls 
 which clung to the rocks so clamorously half-way 
 down and streamed them with an occasional 
 whiteness. One felt small and giddy as upon the 
 edge of an abyss as one looked down below at 
 the sea which, ever so far down, cast its perpetual 
 chains of pearls at the rocks, and withdrew them 
 with an army of mutterings. 
 
 Here on the point of the cliffs is a broken-down 
 tower where red and white cows shelter in the 
 deserted hall, and many visitors will no doubt 
 feel a quickening of romance at the sight of it 
 till they look at the date-stone and see that it 
 is no older than the nineteenth century. It 
 was built, indeed, by a neighbouring landlord, 
 Cornelius O'Brien, M.P., in 1835, as a hostelry 
 for visitors, and it was he, I believe, who also put 
 up the wall of flagstones along the cliffs and 
 the stables which now lie in ruins near the road. 
 Those who have read Mr. J. B. Atkins's finely- 
 made biography of Sir William Russell, the Irish 
 journalist who invented war correspondents, 
 may remember that the latter visited Corney 
 O'Brien at his residence near this at the time of 
 
ii8 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 the Famine in 1846, and heard from his lips an 
 authentic and blood-curdling story of the O'Brien 
 ghost that haunts these terrible cliffs. Russell 
 having during dinner expressed his admiration of 
 the scenery of the Hag's Head at the far end of 
 the cliffs, Corney later on bade his piper — he 
 seems to have kept a piper in the house like an old 
 Gaelic chief — retire, and he said to his guest : 
 " You like the Hag's Head ? Well ! I would 
 not go there now if you were to give me a hundred 
 pounds, and it's not but I want the money." 
 He then told him how he had come into the 
 property, a stranger to the place, and on his 
 arrival went for a walk to the cliffs with the 
 parish priest with whom he was dining that 
 evening. He had heard a tradition of an old lady 
 of the family who, while out on the cliff with her 
 grandson and heir, was " whisked into the sea 
 by a sudden puff of wind " — a natural enough 
 danger in the place. As Corney stood looking 
 down at the waves, he was horrified to feel that 
 he was going over, too. " I gave a shout," he 
 told Russell, " and Father Michael caught me, 
 or I'd have been in the sea ! " 
 
 One would have thought that he would have 
 been rather nervous of the cliffs after that. But 
 no : that very night he visited them again. But 
 the story of this nocturnal visit and what happened 
 in the course of it is best told in Corney's own 
 words to Russell. 
 
CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 119 
 
 "Well," he declared, "as I was driving home from Father 
 Michael's, I thought that as it was a beautiful moonlight night 
 and a good breeze was blowing from the west, I would take a 
 look at the breakers — they were roaring like artillery. So I 
 got out of the gig and told the boy to go home and bid a 
 servant to wait up for me. I struck across the sward straight 
 for the Hag's Head. I had got within seventy or eighty yards 
 of it when I saw on the very edge of the cliff a white figure. 
 It was moving ; alive and no mistake. At first I thought it 
 was a sheep, but getting nearer I perceived that it was a woman 
 in a white dress with a white cap on her head. Then I 
 remembered there was some talk at dinner of a lunatic girl who 
 had escaped out of the asylum at Ennistymon. I made sure 
 that it was she, and I thought that I had just arrived in time to 
 save her life, poor creature ! My plan was to creep quietly 
 behind her, seize her in my arms, drag her as far as I could 
 from the edge, then secure her and haul her somehow to the 
 road. I had got close and was just about to lay hold of her, 
 when 'the thing' turned on me such a face as no human being 
 ever had — a death's head, with eyes glaring out of the sockets, 
 through tangled masses of snow-white hair ! In an instant, 
 with a screech that rang through my brain, ' the thing ' fell or 
 threw itself over the face of the cliff. 
 
 " It was some seconds before I recovered the shock and 
 horror. Then trembling I crept on my hands and knees to the 
 verge of the cliff. I looked down on the raging sea. As I 
 was peering down over the Hag's Head I saw in the moonlight 
 some white object coming up the face of the cliff straight 
 towards me. I am not superstitious or a coward. I tried to 
 persuade myself it was a seal or a great sea-gull, but presently 
 arms and hands were visible — it was crawling hand over hand 
 up the cliff. I jumped to my feet and ran for my life towards 
 the house. As I ran the yell * the thing ' gave when it dis- 
 appeared over the cliff was repeated. Looking back, there was 
 the dreadful sight. It came over the green meadow in pursuit of 
 me, came nearer, nearer, not two hundred yards behind. I bounded 
 
120 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 like a deer up the avenue, and the door was opened by my man. 
 Again the fearful sound close at hand. ' Shut ! shut the 
 door ! Do you hear that ? ' The man heard nothing. I 
 went up to my room ; looked at my face in the glass ; it was 
 pale, but it was not that of a madman. 
 
 "The windows of my bedroom looked on a large walled 
 garden ; the blinds were drawn and the light of the moon fell 
 through them. I was nearly undressed when a shadow was 
 thrown on the counterpane of the bed from one of the windows. 
 There was some one on the sill ! The scream was repeated. 
 A brace of double-barrel pistols lay on the table by my pillow. 
 I fired the barrels, bang ! bang ! bang ! at the window as fast 
 as I could pull the trigger. I ran downstairs to the hall. We 
 called up every soul in the house, searched every inch of the 
 garden — there was soft soil under my window — not a trace of 
 a footstep or a ladder. I had my horse saddled at once, and 
 rode to Ennistymon, and knocked up the priest. The first 
 question I asked his astonished reverence was, ' Tell me, was I 
 drunk when I left you ? ' ' No, you were as sober as you are 
 now, Mr. O'Brien 1 ' And then 1 told him what I have told 
 you. ' I never,' said his reverence, ' heard of any one but the 
 O'Briens hearing or seeing her^ and they have her all to them- 
 selves. I can't make it out.' Nor can I either, Mr. Russell. 
 I had a rail put up at the edge of the cliff where you 
 get the best view of the cliffs. I have been there, now and 
 then, on a fine day, with people — but after sunset — never ! 
 
 Russell declared that he had a very bad night 
 after hearing Corner's story. " I slept but little 
 till morning," he said, " and then, as I was dozing 
 off, I was startled by an awful cry. It proved to 
 be the preliminary of a flourish by the piper for 
 the skirl before breakfast." 
 
 When one has got back to the road again and 
 
CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 121 
 
 driven some way down from the heights, one 
 comes on the showiest holy well I have yet seen. 
 It is in a kind of grotto in a garden beside an 
 inn, and outside the grotto-like building stands a 
 little shrine. The walls of the grotto are thick 
 with holy pictures, abominations of colour re- 
 presenting various saints, and each of them is 
 signed with the name of some beneficiary of the 
 blessed properties of the waters. Other visitors 
 had made presents of rosaries, which were hung 
 here and there from nails. If you read the 
 inscriptions on the pictures, you will be surprised 
 to see how many of the donors are Americans. 
 A barefooted woman with a skin tanned like a 
 Red Indian's and a head of glossy black hair 
 greeted us as we went in, and asked us if we would 
 have a drink from the well. We said we would, 
 and she rinsed out a tin and filled it from the 
 running water and handed it to us. And as, 
 having given her some money, we went out, she 
 called earnest blessings after us. 
 
 The well is named after St. Brigid — ^" the Mary 
 of the Gael," as she has been called. St. Brigid 
 of Kildare, according to the scholars, owes a good 
 deal of her honour in Ireland to a popular con- 
 fusion of her with an earlier Brigid, who has 
 been identified with Dana, the mother of the 
 Celtic gods. Brigid was the goddess of fertility 
 and poetry, and the sacred fire, which the Christian 
 Brigid's nuns kept alive in the shrine in Kildare 
 
122 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 — a fire which no male might approach, and upon 
 which no male might breathe — is, we are told, an 
 inheritance from the old goddess. There is no 
 need to argue that these wells of the saints which 
 spring from every crack in Ireland also date back 
 their holiness centuries before the coming of 
 Christianity. No doubt, they cured people then. 
 Certainly, they cure people still. Rationalism 
 has turned the clearness of a thousand of them 
 into mud, and the rags of thank-offering are no 
 longer tied so profusely on the thorn-bushes that 
 grow beside them or the little cairns of gratitude 
 piled up with a stone from every one who passes. 
 Even to-day, however, as at St. David's well near 
 Enniscorthy, lame men are to be found throwing 
 away their crutches and walking away whole, 
 having tasted and washed in the sacred water ; 
 and the holy pictures hung about St. Brigid's 
 well were all, I believe, thanks for miraculous 
 cures. Still, this well was suspiciously picturesque. 
 One could not help feeling more of a tourist 
 than a pilgrim while one was there. 
 
 Indeed, I had an uneasy feeling that it was a part 
 of the inn garden. I asked the driver to come into 
 the public-house and have a drink before he went 
 on, but he pointed to a badge in his buttonhole, 
 and told me that this pledged him either not to 
 touch liquor at all or to take no more than two 
 bottles of stout in the day. The young men of 
 the west of Ireland seem to take a curious pleasure 
 
CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 123 
 
 in wearing badges of one kind and another, and 
 the temperance badge, I'm glad to say — for I 
 believe in none of the anti-Puritan nonsense — is 
 one of the commonest. When we drove down into 
 Lahinch later, past the wide stretch of sandy 
 golf-links, on which a rare knickerbockered man, 
 his weapons borne by his page, was marching 
 very importantly in the wake of a ball, we noticed 
 badges of one kind and another in the buttonholes 
 of many of the boys who loafed about the railway 
 station. 
 
 It was only by the skin of our teeth that we 
 caught the train. Had we missed it, we could not 
 have reached Limerick — by the Kilrush steamer, 
 at any rate — that night. As we had been 
 driving since breakfast, we were beginning to 
 feel hungry, but there was not even a refreshment 
 bar at the station. Our carman generously made 
 a dash from the station to some near-by shop, 
 and was able to thrust a few pence worth of 
 chocolate in by the carriage window before the 
 train shook itself and crept out of the station. 
 My chief memories of the long journey down the 
 Clare coast to Kilrush are that I had nothing 
 to eat, and that every now and then, as we looked 
 down at the misty sea, an island called Mutton 
 Island rose out of a cloud and mocked us. I do 
 not remember exactly how many hours it took 
 us to reach Kilrush, but it felt like half a day. 
 There has been a strike on the Clare railway 
 
124 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 since we were there — for Irish wages are the lowest 
 possible — and I see no reason why the whole of 
 the county should not go on strike against so 
 irrelevant and rambling a system. When we 
 reached Kilrush at last, two small boys, the elder 
 of whom looked about ten, seized our bags and 
 bore them off, till I became alarmed lest they 
 might rupture themselves with so heavy weights. 
 Luckily, they had not gone thirty yards when a 
 big loafer with a cudgel came up and dragged the 
 bags out of their hands, and gave me a good 
 excuse for paying them off. " Ah, what right 
 have they to be carrying luggage," he protested 
 indignantly. " Their father's a retired policeman, 
 and he with his pension, and they're in no want 
 of money. It's pure begging. They ought to 
 have more shame than to be robbing the poor of 
 their odd pence." 
 
 I hoped when we got on board the steamer 
 there would be nothing to do but loosen a few 
 ropes and speed off up the Shannon towards 
 Limerick, and, as the captain told us there would 
 be no food to be had till the boat started, we were 
 especially anxious to be gone as early as possible. 
 But, alas ! we were just feeling sure that we must 
 be on the point of going, when the advance-guard 
 of a regiment of pigs ran grunting on to the quay. 
 Then there was a great scene of penning in and 
 beating with sticks and squealing, and a few pigs 
 would be herded rebelliously into a little truck 
 
CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 125 
 
 and shut in, and the pulley would begin rattling 
 as though it were out of breath with effort, and a 
 truck would be hoisted in the air and swung round 
 and lowered into the hold of the steamer, a thing 
 of terror, odour, and disharmony. It was the 
 slowest possible business transferring the pigs 
 from the quayside into the boat, and when one 
 regiment of the poor dirty beasts was finished, 
 another came down with silly ears to take its 
 place. Ultimately, we got tired of pig, and, if 
 it had not been for the growing smell of them, 
 we might have enjoyed the time well enough 
 looking over at rare Scattery Island, which lies 
 a mile or more out in the water with a round tower 
 rising amid its ruined churches. It was St. 
 Senan, a native of the county, who, having retired 
 with his monks to this lonely mile of island, first 
 built a religious foundation there. Living in 
 the sixth century — ^he died about 560 — ^he earned 
 fame, like St. Kevin of Glendalough, for the 
 strictness of his discipline. Like St. Kevin, he 
 would allow no woman, however saintly, to set 
 foot within his precinct, and, even when the 
 holy virgin St. Cannera, who was a relative of his 
 own, prayed to be received on the island, he 
 replied forbiddingly — 
 
 *' Quid feminis 
 Commune est cum monachis ? 
 Nee te nee ullam aliam 
 Admittemus in insulam." 
 
126 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 Moore has written some of his flirtatious 
 nonsense about the affair, suggesting that 
 
 " had the maid 
 Till morning's light delayed 
 And given the saint one rosy smile, 
 She ne'er had left his holy isle." 
 
 As a matter of fact, St. Cannera was on the point 
 of death at the time of the visit, and only came to 
 the island to receive the viaticum from her holy 
 cousin, which when he learned he behaved like 
 a human being, and permitted her to go ashore. 
 
 Scattery Island, however, is famous not only as 
 the scene of the anti-feminist St. Senan's great 
 dilemma, but as the retreat whither the remnant 
 of the Danes fled after Limerick had been burned 
 over them by Brian Boru, and Mahon, his 
 reigning brother. That was the occasion of the 
 spoiling of Limerick when the conquerors acquired 
 as their booty " beautiful and foreign saddles ; 
 jewels, gold and silver, and silks ; soft, youthful, 
 bright girls ; blooming, silk-clad women ; active, 
 well-formed boys " — when they slew every captive 
 who was fit for war and enslaved the others. 
 The pagan Danes seem to have thought that a 
 violent Christian like Brian would regard a place 
 of churches like Scattery Island as a sanctuary. 
 Brian, however, was not such a stickler for 
 ecclesiasticism as they imagined. When Mahon 
 was treacherously murdered, and he succeeded 
 him, he forgot everything but vengeance. He 
 
CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 127 
 
 was not, as his chronicler puts it, " an egg in place 
 of a stone, or a wisp of hay in place of a club," and 
 his first fierce deed was to direct his fleet to this 
 same Scattery Island and overthrow the Danish 
 power there in bloodshed. That was in 977, 
 about four centuries after St. Senan. 
 
 Six centuries later, in 1588, another wild tragedy 
 occurred in these waters. This was when seven 
 ships of the Spanish Armada that had been hurled 
 and rolled and broken round the coasts of Scotland 
 and Ireland sailed out of the storm into the 
 mouth of the Shannon and made piteous efforts 
 to get some of their men ashore at Kilrush, so 
 that they might obtain water, for they were 
 dying of thirst, having had no fresh supply of 
 water since they left Spain. It was the order 
 of England, however, that no mercy should be 
 shown to the Spaniards, and though, in their 
 extremity, the Spanish captains offered a butt of 
 wine for every cask of water, and indeed most of 
 the wealth of their ships for as much as would 
 satisfy their needs, they were sent away empty, 
 and, setting sail again, were soon back among 
 the storms and being dashed to pieces on the 
 merciless rocks of Clare. . . . 
 
 To steam up the Shannon on a day of wide 
 prospects is, I am sure, a delightful experience, 
 though even on the best of days I would rather 
 make the voyage on a steamer that did not carry 
 pigs. It is not that I do not like pigs : I love the 
 
128 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 shape of them, and they make a very soothing 
 music except at times of emotional crisis. But 
 the odour of a thousand of them is something 
 never meant to be concentrated in the hold 
 of a single vessel. In the hold ? Alas ! no, it 
 escaped from the hold and wrapped the boat in a 
 kind of cloud that there was no getting away from. 
 The day was sultry, with roaming mists, and even 
 when a hidden sun turned the fogs into a soft 
 gold there were seldom more than a few hundred 
 yards of world to be seen in any direction. In 
 other words, it was just SQch a day as gave the 
 pigs possession of us. It gave our noses to them, 
 and it gave our eyes to them, for there was often 
 nothing else to see. Down in the body of the 
 ship they huddled in terror, their backs all 
 scarred with cuts where their owners had put their 
 marks on them. I believe decent people have 
 been protesting against the cruel way in which 
 these identification marks are made on pigs, and 
 indeed those of us who insist upon living on the 
 corpses of animals might very well force a stoppage 
 of a good many cruelties of marking and transit 
 and slaughter. I will say this for my own 
 sensibility of heart that, after seeing that mass of 
 squalling pigs crying out for a kinder world in the 
 
 Limerick steamer, I did not touch bacon for 
 
 well, for two days. 
 
 Here a poor porker would make a dash for 
 liberty only to be seized by the tail by a big 
 
CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 129 
 
 excited man with a stick under his arm. There 
 a filth-stained beast would resolutely lie down, 
 having taken a notion that it could sleep out the 
 day of judgment, and would risk being trodden 
 over by its fellows, till the big excited man came 
 along and dragged it erect again by the ears, 
 occasionally dropping an ear to hit it a blow with 
 the stick, and raising a hullabaloo infinitely more 
 violent than the screechings of the pig. Snorting, 
 snapping, biting companies of the animals would 
 gradually resign themselves to the beginnings of 
 slumber, curled up cheek on bristled back and nose 
 on buttock, the grunts diminishing into little 
 grunts and the little grunts into lesser grunts, 
 till the bliss of silence seemed about to descend 
 on them. Then some mischievous intruder, a 
 hairy animal and young, would approach, shaking 
 his ears in contempt and grunting damnation on 
 them for a race of slaves. While the big man with 
 the stick was looking away and very patiently 
 relighting his empty pipe, out would dart the 
 jaw of the newcomer, and a pig roused from its 
 sleep would be squealing aloud over a bitten leg. 
 Stumbling up, it would incommode another pig, 
 which would bite another pig, which would 
 lurch into another pig, which would give another 
 pig some other cause of bad temper. And the 
 whole herd would be awake and rebellious again, 
 and the big man down among them, swearing and 
 fighting for order with his stick. 
 9 
 
130 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 It was the mists, I am sure, that concentrated 
 our senses on these indecencies. Every now and 
 then, however, the mists rose, and showed us fair 
 little peeps of sunny landscape, warm and rich 
 and comfortable -looking, with at intervals a 
 fine whitewashed farmhouse standing in the 
 middle of a field. At least, from a distance, 
 many of the farmhouses look as if they were 
 plump in the middle of fields, so comparatively 
 rare are gardens. On the Limerick shore to the 
 south, too, you get a look at some of the old 
 castles in which Ireland — at least the south of 
 Ireland — is so romantically plentiful. There is 
 the Castle of Glin, for instance, dominating the 
 shore with its air of nobleness blasted and shat- 
 tered, when you have got well past the voices on 
 the pier of Tarbert. The Knight of Glin is one 
 of the many romantic names that conjure up the 
 vision of Elizabethan Ireland. It was in this 
 castle that, in the summer of 1600, he and his men 
 were burst in upon and slaughtered by Elizabeth's 
 very capable exterminator. Sir George Carew. 
 The Irish say that women and children were 
 massacred after the fight, and Carew's capacity 
 for robust deeds of the kind is shown in many a 
 page of the British State Papers. Carew was the 
 honourable and pious gentleman to whom Cecil 
 entrusted much of the murderous work that 
 needed doing in those days in behalf of civil and 
 religious liberty. It was to Carew that Cecil 
 
CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 131 
 
 wrote, in regard to the difficult Fitzgerald known 
 as the Sugan Earl : " Take this from me, upon 
 my life, that whatever you do to abridge him, 
 which you shall sale to be done out of providense, 
 shall never be ymputed to you as a fault." It 
 was Carew again who seems to have arranged for 
 the poisoning of Red Hugh O'Donnell when, 
 after the wild night of Kinsale, he fled to Spain 
 to get help for Ireland. " O'Donnell is dead," 
 wrote Carew to Cecil, "... and I do think 
 it will fall out that he is poisoned by James Blake, 
 of whom your lordship hath been formerly 
 acquainted. At his (Blake's) coming into Spain 
 he was suspected of O'Donnell because he had 
 embarked at Cork, but afterwards he insinuated 
 his access — and O'Donnell is dead." On another 
 occasion he employed " one Amyas an Irishman " 
 to murder Florence MacCarthy More. But, after 
 all, Carew in all this was doing no worse than his 
 forerunners and companions in adventure. Sus- 
 sex had attempted to poison Shane O'Neill, and 
 Perrott bribed a poisoner to put an end to Fiach 
 MacHugh O'Byrne. Indeed, as Dr. P. W. Joyce 
 says, " during the reign of Elizabeth assassination 
 was not merely a thing of occasional occurrence, 
 but a recognised mode of dealing with Irish 
 chiefs." It would hardly be worth stressing the 
 point if it were not for the fact that good-hearted 
 British novel-readers are so shocked by poor 
 Catharine de' Medicis and the Borgias. In 
 
132 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 Belfast, too, I am afraid, we know a good deal 
 more about the Borgias than about the Eliza- 
 bethans, who were really quite as skilful. There's 
 a subject of meditation for you if you ever find 
 yourself looking out over the fat lands of Limerick 
 from a Shannon steamer. 
 
 But, indeed, as you drift up this old river, there 
 are more modern subjects of meditation for the 
 practical mind. Here we have a greater river 
 than any other in Ireland, or in England either, 
 and yet it seems to flow in a perpetual Sabbath 
 of idleness, a desert for ships. The voyage from 
 Kilrush to Limerick took us longer, I think, than 
 the train journey from Liverpool to London ; 
 yet, in all that time, we met but one lonely ship 
 that was being tugged seaward, and that came 
 suddenly upon us out of the mist like a lost ghost 
 of the Fighting Temeraire, and, ghost-like, passed 
 on again into the mist. 
 
 The coming and going of that lonely three- 
 master seemed only to make the solitude more 
 profound. It was like being in a backwater 
 rather than on a great river. Here we had a wealth 
 of river flowing amid a wealth of fields, a king- 
 dom of rich land for the conquering ; yet it 
 was barren, lifeless, and unprofitable as the land 
 through which Childe Roland fared on his quest 
 of the Dark Tower. Not ugly like that, or 
 leprous. The beauty of the place was its tragedy. 
 
 As we got nearer Limerick, and past the islands 
 
CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 133 
 
 in the mouth of the great inlet that goes up to 
 Ennis — " Ennis of the Hundred Pubs," as the 
 irreverent call it — the sun was looming out of 
 the mist behind us like a red-hot ball, and orange 
 shadows were spilling themselves over the surface 
 of the river. By the time we came within view 
 of Limerick itself and the dark hill behind, the 
 evening was falling, dim and lilac-coloured : a 
 busy population was promenading up and down 
 the river-bank ; and the nearest thing that we 
 had seen to a manufacturing city in this part of 
 Ireland rose gloomily beside the water with 
 peeping lights. 
 
 Now, as the ballad says, " Limerick is beautiful." 
 Seeing her in good circumstances, one thinks of 
 her as a retired queen of the four civilisations — 
 Irish, Danish, Norman, and English — in Ireland. 
 She has terrible memories of Brian Boru, who, as 
 I have mentioned already, stormed her after the 
 battle in the woods of SoUohod, and put her 
 Danish defenders to the sword, except the non- 
 combatants, who were enslaved. Hither three 
 centuries later came Robert and Edward Bruce 
 to root out the Anglo-Normans, but in vain ; it 
 was on the return march — you may call it a 
 flight — from Limerick through many a wasted 
 county that Robert Bruce is related to have halted 
 his whole army till a poor washerwoman, who had 
 suddenly been overtaken with the pains of child- 
 birth, was fit to be moved — a symbol of the 
 
134 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 gentleness that tempered the barbarity of those 
 days. To most people, however, Limerick is the 
 Limerick of the Williamite wars, the city of 
 Sarsfield, the City of the Broken Treaty. It is 
 curious that the two sieges which live most 
 vividly in the Irish memory — the one appealing 
 chiefly to the Nationalist imagination, the other 
 the chief glory of the Unionists — should both 
 have occurred in the same futile war in which 
 the Catholic Irish fought for an incapable 
 Englishman who was distrusted by the Pope, and 
 the Protestant Irish fought for a capable Dutch- 
 man whom a Pope had subsidised. There is, of 
 course, no reason why Derry and Limerick should 
 not shake hands now, forgetting their old differences 
 and remembering their old heroism. No Orange- 
 man, I imagine, of however forcible politics, will 
 be able to resist a certain pleasant thrill as he 
 reads of how Sarsfield, the De Wet of the Irish, 
 rode out of Limerick at night and cut off the 
 siege-train that was coming up to help William 
 to storm the city. Lauzun, who was very 
 depressed during his absence from France, had 
 said of Limerick that it could be captured by a 
 bombardment of roasted apples, but brave men 
 proved the contrary in 1690 when William iii. 
 had to retreat defeated from its walls. William 
 himself blamed his defeat on the weather, and 
 Macaulay echoed him, but investigation has 
 shown that the floods, which according to William 
 
CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 135 
 
 lost him Limerick, were mere inventions of his 
 brain. The second siege of Limerick, which 
 took place after the battle of Aughrim — Ireland's 
 CuUoden, as it has been called — was less fortunate 
 for the defenders. Ill-armed, exhausted, de- 
 spairing of help from France, they at length 
 consented to honourable terms of surrender, the 
 English guaranteeing civil and religious liberty 
 to the Irish people, besides arranging that the 
 garrison should march out with drums beating, 
 colours flying, and matches lighting. That was 
 in October 1691, and an enormous stone at the 
 end of Thomond Bridge still marks the place 
 where the treaty was signed. No sooner was it 
 signed than the French relief expedition arrived 
 in the river. But it was too late. The Irish 
 leaders had already pledged their honour, and to 
 that they remained faithful. Sarsfield has often 
 been blamed since for sacrificing Ireland to his 
 personal honour on this occasion, but I cannot 
 help thinking that he bequeathed to Ireland a far 
 finer thing in that example of a great soldier's 
 truthfulness than the mere machinery of freedom 
 won by a lie could ever have been. That, of 
 course, may only be cant. But I am quite sure 
 that it is because of their stainless honour that 
 Sarsfield and Emmet have found a place in the 
 daily imagination and affections of Ireland such 
 as has never been given to the cleverer and more 
 effective, but shifty, Shane O'Neill. 
 
136 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 There have been few more distressing scenes 
 in the history of Ireland than when the Irish 
 soldiers sailed from the Shannon, leaving their 
 crying women behind them on the shores, soldiers 
 of fortune henceforth and a race of exiles, 
 
 " Fighting in every clime 
 For every cause but their own." 
 
 It was part of the terms of the surrender that 
 the Irish soldiers might either depart into exile 
 or join the English colours. On a little height 
 outside the city two flags were planted, the royal 
 standard of France and the flag of England. 
 The Irish regiments were to march out under their 
 colours till they reached this spot, and then wheel 
 round to the right or left towards the flag under 
 which they wished henceforth to serve. The first 
 regiment of guards, it is said, wheeled round to the 
 French flag in a body, only about seven men going 
 over to the English colours. But Lord Iveagh's 
 regiment, which came next, wheeled in its turn 
 to take service under William, who offered a 
 bounty and good pay to those who would fight 
 for him. There were about 13,000 Irish fighting 
 men sailed for France in the end of the year, and 
 about 5000 entered the army of England. Ire- 
 land has been above most countries a nation of 
 emigrants ever since. As for the way in which 
 the Treaty of Limerick was violated by King 
 William — whether voluntarily or under pressure 
 
CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 137 
 
 from his Parliament does not matter — it is one 
 of those " deeds that won the Empire " to which 
 Dr. Fitchett has not yet devoted a chapter. 
 Instead of the religious liberty which was promised 
 and pledged to her, Ireland got the Penal Laws. 
 
 But, frankly. Limerick delighted me most that 
 evening, not with its fierce past, but with its 
 busy democratic present. I do not suppose it 
 is really a busy or democratic city, as modern 
 cities go. But after the ruralism of Connacht 
 and Clare, I confess the sight of working men 
 walking about briskly in caps made my heart leap, 
 as though I had suddenly come upon a piece 
 of Belfast in a desert. Munster is far nearer to 
 Ulster in its life than Connacht is, though Munster 
 is the " farthest south " of Ireland ; Limerick 
 has its artisans like Belfast, and its slum children 
 playing on the steps of houses, and indeed it is 
 a good deal less dead to look at than an Ulster city 
 like Derry. In the evening the streets fill ; the 
 lamps gleam above the river ; the soldiers step 
 out of the barracks in King John's Castle and take 
 the air with such girls as will walk with them ; the 
 little shops that sell candies and patriotic ballad- 
 sheets in the poorer parts of the town shine 
 humbly behind their windows ; O'Connell Street 
 (or George Street, if you would rather call it 
 that) keeps what it can of its eighteenth-century 
 air of gentility and mellowness about it as the 
 citizens pace it, disturbed by no noise of tram or 
 
138 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 traffic ; the bridges of the city and its idle 
 quays are a continual wonder. I meet a great 
 many people who think Limerick a dull and ugly 
 place. It seems to me to be a city with a gracious 
 and, in a way, remote life of its own. I will not 
 say that St. Mary's Cathedral is beautiful, though 
 it is historic, and gives you a mighty beautiful 
 view from its tower. Even King John's Castle 
 and all that battlemented part of the town, which 
 has stood the assaults of ages, looms, perhaps, 
 romantically rather than beautifully over the 
 river. But the city has the beautiful secret of 
 charm, like some fine-mannered person of an 
 older generation. . . . 
 
 On the occasion of this particular visit, however, 
 Limerick was a mere place to rest and sup rather 
 than a city to see. Puck Fair was still urging 
 us to make haste if we would be in time, and this 
 meant catching a train at six o'clock the next 
 morning. Even so, there was time for an hour or 
 two's tramping about the streets and renewing 
 one's memories. I had time, too, for a late walk 
 with a friend — perhaps it was he who made 
 me love Limerick so well — to see the Sarsfield 
 monument beside the Catholic Cathedral. " He 
 should have been on a horse," said my friend, as 
 we peered through the darkness at the statue 
 with nothing but the stars lighting it ; and the 
 thought was both romantic and right. 
 
 The waiter at the hotel promised to put a boy 
 
CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 139 
 
 to sit up all night so as to have us stirring by five 
 in the morning. He was a genial man of that 
 exceptional appearance which is always welcomed 
 by Englishmen as " typically Irish." When we 
 had stayed at the hotel before, he had told me 
 all about his family. " I have a little brigade of 
 eight, sir," he had said — " four Irish men and four 
 Irish women, all learning Irish or going to learn 
 it. And isn't it a strange thing, they to be 
 growing up knowing the language of their country 
 and I not to have a word of it, but ' Turrum 
 pogue.' ^ I'm not an Irishman at all, sir." I 
 asked him now how the eight were getting on. 
 '' They're nine now, sir," he said, with a twinkle, 
 as he cleared away some spoons and forks to make 
 room for the dish of salmon-steaks. 
 
 Next morning, we were up before the cows, and 
 slipping out of the town by six o'clock. The 
 fields were bright in the early sun, with little 
 local mists wandering among them as on the 
 previous day, and, as the morning grew older, 
 the mists and the sun fought in mid-air and the 
 mists won. There is a comfortable lush beauty 
 about the County of Limerick that makes it 
 very pleasant to travel in after the desolation of 
 Connacht. It is no wonder that the invaders 
 spoiled this patch of river and towers and trees 
 so determinedly, for it must be one of the richest 
 parts of Ireland. I have even heard it said that it 
 
 1 Tabhair dhom pog (Give me a kiss). 
 
140 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 is too rich, and that more choice butter comes 
 from the milk of cows that have pastured on leaner 
 soil. But I know nothing about that. Originally, 
 we had intended to leave the train at Listowel and 
 take the monorail to Ballybunion, the Kerry 
 watering-place which lies at the mouth of the 
 Shannon. The name of the place, of course, is 
 against it : nothing could show the incom- 
 patibility between English and Irish better than 
 the way in which charming Irish names are made 
 ludicrous in their adoption into the new tongue. 
 Baile Bun Dha Abhainn — the Town at the Mouth 
 of Two Rivers — is attractive and musical, if you 
 know how to pronounce it. Ballybunion is, from 
 its name, the sort of place you would expect to 
 find Matt Hannigan's Aunt of the song spending 
 her Easter Monday. 
 
 I forget whether it was at Tralee or at a later 
 junction that I was foolish enough to ask a railway 
 porter if we were all right for Killorglin. " No," 
 he replied ; " hurry up. Your train's over there." 
 And he seized our bags, hustled us across to 
 another platform, and banged us into a nice 
 newly-varnished train with corridor carriages, 
 which almost immediately rolled out of the 
 station. 
 
 I marvelled at the luxury and the fresh- 
 paintiness of a train in a little local railway in 
 the County Kerry, but I did not for a long time 
 realise that a horrible accident had befallen us. 
 
CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 141 
 
 After awhile, however, I noticed that the names 
 of the stations we were passing had an unfamiliar 
 look. I turned to a map to find an explanation. 
 The map told me at once. We were in the wrong 
 train. We were doing what I had prided myself 
 I had never yet done : we were going to 
 Killarney. That wretched porter had listened 
 only to the first syllable of the name I had given 
 him. He had taken for granted that Killarney 
 was the only Kill in those parts that any stranger 
 would be likely to ask about. I groaned as I 
 foresaw that the fair at Killorglin would be over 
 by the time we arrived there, and here we were 
 being borne miles away from it to a miserable 
 tourist resort that people sing about in the 
 music-halls. There is a real Killarney, I know, 
 where real people live and work and tell stories 
 round the fire, and think more of the Irish revival 
 than of travellers' tips, but that Killarney I would 
 have no chance of seeing from a hotel. The 
 Killarney the train was bearing us into was the 
 Killarney of the lakes and dells, the Killarney of 
 the tune you hear so often from the man who 
 plays the dulcimers outside public-houses. There 
 was no doubt about that as soon as thetrainstopped, 
 and a mauling mass of hotel-touts in peaked caps 
 gathered round our carriage door, waving little 
 bills of prices — Bed and breakfast, 5s. 6d. Bed 
 and breakfast, 6s. Bed and breakfast, 6s. 6d. 
 Tea, with bread, butter, jam, and two boiled 
 
142 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 eggs, IS. 6d. ; and so forth — into our faces. 
 One man would clutch my bag ; another would 
 clutch the rugs ; another would clutch anything 
 that was left ; and another would clutch me. 
 They seemed to be shouting the name of every 
 hotel in Ireland at us. I kept shouting back 
 at them as loud as I could, " I don't want to go to 
 Killarney ! " Either they did not hear me, or it 
 made no impression on them, for they still kept 
 jabbering about the conveniences and cheapness 
 of their respective hotels. Then I smiled at them, 
 and said, in a quite determined everyday voice, 
 " I don't want to go to Killarney." They looked 
 puzzled at first, and then they gathered closer with 
 craning necks, as though to get the best view 
 possible of the lunatic who was standing on the 
 platform of Killarney station and resolutely 
 saying that he didn't want to go to Killarney. 
 " Where is it you want to go ? " one of them 
 asked at last, when he had got the better of his 
 amazement. " We want to go to Killorglin," 
 I explained. " We want to go to Puck Fair ; we 
 were put into the wrong train." " Are yez going 
 to the Puck ? " " They're going to the Puck." 
 " Is it to the Puck yez are going ? " came in a 
 score of voices in all sorts of surprise, and the 
 touts all began grinning, as if it were the best 
 joke in the world. 
 
 " The Puck doesn't begin till to-morrow," a 
 freckled, red-headed man assured us. " I'll be 
 
CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 143 
 
 running a party over from the hotel in the 
 morning. Won't you have a look at the lakes 
 while you're here, and Fll drive you over in the 
 morning ? " 
 
 Perhaps we thought he was lying. But, even 
 if we had believed him, it is possible we would not 
 have stayed another moment at Killarney. For 
 one thing, there was this saturnalia of touting 
 which was our introduction to the place. And, 
 for another thing, the day was leaden, and all 
 the colour had been dulled out of the hills. On 
 such a day, even the loveliest places in the world 
 would have been like a beautiful woman's eyes 
 hidden behind smoked spectacles, or like jewels 
 lying at the bottom of a basin of dirty water. 
 Hills are not hills except in exquisite lights, and 
 lakes are no more wonderful than circles drawn 
 by an infant, unless there are fine and curious 
 skies over them. So there were really any number 
 of reasons why we, having been brought by destiny 
 to Killarney, would not so much as look at Kil- 
 larney. But, probably, base temptation would 
 have overcome us, and we would have allowed 
 ourselves to be trotted and paddled round the 
 lakes even as other men and women, if it had not 
 been for the vision of the many-voiced, many- 
 coloured fair melting into nothingness in the 
 streets of Killorglin. 
 
 Killorglin, we discovered, we could not reach 
 till evening if we put ourselves into the hands of 
 
144 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 the railway company and made back for the 
 junction again. But if we could get a car, and 
 were willing to face a drive of some fourteen 
 miles, we might strike across country to it. " I'll 
 take you for a pound," says one carman, when he 
 heard that we proposed to do this. " I'll do it 
 for eighteen shillings," cried another. A little 
 fellow broke through the legs of the company. 
 " I know a man who'll do it for ten," he said. 
 He then caught up everything he could lay his 
 hands on, and made for the exit from the station, 
 and hoisted our luggage on to a car outside, till 
 the driver of it came up protesting that he at 
 least had never consented to go over to Killorglin 
 for ten shillings, and he was certainly going to do 
 nothing of the sort. 
 
 " Here," called a black-visaged young fellow in 
 the car next to him, waving his whip to us, " I'll 
 do it for twelve shillings." That, with a tip, 
 seemed a reasonable proposal, and our luggage, 
 straps, and books were once more hauled and 
 tumbled from hand to hand. It was at this stage 
 of the journey, I think, that I must have lost the 
 fourth volume of Frazer's Totemism and Ex- 
 ogamy, a book that I had been trying to read in 
 snatches amid the distractions of Galway races. 
 I often wonder who found that odd volume. 
 Reader, if it was you, be a Christian and return 
 it, and I promise to send you a copy of St, 
 Bernard on Consideration in exchange. 
 
CLIFFS OF MOHER TO KILLARNEY 145 
 
 So eager were we to be on the way that we did 
 not even wait to take lunch, though w^e had been 
 fasting since our five-o'clock breakfast. We sent 
 in to a grocer's shop for some biscuits, and while 
 we were sitting outside on the car a fellow, who 
 took us apparently for a honeymoon couple, 
 came up and tried to sell us white heather. It 
 was wicked not to buy it, but we were really 
 very angry with Killarney. The fellow was 
 equally angry with us. For, after going a few 
 yards away, he turned round and yelled " Good 
 luck ! " at us with a most satirical vehemence. 
 I nodded gratefully. " Good luck ! " he re- 
 peated violently ; " good luck ! " People began 
 to look at us curiously out of the shop-doors. 
 " Good luck ! " he shouted again. Fortunately, 
 at that moment our driver appeared with the 
 biscuits and his own dinner and a feed of oats 
 for the horse to put in the well of the car, and 
 in another minute or two we were trotting gaily 
 out of the town and out past the gateways of the 
 big hotels for the motorists, and peeping over a 
 hedge or a wall at a glimmer of one of the lakes. 
 It was a narrow escape, a very narrow escape. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 PUCK FAIR 
 
 KiLLORGLiN, a precipitous town, is for a day, or 
 perhaps even two days in the year, the most 
 interesting place in Ireland. Puck Fair occupies 
 for an interval every August the hill upon which 
 the main street is built, and a puck, or goat, is 
 throned at the head o£ the town high above the 
 Kerry men and women who wander in confused 
 black herds among the streets. It is this goat 
 which gives its name and its chief distinction to 
 the fair. Like an object of worship, it stands on 
 its lofty two-storied platform of boards, a creature 
 of monstrous horns, a prisoner bound with cords 
 for all the clumsily-arranged laurels and green 
 things that are there to do it honour. The 
 platform is a solid affair mounted on poles as 
 high as the mast of a ship, and it is on the top 
 storey, near the level of the roofs of the houses, 
 that the eponymous Puck stands and accepts the 
 shouting and the laughter of the fair. 
 
 A number of red storm-lanterns hang among the 
 
 decorating leaves to give a country illumination 
 
 146 
 
PUCK FAIR 147 
 
 in the darkness, and the whole steep little town 
 wears an air of country festivity. 
 
 Across every entrance to the place, as we drove 
 in on our car, hung an arch of greeting, with an 
 Irish motto of morality or welcome. Go saoradh 
 Dia Eire (God save Ireland), Eire gan meisce, 
 Eire gan spleadhachas (Ireland sober, Ireland 
 free), Ri na gcnoc go deo (The King of the 
 Mountains for ever), Ciad mile failte go h-aonach 
 an fhuic (A hundred thousand welcomes to Puck 
 Fair), Sinn Fein, Sinn Fein amhdin (Ourselves, 
 ourselves alone) — these were some of the signs 
 that gave one a welcome not only to the fair but 
 to an awakening Ireland. 
 
 When we arrived in the town. Puck Fair was, 
 as it were, beginning to move. The next day, 
 everybody said, was to be the big day, but already 
 the street on the ridge of the town was full of 
 rushing horses — horses torn by the halter pell- 
 mell through the shifting crowd with excited 
 bargainers hanging on to their flanks. Selling 
 and buying were engaged in like hostilities. Be- 
 neath the trees on the muddy station road, the 
 prospective buyer would make his offer under his 
 breath to the man with the halter, and the latter, 
 shouting inarticulately and with excited eyes, 
 would dash his horse off recklessly through the 
 encircling crowd of spectators, looking as though 
 he had received an insult which nothing but the 
 shedding of blood could wipe out. The buyer 
 
148 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 stood still for a moment, staring after his adversary 
 with perplexed brows, and then, lifting his stick, 
 he called after him the invariable Kerry summons, 
 " Come here, I want you " — a summons always 
 pronounced rapidly with the effect of a single 
 word. The owner of the horse, however, was 
 still beating off with an indignant back showing, 
 and it was with apparent reluctance that he 
 allowed himself to be brought to a stop by some 
 volunteer go-between. Then the murmur of 
 conversation that you could not catch would 
 begin again, negotiations would once more be 
 broken off with a shout, the crowd would make 
 way for a departing beast, and the whole comedy 
 be rehearsed again till one of the bargainers got 
 tired of it, and the horse was either finally bought 
 or finally refused at the price offered. 
 
 Killorglin and that part of Kerry is at first 
 sight a disappointment to strangers. For one 
 thing, there is no fantasy in the dress of the people, 
 no local fashion, nothing, indeed, but the poorest 
 imitation shoddy. Occasionally women wear the 
 grey Galway shawl, but the thing is not part of a 
 ritual here. In Galway, in Mayo, in Donegal, 
 one seems at moments to be walking amid the 
 outward and visible signs of a distinct Irish 
 civilisation. In this peninsula of Kerry, the old 
 civilisation has clothed itself in cheapness and 
 colourlessness : it has an air of crooked forget- 
 fulness. 
 
PUCK FAIR 149 
 
 There is a proverb which describes Kerry as 
 being the county of big men and little cows, but 
 though the little black and red cows were there in 
 plenty, the men at the fair seemed scarcely to 
 justify the proverb. 
 
 But then I was in a prickly mood. I had lost 
 that volume of Totemism and Exogamy, and 
 had been taken against my will to Killarney, 
 and had been up since five, and there was an 
 atmosphere about which was neither gloom nor 
 shine, but was as though the air needed washing 
 and a leaden sun were trying dully to break 
 through it on a shabby world. Then, in the 
 train of these things, my vanity got a blow. I 
 noticed a public-house with a long poem in Irish 
 scribbled in paint along the face of its upper 
 storey. I went inside and asked for something to 
 drink in what I believed to be the Irish language. 
 The woman of the house, thin of face and dark of 
 brow, looked at me suspiciously. " What is it 
 you want, sir ? " she said. Crushed, I repeated 
 the order in the Belfast dialect of English. When 
 she had given me what I wanted, I thought I 
 would try to practise my Irish again, so I said to 
 her in the best Ollendorf : " Nach labhrann tu 
 Gaedhilg ? " (Do you not speak Irish ?). She 
 looked at me curiously again, as she wiped the 
 lead-covered bar with a soaking clout. " Lab- 
 hrann " (I do), she said shortly : then with a 
 sharp directness, she demanded: " Are you English, 
 
150 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 please ? " " No," I said ; " why ? " "I thought 
 by your accent you must be English," she declared. 
 After that I gave it up. I remained in the shop 
 in silence for a minute or two longer to finish 
 whatever I was drinking, and then, raising my 
 hat with chill dignity, went forth into a clouded 
 world. 
 
 Puck Fair began in earnest the next morning. 
 One awoke to a confused clamour of human voices 
 and cattle roaring and the cracking of sticks on 
 hides and the hurry of herds through mud (for 
 it had been raining in the night) and horses 
 pulled up suddenly by their riders — a noise oi 
 selling and buying in which were mingled the 
 voices of the mountebank, the cheapjack, the 
 seller of dulse, and the beggar at his prayers. 
 
 The beggar was especially uproarious. He 
 spent a good part of the day on his knees on the 
 road outside our hotel. He was a powerful blind 
 man with a wisp of grey beard — grey that had 
 once been a Tartarean black — and he carried 
 about a bottle of straw with him and knelt on 
 this on the muddy footpath or road whenever 
 he felt moved to lift his voice in prayer. Round 
 his neck hung a printed sign with the legend : 
 '' Pray for the repose of the departed souls of 
 your friends." It was by the proxy of this blind 
 beggar, however, you were expected to perform 
 this office. Baring his head and lifting his corpse- 
 like face towards the sky, he shouted out a long 
 
PUCK FAIR 151 
 
 rigmarole that was half a petition to the passers-by 
 and half a prayer to the Almighty. " I ask you 
 for the love of God," he called out, emptying his 
 lungs in a great Cork brogue. " Give a penny 
 to a poor stone-blind man and he without 
 sight." 
 
 Then his brows got a knitted earnestness, and 
 he raised his voice higher, as though feeling that 
 Heaven was far off. 
 
 " That God may bless you," he cried, " and 
 
 that Jesus may bless you, and that the Blessed 
 
 Virgin may bless you, and that St. Joseph may 
 
 bless you, and the holy saints, and that God may 
 
 save the soul of your father and the soul of your 
 
 mother and the soul of your sister and the soul 
 
 of your brother." Then, changing his voice 
 
 again, sometimes even dropping it to common 
 
 conversation, " I ask you for the love of God. 
 
 Give a penny to a poor stone-blind man and he 
 
 without sight." And the same flow of petitions 
 
 would go on over and over again, while the 
 
 mingling crowds went by slowly and with irregular 
 
 feet. His was evidently a lucrative profession. 
 
 I saw a priest stop to put a sixpence in his hand — 
 
 a thing worth mentioning, perhaps, for those who 
 
 can see no good in the priests make a dogma of 
 
 the statement that no priest ever gave a poor man 
 
 so much as a penny. 
 
 I spoke to the old fellow when he was resting 
 from his prayers, and, like everybody else in 
 
152 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 Killorglin, he lamented bygone times when Puck 
 Fair was something like a fair. 
 
 " I remember the time," he said, like a man 
 telling of departed glories, " when there would be 
 five or six blind men like myself at this fair." 
 
 " Where are they now ? " I asked. 
 
 " Ah ! " he sighed, " the maxim of the old 
 people is gone out of the country." 
 
 But whether they had gone in coffins or the 
 emigrant ship he did not say. 
 
 I heard the same story of falling-off in a little 
 low-doored bread-shop where I went to buy a 
 paper. There was a gentle woman sitting behind 
 the counter-load of loaves, a woman of that patient 
 and pervasive kindliness which hangs like an 
 emanation round so many Irish mothers. Seated 
 there in the low light, she was a figure of a kind 
 of still religious beauty. She had sleek hair as 
 black as coals and eyes as black as coals looking 
 gently out on the stir of the world. Her lament 
 over the past, however, like most Irish laments, 
 was not entirely gentle. At least, it had none of 
 the whining sort of gentleness ; hers was the 
 gentleness of the warrior woman. She recalled 
 days when Puck Fair was a scene of thronging, 
 thrilling life — days when the tinkers invaded the 
 town like an army and possessed it for a week. 
 
 '' Ah ! " she said admiringly, patting the head 
 of a five-year-old child that toddled up to offer 
 her a nail or a button or something, " they used 
 
PUCK FAIR 153 
 
 to be the strong, rough people, the tinkers. They 
 were the Hfe of the fair." 
 
 " And do they not come here at all now ? " I 
 asked, my spirits falling, for I had looked forward 
 to the congregation of the tinkers. 
 
 She assured me that there had not been a tinker 
 seen in Killorglin since the Boer War. 
 
 " They say," she declared, unable to resist 
 the temptation of a fine story, " that all the 
 tinkers went to the war and got killed. . . . 
 They were great people for a fight," she went on, 
 with lit eyes, as she remembered the better days. 
 " You would see them with the sticks up and 
 their faces bleeding, and, the minute after, they 
 would be going off for a drink together." She 
 shook her head pensively. " The tinkers were 
 a forgiving people," she said. " They were 
 good people now, were they not, to be so for- 
 giving ? " 
 
 It was the woman in the bread-shop who gave 
 an explanation of the origin of the goat ceremony 
 at Puck Fair. A puck, she said, was the first thing 
 sold at the first fair that was held at Killorglin, 
 and ever since then the fair was called after it. 
 The puck used to stand on the top of the old 
 castle in the middle of the town during the fair. 
 The old castle was pulled down some years ago 
 to make way for a bank, and since that time they 
 had put up a scaffolding for the goat to stand on. 
 They used to put Puck up three or four days before 
 
154 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 the fair, she said, but there had been a great 
 falling-off. 
 
 Outside in the streets, opposing rills of lads 
 and their golden girls, of eager-faced sellers 
 with sticks, and housewives with respectable 
 hand-baskets, met and flowed through and past 
 each other. For those who had no experience of 
 the older days, and who had quieter tastes in 
 drama than raised sticks and bloody faces, the 
 scene was sufficiently lively. There were tinkers 
 there, too, to belie the Boer War legend of the 
 woman of the bread-shop. 
 
 One of them stood at the corner of a road 
 leading past the market-square. Horseless carts, 
 boxes, and all sorts of things lined the gutter, and 
 this big fellow had found an upturned barrel, 
 on the end of which he spread out the four aces 
 of a pack of cards as a preliminary to a gamble. 
 He was a most winning rogue, not swarthy like 
 a gipsy, but dark like a western Irishman ; he 
 had irresistible blue eyes and a laughing face, as 
 he called on the passers-by to come and stake 
 their money. The game was to guess which suit 
 would turn up when the pack was cut : he gave 
 you two to one against any suit you liked. 
 
 " It's a fair game," he kept crying, as he 
 shuffled the cards. " It's a fair game — the 
 fairest game in Ireland." 
 
 I said the tinker was irresistible, but the country 
 people who crowded round and looked at the four 
 
PUCK FAIR iss 
 
 aces over each other's shoulders apparently did 
 not find him so, for they allowed him to go on 
 shuffling the cards and soothering that it was a 
 fair game, the fairest game in Ireland, without 
 making any move to test it. 
 
 At length, a little old farmer in a low hat, an 
 old fellow with a coarse suit hanging on his body 
 and coarse whiskers bushing from his cheeks, a 
 shrewd, sandy, boorish old fellow with an ash- 
 plant undei his arm, who was standing on an 
 empty box and cutting tobacco for his pipe, 
 fumbled for a while in one of his pockets and 
 brought out a penny, which he put down with a 
 deliberate carelessness on the ace of spades. The 
 tinker offered him the pack to cut, and sure enough 
 he cut a spade. The tinker brought out a handful 
 of coppers and gave him two along with the penny 
 on the ace of spades with the air of a man who 
 really enjoyed handing out money. 
 
 " Come on," he appealed to all the bystanders, 
 " now's your chance to make your fortune. Two 
 to one against any card on the table. It's a fair 
 game, I tell you, it's a fair game. It's the fairest 
 game in Ireland." 
 
 The old farmer, whose rocky face had almost 
 quivered into a smile when he was handed the 
 threepence, carefully put down a penny again 
 on the ace of spades. So intensely did he seem 
 to come alive for the moment that one felt as 
 though one had suddenly come on a small duel — 
 
156 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 a duel between Beauty and the Beast. There 
 was even the shadow of a shade of excitement 
 as the old farmer cut the cards again, and showed 
 us a diamond. 
 
 " Turn about's fair play," said the tinker, 
 putting the penny in his pocket. " Try again. 
 There's no deception about this game. I tell 
 you, this is the fairest game in Ireland." 
 
 He looked up hopefully at the old man, but he 
 had not reckoned with the thrift of the peasant. 
 No one looking at the grave and grumpy figure 
 on the box, cutting tobacco once more with a 
 penknife, would have thought that he was even 
 conscious of the card-game which was going on 
 beside him — much less that he had, only a 
 moment before, been caught in the net of gambling. 
 He had become individualised for a moment into 
 a sportsman, but he had sunk again into a piece of 
 nature, and was no more to be appealed to than the 
 sea or the stones in the road. 
 
 " Revenge is sweet," the tinker wooed him. 
 " Now's your chance." 
 
 But the farmer did not even look as if he heard ; 
 he slowly rubbed the tobacco in his hands with 
 the abstracted air of a Presbyterian elder who did 
 not quite approve of the gaieties of the fair. 
 Then, when he had his pipe filled and lighted, 
 he came stiffly and gingerly down off the box, and 
 without looking at anybody made his way off 
 through the crowd, a triumph of caution, a man 
 
PUCK FAIR 157 
 
 who would henceforth have the winning of a 
 penny from a tinker to add to his autobiography. 
 Luckily the tinker had a sense of humour. He 
 had ground of complaint against the old man for 
 unsportsmanlike conduct ; but the little comedy 
 of prudence had been too exquisite to leave any 
 room for resentment. Waves of laughter broke 
 in the tinker's eyes ; he laughed and we all laughed. 
 We laughed until the tinker remembered the 
 serious business of the fair, and in the midst of his 
 laughter began once more to call out his invitation 
 to the world in general : " This is a fair game, 
 ladies and gentlemen — the fairest game in 
 Ireland." 
 
 I will not tell you how much I lost to that 
 hearty young man just because he had an irre- 
 sistible sense of humour. 
 
 All down the street, wherever there were not 
 people, there were booths or roulette tables or 
 shooting-ranges or some other crowded institute 
 of gambling. Right at the top of the hill, just 
 under the horned puck, an auctioneer of old 
 clothes was standing on a platform with trousers, 
 waistcoats, shirts, saddles, overcoats, waterproofs, 
 and all other manner of human necessaries 
 scattered at his feet or hanging on a huge sort 
 of clothes-horse at one side of him. He stood 
 in his shirt sleeves, a square-shouldered, red- 
 moustached, hair-oiled young man, a man with 
 a loud gold watch-chain running across his waist- 
 
158 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 coat. He had a somewhat fiery look, but his 
 business demanded a constant flow of good-humour 
 and auctioneer's wit, and good-humour flowed 
 out of him hke water out of a spring. It flowed 
 out of him, too, in an indefinable much-maligned 
 accent which made men in the crowd turn to 
 their neighbours and nod knowingly : " He's 
 from the north." 
 
 He was trying to sell a tweed overcoat which 
 he had slung on his arm, and somebody had just 
 made a low bid for it. The auctioneer listened 
 derisively. 
 
 " Seven shillings ? " he repeated, with simulated 
 incredulity. " The shirt you'll wear at your wake 
 will cost more than that. And I hope," he added, 
 with a satirical nod at the bidder — " I hope the 
 corpse will look better than the patient." 
 
 While the crowd was laughing, he took up a 
 long white waterproof coat and gave it a slap of 
 approval. 
 
 " Here's the greatest bargain of the fair," he 
 said. " If you saw that coat in the window of a 
 draper's shop, you'd see a ticket on it marked one 
 pound seven and sixpence : divil a lie ! The 
 drapers, I tell you, are worse robbers than the 
 landlords. I say the drapers are worse robbers 
 than what the landlords were. They're worse 
 extorters. It's the truth. I'm offering this 
 handsome gentleman's waterproof coat for twenty 
 shillings. Twenty shillings, do you hear ? I'm 
 
PUCK FAIR 159 
 
 at my old fault. I sell too cheap. Here, 
 maybe you can't get a right view of it there. I'll 
 put it on to show you." 
 
 Talking away the whole time, he put the 
 waterproof on, buttoned it up and turned round 
 and round so as to let us have a view of it in every 
 aspect. 
 
 " Is there any of you thinking of getting 
 married ? " he asked. " If a young fellow was 
 thinking of getting married this coat would mean 
 a thousand pounds extra to the fortune." 
 
 Peeling the coat off him, he again invited bids 
 for it. 
 
 " Twenty shillings ! " he shouted, slapping it 
 hard ; " twenty shillings, and I'll take any money 
 but matrimony ! Nineteen shillings " — with 
 another slap — "eighteen shillings" — with 
 another — " seventeen and sixpence " — with 
 another. " Here, I don't think you people 
 understand. This is a coat made of fine india- 
 rubber — a coat made of the purest indiarubber." 
 
 He stooped and thrust it at a spectator. 
 
 " Smell it, man, smell it," he insisted. " It 
 will do you more good than a week at Bally- 
 bunion " — a seaside resort ; " it's more strength- 
 ening, refreshing, and invigorating. Seventeen 
 shillings." He hit the coat a hard slap again. 
 " If I struck one of you people as hard and as 
 often as I'm striking this coat, you'd be' killed 
 altogether. Sixteen shillings. It wouldn't let 
 
i6o RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 through the rain, if it was raining for a month. 
 Fifteen shillings and sixpence. If it was a wet day- 
 to-day, there'd be plenty of you wanting it. It's 
 not raining now. I can remember the time it 
 was. Fifteen shillings. Going, going at fifteen 
 shillings. Fifteen shillings. Fifteen shillings. 
 Fifteen shillings. What's come over you ? I 
 never was in such a crowd of people before in my 
 life. You've neither manes, brains, nor under- 
 standing. Fourteen shillings and sixpence ? " 
 
 Not an offer from the crowd. Just a sea of 
 faces waiting for the next jest and gibe, everybody 
 taking a thorough pleasure in the names that the 
 red man was calling them. 
 
 At length he threw down the waterproof in 
 disgust. 
 
 " I might as well," he protested, " be standing 
 in the graveyard selling clothes to the dead." 
 
 He turned from the indiarubber coat which 
 nobody wanted and took up a saddle instead. 
 But this scarcely gave him so good a subject for 
 his eloquence. 
 
 " This," said he encouragingly, holding up the 
 saddle to the eyes of the crowd, " is what you call 
 the farmer's friend. If you want to go for the 
 priest or the doctor in the middle of the night, 
 this is what you turn to. The farmer's friend — • 
 who'll show his decent rearing and his common 
 sense by making a reasonable offer for it ? " 
 
 He paused. 
 
PUCK FAIR i6i 
 
 " Come on, all you dogs of war and lovers of 
 peace ! " he bullied us, hitting the saddle a thump 
 with his free hand. " What offers for this fine 
 saddle ? " 
 
 Again he paused and again everybody gaped 
 and said nothing. He threw down the saddle and, 
 as he looked round the crowd, he folded his arms 
 in an attitude of melancholy bitterness. 
 
 " Silent, O Moyle, is the roar of thy waters ! " 
 he misquoted, with a pitying look at the crowd. 
 
 His failure to thump and shout the crowd into 
 a purchasing humour, however, could not depress 
 such virile spirits for ever. As we moved off, 
 feeling that the best of the performance must be 
 over, he was engaged in announcing the glories 
 of a suit of boy's clothes, and we could hear him 
 suddenly break off to rebuke some one in the 
 crowd : " It's no use your winking at me, ma'am. 
 I'm a married man." 
 
 That is a jest that seldom fails in the country. 
 
 Up along the middle of the street just then a 
 crier with a bell in his hand was coming, and he 
 paused and began to ring the bell slowly as he 
 took up his position at the nearest corner. Bent- 
 kneed, stiff-backed, eagle-nosed, grey, he rang on 
 steadily till a small crowd had gathered round him, 
 after which he paused and lifted up a good middle- 
 aged voice and proclaimed in the tones of a 
 herald : " Take notice, take pertickler notice. I 
 wish to inform ye that the auction of a pony and 
 
1 62 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 trap belonging to Mrs. will take place this 
 
 afternoon at two o'clock outside the Bank." 
 
 Having announced further auctions of bulls 
 and other things, he seemed to raise his voice 
 slightly. 
 
 " A1j"o," he continued in recitative, putting 
 an almost threatening emphasis on the second 
 syllable of the word, " that the Clerk of the 
 Workhouse asks me to inform ye that, if any of 
 ye has not paid the last quarter's rates, as soon as 
 this fair is over ye will be prosecuted. Akc," 
 he added, without a pause, as the people looked 
 at each other and smiled, " that a pig weighing 
 a hundredweight and a half went astray at 
 yesterday's fair, and if any of ye will bring me 
 tidings of the pig, I will pay him a half-crown 
 to-morrow." 
 
 As he reached the last words of the sentence, 
 his words fell to the ordinary tones of conversation, 
 like a ballad-singer's when he has reached the 
 last line of a song. And, ringing his bell, he went 
 on his way. 
 
 As the day wore on, the noise and the crowds 
 increased, and all the gambling games which 
 lined the gutter down the hill were surrounded 
 by crowds of eager faces. I noticed in particular 
 one audacious old scoundrel with a humped back 
 who was running a penny draw with a dirty box 
 of gimcracks in front of him. He, too, kept 
 forbidding the female sex to wink at him on the 
 
 
THE BALLAD-SINGER. 
 Drarci! and coloured by jfack "B. Teals. 
 
 BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 CHESTNUT HILL, MASS. 
 
PUCK FAIR 163 
 
 ground that he was a married man. But his 
 jests were of the feeblest. He had no humour 
 beyond the official humour of his class. He was 
 selling bits of cardboard about half the length 
 of your finger at a penny apiece. You drew one 
 of these at a venture out of a small box he passed 
 round, and on it the name of your prize was 
 written. The old man took the scrap of cardboard 
 from the purchaser and read out the inscription. 
 " A lady's gold ring," he would announce, and with 
 great solemnity would hand a ring that had once 
 been in a lucky-bag over to the winner. Or it 
 might be a lady's brooch, or a photograph frame, 
 or a necklace, all of them mighty lucky-baggy and 
 mighty showy for a penny. Or he would read out 
 impressively, " A pair of gentleman's bootlaces," 
 and would present the prize to the winner, beaming 
 congratulation. It was a lottery in which there 
 were no blanks. The poorest prize I could see was 
 a ballad. I would not call a ballad a poor prize 
 in ordinary circumstances, but this old man did 
 not give his victims ballads in the ordinary form. 
 He had simply cut the ballads out of a cheap 
 ballad-budget, and his prizes were only these 
 clipped snippets. In any case, " Paddy Hegarty's 
 Ducks " is no ballad in the country sense of the 
 word. I never heard the words of it before, but 
 old Ananias read the first verse out to us with 
 unction as he distributed the prizes. 
 
 Killorglin is a town of several streets, and every 
 
1 64 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 square inch of it was filled with the fair. In 
 better days, I believe, the fair used to overflow 
 out along the country roads, but even in our own 
 degenerate times there is enough of it to tire one. 
 On wandering down towards the bridge at the 
 bottom of the hill I met the man who had driven 
 us over from Killarney the day before, and he had 
 already had a surfeit of it in the shape of small 
 whiskies. 
 
 " We didn't get to bed last night at all, sir," 
 he told me, in explanation of the antic movements 
 of the limbs and face of his companion. " It's 
 only a drop of dynamite that keeps the life in us." 
 
 Sitting near us on the window-sill of a public- 
 house, watching the crowds and the red and the 
 black cattle go by, was an old grumble-faced 
 farmer, a heavy-nosed, whiskered old fellow with 
 an enormous mouth. He passed some remark 
 about the time of day, and it was not long after- 
 wards that he passed some remark on a girl that 
 went by. 
 
 " This should be a good place to get a woman," 
 he suggested dully. 
 
 I looked at his face to see if I had misheard him ; 
 but not a muscle of it moved to tell me. 
 
 " You bawdy old wretch," thought I, not 
 giving him the benefit of the doubt, " how dare 
 you sit there in this land of innocence and think 
 such things ! " 
 
 " It's grand, man," said the young drunk chap, 
 
PUCK FAIR 165 
 
 putting a friendly hand on his shoulder, " to be 
 sitting at the door of a pub all day, taking a good 
 look at all the fine girls that do be coming into 
 the fair." 
 
 Old heavy-nose grunted. 
 
 " It's good to be looking at them," he agreed ; 
 " but," he added gloomily, " it's better to be 
 hugging them." 
 
 By this time the sun had begun to shine, and, 
 better still, I had been directed to a shop where 
 I could get a certain paper I wanted. When I 
 arrived at the shop — not far from the bridge — 
 the proprietor, who was standing in the doorway, 
 said that the paper had not arrived yet, but he 
 was expecting it every minute. Meanwhile, in 
 case I would wait for it, he offered me a stool that 
 he had brought out and placed outside his door 
 on the footpath. He was a middle-sized hard 
 man of rounding stomach, with close curly hair 
 all over his face ; he wore a brown bowler hat, 
 and a grey suit of clothes that would take no harm 
 from the flour in his shop. He talked for some 
 time on all sorts of topics, especially on his travels 
 to London and one or two occasions on which he 
 had seen English monarchs and lord-lieutenants. 
 I did my best to keep the conversation on humbler 
 planes, but this little gentleman had an extra- 
 ordinary interest in royal families, and seemed to 
 think that I, being a stranger, maybe a tourist, 
 must be both an authority on and an enthusiast 
 
i66 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 for these things. When he had told me all he 
 himself knew of royalty, he asked me if I had 
 seen Queen Alexandra's picture-book. I con- 
 fessed I had not, and when he said he would go 
 in and bring it out to me, I couldn't for the life 
 of me throw cold water on his kindly and hospitable 
 intentions. I took the book in my hands and 
 began to turn the pages over sadly, glancing at 
 portraits of royalties dressed as soldiers, sailors, 
 and Highlanders. At last, in sheer weariness, I 
 left the book lying open on my knee, and, as luck 
 would have it. King Edward in a yachting-cap 
 smiled out from the page. 
 
 " Grand man that ! " said my host, tapping a 
 freckled finger on the royal portrait. 
 
 " Do you not think," said I, resolved to turn 
 the conversation at all costs, " that Parnell was a 
 better man ? " 
 
 I would hardly have said it, if I had guessed it 
 would have ruffled him so. 
 
 " Parnell ? " he barked, in an incredulous voice. 
 " O God, no. Oh, my God, no," he said, as 
 though the very suggestion choked him with 
 disgust. " I can tell you," he declared, his eyes 
 dancing, as he snapped Queen Alexandra's photo- 
 graph-album out of my hands, " there's damned 
 little nationality in my bones. Maybe there 
 would be," he glared, retreating into the door of 
 his shop, " if it paid me." 
 
 When he came out again after putting away 
 
PUCK FAIR 167 
 
 the album I led the conversation timidly to the 
 question whether nationality does not after all pay, 
 and asked him to name me any country in which a 
 successful movement for political independence 
 or the revival of a national language had not 
 resulted in industrial and agricultural progress. 
 He was quite reasonable, and admitted that what 
 was good for Bohemia and Hungary and England 
 and Greece might be good for Ireland. But I 
 saw that any reference to the respective merits 
 of King Edward and Parnell would be wind to a 
 flame again, and I avoided making the national 
 question a personal matter. By the time The 
 Irish Times arrived we were excellent friends, 
 and, before I left, he emphasised the fact again 
 and again that he might believe in nationality 
 if it paid him. . . . 
 
 I was getting a little weary of the fair and its 
 thousand incidents — as weary as the old puck 
 who stood, with bound horns, on his mast-high 
 stage and looked down at us through a wall of 
 green leaves. So I escaped from the town along 
 a country road, up which broken companies of 
 small cattle and their drivers moved continuously, 
 and men rode home adventurously on their horses 
 towards the mists that still hung in dull veils over 
 the faces of the Kerry hills. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 TOURISTS IN KERRY 
 
 Travelling in the train from Killorglin to 
 Cahirciveen in the late afternoon, one was still 
 in the atmosphere of Puck Fair for many miles 
 of the way. Caravans of horsemen and cattle 
 and carts and cars poured out along the road that 
 runs beside the railway, and in their disordered 
 hurry homeward had an air of flight — of a miniature 
 retreat from Moscow. The train, too, was full 
 of the holiday. Boys were stamping their feet, 
 thumping the sides of the compartments, and 
 singing boisterously ; girls were laughing in the 
 next carriage as they only laugh on days of crowds 
 and excitements ; half-bodies were stretching 
 out of windows and hailing other half-bodies 
 farther along the train. 
 
 There was a very charming girl in the carriage 
 with us, wearing a flowered hat that looked strange 
 to this part of the world. She was sitting between 
 two younger sisters who had shawls over their 
 heads, and who looked at everything, including 
 her, with smiles of wonder. She was just back 
 
TOURISTS IN KERRY 169 
 
 from America, she said, where she was in service ; 
 and she was going to go out there again. She 
 could not settle down at home after having been 
 in America. There was nothing to do on the 
 farm. She would die of dullness. It was nice 
 enough in the summer, but nobody who had ever 
 had to stay on a farm through the winter would 
 be content to settle down in the country. The 
 two dark sisters with the brown eyes listened to 
 her in shy admiration, smiling under their shawls 
 as though they too had seen the vision of America. 
 It is an odd fact that in many parts of rural 
 Ireland America seems far more real and far 
 nearer to the people than any Irish city. Men 
 and women who know as little of Dublin almost 
 as they do of Berlin talk to you of New York as 
 though it were just round the corner, a paradise 
 of crowds and lights. Obviously, the fault of 
 this lies to a great degree with the schools, which 
 have always taught geography and history on the 
 principle that Ireland is, in the vulgar phrase, 
 the last country God made. You may be brought 
 up in a garden, but if your are taught to look at 
 all the flowers in it as weeds, to be bored even 
 by their names, and to dream of other distant 
 gardens as the only places where really wonder- 
 ful flowers grow, you will feel homesick for the 
 intenser beauty, and you will continue blind to 
 the loveliness around you. Luckily, politics and 
 sport have served to keep some local enthusiasms 
 
I/O RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 burning here. The railway carriages testify- 
 to this with their bescribbled walls. " Up 
 Kerry," "Up Murphy," "Down So-and-so, 
 he's a grabber," are mottoes very plentifully 
 pencilled over the railway trains of Kerry. . . . 
 
 Cahirciveen was at the end of that glorious 
 railway journey, which took us now among the 
 mountains and now high above the shore, with 
 riders trooping along the road low down between 
 us and the sea. Like the days that went before 
 it, it was a poor day for seeing the hills, but 
 Dingle Bay shone below us with a million re- 
 freshing waves, and the horsemen riding along 
 the shore made the scene as exciting as a ballad. 
 
 We had no intention of staying in Cahirciveen. 
 It was simply to be a place where we changed on 
 to a mail-car for Waterville. The mail-car for 
 Waterville, however, though it was in the railway 
 guide, was not in Cahirciveen when we got there. 
 Nor would it leave Cahirciveen till the next 
 morning. Further, the porter at Killorglin had 
 put our luggage into the wrong train. That is 
 how we came to spend the night in Cahirciveen, 
 a little town, shaped like a catapult, which lies 
 along the side of a hill where the stones gleam 
 like jewels in the sun. 
 
 I do not curse the author of the railway guide, 
 and I do not curse the porter. On the contrary, 
 I am grateful to them, for Cahirciveen is a real 
 place, not a tourist resort, and that hotel a little 
 
TOURISTS IN KERRY 171 
 
 above the railway station is a house of comfort, 
 cleanHness, and honest tariffs. 
 
 On the next morning the sun rose with a lion's 
 strength. Every rock in the hillside was shining, 
 and brown floods were pouring down the river 
 into the blue sea-water that comes up Valencia 
 Harbour towards the town, and in the fierce 
 light the tide swirled copper-coloured, while 
 blue-jerseyed fishermen dragged their brown nets 
 through it up among the boats on the shore 
 below the bridge. 
 
 Cahirciveen is not only beautiful in its situation 
 but interesting in its memories, for it was a little 
 to the west of the town that Daniel O'Connell 
 was born. The ivy is now growing through the 
 windows of the ruined house, which lies behind 
 a locked gate in a field where cattle browse. It 
 was on the way to the house that we met an old 
 slim-headed farmer mending the road and trust- 
 ing to William O'Brien to regenerate Ireland. 
 He was especially eager that Mr. O'Brien should 
 rescue him from the clutches of his landlord, who 
 had refused to let him sell the turf off his farm. 
 
 " If it was myself owned the farm," said he, 
 leaning on his long spade, " and had the right to 
 sell the turf off it, do you think it's here I would 
 be, mending this damned road ? " 
 
 I asked him wasn't his landlord — a famous 
 English gentleman — an absentee. 
 
 " I don't know what he is," he asserted 
 
172 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 vehemently. " I know he's a tyrant. That's what 
 he is." 
 
 I comforted him by assuring him that the day 
 of the landlords was nearly over. 
 
 " Ah ! " said he, spitting on his hands, and 
 ladling stones into a hollow of the road, " I'm 
 in dread they'll be brought to their knees yet. 
 There was O'Connell now, he was a great man, 
 and there was Parnell, he was a great man, and 
 there's William O'Brien, and I'm thinking if it 
 wasn't that they had treated O'Brien badly, they 
 would have got rid of them fellows long ago. 
 Conciliation — that's what they call it. That's 
 what O'Brien wants, and treating Catholic and 
 Protestant fair and fair alike. Isn't a Protestant 
 just as much an Irishman as a Catholic ? That's 
 what O'Brien says, and he's right. In the name 
 of God, what's to divide them, once the land 
 belongs to the people ? " 
 
 O'Connell is commemorated in Cahirciveen, 
 not only by his ruined birthplace, but by an 
 ambitious new memorial chapel, the foundation- 
 stone of which was sent by the Pope. Other and 
 older ruins — a castle of the McCarthies and a 
 circular stone fort — lie beyond the river. 
 
 There used to be a motor char-a-banc which 
 took you from Cahirciveen round the coast of 
 Kerry, but this so bruised and smashed the soft 
 roads that — as far as Waterville, at any rate — it 
 had to be supplanted by the old horse-vehicle 
 
TOURISTS IN KERRY 173 
 
 again. When this drew up at the door of our 
 hotel, a little foreign lady was uttering a shrill 
 monologue to the driver, who smiled sheepishly. 
 The driver, it seemed, had brought her in from 
 Waterville that morning for the train to Dublin, 
 had put her with her bags into a carriage which 
 did not belong to the train at all, and the train 
 had steamed out shortly afterwards without her. 
 She was able to get no satisfaction out of the 
 stationmaster or the porter, and the driver evi- 
 dently thought that if he smiled long enough, 
 he, too, would prove himself guiltless. The little 
 shrill lady was doing her best to peck him into 
 realising the enormity of his offence. She at last 
 broke off in exhaustion. 
 
 " Driver, bring me a brandy," she commanded 
 sharply, and when she had swallowed this she 
 began to pour out her grievances against the 
 driver with renewed volubility. She said she 
 would make him take her back to Waterville 
 for nothing, anyway. 
 
 Farther on, we picked up two other ladies. 
 They sat directly behind us, and talked at the 
 top of their voices. Both of them were going to 
 Waterville. They had evidently never met before, 
 but they were soon talking like old friends, for 
 they both had the same interest in the English 
 Royal Family and the aristocracy. One of them 
 praised a certain royal lady. 
 
 " Ah yes," admitted the elder of the two ; 
 
174 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 " good, but such a bore ! So different from 
 Queen Victoria ! Queen Victoria was such a 
 dear, lively old thing — so fond of company. She 
 simply couldn't bear any one who was dull to be 
 in the same room with her. Queen Mary ? Ah 
 yes, charming, charming. And so good to the 
 
 poor. And so clever. Lord told me that 
 
 he considers her one of the cleverest queens we 
 have ever had." 
 
 The younger lady, in a shy voice, corroborated 
 this on almost as aristocratic authority. 
 
 " Ah ! " exclaimed the other — she spoke com- 
 mandingly from the pit of her throat, as 
 dowagers are made to do on the stage — " You 
 
 know , do you ? Then you probably 
 
 know Lady ? " 
 
 The younger lady did not, but she had friends 
 who knew Lady — ■ — very well, indeed. 
 
 " Delightful woman," declared the dowager. 
 " Oh, you must meet her some day. Do you 
 know, the Duke of Connaught said that she was 
 the wittiest woman in Ireland. That was when he 
 was Commander of the Forces. She was invited 
 
 to Dublin Castle with Lord to meet him, 
 
 and, as luck would have it, she got a raging 
 toothache that day, and one side of her face was 
 quite swollen. So, when she was taken up to be 
 presented to the Duke, she said to him, ' You 
 must only look at this side, your Royal Highness. 
 The other cheek's at home in bed.' The Duke 
 
TOURISTS IN KERRY 175 
 
 was greatly charmed with her ; she's so full of 
 fun. He said afterwards that she was the wittiest 
 woman in Ireland." 
 
 From that the talk drifted to Waterville, its 
 hotels, beauties, and inhabitants. 
 
 " The most charming peasantry in the world," 
 was the elderly lady's verdict on the last of these ; 
 " so good-mannered, and witty, and obliging." 
 
 The other lady said she knew some people who 
 were very fond of the northern Irish. Her com- 
 panion hummed and hawed at that ; the north, 
 she said, had no manners and had not the southern 
 brightness and humour. 
 
 " I have heard it said," the other suggested 
 timidly, " that they're very thrifty." 
 
 " Ah ! " the dowager admitted, with a fine 
 touch of scorn in her voice, " thrifty, if you like ; 
 but thrift's not everything." 
 
 It was at this point that I suddenly came to 
 a firm resolution : quite loud into myself, " I'm 
 blessed if I'll stop at Waterville at all." 
 
 No, Waterville lies beside a wild bay and has 
 a lovely lake behind it. But those ladies had 
 conjured up a week-end atmosphere about the 
 place by the time we reached it, and the ugly, 
 clean, reddish-brown model houses inhabited by 
 the servants of the Cable Company that has a 
 station there were like a cry to us to go on farther 
 to Parknasilla, which, at least, has a beautiful 
 name. 
 
176 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 At Waterville we gave up horses and took to a 
 covered mot or- vehicle driven by a little sulky- 
 chauffeur from London. To hear him talk — 
 and I will say this for him, that any of the passen- 
 gers who asked him questions found it difficult 
 to get more than a grunt out of him — was to 
 exchange the magic of Kerry for the magic of 
 Holborn. While this little screw-faced man was 
 running about in his brown mechanic's suit and 
 with a cigarette sticking to his lips, even the most 
 determined sentimentalist must have found it 
 difficult to persuade himself that he was in a land 
 of colleens, shillelaghs, and wakes. One Irish — 
 or alleged Irish — characteristic the chauffeur had. 
 He was a magnificently reckless driver. But, 
 after all, he may have learned that when driving 
 motor-buses in London. He certainly took the 
 sharp, sudden corners of the Kerry rocks in a 
 spirit of blind faith that made me expect every 
 minute to be plunging into the ruins of an ass-cart 
 or to be hurled over the side of the road — which 
 in places hangs on a kind of cliff-edge, with only a 
 little futile wall dividing it from the abyss. It 
 runs in a multitude of curves, its future ever 
 unseen behind a threatening jut of stone. Round 
 these we swept with something of the gay care- 
 lessness of a switchback railway. The chauffeur 
 clearly acted on the assumption that Kerry was a 
 privileged motor-run with no native population — 
 none at least that was likely to be travelling the 
 
TOURISTS IN KERRY 177 
 
 coast-road. Perhaps he was right. Kerry — this 
 bit of it, at any rate — has an air of wilderness 
 beyond any other part of Ireland I know. It 
 looked all ragged and deserted in the dull misty 
 light that afternoon, its boasted mountains like 
 shapeless piled-up heaps of green and stones. No 
 wonder the tourist who judges Ireland by the 
 wildest parts of Kerry, and only knows these as 
 they can be seen from a rushing motor-car, gets 
 an exaggerated idea of Irish desolation and 
 poverty. 
 
 Here he sees an untidy little farm hanging 
 among the rocks of the hillside, and here an excited 
 ragged man trying to keep a terrified ass from 
 backing into eternity at sight of the motor ; and 
 here a long barefooted boy, a youth of sixteen 
 or so with wild hair, coming up with a parcel to 
 be posted, tugs his forelock and calls the 
 chauffeur " sir " (How sick that made me feel !). 
 Ireland lies about us, no doubt, but this is not 
 Ireland that we see from the tourist motor. Why, 
 the motor is even roofed in such a way that we 
 cannot get a fuU view of the hills ! We are cooped 
 in and protected from the rain and reality. 
 
 A lady with two or three children and a load of 
 wooden spades, who sat beside us, did nevertheless 
 induce a number of Irish thrills in herself as we 
 rumbled along. We were passing a small house 
 where a number of people were sitting on the wall 
 outside and moving about the door. It was 
 
178 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 obviousl)^ a funeral party or some such thing. But 
 the lady romantically jumped in her seat and 
 cried to her husband, " Look ! It's an Irish 
 eviction. I'm sure it's an Irish eviction." 
 
 Her husband said " Humph ! " and went on 
 smoking his cigar with the look of a man who 
 would say, " Those damned Irish, they are always 
 being evicted." 
 
 I could imagine those two laying down the law 
 about Ireland after their return home. 
 
 " My dear, have you ever been in Ireland ? We 
 have. If you knew the people, you would not 
 talk like that. The last time we were there we 
 saw an eviction, and I can assure you it made me 
 realise the Irish question as I had never done 
 before. Poor creatures — I felt sorry for them. 
 But to put the loyal and prosperous north under 
 the heel of such people ! Squalid, superstitious, 
 and half-starved ! My dear, if you had ever spent 
 any time among the southern Irish, you would not 
 talk of such a thing." 
 
 Past Derrynane, O'Connell's old home, a 
 wooded estate running into the sea, we flew, and 
 through the town of Sneem, which had a mildewed 
 look in the clammy misty light. And after that 
 it was not long till we were rolling up the drive 
 through the paradisiacal grounds in which the 
 hotel of Parknasilla stands. 
 
 Parknasilla is, I am sure, an ideal hotel for the 
 rich tourist. Originally the palace of a bishop, 
 
i 
 
TOURISTS IN KERRY 179 
 
 it lies in a beautifully wooded estate, and plants 
 grow about it in a tropical luxuriance. Close 
 to the sea, it has its own boatmen and fishermen, 
 and its shore of rocks with little inlets of the sea 
 running up among them — rocks rich in wrack 
 and seaweed, and with bridges leading from the 
 woods to them — the woods and the sea both so 
 fragrant. Here is a retreat from business and 
 poverty — ^like a hothouse set in a congested 
 district. Even though the evening was wet, it 
 was pleasant to wander among the tangle of the 
 trees, as in a forest of silver birches with rich under- 
 growth, and to watch the sea, slow and quiet, 
 filling the little bays among the rocks, and the 
 wrack moving in the inward and outward wash. 
 
 This was all good. But I confess the hotel 
 itself overwhelmed me. It was a place of huge 
 respectable silence, a haunt of the boredom of 
 the rich. Ladies in evening dress sat reading 
 novels in the large drawing-room in chilling 
 groups. Here one had all the exclusiveness which 
 is supposed to be the special mark of English life. 
 As I looked round that company of the well- 
 dressed, sitting on their chairs and sofas, all silent 
 and all damned, I'd have given my second-best 
 pair of boots to be back in Lisdoonvarna, with its 
 boisterous and hospitable welcome. Doubtless 
 these were human beings in the hotel at Park- 
 nasilla, but they were pretending not to be. 
 No doubt they were enjoying themselves, though 
 
i8o RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 they evidently thought it good manners to 
 conceal the fact. They seemed to carry little 
 prisons of starch about with them — to be resolved 
 to keep as aloof as the kings and queens of some 
 savage tribe. It was not that they suffered from 
 the shyness of strangers ; they had simply the 
 standofhshness of people who did not care for 
 the human race outside their own little social 
 group. They were the most extraordinary spec- 
 tacle I had yet seen on the west coast of Ireland. 
 Decent' people, kind people, good people, I'm 
 quite sure. Heaven bless them, but you might as 
 well have tried to feel brotherly to a lot of 
 walruses. 
 
 The next day we fled from the place. We 
 felt that we must get back to Ireland, and we 
 eagerly climbed the motor that gets you to Ken- 
 mare in time for lunch, to Glengariff in time for 
 tea, and to Bantry in time for the Cork train. 
 And what a journey that is, even when taken in 
 a rush on a day of wet wind and flying mists ! 
 That climb up the steep and winding mountain- 
 roads between Kenmare and Glengariff, with the 
 mists now cutting us off from the underworld as 
 though we were up in a dirigible above the clouds, 
 and now disclosing distant valleys of poverty far 
 down below us and eager peaks rising above and 
 around us like shapes in some monstrous war, 
 leaves a mighty exciting memory behind it. It 
 is as though one had found a motor-road up the 
 
TOURISTS IN KERRY i8i 
 
 Brocken in a dream. And though, when one has 
 passed through the rock-tunnel at the top, a 
 woman comes out of a lemonade shanty by the 
 roadside with a tray of picture post-cards for sale, 
 one remains immune from disenchantment. 
 
 And Glengariff, too, with its islets lying golden 
 in the sun that comes after rain, dwells by a fairy 
 sea. Glories of pines, glories of bay, glories of 
 hills are here in so rich a loveliness that the tourist 
 is lost among them. . . . And by the time one 
 has reached Bantry one is in Ireland again — Ireland 
 of the cows and the whin ditches, and the fields 
 of daisy and buttercup and benweed, and the 
 human beings. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 KINSALE 
 
 " The Town of Kinsale is a large, stinking, filthy 
 hole," wrote the Reverend Richard Allyn, chap- 
 lain of H.M.S. Centurion, in his journal in 
 1 69 1. "I was glad to leave so vile a place, though 
 indeed I was somewhat sorry to part with Parson 
 Tomms and the two only fit men for Christian 
 conversation beside himself in the whole town- — 
 viz. Mr. Stowell, the mayor, and Parson Mead." 
 Kinsale is no longer large or stinking or filthy, if 
 it was ever any of these, and as I went there in 
 search not of Christian conversation, but of 
 quietness and the site of a battle, I cannot say 
 whether Parson Tomms and Parson Mead and 
 the mayor have left any worthy successors. I 
 deny upon oath, however, that it is or ever was 
 a vile place. 
 
 Kinsale is one of those quaint and still southern 
 towns which look almost as though they had 
 been forgotten at the bottom of a motionless sea 
 of air. Its narrow streets wind without the 
 rumble of imany carts round a crook of water, 
 
KINS ALE 183 
 
 and behind them rises, as it were, a cliff of ruinous 
 dwellings and ruinous walls — a high terrace of the 
 poor dropping gradually towards the mouth of 
 the Bandon River. It is a town of steep places 
 going up from a central labyrinth, and, though it 
 has the most modern of post offices and some fine 
 enough new houses, these things do not make the 
 local atmosphere. One remembers Kinsale chiefly 
 for the bygone fashion of its houses — the old- 
 fangled round projections of their upper storeys 
 and their wavy fronts of dark tiles. One re- 
 members it, too, because of the women who move 
 so quietly about its streets, bending forward 
 against the wind in their dark hoods and cloaks. 
 Personally, I do not like the southern Irish cloak. 
 I prefer infinitely the grey patterned shawls of 
 the west. The cloak, however, for all its stains 
 and dustiness, has a curious impressiveness as of 
 an heirloom. It is like an inheritance of grandeur 
 fallen upon evil days. It gives poverty a past, and 
 suggests that out in the future the pride of life 
 will one day be brought back again to the quayside 
 of Kinsale on foreign ships. Meanwhile, on the 
 backs of the poor, it is a misfit, an incongruity. 
 Grey-haired women, with an irregular patch of 
 face showing through its ample gathered hood, 
 have the appearance at times of professional 
 mourners as they pass you on the road. 
 
 We did not stay in Kinsale itself, but went out 
 to one of the numerous coves which lie along the 
 
1 84 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 side of the long serpentine water known as Kinsale 
 Harbour. Here a steep little road of neat houses 
 falls to a landing-place for boats, and at the far 
 side of this another steep road rises towards the 
 flagstaff of a coastguard station, a handful of 
 threatening cannon, and an old grey fort that 
 is inhabited by modern soldiers. This, to my 
 inexpert eye, appeared as though its loop-holes 
 and bastions might be a place to defend in time 
 of war. It looks back, on the one hand, two or 
 three miles over a round peninsula to Kinsale, and, 
 on the other, gazes along several miles of Kinsale 
 Harbour towards the ocean beyond and passing 
 ships. Of military values, however, I know 
 nothing. This stumpy grey fort, which is so 
 ugly that it could only justify its existence by 
 being indispensable, is by all accounts fit only 
 to be the barrack that it is. 
 
 It was built by the Earl of Orrery in the time 
 of Charles ii. of England for the protection of 
 Kinsale, and by him was called Charles Fort — 
 a name it earned, for it stood out loyally for the 
 Stuarts in 1690 against William of Orange's 
 Danes and Englishmen. The siege began on the 
 3rd and 4th of October, when Sir Edward Scot, 
 the Governor, on being called on to surrender, 
 declared, that " it would be time enough a month 
 hence to talk about surrendering." The Governor 
 of Kinsale town had already threatened to hang a 
 trumpeter who had made a similar demand on 
 
KINSALE 185 
 
 him, and, firing the town, had retreated to 
 Old Fort on the round peninsula I have men- 
 tioned, where he had been forced to surrender 
 after the slaughter of two hundred of the 
 garrison. 
 
 Charles Fort, we are told, contained at the time 
 a garrison of a thousand men, and provisions to 
 support them for a year — including "one thousand 
 barrels of wheat, one thousand of beef, forty 
 tons of claret, and great quantities of sack, brandy, 
 and strong beer." Unluckily, the walls did not 
 last as well as the provisions, and the guns and 
 bombs of the besiegers were so effective that by 
 the fifteenth of the month hostages were ex- 
 changed and the garrison consented to surrender 
 on condition that it " should continue in the Fort 
 the 1 6th and march out the 17th with bag and 
 baggage, drums beating, colours flying, lighted 
 matches and bullet in mouth, and to have a 
 safe convoy near Limrike." It is interesting to 
 remember that it was the soldier who was after- 
 wards the great Marlborough into whose hands 
 the keys of the fort were delivered. 
 
 It was on the sheltered side of Charles Fort 
 that we looked for rooms, and we could have got 
 these at the first house at which we called, only 
 that the woman of the house was unable to 
 guarantee us Christian food. She asked hesitat- 
 ingly what we would want to eat. We gave her 
 a list of simplicities that might have done for a 
 
1 86 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 hermitage. We mentioned eggs, for instance, as 
 an easy country food. 
 
 " We couldn't give you any eggs," she said, 
 shaking her head gravely. 
 
 We said that fish would do. 
 
 She shook her head again. 
 
 " I doubt if we could get you any fish," she said. 
 
 We thought this very extraordinary, and asked 
 her what she herself proposed to give us. 
 
 She did not answer directly. " Would you 
 have any objection to condensed milk ? " she 
 asked. " I'm afraid there may be some trouble 
 getting milk for you." 
 
 In amazement, we asked for an explanation of 
 this mysterious famine of eggs and milk in the 
 heart of a country district. 
 
 " We're boycotted," she said, with a worn look, 
 and recommended us to try some more comfort- 
 able house, promising to take us in if we could get 
 rooms nowhere else. 
 
 The circumstances of this boycott, as we heard 
 the story afterwards, were peculiar. The trouble 
 was connected with a farm from which a tenant 
 had been evicted nearly thirty years before, and 
 which had afterwards been taken by an immigrant 
 from England or Scotland. Now that the land 
 war was over, the evicted tenant had returned 
 from America with money in his pocket, and 
 demanded to be allowed to buy back his farm. 
 Naturally enough, the new occupants would not 
 
KINSALE 187 
 
 budge : the^ too had, hy this time, their asso- 
 ciations with the farm. It was the opinion of 
 the neighbourhood, however, that the " wounded 
 soldier of the land war " — to use the phrase of the 
 orators — ^had the first claim on the fields, and 
 all the common services of life were quietly- 
 withdrawn from the later comers — people who, 
 though everybody recognised their honesty and 
 decency and the difficulty of their case, stood in 
 some measure as symbols of a dead system which 
 had robbed half the fields of Ireland of their 
 rightful owners. 
 
 It was the kindness of the boycotted woman 
 which sent us back up the hill to a house on the 
 edge of the street where a landlady beyond praise 
 mistook us for army people and allowed us in. 
 I was not in sight myself at the time she consented 
 to admit us : even the most generous imagination 
 would have some difficulty in finding anything 
 soldierly about either my dress or my figure. 
 Our landlady afterwards told us frankly, however, 
 that it was well she thought we either must 
 belong to the army or had come off a yacht lying 
 out in the harbour, for otherwise she might 
 never have taken us in. 
 
 " I don't take everybody as lodgers," she said, 
 wagging her netted head. " Oh, Lord bless you, 
 child, no." 
 
 She was a woman of good size, with head bent 
 forward between her round shoulders, and arms 
 
1 88 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 swinging little short swings in front of her as she 
 walked. Her face had character, worldly wisdom, 
 and kindliness ; she had a good Roman nose, and 
 mobile lips that were constantly twinkling into 
 smiles along with her ageing eyes. She had two 
 enthusiasms — one for British officers and one for 
 the north of Ireland — though in politics she was, 
 I believe, a Nationalist, and in religion a Catholic. 
 She was essentially one of those women who are 
 interested in the motherliest way in whatever 
 environment they are placed in, and the best part 
 of her life had been spent as a stranger among the 
 people of the north, while, since she had returned 
 to Kinsale, she had been letting the best rooms in 
 her house to a succession of officers in the Kinsale 
 garrison. 
 
 I cannot tell you how sad I felt at first 
 when Mrs. Dermott brought in the plates at 
 meal-times, and held the floor through the entire 
 meal and for an hour afterwards, while she told 
 us anecdotes of officers and officers' wives who had 
 stayed in her rooms. She had had wounded 
 officers from the Boer War, and militia officers 
 during the summer training, and ordinary officers 
 belonging to the permanent garrison which is 
 cooped up in a great barracks over the town of 
 Kinsale. If we asked for honey, she once knew an 
 officer who was a great one for honey, and if we 
 praised the air of the headland, she once knew a 
 sick officer, who had come there so white and weak 
 
 I 
 
KINSALE 189 
 
 — " Child of grace, I was sure he was done for in 
 this world, and he looking more dead than alive," 
 — but in a fortnight his cheeks were as brown as 
 brown, — " and eat ? Child, he could eat three 
 of you ! " Similarly, when we had no drink at our 
 meals, we were supported by numerous precedents 
 of abstemious officers, and, when the washing 
 was brought back, I had a lecture on the airing 
 of underclothing, with a tragic tale of a young 
 officer lodging in these rooms who had once put on 
 a woollen undershirt without airing it, and had 
 caught a chill on his kidneys and died. 
 
 Every evening Mrs. Dermott talked the sun 
 out with these and similar mem.ories, talked till 
 the breath left her and she stood over us in the 
 quarter light, her lips shaking as she waited for it 
 to return. Her turns of speech, however, her 
 acute intelligence, her immense brooding kindli- 
 ness, her deep humanity, made even her army 
 gossip not only bearable but in the end desirable. 
 Perhaps my liking for her grew because she lifted 
 her hands in praise of the north of Ireland even 
 higher than in praise of British officers. 
 
 " I always say," she declared — that was when 
 she was telling us how cheaply she could get us a 
 section of honey, for which we, as visitors, might 
 be charged a higher price — " that the north of 
 Ireland people are the honestest people in the 
 world. In the north of Ireland nobody ever 
 would take advantage of a stranger." 
 
190 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 I knew that even in the north there are ex- 
 ceptions, but none the less I did not deprecate 
 the praise. 
 
 " No," she went on ; " in the north of Ireland " 
 — she always gave the full phrase and pronounced 
 it almost like " de nort' of Ireland " in the old- 
 fashioned way — " in the north of Ireland nobody 
 will try to put upon you, and nobody will be put 
 upon. They won't stand it," she declared, raising 
 her voice vigorously. Her eyes twinkled at the 
 sides of her Roman nose. " See here." She spread 
 an example before us. " In de sout' of Ireland 
 a poor man can't get married without he paying 
 a pound, two pound, three pound, to the priest. 
 I say to a priest one day, ' You should go to the 
 north of Ireland and try putting them charges on 
 the people. The people in the north of Ireland 
 would show you mighty quick. You don't catch 
 the north of Ireland people paying you two and 
 three pound, and they not able to afford it.' Oh, 
 I told him out straight, I did, and I don't know if 
 he liked it, but it was the truth, child." 
 
 Kinsale Harbour, in spite of all the talk about 
 officers, and of the fact that you could not go out 
 on the road without meeting some soldier posting 
 along in putties and with a gun, and occasionally 
 the half of a khaki regiment, was a place of 
 entrancing gentleness and beauty. When once 
 you have left the town and climbed the steep 
 roadway known as Breakheart Hill, and reached 
 
KINSALE 191 
 
 the high level road between field-walls made of 
 what looked like petrified faggots of wood, you 
 have the stretch of a gay world of blue under you, 
 pouring round the headlands into the distant 
 colourless waste of the ocean. After passing 
 Charles Fort, you need the road no longer, but 
 turn down a slope with a makeshift plot of 
 coastguards' graves in the middle of it and some 
 targets for rifle practice farther on, till, crossing 
 a crumbling bridge, you come to a path along the 
 border of the water. It is a world of heather and 
 brambles and bees and an infrequent tethered 
 goat and rocky passages that you find here dow^n 
 by the sea. Then, after less than a mile of 
 circuitous walking, you come on a little white cove 
 of fishermen's cottages, with a tide of children 
 pouring out of the door of one of them and dogs 
 lying flat in the neighbourhood, half asleep and 
 half on guard. Down below on the pebble beach 
 the boats are lying idle. Two soldier-boys are 
 stooping and picking up stones to skim along 
 the surface of the water. . . . 
 
 This is the third day we have wandered here. 
 We pass round a bend in the path, and see a 
 hundred yards in front of us an old woman 
 labouring along with a red handkerchief tied 
 round her head and a sack humping her shoulders. 
 She staggers a pace or two behind the back of an 
 aged man, who creeps along on little stiff bow-legs, 
 and they seem to be screaming at each other 
 
192 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 like gulls through the wind — those gulls which are 
 clamouring in the wake of disappearing porpoises 
 out in the bay. You would swear that the man 
 and the woman were quarrelling with each other ; 
 at least, you would think that the woman was 
 shrilly nagging at the stiff old back in front of 
 her, and that the man was crawling home van- 
 quished, and only able to utter an intermittent 
 squeak in answer. As we come nearer, however, 
 we find that the old man — a very perfect gentle 
 fisherman — and the woman are exchanging gossip 
 and grave thoughts in the friendliest way in Irish, 
 and that the shrillness is but a piece of age and a 
 result of walking and talking in single file in a high 
 wind. The man and woman turn round to greet 
 us in the name of God. She looks round at us 
 from her bent shoulders and surveys us from strong 
 dark eyes and a deep-ridged brow with strands 
 of grey-black hair parted over it. Ah, she 
 declares, after we have been talking for a while, 
 there used to be plenty of Irish, good Irish, spoken 
 in these parts, but the most of it was dead with 
 the old people. From the language we go on 
 to talk about the songs. She shakes her head 
 gloomily. 
 
 " Ni raibh abhrdn ar bith agam ariamh " (I 
 never had any songs), she called out in her loud 
 sad voice into the wind. " Bhi me ro-dhubh- 
 chroidheach i gcomhanaidhe. Do you under- 
 stand what I'm saying ? I never had any songs," 
 
KINSALE 193 
 
 she translated for us. " I was always too down- 
 hearted." 
 
 She went on shaking her head and sighing as 
 she stumbled forward. 
 
 " It's only this present year my man died," she 
 told us, " and he sixty-nine years of age. If 
 he had lived till November next, he would have 
 qualified for the pension. He was a pilot. He 
 took the sway of all the pilots in Cork Harbour. 
 I had four sons to him, and two of them died, and 
 they just after getting appointments under the 
 Government, and the others went to America. 
 Up in that white house at the end of the road," 
 she went on, nodding to a lane that broke away 
 from the coast-path, " they were all born. And 
 now I'm living in it all by myself with nobody 
 at all keeping me company except Almighty God 
 and His Blessed Mother." 
 
 The old man turned round and, apparently not 
 having heard all this, said in a shrill, cracked 
 voice — ■ 
 
 " Her husband was a pilot, sir. They say there 
 was never his equal to be found in this part of 
 Ireland." 
 
 " Well," the woman went on, following her own 
 trend of thought, as she adjusted the burden to 
 her back, " the pensions is a great blessing to the 
 poor." 
 
 " They are, they are," piped the old man. It 
 was Friday, and they had just been in to get them 
 13 
 
194 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 at the Kinsale post office. " You've seen the 
 forms, sir ? " And he brought out what looked 
 like a book of five-shilling postal orders, and turned 
 and handed it to me with an air of pleasure. 
 
 " But, God knows," said the woman, " they 
 try to get it back out of you in rates. Ten shillings 
 they want to charge me on that house of mine, and 
 
 when I went in to speak to Mr. in Kinsale 
 
 about it, and asked him what I got for it, he said 
 it was for the roads. ' The roads ! ' I said to him, 
 ' and me living a mile away from any road at all 
 in an old lane between two hills of furze ! If you 
 charge me for roads, why don't you make me a road 
 up to my house so that I won't be having to tramp 
 through a bog of mud where you wouldn't drive 
 a cow ? ' Ah, well," she said suddenly, " it's 
 here I turn off. Bean?iacht leat, a dhuine 
 uasail ! Beannacht leat, a hhean uasal ! " And 
 with a sad face she took her sorrows and her sack 
 off along the muddy path up the hillside. 
 
 Every day of our visit we had come round the 
 coast-path, and the old man had on each occasion 
 welcomed us as a friend. He lived here in the 
 cove from which the old woman's path went up 
 the slope — he and his son and his son's children. 
 He was one of those old men whom to know is 
 a religious experience. Old age, I suppose, is 
 beautiful in all places where the people do not 
 spend their vigorous years in bawdy thoughts. In 
 Ireland the percentage of simple and pleasant 
 
KINS ALE 195 
 
 people among the old must be as high as in any 
 country in the world. One of my friends argues 
 that the old people in Ireland are beautiful 
 because they are pagans, but ordinary observers 
 will with better cause relate those grey and gentle 
 folk to the saintly sort of Christianity. They 
 are of the Christian type that you find in the 
 fables and short stories of Tolstoy. Theirs are the 
 heads of men and women who have become as 
 little children : they are gracious spirits, blessing 
 God for sunny days on the shores of want. 
 
 Sentiment in those who write is a dangerous 
 and at times a damned thing, but this old, blue- 
 jerseyed man, living in the cottage under the 
 hillside, made one feel childishly happy. He 
 asked us into his house, before which his sailor 
 son was sitting on a low wall, carving the model 
 of a small boat, and setting it in relief in a box to 
 serve as a sort of wall-picture for the children. 
 The daughter-in-law, a shy woman with a head of 
 hair like a consuming fire, was washing things in 
 the kitchen, where the fire on the floor had gone 
 out. " Keep your hat on, keep your hat on," 
 the old man said to me, as I ducked under the 
 lintel and took my hat in my hand ; and a couple 
 of small children, shyly hiding in their mother's 
 skirts, gazed at us with more wonder than happi- 
 ness. He gave a grandfather's laugh at their 
 nervousness, and began to feel in one of his 
 pockets. " Is this what you're expecting ? " he 
 
196 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 asked, producing a penny packet of Jacobs's 
 Niagara wafers and tearing the top off it. " Ha, 
 boy, you were expecting this." And he began 
 to dole out his biscuits to the two solemn children 
 — a big-headed, red, sulky boy, and a girl with 
 curls as fine as a baby's hair. The children 
 munched the biscuits inattentively, still keeping 
 their eyes and their thoughts on us. They always, 
 he said, expected him to bring them back a bag 
 of biscuits on Friday when he came back from the 
 post office with his old age pension. 
 
 He had also brought home with him a share of 
 knowledge about us and our family — knowledge 
 which he had gathered in a public-house from 
 some one who knew us. " I take the one drink 
 in the week," he explained, in regard to the public- 
 house. " When I draw the pension on Friday, I 
 always have a pint of stout : it's good medicine." 
 
 He wanted to give us tea while we were there. 
 We were anxious to go round to the point of the 
 headland that day, however, so we could not wait. 
 Our host showed us out, lingering to look at some 
 gutted fish which were drying on the grass 
 opposite his house on the other side of the path. 
 Those were skad, he told us, — good to eat, — and he 
 would have some parcelled up for us by the time 
 we came back from our walk. Porpoises were 
 playing in the bay, coming up like great black 
 surges, with a constant flutter of shrill birds 
 rising and alighting over them on the look out 
 
KINSALE 197 
 
 for fish. The old man did not know them as 
 porpoises. He was willing to compromise and 
 call them grampuses, but he had another name for 
 them, like packers. He went on to talk about the 
 strange things of the deep. There was a cave 
 somewhere in the bay, he said, where you could 
 see the seals bobbing up and down — kind gentle 
 creatures that would do you no harm. Did we 
 know the Irish word for a seal — ron ? Did ever 
 we hear what sailors say about the seal ; that " if 
 a seal comes on a drownded body in the water 
 it won't leave it, or let any injury come to it, but 
 will stay by the drownded man, keening him, till 
 his friends come and take him away " ? Our friend 
 had little lore, however. He believed that the 
 Danes had been on the Old Head of Kinsale and 
 fought a battle there, and he gave us a bald version 
 of the story of how they made ale from the heather 
 — a story that one seems to meet everywhere in 
 Ireland. Even when he directed us towards the 
 end of our journey — an end with the suggestive 
 name of Hangman's Point — ^he could give us no 
 details about the history of the name. " They 
 say," he related vaguely, " it was a man who used 
 to put up false lights to wreck ships. It was at 
 the point they hung him. That would be 
 hundreds of years ago." He said he could get 
 us a history book from a schoolmaster he knew, 
 which would tell us all about Ireland and the 
 Danes and the Spaniards. . . . 
 
198 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 It was a day of the enthusiasms of the air — a day 
 upon which bird and bee seemed to swing through 
 the air with a swift delight and ease. After we 
 had left the cove, the coast-path was less marked 
 and earthy ; it now followed the edge of the 
 low rocks, a green track, leading nowhere. One 
 passed round a curve and saw the wide sea at the 
 mouth of the bay ; one went farther, and the 
 bay seemed to be landlocked once more. Down 
 among the rocks, the waters splashed into a 
 thousand gullies, a million little waves advancing 
 with a million little voices and breaking into 
 fragrance and laughter. One dark rock stood out 
 some little way from land, a grotesque of nature. 
 Now it was hidden as the height of the water bore 
 over it, and now the hollow sea fell from it and left 
 it dripping. It was shaped in such a way that, 
 amid the rise and fall of the swirling tide, it 
 looked for all the world like the exsurgent head of 
 a baby bear — a bear washing its screwed-up face 
 with a circling paw, and taking advantage of 
 everybreathing-space to scrub its cheeks vigorously 
 and dash the water from its eyes. Outside, the 
 bay flowed dark blue and a desert for ships — for, 
 owing to a strike, even the fishing-boats did not 
 trouble to put out. There was nothing to disturb 
 the lifelessness of the place save those swarms of 
 birds, clustered like bees here and there above the 
 water, where a porpoise would suddenly curve 
 with his slimy back out of the deep, only to charge 
 
KINS ALE 199 
 
 downwards immediately again, a bull of the sea, 
 after his prey. 
 
 One can spend hours watching these beasts 
 appear and reappear with an astonishing ex- 
 citement. It appeals to all the child that sur- 
 vives in us, the child to whom the world, instead 
 of being an engine of universal law, is a perpetual 
 game of miracles. Sitting out of the wind, one 
 has a miniature of the same excitement as one 
 watches the divers breasting the small waves and 
 suddenly sending up their tails and precipitating 
 themselves under the water. But the porpoise 
 is so much more volcanic in its appearance, so 
 irresistible in its monstrous energy, that one 
 awaits its coming with a happy awe as well as with 
 a delight in surprises. 
 
 Nature was all at sport on this day of sunny 
 tumult. High up in the air half the gulls of the 
 world seemed to be flying, coursing upwards on 
 the slow beat of their wings, and then allowing 
 themselves to hang like kites with wings outspread 
 and still. Over the water now and then came a 
 dark streak of humour, when a wild duck, leaving 
 the scrimmage of gulls that screamed along the 
 track of the porpoises, would suddenly make off 
 for some shoreward destination, looking for all 
 the world like a small boy on a bicycle on an 
 express errand. The wild duck, as it flies, has an 
 air of almost fearful responsibility. \Vhether it 
 is the shape and size of its wings, or whether it 
 
200 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 is that they sprout from so high up its back, it 
 always seems to fly with anxiety. Its long neck 
 extended like an inexpert swimmer's as he makes 
 in wild scuffling haste towards the ladder, it surely 
 has a faster and at the same time stiffer beat of 
 the wing than any other bird of its size. Having 
 thought of these birds as messengers of the air, 
 one took a new interest in them as one saw single 
 spies of them being dispatched at repeated 
 intervals from the porpoise groups in the bay, 
 and beating away across the peninsula with their 
 tidings. 
 
 It was our intention to reach Hangman's Point 
 before turning homewards, but really the por- 
 poises and the wild ducks hung on our tracks and 
 made game of us. We were soon out on a moun- 
 tain-side high above the sea, where sheep moved 
 away from our path on a little wind of fear and 
 then were borne back towards us on a little wind 
 of curiosity. Passing a cliff and clambering round 
 a breezy corner, we found ourselves suddenly in 
 the midst of the other half of the gulls of the world, 
 which with a cry broke into the air and left us the 
 kingdom of their grey rocks and falling green as a 
 possession. Here, when the birds were gone, we 
 seemed to have reached the absolute silence, the 
 silence of undiscovered countries. Down below, 
 far down, the very sea seemed to be breaking itself 
 against the rocks with a veiled murmur. If a 
 man had appeared anywhere down yonder, one 
 
KINSALE 201 
 
 would have suspected him like a stranger on a 
 desert island. 
 
 It was our doom never to reach Hangman's 
 Point, We skirted what must have been the last 
 bay on that side of Kinsale Harbour, and were 
 walking on the edges of our boots along a high 
 slope of green, when the dry spitting sound of 
 rifle-fire reminded us that this part of the head- 
 land was a practice-ground for the soldiers, and a 
 little farther on a red flag struggled in the wind 
 and warned the deaf of danger. That decided us. 
 We returned slowly along the high slope of green, 
 and past the sheep that moved away from us on 
 a little wind of fear and turned their faces back to 
 us in a little wind of curisoity, past the porpoises 
 and the wild ducks and the gulls and the divers 
 and the rock that washed its face in the waves 
 like a baby bear, and at the end of an hour or so 
 we were back in the cove again — the cove of the 
 old people and the children. How beautiful and 
 yet how mean the little hamlet looked as we came 
 round the corner into view of it again ! There 
 was no deep comfort of thatch roofing the houses. 
 The best of the cottages were under dull slates : 
 others of them stared blindly upward in a horror 
 of corrugated iron. I do not know who is to 
 blame : some Dublin Castle Board, I believe, 
 for the old man told me that the Government 
 was his landlord. As for himself, he was infinitely 
 picturesque — grizzled and blue and generous with 
 
202 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 smiles — as he stood at the gate of his cottage with 
 its three square yards of garden walled off before 
 it, amid the huddled dreariness of the village, 
 and waited for us with the parcel of skad in his 
 hand. (Here I may say that we ate some of the 
 skad when we got back to our rooms, and that a 
 meal of pieces of string preserved in salt would have 
 had about the same taste, and been about equally 
 digestible. How in the world people who live 
 largely on this sort of thing through the winter — 
 how the children who live on it — survive and 
 even keep cheerful, I do not know. Enemies 
 of social reform should all be made to live on 
 skad and tea for a year to enable them to see at 
 least one of the reasons why the world needs 
 changing.) 
 
 It came out in the course of our conversation 
 with the old fisherman that he had never been 
 outside the bounds of the County Cork. His 
 most memorable adventures had consisted in 
 rowing parties of gentry and officers up the 
 Bandon River : he glowed at mention of these 
 old labours as a boy glows when he relates how 
 he showed the way to a famous man or picked 
 up a parcel for a beautiful actress. His son, with 
 a breaker of red hair curling over his forehead, 
 seemed less satisfied with so limited a field of 
 experience. Courteous and kindly, as he carved 
 away at his wooden bas-relief of a boat, he 
 spoke as a man with a restless spirit in him. 
 
KINSALE 203 
 
 Perhaps, however, it was only the enforced 
 idleness of the fishermen's strike that gave him 
 this air. 
 
 Other people spoke to us, and other people's 
 dogs barked at us, as we returned through the 
 village. On a ragged patch of green near the end 
 of it an old sailor with a Kruger whisker round his 
 throat lay on his stomach, and, as we passed, 
 called out that it was a fine day. He was on his 
 feet an instant afterwards and beside us for 
 conversation. He was a low-sized man with 
 something of a stage Irishman's face, wizened 
 and freckled and scabbed and keen. He and the 
 fisherman might have stood as twin types of 
 experience and innocence. Every freckle on 
 his face seemed to be a letter in the alphabet of 
 mischief. His red-rimmed eyes looked as though 
 they had in their time seen the tree of the know- 
 ledge of good and evil. He was wearing a jersey 
 and an old sea-hat, and was chewing a head of 
 grass. As he put his hand towards his mouth, 
 you could see that one of his fingers was missing. 
 When he spoke his mouth skewed up one side of 
 his face, like a gurnet's. 
 
 He told us that he had seen us passing through 
 the cove before, and speaking to the people at 
 the other cottage. " Ah ! " he said, twisting his 
 face and moving his shoulders in a pitying way, 
 " decent people ! decent people ! But them 
 that has never travelled, what have they to talk 
 
204 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 about ? A man that has never been away from 
 home hasn't much conversation." 
 
 An obvious question brought out the fact that 
 he himself had been in the British Navy and, after 
 that, had voyaged in fishing-boats round all the 
 shores of Ireland. Hearing what part of Ireland 
 I came from, he went through the catalogue of 
 all the northern harbours, naming them one by 
 one as though each name itself conjured up some 
 glory of a life of adventure. Greenore, Belfast, 
 Larne, Portrush, Burtonport, Westport — these are 
 a few of the places he had laboured past in his 
 long harvesting. 
 
 " It was in Belfast," he said, holding up his 
 mutilated hand to us, " I was in hospital the 
 time I had to lose my finger. It was a dog-fish 
 bit me. Did you ever see a dog-fish, ma'am ? 
 Like a small shark it is ; and the most painful 
 thing ! Still and all, the pain I could endure. 
 I don't think there's any man living could endure 
 worse pain nor I can and say nothing. No, it 
 was the lying idle in hospital, and the sick and the 
 dying and the dead all around me, and nothing to 
 do all day but turn from my side on to my back 
 and from my back on to my side — well, I tell you 
 I used to lie there and let groans out of me like 
 the dying. ' Have patience ! ' says one of the 
 nurses one day, when she heard me, 'have patience, 
 man ! ' ' Patience ! ' says I. * Woman, if I had 
 to have patience, I would be dead long ago ! If 
 
KINSALE 205 
 
 you were out in a storm, and the ship in dinger, 
 what good would patience be to you. then ? It's 
 the activity of the sailor,' says I, ' keeps the ship 
 from going down.' No," he went on, with cocky 
 self-satisfaction, " I never was a patient man. . . . 
 It would be a nice day, sir, to go back by boat for 
 
 a change. Did the " (naming the people in 
 
 the fisherman's cottage) " not offer you a boat to 
 take you home in ? It's queer they wouldn't 
 have offered to row you over : twenty minutes 
 would do it. ... I have a boat down on the 
 beach." 
 
 Certainly there was allurement in the sun and 
 in the innumerable serpent tides — and in the 
 sailor ! But then the wind swept across the water 
 like charging hosts, and, over on the far side of 
 the bay outside Sandy Cove, seemed to be con- 
 juring flights of snowy birds out of the bosom of 
 the sea. The old man assured us, however, that 
 there was no danger . . . admitted there would 
 be danger going over to Sandy Cove, and swore he 
 wouldn't take a boat over there if he was offered 
 five pounds for it. He knew the sea, he declared, 
 and rowing round close to the shore would be as 
 safe as walking. 
 
 Easily persuaded, we went down to the beach, 
 with a black dog following us, while the old sailor 
 scuffled off to one of the cottages for his rowlocks. 
 With a push we had the boat into the water — and 
 the wind. With quick movements and a trampling 
 
2o6 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 of boards, the sailor had got himself between the 
 oars and was pulling us out, an uneasy cockleshell, 
 into the gurly sea. He was now as merry as a 
 midget. He was triumph in miniature who, 
 having met an easy victory in two simple strangers, 
 now went forth against the mighty Ocean itself. 
 
 " What age would you take me to be, ma'am ? " 
 He sent a voice of pride and high spirits into the 
 wind. 
 
 Smiling, we refused to guess. 
 
 " Eighty- three, ma'am," he declared, with a 
 great tug at the oars — " eighty-three on my last 
 birthday." 
 
 " Good God ! " I thought to myself, as the 
 stern went deep in a wave and the wind whirled 
 the nose of the boat round towards the shore, 
 " and to an old man of eighty- three we have 
 entrusted our lives." 
 
 " I was nearly running in the pensioners' race 
 at the Sports on Monday," he bellowed, for the 
 wind made talking difficult, "but at the last minute 
 I turned back. Ah, I could have won it. But I 
 wasn't going to be laughed at ! " 
 
 The Irish sense of humour, in the decadence 
 of the last hundred years, seems to have found 
 something especially delightful in the grotesque- 
 ness of age. Possibly it is because there have been 
 such a disproportionate number of old people in 
 the country, and because in the very poorest and 
 most illiterate of them there is such a strain of 
 
KINSALE 207 
 
 wild individuality. Whatever may be the reason 
 of this mingling of humour with antiquity, these 
 old age pensioners' races have been a popular 
 feature during the last year or so at Irish Sports, 
 and there had been such a race at the bank 
 holiday sports in Kinsale. 
 
 Out in the bay coming in an opposite direction 
 to ourselves was a boat crowded with soldiers in 
 khaki. It seems to be a usual thing for the 
 soldiers to row part of the way to the practice- 
 ground instead of walking by the road. They 
 were making only the poorest progress in this 
 instance against the difficulties of wind and tide. 
 Half a dozen oars were out and half a dozen 
 soldiers were tugging at them. Each soldier, 
 however, seemed to be pulling in a different 
 direction. The oars were all up and down with 
 the irregularity of sticks in a melee at a fair. In 
 the result, the boat was proceeding now sideways, 
 now backways, every way indeed except directly 
 towards the cove we had just left. Now it 
 advanced like a crab with half its claws broken ; 
 now it went round and round like a dizzy hen. 
 The old sailor, with his eye sweeping over the sea, 
 watched the helplessness of the soldiers cheerfully. 
 
 " Ah," he commented, with a grin at their 
 uneven splashing, " you might as well have a lot 
 of pigs in a boat as them fellows ! " 
 
 As for ourselves we were going forward and with 
 a kind of straightness, but each swirl of the tide 
 
2o8 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 seemed to lift us sidewaj^s a considerable distance 
 towards the edge of the rocks. I watched those 
 rocks drawing nearer with an uneasy fascination, 
 and began to wonder whether even one of us 
 would be saved, or whether our infant child 
 would be left a complete orphan. Evidently the 
 old fellow read my thoughts, for he looked over, 
 scanning me closely, and said : " Well, if I was 
 asked my opinion whether you or the lady had 
 the most courage, I would award the prize to the 
 lady ! " 
 
 I admitted her superiority. 
 
 " An','' said the eighty-three-year-old, making 
 a general reflection, as the boat was lifted on a 
 windy wave another ten yards nearer destruction, 
 " them that hasn't the courage should stay on the 
 land. The fearless man will come through a 
 storm where the heartless man will be drownded." 
 
 The words had hardly been spoken when we 
 got into calmer water, and the old fellow was 
 soon pulling us along under the grey walls of Fort 
 Charles and round to the boat-slip that meant 
 home to us, and, before we knew, we were 
 clambering out of the swaying and pitching boat 
 and the sailor was staring at the coin which I had 
 given him as though it were excessive, which it 
 was not. 
 
 " Well," he said, with a chuckle, " asking's 
 getting. And the — ■ — " (naming our other 
 friends) " might have had ye, if they only had to 
 
KINSALE 209 
 
 have my spunk. Good-bye, ma'am. Good-bye, 
 sir. Thank ye. The blessing of God on you ! " 
 And with a twirl of his hat, he was down between 
 the oars again, and throwing himself back into 
 the wind, as vain as Alan Breck, as freckled as a 
 turkey egg, as merry as a midget, as heroic as any 
 one who ever went out and wrestled with Proteus 
 amid shifting and violent seas and overthrew him. 
 
 At Kinsale we spent but little time in wander- 
 ing over old historical places — the object but for 
 which we never should have visited this town by the 
 narrow waters at all. I had eagerly longed to go 
 to Kinsale ever since I read the story of the siege 
 of 1 60 1, when Don Juan del Aquila sailed up the 
 harbour with 3500 Spanish men-at-arms and held 
 the town " for Christ and the King of Spain." 
 
 This siege is one of the most maddening in- 
 cidents in Ireland's maddening history. Ireland 
 fell at Kinsale disastrously through a kind of 
 accident. It was after Kinsale that Red Hugh 
 O'Donnell, the flower of lovely courage and fire, 
 crossed to Spain, to be pursued by the assassin- 
 delegate of Sir George Carew, President of 
 Munster and friend of the great Cecil. " God 
 give him strength and perseverance," writes 
 Carew of the murderer to Mountjoy, Elizabeth's 
 Deputy. " I told him I would acquaint your 
 lordship with it." 
 
 It was Kinsale that dashed Hugh O'Neill, the 
 third soldier in Europe of his age, according to 
 14 ' . . 
 
2IO RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 Henri Quatre, so hard to the ground that, before 
 three j^ears were up, he was the chief figure in 
 the Flight of the Earls from RathmuUan in Lough 
 Swilly — that sea sorrow of which the Four 
 Masters so finely said : " It is certain that the 
 sea hath not borne, and the wind has not wafted 
 in modern times, a number of persons in one 
 ship more eminent, illustrious, and noble, in point 
 of genealogy, heroic deeds, feats of arms, and 
 valiant achievements, than they." 
 
 Ireland may be said to have perished at Kinsale 
 for a generation. And what offends one most is 
 that she had victory in her grasp, had Hugh 
 O'Neill had his way. The Spaniards were 
 besieged in the town, the English having captured 
 from them the castles of Rincorran on the east 
 of the bay and of Castle-na-Pairc, still surviving 
 in a fragment on the round little peninsula, on the 
 other side. Soon the English were themselves 
 besieged, for Red Hugh O'Donnell hastened 
 down from the north and sandwiched them in 
 between his army and the Spaniards and the 
 town. To keep them there, and let famine and 
 sickness do their work, was all that the Irish had 
 to do, as Hugh O'Neill saw, when he arrived with 
 fresh troops on the 21st of December. Already 
 6000 of the English had perished in the three 
 months of the siege, and, though Don Juan made 
 restive demands from within the town, O'Neill 
 was in favour of leaving it to General Hunger to 
 
KINSALE 211 
 
 finish the campaign. Unhappily, Red Hugh 
 O'Donnell, ever a glutton for action, took his 
 stand with Don Juan, and at a council of 
 the chiefs, O'Neill's Fabian policy was swept 
 aside. 
 
 On the night of January the 3rd, 1602, a pitchy 
 night of storm and rain, O'Neill set out with his 
 men to surprise the English forces and effect 
 a junction with del Aquila. Misled by their 
 guides, blinded and buffeted, they arrived at the 
 English lines, only to find them in battle order. 
 It is said that Brian MacMahon, an Ulsterman, 
 finding Carew courteous enough to send him a 
 bottle of whisky for which he had asked, was so 
 inflamed with gratitude that he returned him 
 warning of the attack that was in preparation. 
 Whether or not this part of the story is true, we 
 know that, on finding the surprise had failed, 
 O'Neill made to retire until O'Donnell and 
 Tyrrell joined him, and that, in the confusion, 
 helped by the storm and darkness, panic took 
 command. O'Neill put forth all his mighty 
 courage to rally his men, and O'Donnell and the 
 others, coming up later, fought like tigers to 
 retrieve the situation. But Mountjoy had seized 
 the key of the fight, and there was no recovering 
 it. Don Juan, who was a brave man, but had 
 little brains for fighting, surrendered, and became 
 a warm friend of Carew's. " Surely," was his 
 comment on the Irish whose national liberties 
 
212 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 his incapacity had thrown away — " surely Christ 
 never died for this people." 
 
 It would be ungenerous, however, not to be 
 grateful to all the decent Spaniardswho died round 
 the walls of Kinsale for Ireland. Some people 
 will, of course, contend that the war was a 
 religious war, and not a national war at all. 
 Fundamentally, however, it was not a war of 
 religions. The Earl of Clanrickarde was one of 
 the most insatiate of the Queen's soldiers, and 
 like many another of them was a good Catholic. 
 " He killed," says Dr. P. W. Joyce, " twenty men 
 with his own hand in the pursuit, and he gave 
 orders that all Irish prisoners should be killed 
 the moment they were taken." What a siege ! 
 What a battle ! What a (if the word is permissible) 
 mess-up ! 
 
 " It was a terrible business," said a young 
 Kinsale man in a shop to me one day ; " and it 
 seems to have put such a damper on the people 
 here that they have been depressed ever since." 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 CORK AND MALLOW 
 
 If you want to feel enthusiastic about Ireland, 
 
 you should go to Cork on a fine day. Even if 
 
 you go there as we did in a time of mixed sun and 
 
 thunder, you will scarcely find Cork other than 
 
 beautiful. Like Dublin and like Limerick, it 
 
 has escaped a great deal of the ugliness of the 
 
 modern world. Though it has its industries, 
 
 it is not offensively industrial. Patrick Street, 
 
 which is the heart of the city — a curved street 
 
 of excellent, low, stucco-fronted shops — has a 
 
 leisurely air, as though it possessed the custom of 
 
 people who were living on pensions and inherited 
 
 fortunes. Even the electric trams which swing 
 
 through the broad streets to places with names 
 
 like Blackpool and Tivoli are leisurely, and no 
 
 more think of hustling than would the dancers 
 
 in an old - fashioned minuet. Perhaps it is 
 
 because I was brought up in a tradition which 
 
 ignored when it did not actually disesteem the 
 
 south of Ireland, that cities like Cork and Limerick 
 
 and Kilkenny and towns like Mallow and Ennis- 
 
 313 
 
214 RAMBI.es in IRELAND 
 
 corthy now in their different ways perpetually 
 bring me something of the enthusiasm of un- 
 expected discoveries. Cork, a fair island-city 
 lying among rivers, with its patriotic statues, its 
 bridges, and the inside-cars, or jingles, that run 
 through its streets with something of the exotic 
 mystery of palanquins, may have very little to 
 show in its buildings that is lovely in detail, but 
 the general effect is certainly entrancing. 
 
 But Cork did not treat us fairly. It hid itself 
 under a deluge during a great part of the time 
 that we were there. Hardly had we arrived at 
 the top of a steep hill to look out over the city 
 on Sunday morning than a thundercloud began 
 pouring out its violence and its rain till we had to 
 hurry into a porch for safety. That is why I 
 saw Cork only in flying peeps. Indeed, the only 
 thing that remains to me of that vision from the 
 hill is the piebald church-tower in which peal the 
 bells of Shandon, half of it white and half of it 
 red, or, to quote the poetic description of it, 
 
 "Party-coloured, like the people, 
 Red and white stands Shandon steeple." 
 
 That is the chief curiosity in the landscape of 
 Cork. From what I could gather from a Corkman, 
 an even more striking curiosity of the city is its 
 pre-eminent brains. Cork is quite satisfied of this. 
 Corkmen do not argue the fact : they merely 
 explain it. They tell you that the province of 
 
CORK AND MALLOW 215 
 
 which Cork is the capital has never lost the 
 traditions of the old Irish culture — that even a 
 century ago the bards of Munster were producing 
 scholarly and human poetry. And, if you want 
 a more modern explanation than this, they will 
 attribute their intelligence to the influence of 
 the Christian Brothers' schools — excellent lay 
 institutions which have flourished especially well in 
 this county. Cork has unquestionably a reputation 
 for taste and intellect. One hears it asserted even 
 to-day that there is no quicker audience for the 
 drama to be found anywhere. It was said in 
 the eighteenth century that the god of music 
 seemed to have taken a stride from the Continent 
 over England to Ireland, and that in Cork " a 
 stranger is agreeably surprised to flnd in many 
 houses he enters Italic airs saluting his ears ; and 
 it has been observed that Corelli is a name in 
 more mouths than many of our lord-lieutenants." 
 Perhaps even to-day Corelli is a more popular 
 name in Cork mouths than the Lord-Lieutenant's. 
 But it is Corelli with a difference. 
 
 As you go through the streets of Cork in this 
 present century, you certainly see no signs of 
 that impassioned culture which amazed former 
 generations. Even outside the best book-shop in 
 the city — and it is a very fine Irish book-shop — 
 you will see a great display of coloured picture- 
 postcards with a gallery of colleens and pigs and 
 all the other pseudo-Irish paraphernalia. It is 
 
2i6 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 these and not the histories of Keating or the poems 
 of Owen Roe O'SuUivan that summon you to 
 attention. I have heard it said that it is not the 
 people of Cork who are to blame for the per- 
 vasiveness of these idiocies, but the multitude of 
 tourists who include Cork in their tour to Killarney. 
 I myself saw a tourist in the hotel where we 
 stayed addressing at least fifty of these pig 
 postcards during a wet hour in the afternoon. 
 What visitors to Ireland find to attract them in 
 these intolerable colleens with head on one side 
 and arms akimbo, who exchange fatuities about 
 kisses with turnip-faced young men in tail-coats, 
 is a mystery to the mere Irishman. Perhaps it 
 adds to one's sense of adventure to see the in- 
 habitants of a country in which one is travelling 
 as grotesque and as unlike one's own friends and 
 relations as possible. Or perhaps it is that the 
 average civilised man always prefers unreality to 
 reality — wish-wash to realism. Add to this the 
 fact that one likes to believe in the existence of 
 otherwise nice people who do not take regular 
 baths and who sleep in the same room with the 
 pigs. It is a kind of flattery to one's own efficient 
 self to believe that such persons are upon the 
 earth. . . . 
 
 It was the rains of Cork that prevented us from 
 seeing a championship hurling-match while we 
 were there. The Irish games have remained alive 
 in Munster more generally than in any of the 
 
nmoB 
 
CORK AND MALLOW 217 
 
 other provinces, and this was expected to be the 
 great match of the year, so it was something of a 
 misfortune for us that a deluge kept falling for 
 hours so that the game had to be put off. 
 
 We went out, instead, along the river promenade 
 which is called the Marina, opposite which rises 
 a wooded hill thickset with the houses of the rich 
 and respectable. But here a thunderstorm broke 
 out of the sky above us, and we hailed a ferry-boat 
 to take us over the low muddy river to the tram- 
 line on the other side. . . . 
 
 But, when I started out, I did not really intend 
 to see much of the big cities, I set far more 
 store by little places like Cong and Killorglin and 
 Kinsale than by capitals like Cork. And of the 
 small towns there was none to which I looked 
 forward more eagerly than Mallow. I wanted to 
 go there, not out of veneration for the memory of 
 the Rakes of Mallow, immortalised in the song, 
 but because the prophet of all that is best in 
 modern Ireland was born there almost a hundred 
 years ago. This was Thomas Davis. 
 
 I expected to find Mallow very conscious of its 
 glory in having given birth to so great a man. 
 Expected, but in vain. It has called one of its 
 streets after him, and the name of the street and 
 of William O'Brien Street, which is a continuation 
 of it, is up in Irish. But the waiter at the hotel 
 had never heard of him all the same. 
 
 I asked him where Davis's birthplace was, but 
 
2i8 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 he shook his old white whiskers, said that he did 
 not know the gentleman's name, and that he must 
 have lived in Mallow before his time. I asked an 
 old workman in the street, and he showed me a 
 renovated public-house and said it was there, but 
 the people of the public-house knew as little of 
 Davis as of Dionysius the Areopagite, and though 
 the landlady, with immense hospitality, sent out 
 to various gentlemen to find out what we wanted, 
 while she told us how Mallow had been ruined 
 by the coming of the railway, and discoursed 
 hostilely on Sir Horace Plunkett's co-operative 
 movement, we could get nothing from anybody 
 except opinions, opinions, and opinions. I am 
 not really fond of looking at houses where great 
 men were born, but Davis's birthplace is different. 
 I have enough veneration for Davis to be excited 
 by coming on the least trace or signature of him. 
 Even to be in Mallow, with its quaint old bay- 
 windowed houses, its ghost of an old spa, and its 
 air of having been left over from the coaching 
 days, was exciting, for had not Davis idled in 
 it as a boy ? Wild wind was blowing about the 
 streets — it blew our umbrella inside out — as we 
 prosecuted our search for the house, and pro- 
 secuted it in vain, though we called to our 
 assistance an innumerable host of inhabitants of 
 the place, from solicitors to stonebreakers. The 
 stonebreaker knew where a Miss Davis lived just 
 outside the town, but knew nothing of Thomas ; 
 
CORK AND MALLOW 219 
 
 he guessed he must be some relative of Miss 
 Davis's. 
 
 As a good many readers may be almost as 
 ignorant of the great Irishman as the people 
 of Mallow were, it may be as well to record a few 
 of the facts of his life. Born here on the 14th 
 of October 1814, the son of a surgeon in the 
 English army, he grew up especially proud of 
 two things — one, that his father was in some sort 
 a soldier ; and the second, that his mother, Mary 
 Atkins, had in her veins the blood of the house of 
 O'Sullivan Beare. Soldierly as Davis ultimately 
 was, and proudly Irish as he became in every fibre 
 of his body, however, it is difficult to say at what 
 period in his life he grew to be like the Davis of 
 history. We are told that in his childhood he 
 was delicate, that at school he had no taste for 
 the boisterousness and games of those around him, 
 and Sir Charles Gavan Duffy quotes one of 
 Davis's relations as saying that " when he had 
 grown up, if you asked him the day of the month, 
 the odds were he could not tell you. He never 
 was any good at handball or hurling, and knew no 
 more than a fool how to take care of the little 
 money his father left him. He saw him more 
 than once in tears listening to a common country 
 fellow playing old airs on a fiddle, or sitting in a 
 drawing-room as if he were in a dream, when 
 other young people were enjoying themselves." 
 At Trinity College he seems to have been for a 
 
220 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 long time a silent and undistinguished student, 
 whom the most brilliant among his contemporaries 
 regarded with a touch of patronage as a rather 
 dull person. It was at Trinity, however, that 
 he met Wallis, the talker, the arm-chair philo- 
 sopher, the " Professor," as he called himself, 
 " of things in general and Patriotism in par- 
 ticular." Wallis himself never did anything of 
 great note in the world — he would be despised 
 by most people, indeed, as a mere talker, like 
 Turgenieif's Rudin — but he apparently served 
 his purpose in life by showing Davis the way. 
 Davis's soul, one imagines, was dimly seeking after 
 Nationalism from a very early age. His tears 
 while he listened to the old country fiddler and 
 the emotions of which he sings in " A Nation 
 Once Again " go to prove this. But Wallis, no 
 doubt, helped him to realise himself, his destiny, 
 and his duty to the Irish nation. " I loosed," 
 said Wallis, with, perhaps, an exaggerated egotism, 
 " the tenacious phlegm that clogged Davis's 
 nature and hid his powers from himself and the 
 world." 
 
 To us one of the most interesting facts about 
 Davis as a student is that he left College a lover 
 of liberty and a lover of Ireland, though his love 
 of liberty and love of Ireland had not as yet been 
 fused into a passionate Nationalism. He was as 
 yet a Liberal, and his first-published work was a 
 pamphlet attacking the British House of Lords, 
 
CORK AND MALLOW 221 
 
 and proposing, not its abolition, but its reform. 
 It was three years later than this, in 1 840, that his 
 Presidential address to the Historical Society- 
 made his friends and contemporaries realise for 
 the first time that they had in Davis a comrade of 
 strange passions and a strange philosophy — the 
 passions and the philosophy of a patriot. In 
 unselfish patriotism alone, he warned his hearers 
 in this address, lay the only means of making 
 democracy a blessing and not a curse to the world. 
 " On the shore of democracy," he said, " is a 
 monstrous danger ; no phantom is it, but alas ! 
 too real — the violence and forwardness of selfish 
 men, regardful only of physical comfort, ready to 
 sacrifice to it all sentiments — the generous, the 
 pious, the just (victims in their order), — till 
 general corruption, anarchy, despotism, and moral 
 darkness shall rebarbarise the earth." Education 
 — education of the heart as well as the intellect — 
 was the road he pointed out towards the service 
 of one's country, as well as to the annihilation of a 
 selfish materialism. 
 
 It was in the next year, when he was nearly 
 twenty-seven, after having contributed various 
 patriotic papers to the press, that he made his 
 well-known defence on purely national grounds of 
 the bigoted and backward Royal Dublin Society 
 against the British Government. 
 
 At this time, he and his friend Dillon were full of 
 schemes for the revival of the spirit of Nationality 
 
222 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 among Protestants, both Whig and Tory, and they 
 were lucky enough to persuade the proprietor of 
 the Morning Register to give them control of 
 his paper for a limited period, in order to prove 
 w^hether or not there was a public to listen to their 
 sanguine theories. The experiment was a failure. 
 The circulation went down instead of up. The 
 year is memorable, however, because in it Davis 
 definitely attached himself to the national and 
 popular cause, and became a member of the 
 Repeal Association. It is memorable, too, because 
 in it Davis first met Duffy, and thus began a 
 friendship and union which was to give Ireland 
 The Nation, the greatest national journal it has 
 ever known — to give Ireland more than this, a 
 new national soul. Not that Duffy immediately 
 warmed to Davis. He tells us frankly in his 
 Life in Two Hemispheres, that he was more 
 pleased with Dillon at first. Davis, he says, 
 " was able and manifestly sincere ; but at first 
 sight I thought him dogmatic and self-conceited 
 — a strangely unjust estimate, as it proved in the 
 end." This is only one of the several proofs 
 that Davis, for all the fascination and enthusiasm 
 of his nature, did not charm every one or make 
 them all fall in love with him at first sight, as 
 Nationalists are sometimes inclined to picture 
 him as doing. His were the deep and gener- 
 ous qualities which do not necessarily attract 
 immediately. 
 
CORK AND MALLOW 223 
 
 With the first number of The Nation, published 
 in October 1843, began a new life for Davis. 
 From this till the proclamation of the Clontarf 
 meeting, a year later, was the period of his most 
 unbounded enthusiasms and his highest hopes. 
 Seeing O'Connell's tremendous influence among 
 the people, seeing how disciplined the nation 
 showed itself in its magnificent temperance 
 crusade under Father Mathew, amazed and 
 delighted hj those large meetings where something 
 like a million Irishmen could meet and disperse 
 in perfect dignity and order, rejoiced not only by 
 the adhesion of the Catholic Bishops and of many 
 of the educated Protestants, but by the belief 
 that the " Protestants of the lower order," to 
 use his own phrase, were now neutral, he saw 
 Ireland in his imagination preparing for another 
 1782. Davis has been called "the saint of Irish 
 Nationality." This is true, but it is only a half- 
 truth. He was also the soldier-statesman of 
 Nationality. One is constantly struck, in reading 
 his poems and letters, with the thought how 
 capable he was of becoming the Washington of 
 Ireland. " I am for the sharper remedies," he 
 wrote in one of his letters to a friend, though he 
 went in for no foolish worship of bloodshed. 
 His attitude to the Federalists is worth recalling 
 in these days when talk of Federalism is again in 
 the air. He believed that England would yield a 
 measure of self-government to O'Connell in com- 
 
224 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 bination with the Federalists, as she had yielded an 
 independent Parliament to the Volunteers. This 
 was his deepest hope, and for this purpose he 
 desired to see the Federalists growing into a 
 strong party, holding that no party which be- 
 lieved in the nation, however limited their 
 conception of nationality, could be anything but 
 a blessing to Ireland. He wrote to Maddyn : 
 " If you can quietly get a Federal Government, I 
 shall, for one, agree to and support it. If not, 
 then anything but what we are." 
 
 During all this time we find him pressing 
 forward the necessity of making Ireland's cause 
 known before the world, and cementing friend- 
 ships with France and America, and trying to win 
 Taifs Magazine, an organ of British Radicalism, 
 to the Irish cause. During this year, inatod, 
 as ever, we find Davis acting both as a great 
 fighting man and a great conciliator — a com- 
 bination which we reverence in Mazzini, in 
 Abraham Lincoln, and in most of the noblest 
 figures in history. Even in his most enthusiastic 
 moods, however, he was always returning to the 
 thought which inspired his address to the His- 
 torical Society — that to patriotism must be added 
 education before the greatest things can be 
 accomplished. At the same time, it is probable 
 he was not more disturbed by the low state of 
 education in the country than by the vacillating 
 policy of the national leader, Daniel O'Connell. 
 
CORK AND MALLOW 225 
 
 When it was suggested, for instance, that a Council 
 of Three Hundred should meet in Dublin as a 
 ^e facto Irish Parliament, Davis, who had been 
 going here and there in the south to discuss the 
 matter with representative men, wrote to Duffy : 
 " If O'Connell would prearrange, or allow others 
 to prearrange, a decided policy, I would look 
 confidently to the Three Hundred as bringing 
 the matter to an issue in the best way. As it is, 
 we must try and hit on some medium. We must 
 not postpone it till Parliament meets, for the 
 Three Hundred will not be a sufficiently fine 
 or brilliant thing to shine down St. Stephen's and 
 defy its coercion. Yet we must not push it too 
 quickly, as the country as far as I can see is not 
 braced up to any emergency. Ours is a tremendous 
 responsibility, politically and personally, and we 
 must see where we are going." This letter, I 
 think, is significant of many things in the politics 
 of Davis. It shows him ready and even eager for 
 action himself ; at once questioning the wisdom 
 of O'Connell and recognising the fact that unless 
 they were ready to work with O'Connell, with all 
 his limitations. Nationalists had no prospect of 
 succeeding in their cause ; clearly perceiving the 
 great need for education among the people, 
 but determined to do with them the utmost that 
 circumstances would allow. 
 
 There is no need to go into the mere chronology 
 of Davis's biography. His true biography is, after 
 15 
 
226 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 all, the story of his thought and spirit. So I will 
 not take up space in reviewing his attitude to 
 O'Connell's acquiescence in the prohibition of the 
 Clontarf meeting, or the events leading up to 
 his differences with O'Connell over the Queen's 
 Colleges two years after. It is only necessary to 
 say that during all this time his insistence upon 
 the need of a national system of education kept 
 growing stronger, his plans for furthering educa- 
 tion became more detailed, and many of them 
 were put in practice. It was his educational en- 
 thusiasm that impelled him more than once to 
 make the attempt to withdraw from political 
 journalism for a short time in order to write an 
 Irish history ; and it was only the eager entreaties 
 of his friends, who realised that this would be the 
 work not of months but of years, which kept 
 him to his task at the Nation office. " Beside a 
 library," he exclaims in one place, " how poor are 
 all the other greatest deeds of man — his con- 
 stitution, brigade, factory, man-of-war, cathedral 
 — how poor are all miracles in comparison ! " 
 Knowledge, he held, was the key to national 
 force, and it was the ambition of his life to add 
 to the knowledge of Ireland — a knowledge which, 
 he believed, would bring the best gifts of freedom 
 in its train. 
 
 Again and again he projected the establishment 
 of a monthly magazine in the pages of which it 
 would be possible to make a fuller and more 
 
CORK AND MALLOW 227 
 
 intellectual appeal to the thoughtful classes than 
 was possible in the columns of a weekly paper. 
 His purpose, through all his later life, one might 
 say, was to make the intellect of the country 
 national, and to make the nationalism of the 
 country intellectual. Education, he held, was a 
 necessary part of even the most active policy, as 
 may be seen in a letter he wrote to Maddyn, 
 when the latter had introduced a character- 
 sketch of him into one of his books. " I am," 
 wrote Davis, " but one of many, as resolved as a 
 river is to descend, to lift the English rule from oif 
 Ireland, and give our country a career of action 
 and thought. For this purpose much action 
 and thought through a series of years must be 
 used by us. Action, even in a military sense, is 
 not mere cutting, firing, and even charging. 
 Organisation, education, leadership, obedience, 
 union, are all action too — the best and most 
 mature action in some cases — in ours, I think, 
 for instance. There is as much action in the depot 
 as in the service companies, as any soldier can tell 
 you." His passion for education led him to 
 welcome both the National Schools and the 
 Queen's Colleges, though he welcomed them 
 critically. The National Schools, he said, " are 
 very good as far as they go, and the children should 
 be sent to them ; but they are not national, 
 they do not use the Irish language, nor teach 
 anything peculiarly Irish." Consequently, he 
 
228 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 advised that " until the National Schools fall 
 under national control, the people must take 
 diligent care to procure books on the history, 
 men, language, music, and manners of Ireland 
 for their children." Had Davis's advice been 
 taken by the people of Ireland, these schools 
 might have become an enormous blessing to 
 Ireland instead of, as they have been, a three- 
 parts curse. His attitude on the Queen's Colleges 
 was equally sane. He saw clearly that they must 
 be modified so as to get rid of the objections of 
 the Catholic Bishops to them that they were 
 " godless " colleges. But he strongly differed 
 from the uncompromising attitude of John 
 Mitchel, who tells us in The Last Conquest of 
 Ireland {Perhafs), that he detested the Colleges 
 as much as the Archbishop of Tuam, but for a 
 different reason — not that they were " godless," 
 but that they were British. Davis, however, saw 
 that it would be possible to alter the constitution 
 of the Colleges, so that they would neither be 
 necessarily " godless " (in the Bishops' meaning 
 of the word) nor British. The prospect of a 
 popular university, says Duffy, was to him " like 
 the unhoped-for realisation of a dream. To 
 educate the young men of the middle class and of 
 both races, and to educate them together, that 
 prejudice and bigotry might be killed in the end, 
 was one of the projects nearest to his heart. It 
 would strengthen the soul of Ireland with 
 
CORK AND MALLOW 229 
 
 knowledge, he said, and knit the creeds in liberal 
 and trusting friendship. He threw all the vigour 
 of his nature into the task of getting this measure 
 unanimously and thankfully accepted." He even 
 prepared a petition from the more influential 
 citizens of Dublin, asking for amendments in the 
 Bill establishing the new Colleges. In regard to 
 the Queen's Colleges, as in regard to the National 
 Schools, Davis's attitude was surely in the main 
 right. The Irish nation might in both cases 
 have done much more than it did to get control of 
 such instruments for instructing the young in 
 the broad truths which underlie Nationality and 
 the life of a free people. 
 
 Davis believed not only in using every single 
 educational institution, however imperfect, which 
 the British Government could be got to pay for 
 out of the Irish taxes, but in doing everything 
 possible to put knowledge within the reach of 
 everybody in Ireland, of whatever rank or age. 
 " Knowledge and organisation," he wrote in an 
 article in favour of Repeal Reading - Rooms, 
 " must set Ireland free and make her prosperous. 
 If the people be not wise and manageable, they 
 cannot gain liberty but by accident, nor use it 
 to their service. An ignorant and turbulent 
 race may break away from provincialism, but 
 will soon relapse beneath a cunning, skilful, and 
 unscrupulous neighbour. England is the one — 
 Ireland must not be the other. If she is to be 
 
230 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 self-freed, if she is not to be a retaken slave, she 
 must acquire all the faculties possessed by her 
 enemy, without the vices of that foe. We have 
 to defeat an old and compact government. We 
 must acquire the perfect structure of a nation. 
 We have to resist genius, skill, and immense 
 resources ; we must have wisdom, knowledge, 
 and ceaseless industry." Hence it was the duty 
 of Repealers never to pause in their labours until 
 there was " a reading-room in every village." In 
 the same article Davis goes on to remark upon the 
 national backwardness in literature and military 
 knowledge, and on the general industrial ignor- 
 ance which is " the leading economical difference 
 between England and Ireland " ; and he then 
 says : " We are not afraid of all those things, nor 
 do we wish to mufHe our eyes against them. 
 We want a brave, modest, laborious, and instructed 
 people. It is deeper pleasure to serve and glory 
 to lead such a people. It is a still deeper pleasure 
 and honour to lead a race full of virtue and 
 industry and a thirst for knowledge. But for a 
 swaggering people who shout for him who flatters 
 them, and turn from those who would lead them 
 by plain, manful truth — who shall save them ? " 
 Davis, it will be seen, was neither a foolish 
 optimist nor a foolish pessimist. He was willing 
 to recognise every dismal and depressing fact in 
 the Ireland of his day, as well as all the cheerful 
 ones, but he was one of those inspired men who 
 
CORK AND MALLOW 231 
 
 know that the human soul is greater than a world 
 of temporar}^ facts — that, granted a sufficiency 
 of souls inspired hy the same high courage as he 
 felt in his own breast, nothing could withstand 
 them. Courage, knowledge, discipline — these 
 were the three main lessons which he taught to 
 his fellow-countrj^men. His soldierly instincts 
 told him that without discipline success was 
 impossible in anything. 
 
 His hatred of indiscipline surpassed that of any 
 national leader we have ever had. He saw that 
 noisy indiscipline was one of the vices of which 
 as a nation we had to get rid, and he detested it 
 and denounced it even when it took the shape of 
 rowdiness on behalf of national things. It was 
 his scorn of indiscipline that made him at one 
 period call to order those " scolding mobs " 
 which met in the present O'Connell Street in 
 Dublin every evening to hoot the foreign-made 
 mail coaches which had taken the place of the 
 old Irish-made vehicles. Davis attacked the 
 giving of the coach contracts out of Ireland, but, 
 when once the mischief was done, he had no 
 patience with those who would go out merely to 
 create a disturbance without the least hope or 
 idea of undoing the evil. " ' I hate little wars,' 
 said Wellington," he wrote in reference to these 
 scolding mobs. " So do we ; and we hate still 
 more a petty mob meeting without purpose, and 
 dispersing without success. Perfect order, silence, 
 
232 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 obedience, alacrity, and courage make an as- 
 semblage formidable and respectable. We want 
 law and order — we are seriously injured hy every 
 scene or act of violence, no matter how transient. 
 Let us have no more of this humbug. If we are 
 determined men we have enough to learn and 
 to do without wasting our time in hissing and 
 groaning coaches." 
 
 It was his hatred of indiscipline — indiscipline in 
 the form of carelessness about the truth — which 
 inspired his defence of the Duke of Wellington 
 against the belittlements of O'Connell. " In 
 reference to popular faults," he wrote, " we 
 cannot help saying a word on the language applied 
 to certain of the enemy's leaders, especially the 
 Duke of Wellington. We dislike the whole 
 system of false disparagement. The Irish people 
 will never be led to act the manly part which 
 liberty requires of them by being told that 
 [the Duke], that gallant soldier and most able 
 general, is a screaming coward and doting corporal. 
 We have grave and solemn work to do. Making 
 light of it or of our enemies might inspire a 
 moment's overweening confidence, but would 
 ensure ultimate defeat. We have much to con- 
 tend against ; but our resources are immense, 
 and nothing but our own rashness or cowardice 
 can defeat us." 
 
 Davis could hate the English Government of 
 Ireland, and yet give credit to Englishmen or 
 
CORK AND MALLOW 233 
 
 Hiberno-Englishmen for such virtues as they 
 possessed. He always made it clear that the 
 quarrel of Irish Nationalism was with the Eng- 
 lish Empire, not with the English people — with 
 England as a tyrant, not with this or that English 
 person as a human being. He could hate wrong : 
 he saw too deep ever to hate humanity. That is 
 why he neither underrated the English nor wished 
 to belong to their Empire. " Is Ireland to share 
 in the criminal profits of the Empire ? " he 
 demanded. " Are the Irish people so forgetful of 
 the common cause which binds them to the 
 Indian and American as to give their flexible 
 genius, their valour, and their passions, to 
 holding down the subject races — regardless too 
 of the crimes against themselves of the partner of 
 such a career ? We repeat, again and again, we 
 have no malice against — no hatred of the English. 
 For much that England did in literature, politics, 
 and war, we are, as men, grateful. Her op- 
 pressions we would not even avenge. We would, 
 were she eternally dethroned from over us, 
 rejoice in her prosperity ; but we cannot, and 
 will not, try to forget her long, cursing, merciless 
 tyranny to Ireland ; and we do not desire to 
 share her gains, her responsibility, or her glories." 
 We find the same clear refusal to be either pro- 
 Imperial or anti-English in another passage of 
 his writings which runs : " It is not a gambling 
 fortune made at imperial play Ireland wants : 
 
234 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 it is the pious and stern cultivation of her faculties 
 and virtues, the acquisition of faithful and 
 exact habits, and the self-respect that rewards 
 a dutiful and sincere life. To get her peasants 
 into snug homesteads with well-tilled fields and 
 placid hearths ; to develop the ingenuity of the 
 artists, and the docile industry of her artisans ; 
 to make for her own instruction a literature 
 wherein our climate, history, and passions shall 
 breathe ; and to gain conscious strength and 
 integrity, and the high post of holy freedom : 
 these are Ireland's wants. These she will not 
 sacrifice to pursue the chance of being allowed a 
 third or half even of the offices, profligacy, and 
 oppression of the British Empire. Peace with 
 England — alliance with England — to some extent, 
 and under certain circumstances, confederation 
 with England ; but an Irish ambition — Irish 
 hopes, strength, virtues, and rewards for the 
 Irish." 
 
 To Davis, with his high ideas of virtue and 
 discipline, outrages were abhorrent as a method 
 of attaining one's ends. How clean-handed he 
 would always have kept the people in their 
 struggle for their rights may be seen in his 
 denunciation of the Munster agrarian outrages. 
 Davis never could be got to idealise the man who 
 shot his fellow-man — even if the fellow-man were 
 a landlord — as a national hero. It is one thing 
 to acknowledge that agrarian crime is often the 
 
CORK AND MALLOW 235 
 
 crime of a brave and generous man who has been 
 goaded into it by injustice and oppression. It is 
 another thing to argue that the crime is really a 
 virtue to be praised and imitated. Davis was not 
 the man to go murdering landlords or bailiffs 
 himself. This being so, he would not advise other 
 people to do it. There is, of course, a good deal 
 to be said on both sides in regard to political 
 crime. I doubt, however, if the national soul 
 of Ireland has really gained from all the long 
 generations of political crime which are commonly 
 supposed to have disestablished the Episcopalian 
 Church and brought about the Land Acts. I 
 do not, of course, include an incident like the 
 Manchester rescue among political crimes ; the 
 Phoenix Park murders, on the other hand, are the 
 sort of crime which a school of Nationalists 
 educated in the lofty principles of Davis could only 
 commit if they were driven temporarily mad. 
 
 Crime separates men and makes them sus- 
 picious of each other. Virtue, if it is not too 
 much mixed with self-righteousness, unites and 
 conciliates. Conciliation itself is a virtue, as 
 Davis said, and not always the easiest to practise. 
 Longing for union among all classes, he preached 
 conciliation as " a fixed and everlasting duty, 
 independently of the political results it might 
 have." " If Irishmen were united," he writes, 
 *' the Repeal of the Union would be instantly and 
 quietly granted." So conciliatory was Davis that 
 
236 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 Duffy contends that " he set an undue value . . . 
 on mere social sympathy and the dilettante 
 nationality which grew enthusiastic over the 
 Cross of Cong or a Jacobite song of the later bards, 
 but was indifferent to the present sufferings and 
 hopes of the people." Davis, however, realised 
 that it is often on the dry-as-dust industry of 
 these antiquaries that the truths of history must 
 be built. 
 
 This is not meant to be a complete and balanced 
 estimate of Davis. It is only a scattered reminder 
 to those who are interested in Irish Nationalism 
 of how many-sided, how heroic, how unbending, 
 was Davis's national philosophy. Davis did not 
 believe in any short cut to Nationhood. He saw 
 that nations were built from within — that they 
 were the results of faith, of vision, and labour. 
 He had an enthusiastic battlefield imagination 
 which would have made him glad to die fighting 
 for Ireland, or indeed, as one of his songs says, 
 " for any good cause at all " ; but he did not 
 love fighting for fighting's sake. Righteousness 
 and liberty were his passions. He was not, more- 
 over, one of those who care for liberty only in 
 their own country, thus making Ireland little 
 better than a province or a parish. His belief 
 in liberty was of a religious quality. Therefore 
 he longed for its coming all the world over. His 
 " Ballad of Freedom " is not great poetry, but 
 it expresses a great spirit : — 
 
CORK AND MALLOW 237 
 
 " Russia preys on Poland's fields, where Sobieski reigned ; 
 And Austria on Italy — the Roman eagle chained — 
 Bohemia, Servia, Hungary, within her clutches gasp ; 
 And Ireland struggles gallantly in England's loosening 
 
 grasp ; 
 Oh ! would all these their strength unite, or battle on alone, 
 Like Moor, Pushtani, and Cherkess, they soon would have 
 
 their own. 
 Hurrah ! hurrah ! it can't be far, when from the Scinde 
 
 to Shannon 
 Shall gleam a line of freemen's flags begirt with freemen's 
 cannon ! 
 The coming day of Freedom — the flashing flags of 
 Freedom 
 The victor glaive — 
 The mottoes brave. 
 May we be there to read them ! 
 That glorious noon, 
 God send it soon — 
 Hurrah ! for human freedom ! " 
 
 Davis's gospel — ^his gospel of righteousness and 
 liberty — was true for Ireland because it was true 
 for the world. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 CASHEL OF THE KINGS 
 
 The train approached Cashel in the light of a 
 misty moon. Suddenly, as we looked out of the 
 window over the monotonous level of the fields, 
 a miracle happened before our eyes, and a castle 
 in elfland rose out of the air. It silenced one like 
 a revelation ; it was as though we had burst into 
 a new world. As the train curved round into 
 the station, we were like passengers on a ship 
 arriving in harbour in some country of the 
 imagination. Here, after long expectation, was 
 the Rock of Cashel, the most memorable height in 
 southern Ireland — the rock upon which the floods 
 of slaughter and foreign war broke through the 
 centuries, and which is now desolate in the plain, 
 a rock left behind by the tide. 
 
 Cashel is still a retreat of that spirit of lone- 
 liness which was abroad in these parts of Ireland 
 in the devastating days of Elizabeth, when the 
 Four Masters wrote that " the lowing of a cow or 
 the voice of a ploughman could scarcely be heard 
 from Dunqueen in the west of Kerry to Cashel," 
 
CASHEL OF THE KINGS 239 
 
 Since then, the cows have come back into the 
 fields, though the ploughman has not. But 
 Cashel still seems to be dazed from the shock of 
 so vast a silence. 
 
 The next day was Sunday, and we were eager 
 to be out and to see whether there was any reality 
 in the vision of the night before. I had got it 
 into my head somehow or other that a part of 
 the ruin on the rock was still, in the beautiful 
 everyday phrase, a place of worship, and served 
 as a Protestant cathedral. Consequently, I was 
 looking forward — resignedly, perhaps, rather than 
 hopefully — to spending my morning on the rock 
 like an orthodox churchman. When I went into 
 the low breakfast-room in the hotel, decorated as 
 nearly all such rooms are with photographs of 
 the proprietor's relatives and with cheap repro- 
 ductions of meaningless landscape paintings, I 
 found an old white-bearded gentleman who 
 looked like a Hebrew prophet at the table, and, 
 supposing him to be still more of an orthodox 
 churchman than myself, I asked him at what 
 time the service in the Cathedral began. 
 
 " I don't know," he said — a little shortly, I 
 thought — as he lowered his beard towards his 
 egg. He filled his mouth with egg, and wiped a 
 corner of his moustache suddenly with his napkin. 
 " I don't know anything about it," he repeated. 
 
 " I must ask the girl when she comes up," I 
 said. 
 
240 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 He wiped his mouth again. 
 
 " I have no interest in any of the churches," he 
 declared, looking straight before him, " Catholic 
 or Protestant. I haven't been inside a church at 
 service-time for between fifty and sixty years, 
 and I don't expect ever to be in one again." 
 
 That sounded uncompromising. He looked 
 more and more like a Hebrew prophet as he 
 warmed to his speech. Narrow-eyed, Roman- 
 nosed, with bushy white eyebrows, he had a 
 lean old face not unlike General Booth's. He 
 had not General Booth's inches, however ; he 
 was a small man. 
 
 " No," he continued, a steely look in his eyes ; 
 " I was brought up in a strict Methodist house, 
 where we were taught that God would send us to 
 hell if we went for a walk through the fields on a 
 Sunday, and that our Roman Catholic neighbours 
 were so infernally wicked that He would send them 
 to hell whether they went walking in the fields 
 on Sunday or not. That's the kind of house I 
 grew up in. It was all punishment, punishment, 
 punishment. God was the great punisher. Ac- 
 cording to the Bible, God was love, but there was 
 nothing to show it. It was worse than being in a 
 reformatory. At last I could endure it no longer. 
 I ran away. I was a boy of seventeen then. I 
 got as far as Queenstown, and there I hid myself 
 away in a boat for America, and didn't show my 
 nose on deck till we were a good many miles out 
 
CASHEL OF THE KINGS 241 
 
 in the Atlantic. And when I landed in New 
 York, do you know what I did ? I just got into 
 the country and walked right ahead for five days. 
 I had no money, but I felt so free that every step 
 I took seemed like dancing. It was the first time 
 I had ever known what happiness was. I could 
 have gone on for ever. Those were the happiest 
 days of my life. At last I got some work to do on 
 
 a farm near a place called , and after that I 
 
 got a post in a school. And I've never regretted 
 it. I can worship God still, but not in a church. 
 There's more religion to me," he said pugnaciously, 
 " in a cow chewing her cud in a field than in 
 all the churches of Ireland. But there " — and he 
 raised his hand deprecatingly — " every man has 
 a right to his opinion, and, if anybody feels the 
 better of an hour spent in church, I'd be 
 sorry to interfere with him. But I'm blowed if 
 I'll go myself " — and he laughed cunningly into his 
 napkin — " unless they drag me there in a coffin 
 after I'm dead. And that will be against my 
 will." 
 
 I told him I thought he would find less severity 
 among Irish Protestants than he used to do. 
 
 " I don't know," he said, unwilling to give them 
 any virtues. " I think they're just as bad as 
 
 ever. I spent my holiday two years ago in , 
 
 in the County Cork, and one day, when I was out 
 painting in a field, a parson comes up to me and 
 says, ' Have you been here long ? I didn't see 
 16 
 
242 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 you at church on Sunday, did I ? ' ' No,' said 
 I, ' I'm too old, far too old, for that sort of thing.' 
 Fancy that now ! Just because he was a parson, 
 he actually thought he had the right to question 
 me about my movements and to interfere with 
 the way I wanted to spend my Sunday. They're 
 just a lot of officious bigots — that's what the clergy 
 are so far as I have met them. I don't like the 
 breed." 
 
 I expressed surprise that he should have come 
 back to a country with which he had so many 
 unpleasant associations. 
 
 " You might think so," he admitted. " It may 
 be partly that the country has a tug on any one 
 who was born in it. And then, I'm a painter. 
 If you were a painter — and you may be for all 
 that I know — you would never wonder what 
 brings any one back to Ireland. The clouds — 
 perhaps you hate clouds and rain, but they're 
 meat and drink to me. Every alternate year 
 I come over and hide myself in some quiet part of 
 Ireland, like Cashel, for the summer, and it's my 
 notion of a well-spent day to get away out after 
 breakfast with my stool and paint-box and to 
 forget myself among birds — you have birds in 
 Ireland — and clouds and flowers till I can't see 
 to paint any more. I'm an old man, as old as I 
 look, and my beard's white, as you see, and I'm 
 rheumatic and dyspeptic and all sorts of things — 
 I've had a feeling of a red-hot poker in my chest 
 
CASHEL OF THE KINGS 243 
 
 since I overate last night of that soda-bread on 
 the plate in front of you — but I forget all that 
 when I get out into the Irish light. But, if you 
 listen any more, you'll be late for the Cathedral. 
 Well, I'll go and see about my box, and try to lose 
 myself out in the country ; and I hope you'll 
 enjoy your service as much as I will mine." 
 
 After listening to the old gentleman, I felt 
 rather as if I had had the sermon already. And 
 indeed it was not in our destiny to hear any other 
 sermon that day. We learned from the maid that 
 the Cathedral had no connection whatever with 
 the rock, and that the rock was ancient ruins 
 and nothing else, and no holy songs rising from it 
 any more. So, as there was no service on the 
 rock, we had no service at all. 
 
 The Rock of Cashel is one of the most un- 
 expected things in Ireland. There is no excuse 
 for this wonderful pile rising out of such a 
 poor little town as Cashel, and there is no logic 
 in the appearance of three hundred feet of rock 
 in the middle of an immense flat plain. Naturally 
 there is a reason in folklore for it. The devil, 
 who has had so widespread an influence on the 
 geography of Christian countries, was one day 
 pursuing an enemy across the County Tipperary, 
 when, feeling hungry, he took a great bite out of 
 the hills to the north of Cashel. But, feeling even 
 more angry than hungry, instead of swallowing 
 it, he spat the piece out after the runaway, and 
 
244 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 it still lies where it fell, the world-famous Rock of 
 Cashel. Standing on the rock, you can still see 
 the mighty tooth-notches in the hills, and there 
 is no better known landmark than the Devil's 
 Bit in the County Tipperary. However the huge 
 crag may have come there, it must have suggested 
 itself as a suitable place to fortify as soon as man 
 had escaped from the Golden Age into militarism. 
 It is said that a King of Munster was led by the 
 dream of two swine-herds, who saw an angel 
 blessing the rock, to build a fort on it in the fifth 
 century ; but the dream seems unnecessary. In 
 any case, there was apparently some kind of royal 
 residence on the spot by the middle of the fifth 
 century, when St. Patrick arrived there in the 
 course of his extraordinary bloodless mission 
 through Ireland. It was here that St. Patrick 
 converted King Angus, and it is in his sermon to 
 the King and his people that he is said to have 
 chosen the three-leaved shamrock as a symbol of 
 the Trinity. His conversion and baptism of the 
 King are also memorable as having given an 
 occasion for a fine act of stoical endurance on the 
 part of the new convert. During the baptismal 
 ceremony, Patrick struck his crozier into the 
 ground, not seeing that, in doing so, he was 
 impaling the King's foot. The King said nothing, 
 and the ceremony went on till the end, when 
 Patrick saw blood flowing on the ground and 
 realised what he had done. Questioned as to his 
 
CASHEL OF THE KINGS 245 
 
 reason for not speaking about the accident, the 
 King innocently declared that he had thought 
 it was part of the ceremony, symbolic of the 
 sufferings of the Cross. This crozier of the saint, 
 by the way, was reputed to be a staff that had once 
 belonged to Jesus, and Pope Celestine had given 
 it to Patrick to support him in his mission in 
 Ireland. Naturally, so popish a relic stood a 
 poor chance amid the futurism of the Reforma- 
 tion, when it was destroyed — one hopes not out 
 of malice. 
 
 Even to-day the Rock of Cashel is inhabited by 
 the visible memories of all these things. As soon 
 as the Board of Works caretaker unlocks the gate 
 for you, and you go inside the walls, you see an old 
 weather-worn cross standing on an old weather- 
 worn stone. On one side of the cross is an epis- 
 copal figure, said to be St. Patrick himself, and 
 on the other is a crucified Christ fully clothed, 
 as one is told was the rule in early carvings. It 
 was on the stone which is now the pedestal of 
 the cross that Angus and the Kings of Munster 
 of his time were crowned. Possibly, the great 
 slab that lies on the ground beside it also links us 
 with very ancient times : it is said to have been 
 a Druid altar. 
 
 But the glory of Cashel does not consist in its 
 associations with the Druids or with St. Patrick or 
 with stoical kings. One thinks of it with especial 
 affection because it is one of the undestroyed 
 
246 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 monuments of the civilisation that was taking 
 shape in Ireland before the Norman invasion. 
 In another hundred years — perhaps even in 
 another fifty years — there will be no need to 
 emphasise the fact that Irish civilisation was a 
 real and living thing before ever a Norman, or 
 whatever you like to call him, set foot in it. It 
 is still necessary, however, to remind ordinary 
 readers that pre-Norman Ireland possessed a 
 literature, an ecclesiastical art, and a culture 
 which gave her a far from despicable place among 
 the nations of the time. Here on the Rock of 
 Cashel a heap of buildings bears witness to the 
 reality of that civilisation. The high-pointed stone 
 roof of Cormac's Chapel, raising its little towers so 
 sturdily by the side of the central mass of the 
 buildings, may not strike you as beautiful — I for 
 one should not dream of calling it so — but it is 
 at least the covering of a strong and faithful piece 
 of work, a shrine of some very honest-eyed art. 
 It used to be thought by some that this chapel 
 was built in the time of Cormac MacCuUinan, 
 who was both Bishop of Cashel and King of 
 Munster at the beginning of the tenth century — 
 a scholar in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Danish as 
 well as in Irish, whose famous " Glossary " is said 
 to be " by far the oldest attempt at a comparative 
 vernacular dictionary made in any language of 
 modern Europe." It seems to be generally 
 agreed nowadays, however, that the Cormac of 
 
[Lajcrem'f. 
 
 CORMAC'S CHAPKL, CASHKL. 
 
CASHEL OF THE KINGS 247 
 
 Cormac's Chapel was a King-Bishop of about two 
 hundred years later, and that the chapel was built 
 within the half century before the arrival of the 
 Normans. The inside of the building, which is 
 as solid as a gaol, gives one a greater impression 
 of fancy and life than the sharp angle of the stone 
 roof. Here, as soon as one has passed the many- 
 arched doorway, one is in a shrine of humour 
 as well as religion. Obviously, the ornamentation 
 of the church was the work of holy men with a 
 sense of fun. Everywhere that it was possible to 
 stick in a human head as an ornament, a monk's 
 face grins or prays, and one feels that one has here 
 from the hand of an artist of kindly and satiric 
 genius a gallery of portraits of the sweet-hearted 
 and naughty men — for, clearly, there were both 
 sorts — who fed and feasted and prayed against 
 the world's sins on the rock eight hundred years 
 ago. 
 
 Delightful a niche of the past as Cormac's 
 Chapel is, hdvv"ever,^with its traceries and carvings 
 of animals and men, and its suggestions of walls 
 once a wealth of colour, one has to go on into 
 the main mass of the buildings in order to find 
 the magic and essence of Cashel. The great rock 
 cathedral is now roofless — it was unroofed in the 
 eighteenth century by the soldiers at the bidding 
 of Archbishop Price, who was tired of holding 
 services in so incommodious a place — but it is 
 still the most impressive church building in 
 
248 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 which I have ever been. From the outside, 
 its rubble ruins of walls give an impression 
 of towering largeness rather than loveliness as 
 they crown the promontory of the rock ; but, 
 as soon as you stand under the great central arch 
 of the old cathedral — an arch of extraordinary 
 beauty — and submit yourself to the influences of 
 the grey stones around you, you begin to enter 
 into a field of thrilling experiences. I cannot 
 exactly define the nature of those experiences ; 
 but I will put the matter this way. I believe 
 that if an imaginative man wished to write a 
 novel about early or late medieval Ireland, he 
 could not do better than go to Cashel and haunt 
 the ruin on the rock and become haunted by it. 
 It is bound to affect a sensitive imagination, as 
 St. Mary Redcliffe in Bristol affected Chatterton. 
 I do not know if ghosts walk, but this rock with 
 its cathedral aisles open to the sky is surely a 
 meeting-place of the shadows of kings and monks 
 and a great throng of feasters and fighters. 
 Presences, taller and more majestic than life, still 
 seem to move through the quiet air. The walls 
 are burrowed with secret stairways and passages, 
 and little children come out of these and cry out 
 little boasts over dangerous heights ; but one 
 can fancy that this is but an accidental sign of 
 life — that the real intense life of the place is going 
 on imperceptible to the ear or the eye. Climbing 
 to a grassy square over the doorway of the church, 
 
CASHEL OF THE KINGS 249 
 
 and looking out over the plain, one can easily 
 fill the green miles with the conquering music of 
 the old armies of Munster as they swung home, 
 gallant as young hurlers, from grips with the 
 Danes. 
 
 Cashel of the Kings the town is called ; and 
 Brian Boru built a royal house on the rock, and 
 there he seems to have married, or at least to 
 have made a mistress of Gormlaith — Gormlaith, 
 the stirrer-up of strife, whose greed of husbands 
 is condemned by the Four Masters in the words — 
 
 " Gormlaith took three leaps, 
 Which no woman shall take to the Day of Judgment : 
 A leap at Dublin, a leap at Tara, 
 A leap at Cashel of the goblets higher than both." 
 
 It was Brian's descendant, Donal, who is said 
 to have built the great Cathedral on the rock, 
 squeezing it into the space that was left between 
 Cormac's Chapel and the round tower on the one 
 hand, and the royal house and the edge of the 
 rock on the other. If so, it is only another proof 
 that Ireland, between the defeat of the Danes and 
 the coming of the Normans, was a country of 
 revival rather than a country of recession, as it is 
 usually described. 
 
 Henry 11., when he came to Ireland in 1 1 72, 
 appreciated the significance of the rock — which in 
 regard to royalty was a southern Tara, and in 
 regard to the Church was a southern Armagh — 
 
250 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 and it was there that he called together the Synod 
 of Cashel in order to make the Irish clergy good 
 Catholics, as the Pope had enjoined upon himwhen 
 giving him possession of the island. This again 
 was the place where Edward Bruce chose to hold 
 his Parliament when he became for a brief interval 
 King of Ireland. Cashel, indeed, may be de- 
 scribed as the Acropolis of Munster. For hun- 
 dreds of years it was at once a summons and a 
 challenge in the political and religious world. 
 Fire and sword swept round about it again and 
 again. In 1494 the Cathedral itself was burnt 
 by Gerald, the great Earl of Kildare. This is 
 one of the famous incidents in the history of 
 Cashel. Gerald, we are told, was summoned to 
 appear before King Henry vii. and explain his 
 conduct, the Archbishop of Cashel being present 
 to accuse him. The Earl did not deny having 
 committed the sacrilege, but defended himself 
 on the ground that he never would have burned 
 the Cathedral unless he had thought that the 
 Archbishop was inside it. This answer, it is said, 
 greatly tickled the King. It is an example of 
 Irish, or Anglo-Irish, humour, one would think, 
 that might have tickled anybody — even the 
 Archbishop. Unfortunately, the anti-Irish his- 
 torians are not, in the vulgar phrase, out for 
 humour but for scalps. They take the excellent 
 Bernard Shawism of the Great Earl with an 
 almost fanatical seriousness, and ask us to see in 
 
CASHEL OF THE KINGS 251 
 
 it yet another proof of the cruelty and barbarism 
 of old Irish life. 
 
 The only conspicuous tomb that lies out of the 
 sun in the church wall is to the glory of another 
 Archbishop of Cashel, who is also one of the most 
 famous converts — or, if you look on it in that way, 
 perverts — in Irish church history. This was the 
 Archbishop Miler M'Grath who, having been 
 consecrated by the Pope in Rome, allowed himself 
 to be arrested by Queen Elizabeth's men when on 
 his way to Ireland, and was soon either persuaded 
 or bribed to become a Protestant. The chapter 
 in which O'SuUivan Beare tells the story of the 
 Archbishop in his History of Catholic Ireland is 
 ingeniously romantic. Miler, having become a 
 Protestant and been inducted into the diocese of 
 Cashel, straightway set out to prove the thorough- 
 ness of his conversion by wedding " in unholy 
 union," as the historian puts it, Anna Ni Meara. 
 Having married her, however, he found to his 
 astonishment that she would not eat meat on a 
 Friday. " Why is it, wife," he asked, " that you 
 will not eat meat with me ? " " It is," she 
 replied, " because I do not wish to commit a sin 
 with you." " Surely," was his natural retort, 
 " you committed a far greater sin in coming to 
 the bed of me, a friar ! " 
 
 On another occasion he found her weeping, 
 and asked her why. " Because," she told him, 
 " Eugene " (a Franciscan friar), " who was with me 
 
252 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 to-day, assured me by strong proof and many holy 
 testimonies that I would be condemned to hell 
 if I should die in this state of being your wife. 
 I am frightened, and cannot help crying lest this 
 be true." " Indeed," replied the Archbishop — 
 and you may be sure her complaints iiad exhausted 
 the last ounce of his patience — " if you hope 
 otherwise, your hope will lead you much astray, 
 and not for the possibility but for the reality you 
 should fret." 
 
 Not long after this, we are told Anna died 
 consumed with grief. But the Archbishop had 
 not yet been cured of uxoriousness. O'SuUivan 
 Beare, writing a few years afterwards, told the 
 world, as Mr. Matthew Byrne translates him in 
 Ireland under Elizabeth : " The wicked Miler 
 married a second wife and now lives sinning, not 
 in ignorance but wilfully. He does not " — and 
 this is surely a very fine acquittal on one score 
 from an enemy — " hunt priests nor endeavour to 
 detach Catholics from the true religion." 
 
 How admirably this tolerant and worldly and 
 amorous friar would fit into the portrait-gallery 
 of Anatole France ! It is to be feared that he 
 did little service to the cause of Protestantism in 
 Cashel, for a report written by two Irish Jesuits 
 at the beginning of the reign of James declared 
 that at that time " in the metropolitan city 
 of Cashel . . . there was one solitary English 
 heretic," and that, " fearing to be well scorched, 
 
CASHEL OF THE KINGS 253 
 
 he made himself a Catholic, whereupon the 
 townsmen burned his house, so that even a 
 heretic's house should not remain in their city." 
 
 The distrust on the part of the Cashel people 
 of " English heretics " was not unjustified. 
 Probably they cared little for theology, but they 
 cared a great deal about being conquered and 
 robbed by foreigners. At least, so far as one can 
 judge from the general record of Irish tolerance 
 in the matter of religion, anything that Protestants 
 have ever suffered in Ireland has been suffered 
 only by men who were invaders and robbers of 
 the people's land. Protestants do not seem to 
 have been injured because they were Protestants. 
 In Cashel especially, the greatest record of 
 crime must be assigned, not to Irish Catholics, 
 but to government troops. The sack of Cashel on 
 the 4th of September 1647, by Lord Inchiquin's 
 troops, was one of those events that spread horror 
 through Ireland. Inchiquin offered to let the 
 garrison in Cashel march out with all the honours 
 of war, if they would pay him ^3000 and leave 
 the clergy and citizens to his mercy. They, 
 naturally, refused, whereupon Inchiquin's men 
 stormed the rock, massacring soldiers and priests, 
 men and women, till the place flowed with blood. 
 Inchiquin, it is said, having made his way into the 
 Cathedral after the slaughter, put on the Arch- 
 bishop's mitre and declared gaily that he was now 
 Governor of Munster and Archbishop of Cashel 
 
254 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 as well. As an epilogue to the butchery, the 
 statues and crucifixes were broken in pieces to 
 make a soldiers' holiday, and the sacred vestments 
 used as horsecloths or worn by the soldiers in 
 mockery. The vessels of the altar and the other 
 spoils were sold to the people who had gathered 
 in from surrounding parts " as if to a fair." 
 
 There is no less bloody-looking place in the 
 world than Cashel now. The rock has long since 
 been washed of its stains, and the town which 
 flows up to it is much too poor and unawake to 
 tempt even a Cossack with thoughts of plunder. 
 Probably there was stir and gaiety in it till the 
 railways came ; it lay on the old coach-road 
 between Dublin and Cork. But if the designers 
 of the railway system had purposely set out to 
 isolate and starve the towns in the south of 
 Ireland, such as Cashel, they could scarcely have 
 succeeded better than they did. Almost every- 
 where that a good town stood they avoided like 
 a pestilence. Thus they did not take their main 
 line round by Kilkenny, and they ran it several 
 miles to the north of Cashel. Cashel has never 
 recovered from the snub. It has moped and 
 moulted in its corner ever since. It still possesses 
 its palace upon a rock, and finds it a useful place 
 to send the children to play on Sunday afternoons, 
 and a convenient place to bury its dead by the 
 old holy well out of which one is now forbidden to 
 drink. At the same time, for all the widow's 
 
CASHEL OF THE KINGS 255 
 
 weeds in which it has clothed itself, it retains 
 memories of pride. " I have reared twelve 
 children in the City of the Kings," a woman 
 half wailed, half boasted, in the course of our 
 visit, as she stood on the railway platform, and 
 saw the train go off with a load of emigrants, 
 " and there's the last of them gone from me." 
 It was a dirge sung over a royal place. " There 
 will soon be no Irish left at home at all," she cried. 
 " The hedges and ditches will soon be emigrating 
 ou-t of Ireland." Certainly, Cashel is a deserted 
 city. But the rock and the world that you see 
 from the rock — how they make the city itself 
 negligible ! As you stand under the central 
 arches of the Cathedral, and see the columns 
 springing up to meet each other with the grace 
 and spontaneity of wild daffodils, you enjoy one 
 of the most beautiful things in Ireland — one of 
 the few lyrics in stone, indeed, of which Ireland 
 can boast. So let no Irishman miss seeing Cashel 
 and spending a long day in the clear light of 
 the ruined Cathedral on the Rock. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE MAN FROM THURLES 
 
 I MET the man from Thurles in Kilkenny as I 
 was going up to the station from the Imperial 
 Hotel. 
 
 He was old and shuffling, a ragged creature that 
 once was a man and now humped from town to 
 town with a spotted red handkerchief in his hand, 
 gathering the needs of his belly from among those 
 things that we others do not require for our dogs. 
 He was as hairy and weather-beaten as a sailor, 
 but he was like a squeezed and shrivelled sailor. 
 His dark hair and beard were as limp as weed. 
 His eyes, which looked like the eyes of a blind 
 man, with the lids falling down on them as if in 
 deadly weariness, might have belonged to one 
 who had been captured by Algerian pirates in 
 his youth and who had lived in dungeons. He 
 was wearing a tattered wideawake, a symbol of 
 homelessness, and as he walked he seemed to put 
 his feet down with uncertainty, like a drunken 
 man. 
 
 I stopped him to ask whether a church set up 
 
 256 
 
THE MAN FROM THURLES 257 
 
 high among gravestones by the side of the road 
 was the Black Friary — I think that was the name 
 of the place. 
 
 He made me repeat my question, and then in 
 a monotonous voice told me — ^what I could see 
 for myself — 'that it was a graveyard in there, 
 mumbling something about Protestants and 
 Catholics both being buried in it — " side by side," 
 he added for the sake of euphony. 
 
 Obviously, he had not heard my question or 
 did not know the answer to it. But that did not 
 matter. I really did not care twopence about 
 the Black Friary. 
 
 He went on to say that he was a stranger in 
 Kilkenny, and (without ever raising his fly-blown 
 eyes) that he had only arrived there that day after 
 a walk of thirty miles. 
 
 I asked him what part of the country he was 
 from. 
 
 " Thurles," he said, his voice seeming to come 
 from a fuller chest, as he gave the name of the 
 town its two syllables ; " did you ever hear tell 
 of Thurles ? " 
 
 I told him I had been there about a year before. 
 
 " It would surprise you," he commented, 
 " the difference you would find between the 
 people of Thurles and the people belonging to 
 Kilkenny." 
 
 " How was that ? " I asked him. 
 
 " Well," he replied, " in Thurles, and indeed 
 17 
 
258 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 I might say in all parts of the County Tipperary, 
 everybody has a welcome for a stranger. For 
 instance," and he pointed a hand half-hidden 
 under a long sleeve at me, " you're a stranger, 
 and " (touching his own coat) " I'm a stranger, 
 and if this had to be in the County Tipperary, 
 and one of us wanting a bed, we would have no 
 trouble in the world but to go up to the door of 
 the first house, and there would be as big a 
 welcome before us as if we had to come with a 
 purse of gold. But here," and his voice grew 
 bitter, " they would prosecute you if you would 
 ask them for as much as a sup of water," 
 
 Suddenly his appearance changed ; his bold 
 Jekyll collapsed into a whining Hyde. 
 
 " Is that a polisman I see coming ? " he 
 asked, laying his trembling fingers on my arm and 
 steadying his eyes to look down the road. " If 
 it's a polisman he is, you won't let him come in- 
 terfering and asking me questions. You wouldn't 
 let him do that, sir. But in the name of Almighty 
 God," he demanded, battering himself into a 
 kind of rhetorical courage, " what would a polis- 
 man want cross-examining the likes of me ? Did 
 I ever steal anything, if it was only taking a turnip 
 out of a field ? Did I ever — tell him not to 
 interfere with me ! " he quavered ; " tell him not 
 to interfere with me ! " 
 
 I should not have been surprised if he had put 
 his hand into mine for comfort like a frightened 
 
THE MAN FROM THURLES 259 
 
 child. He held in his breath as the policeman, 
 a bold-boned figure in dark green, trod past. 
 Then he let his breath out again. 
 
 " They're tyrants, them fellows," he said, 
 " and the lies they would tell on a poor man 
 might be the means of getting him a week or 
 maybe a month in gaol, and he after doing 
 nothing at all but only going quietly from place 
 to place. And thieves and robbers running loose 
 that would murder you on the roadside and no 
 one to say a word." 
 
 " Do you mean tinkers ? " I asked. 
 
 " I do not, then," he said. " I mean soldiers — 
 milishymen." 
 
 I asked him to come into a public-house for a 
 bottle of stout, but he said that a bottle of stout 
 would make him light in the head. At length, 
 however, he said he would come and have a glass 
 of ale if I was sure I could keep the police from 
 annoying him. I gave him my promise and we 
 went in. 
 
 " What do I mean ? " he said, when I brought 
 him back to the militiamen. " This is what I 
 mean. I had a fine blackthorn stick one time," 
 — he called it a " shtick " — " a stick I had cut 
 from the hedge with my own hands, and seasoned 
 and polished, and varnished till it was the hand- 
 somest stick ever you seen. Well, I was walking 
 along the road in this part of the country one day, 
 when who should meet me but two of these 
 
26o RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 milishymen. ' Give us baccy,' says one of them, 
 — that's what he called tobacco. ' I have no 
 tobacco,' says I. ' You lie,' says he, rising his 
 fist to threaten me. ' It's the truth,' says I, 
 putting up my arm to protect myself." 
 
 He cowered behind his arm, and shrank as 
 from a blow at the recollection. 
 
 " * If you haven't tobacco, you have money,' 
 says the milishyman. ' God knows I have neither 
 money nor tobacco,' says I. And with that he 
 made a rush at me and took the stick off me, 
 and threw me into a bed of nettles and began to 
 beat me with it. ' Would you have my murder 
 on your souls ? ' says I ; but they only laughed and 
 began searching me to see if I had anything worth 
 stealing. There was nothing but only a few crusts 
 of bread I had tied up in a handkerchief, and they 
 took them out and pitched them over the hedge. 
 They would have murdered me, I tell you, if 
 they hadn't heard somebody coming. But that 
 scared them, and they set off down the road. 
 * Won't you leave me my stick ? ' I called after 
 them. ' Don't you see I told you the truth, and 
 what use could a rotten ould stick be to the likes 
 of you ? ' And one of them shouted back that I 
 could go to hell for my stick, and he threatened 
 me, if I was to say a word about it, he would find 
 me out and beat me till there wouldn't be a whole 
 bone left in my body." 
 
 The old man half lifted the glass with his 
 
1 
 
THE MAN FROM THURLES 261 
 
 withered arm to his lips, and half stooped his 
 withered face to the glass. Having drunk, he 
 wiped his mouth on his sleeve. 
 
 " Now wouldn't you feel lonesome," he whim- 
 pered, his lips against his sleeve, " after a stick 
 that you had cut and polished yourself, and that 
 you had been used to have with you wherever 
 you went ? And many's a good offer I had to 
 sell that stick. But I would as soon have thought 
 of selling an arrum or a leg. I wouldn't " — he 
 paused and his imagination took a leap into great 
 sums — " I wouldn't have taken a shilling itself 
 for it." 
 
 To him a shilling was something considerable. 
 It represented life for two days ; he could exist, 
 he told me, on sixpence a day, in a place like 
 Kilkenny. Twopence was the price of a bed in 
 straw on the floor, where the rats ran across you 
 till you dreamed you had fallen in the middle of 
 a fair and that all the beasts were trampling over 
 you. Then in the morning there was a penny for 
 tea, a penny for a slice of bacon, a penny for 
 bread, a halfpenny for sugar and a drop of milk, 
 and a halfpenny for the loan of a can to make the 
 tea in and a share of the fire. If he had bed and 
 breakfast, he said, he did not mind about the rest 
 of the day. He never felt hungry, as long as he 
 had his cup of tea in the morning. 
 
 Sunk to the hovels though he was, he had the 
 rags of a finer past about him. He used to be 
 
262 RAMBLES IN IRELAiND 
 
 the best slaner, he assured me, in the north of 
 Tipperary. Did I know what slaning was ? It 
 meant cutting turf, and he used to be so good a 
 hand at it that he could earn enough by two or 
 three days' work to keep him the entire week. 
 
 " There's a man I was at school with in Thurles 
 living in this town," he went on, adding proof 
 to proof of his original respectability, " a rich 
 man, and, what's more, a giving man, and you'll 
 think it a queer thing, bat I have only to walk up 
 to his door and ask is he in to get all I want to 
 eat and drink, and money, too, maybe sixpence, 
 into my hand, and I going away, to put me a bit 
 along the road. But I wouldn't go near him." 
 
 " Why was that ? " I asked him. 
 
 He made no sign of having heard me. 
 
 " If I was to walk up to his door, and he in at 
 his dinner," he went on, like a man describing 
 a vision of Paradise, " he would bring me in and 
 sit me down by his side at the table, and I tell 
 you it would be a table for a feast. There would 
 be roast beef, or mutton, or a shoulder of lamb, 
 or maybe a chicken. There would be ham and " — 
 his imagination seemed to pause on the outer edge 
 of its resources — " all a man could eat and he 
 in a dream." 
 
 " And why do you not go to him ? " I asked 
 again. 
 
 " I wouldn't," he said briefly ; and then, re- 
 turning to his vision, " every sort of vegetable 
 
THE MAN FROM THURLES 263 
 
 there would be on the table — potatoes, and 
 turnips," — ^he went over their names in a slow 
 catalogue, dwelling on each as though the very 
 words had magic juices for an empty stomach, — 
 " and carrots, and cabbage, and peas, and beans, 
 and parsnips, and curlies, and — and all. I tell you 
 none of the hotels in this city could do you better." 
 
 " But why don't you go and see him ? " I 
 persisted. 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 " I wouldn't," he said helplessly. 
 
 There was something puzzling about the old 
 man. It may have been merely his timid and 
 indirect spirit. I doubt if he had the heart 
 to beg — at least openly — either from a lifelong 
 acquaintance or from a stranger. He was going 
 out of the public-house without asking me for 
 a penny. I stopped him, however, and put a 
 sixpence into his hand to see him over the night. 
 He peered at it for a moment, and slowly took 
 his hat from his head. Raising his sand-blind 
 eyes, he let them dwell on me. He drew in a long 
 breath as though about to deliver an oration. 
 Then, straightening himself into a kind of majesty, 
 he said with the air of a man uttering the supreme 
 benediction : " You're the best bloody man I've 
 met since I left Thurles." 
 
 And having paid me the most magnificent 
 compliment in his power, he put on his hat, 
 and wobbled in front of me out of the bar. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 DUBLIN 
 
 It is not without significance that the two best- 
 known ports of entry into Ireland should be 
 called Kingstown and Queenstown. Every time I 
 land at Kingstown for Dublin and see the tall pillar 
 which stands there in memory of King George iv.'s 
 tipsy visit, I feel an ironical satisfaction that 
 this heavy comedian of a monarch should have 
 been chosen as the symbol of English rule in 
 Ireland. He came to Ireland in the first year of 
 his reign with a world of promise in his eyes. 
 The Irish Catholics, many of whose leaders had 
 been cheated into supporting the Union by a 
 promise of Catholic Emancipation, looked to him 
 as a liberator, and he smiled and smiled and 
 played the part of the leader of the Irish race at 
 home and abroad till he was safely out of the 
 country. It was at Dunleary on the south side of 
 Dublin Bay that he embarked for England again — 
 Dunleary, which has been known as Kingstown 
 ever since in honour of the event. 
 
 O'Connell, who could never miss an oppor- 
 264 
 
DUBLIN 265 
 
 tunity for a theatrical turn, followed him to the 
 edge of the dock with a laurel crown, and men 
 say that he tumbled into the water as he made 
 one of his obeisances of premature gratitude. 
 But I do not believe that, though O'Connell 
 became capable of anything when he was en- 
 thusiastic. The whole affair of the royal reception 
 disgusted every one who felt that slavery of the 
 soul was a greater curse than being without a vote. 
 Byron, who was a good enough Home Ruler from 
 the first to denounce the Union between Great 
 Britain and Ireland as " the union of the shark 
 with its prey," sat down in anger and wrote " The 
 Irish Avatar," berating the Irish people for the 
 way in which so many of them had grovelled to 
 " the fourth of the fools and oppressors called 
 George," as he described the King in the most 
 famous line of the poem. 
 
 Dublin, a city set upon a plain, is a grave and 
 aristocratic witness to what Ireland was beginning 
 to do for herself in the pre-Union days. I say 
 grave, though Dublin has been credited with 
 almost every other virtue and vice but gravity. 
 She is popularly thought of as the boon-com- 
 panion among cities. She is supposed by many 
 foreigners who enter her to be symbolised by the 
 red-eyed whimsical old man who sells the papers 
 on Kingstown platform as you step off the boat in 
 the morning. " Irish Times I Christian Herald ! 
 Winning Post ! " he calls monotonously as he walks 
 
266 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 up and down with an air at once sheepish and 
 cunning ; and then he goes on to some other 
 ridiculous collocation : " Ally Slo-per ! The War- 
 Cry ! Ally Slo-per ! Irish Times ! Christian 
 Herald! Freeman'' s Jour7ial! The Pink 't/7?/" 
 He does not care so long as he makes the English 
 visitors turn to each other at the doors of the 
 waiting train, and say after him as if repeating a 
 good joke — which they had travelled hundreds of 
 miles to hear — " Irish Times I Christian Herald ! 
 The Fink ''Un ! D'you hear him? Good old 
 Ireland ! " It must be inspiriting to find at the 
 outer gate of a strange country a figure who is a 
 proof that all your preconceptions about the 
 country were right. In a land of jokes to be met 
 at the very water's edge by a jocular paper-seller 
 is to have adventured not in vain. 
 
 In spite of King George iv. and jocular paper- 
 sellers, however, I insist that Dublin is a city of 
 grave dignity. It is a national capital, a place of 
 leisure and statues and wide streets and squares, 
 with brick-faced venerable houses which in the 
 radiance of sunset have a colour at times as beauti- 
 ful as old wine. As one walks its pavements, one 
 is always, as it were, under the shadow of history 
 as of some high wall. Here in the evening, as 
 one passes under the colonnade of the Parliament 
 House — now the Bank of Ireland — one is back 
 in the sonorous and stately eighteenth century, 
 with its fine worldliness and its fine rebellion 
 
DUBLIN 267 
 
 against worldliness. It is not that other towns 
 do not recall the eighteenth century as weU as 
 Dublin. But Dublin, unlike other towns, seems 
 to have settled down in the eighteenth century 
 and to have gone little further in the next hundred 
 years. Dublin of the eighteenth century is more 
 real than Dublin of any generation since. 
 
 Not that even Dublin of the present day does 
 not impress itself on the imagination in spite of 
 the fact that in one respect it is an English fort 
 and in another a provincial town to which the 
 number-one touring companies take the musical 
 comedies from London. Notwithstanding all the 
 soldiers who fill O'Connell Street at night with 
 their red tunics and the London plays which are 
 so enthusiastically welcomed in the theatres, no 
 intelligent Englishman can feel that in Dublin he 
 is in a British city. An English lady who recently 
 visited it for the first time told me that on going 
 into the Shelburne Hotel she quite naturally 
 found herself addressing the servants in French. 
 Dublin, too, is doing nothing to minimise the 
 differences between herself and the cities beyond 
 Ireland. She is not yet an Irish-speaking city, 
 but she at least tinily foretells the day when she 
 will be, by writing up the names of so many of 
 her streets in Irish as well as English. The hard- 
 headed do not like this. They even become as the 
 turkey-cocks now and then as they look up and 
 see those Gaelic characters insulting the twentieth- 
 
268 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 century street corners. The practical man — " a 
 bore in blinkers," some one has called him — thinks 
 that few greater calamities could happen than that 
 Ireland should become interesting to Irish men 
 and women again. He believes first of all in the 
 living he himself earns. After that, his Irish 
 creed may be summed up as dullness in the 
 country, dullness in the towns, and dullness in 
 the schools. He has been supreme in Ireland for 
 a good many years now, and, God knows, besides 
 driving population and manners and laughter and 
 industry out of the country, he had very nearly 
 succeeded in making it a very wild of dullness, 
 from Belfast to Cork, from Ireland's Eye to the 
 Aran Islands. Then a few years ago a handful of 
 sentimentalists appeared who felt that, if it 
 profited a man nothing to gain the whole world 
 and lose his soul, it must profit a nation still less 
 to lose the whole world and its soul as well. . . . 
 
 Irish though it is to-day, it is by no means as 
 an Irish city that we always find Dublin standing 
 out in history. Dublin was Norse and Danish 
 in its early years. Iseult, as students know, was a 
 Danish king of Dublin's daughter. Having de- 
 feated the Norsemen in Carlingford Lough in a 
 great battle for the rule of Ireland in the middle 
 of the ninth century, the Danes seized the fortress 
 which their rivals had already built at Dublin, 
 and founded a monarchy there with Olaf the 
 White as king. Dublin remained a Danish 
 
DUBLIN 269 
 
 capital for about a century and a half after that, 
 when Brian Boru broke the power of the foreigners 
 for ever at the battle of Clontarf. I believe there 
 is some debate about the site of the battle of 
 Clontarf/ but if you take a tram along the north 
 side of Dublin Bay, you will find a dreary flat of 
 brick dwellings by the sea with the name of 
 Clontarf ennobling it. It was on Good Friday, 
 1014, that the aged Brian, directing the battle 
 from his tent, and praying to the God of the 
 Christians for the victory, drove the heathen 
 stranger into the tides. Thus in 191 4 it will be 
 exactly nine hundred years since the greatest 
 national victory in the history of Ireland took 
 place. In 1 914, it is interesting to note, a 
 measure of Home Rule for Ireland will, if some 
 accident does not happen, be sent up to the 
 British House of Lords for the third time and 
 automatically become law. It is surely a note- 
 worthy achievement on the part of the Irish 
 people to have come through those nine hundred 
 years of turmoil, persecution, and defeat, with 
 their purpose of liberty still unextinguished. 
 
 1 " The battleground extended from about the present Upper 
 Sackville Street to the Tolka and beyond — along the shore towards 
 Clontarf. The Danes stood with their backs to the sea ; the Irish 
 on the land side facing them. Malachi and his Meathmen stood at 
 the Irish extreme right, on the high ground probably somewhere about 
 Blessington Street. The hardest fighting appears to have taken place 
 roMnd the fishing-weir on the Tolka, at, or perhaps a little above, the 
 present Ballybough Bridge ; and indeed the battle is called in some old 
 Irish authorities, 'the Battle of the Weir of Clontarf.'" — Dr. P. W. 
 Joyce's Short History of Ireland to 1608, p. 217. 
 
270 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 One finds a memorial of the old Danish Dublin 
 in Christchurch Cathedral on the south side of 
 the river. Here the Danes who survived Clontarf, 
 having become converted to the victorious re- 
 ligion of Christ, bailt the Church of the Blessed 
 Trinity, and, rightly or wrongly, tradition assigns 
 the crypt of the present building to the original 
 church. One visits the church nowadays, however, 
 less for the sake of the Danes than to see the tomb 
 of Strongbow, pioneer of English decivilisation 
 in Ireland. An old man shows you round the 
 mysteries of the place. He shows you Strongbow 
 in stone in knightly armour and with a shield on 
 his left arm, and, beside him, the body of his son 
 cut off at the middle — the son whom he slew for 
 cowardice in battle. He shows you a fragment 
 of Eva, Strongbow's wife. For sixpence a head, 
 he takes you down into the crypt, where the 
 electric light sheds its baleful glare along the 
 forest-like vistas of the arches, and shows you a 
 mummified cat chasing a lost rat trapped in a 
 living tomb and preserved behind the organ-case, 
 and only discovered many years afterwards, a 
 death's comedy for the amusement of sightseers. 
 He shows you — and this is his special pride — the 
 bust of a philanthropist's orphan, set in a niche, 
 and, lighting a match, insists upon your taking 
 a close look and seeing a tear making its way 
 down the orphan's face. What are the Danes to 
 him ? How does Strongbow come home to his 
 
DUBLIN 271 
 
 business and bosom ? The tear, on the other 
 hand, like the mummified cat, is a miracle for 
 simple eyes. " Do you see it ? Do you see it ? " 
 he asks eagerly as he holds up the match to the 
 bust. He would not feel that he had given you 
 your sixpence-worth unless he showed you that 
 orphan's tear — that and the dead cat. 
 
 I do not know if any one calls the discoloured 
 Gothic cluster of Christchurch beautiful. I 
 imagine not — at least on the outside. And, if 
 you want to think it beautiful inside, you must go 
 there when no service is in progress. If you go 
 there at the time of a service, you will be struck 
 by the extreme nakedness of Irish Protestantism. 
 Irish Protestants have felt it so urgent a matter 
 to disown the Pope that they have disowned a 
 good deal of beauty — which is no more the Pope's 
 than anybody else's — as well. Consequently, 
 though in occupation of elaborate cathedral 
 churches, they fill them with no elaborate ritual. 
 Here no candle burns its little Popish flame ; and 
 this is symbolic of the way in which the whole 
 service seems to be trying to avoid the very 
 appearance of Popery, instead of following along 
 beautiful and fitting lines on the merits of the 
 case. ... I do not know, however ; I am a 
 Protestant of Protestants myself, and suspicious 
 of any but simple services. Probably, the real 
 flaw in Irish Protestantism has little to do with 
 its ornaments or want of them. It is that 
 
272 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 Protestantism has existed in Ireland too much 
 as a negation. It has been a negation of the 
 Pope, on the one hand, and of Ireland, on the 
 other. It has stood for contempt and ascendancy, 
 not for brotherhood. Though it has produced its 
 saints in thousands, it has never stood for saintli- 
 ness, or even common justice, in the national life. 
 For the first century of its history in Ireland, a 
 Protestant meant an Englishman and an English- 
 man meant a criminal. It may be retorted that 
 it was a Protestant, Bishop Bedell, who translated 
 the Bible into Irish in the days of the first Stuarts. 
 That brought him no honour from his own Church, 
 however. Primate Ussher, afraid to offend the 
 authorities, censured him for attempting to 
 win Ireland to what he believed to be the true 
 faith of Christ by using the language which the 
 Irish people understood. Of course, intolerance 
 in religious and national matters was a common 
 thing in these parts of the world in the sixteenth 
 century, but nowhere more than in Ireland was 
 Christ's name used as an excuse for murder, theft, 
 and every sort of cruelty. Protestantism came 
 to Ireland as a land-grabbing invasion, not as a 
 gospel of glad tidings. 
 
 Its spirit must have been seen in Christcharch 
 on that day in 1627 when George Downham, 
 Protestant Bishop of Derry, preached before the 
 Lord Deputy and the Council on the subject of 
 the " graces " that were being asked from King 
 
DUBLIN 273 
 
 Charles and in support of the contention of twelve 
 Bishops, with Ussher at their head, that (in a 
 few words) the toleration of Catholicism was 
 a grievous sin. Having read out the decision of 
 the Bishops, we are told, he requested the 
 congregation to say Amen, and " suddenly the 
 whole church almost shaked with the great sound 
 their loud Amens made." The Protestants of 
 those days, to tell the truth, were anxious neither 
 to tolerate nor to convert the Irish Catholic. 
 They preferred that he should remain an in- 
 tolerable Catholic in order that they might have 
 an excuse for seizing his land. They wished the 
 Bible to be an excuse for, not an alternative to, 
 the sword. As for the state of the Irish Protestant 
 churches in those critical days, I need only quote 
 the testimony of that unbending Protestant and 
 Unionist historian, Mr. Richard Bagwell. 
 
 " One parish church in Dublin," he writes in 
 Ireland under the Stuarts, " was the Viceroy's 
 stable, a second a nobleman's residence, and a 
 third a tennis-court where the vicar acted as 
 keeper. The vaults under Christchurch were 
 from end to end hired to Roman Catholic 
 publicans, and the congregation above were 
 poisoned with tobacco smoke and with the fumes 
 of beer and wine." The communion table in 
 the middle of the choir was " made an ordinary 
 seat for maids and apprentices." It will be said, 
 perhaps, that other churches of other creeds 
 x8 
 
274 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 were as lax. But that does not affect the 
 point. 
 
 Christchurch, though it is an especially historic 
 place for English-speaking Irish Protestants as 
 being the first churcJi in Ireland where the 
 English version of the Bible was read in public and 
 left open for all to read, has a more national 
 interest for Irish Christians in general, as the 
 repository of the casket which contains the heart of 
 St. Lawrence O'Toole, the statesmanlike church- 
 man who is perhaps the most dignified and at- 
 tractive figure in Ireland at the time of Henry 
 II. 's invasion. Lawrence O'Toole, the first Irish 
 Bishop to be consecrated in Dublin, stood for 
 national revival in the Irish Church. Hitherto, 
 the Church had been divided owing to the practice 
 of the converted Danes of sending their bishops 
 to be ordained at Canterbury. It was St. 
 Lawrence, by his sweet and diplomatic spirit, who 
 finally brought the two branches of the Church 
 into union again in allegiance to Armagh. He is 
 sometimes criticised by later politicians for having 
 been a party to the surrender of Ireland to Henry 
 II., and for having gone to Windsor and Normandy 
 with a loyal knee. But, so far as we can judge, he 
 was an unselfish student of the honour of his 
 country as of the honour of his Church ; and his 
 life — Mrs. Green describes him as " feeding the 
 poor daily, never himself tasting meat, rising at 
 midnight to pray till dawn, and ever before he 
 
DUBLIN 275 
 
 slept going out into the graveyard to pray there 
 for the dead " — was the life of a saint. It was 
 St. Lawrence, the last of the saints, who in this 
 very church conducted the funeral service over 
 Strongbow, the first of the Normans. 
 
 It is to Christchurch and not to the more 
 popularly known St. Patrick's Cathedral — which 
 is only a step away, as they say — a step into a 
 slum — that one goes in search of the rich as- 
 sociations of history. It is unfair, perhaps, to 
 say that St. Patrick's, with its battlemented walls 
 and its blackened tower, stands any longer in a 
 slum. For Lord Iveagh, a patriotic Irishman in 
 everything except his politics, has displaced many 
 picturesque hells of poverty and disease in the 
 surrounding parts by huge barracks of inimitably 
 ugly brick — model tenements for the poor — 
 which are no doubt much pleasanter to live in 
 than to look at. Consequently, as one comes out 
 of the church on Sunday, one no longer feels 
 that one is invading a subterranean world of 
 narrow streets where — for this was a fine ragged 
 Sunday market only a few years ago — the house- 
 fronts are in dingy holiday behind their curtains 
 of sleeves, trouser-legs, and other pieces and 
 patches of old clothes. The poor of Ireland have 
 gathered round this ancient church, — which has 
 been saved from ruin by stout as Christchurch 
 Cathedral was saved by whisky, — but they do not 
 go to it. They wear St. Patrick's flower on his 
 
276 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 holiday, but they cannot persuade themselves 
 that he was really a Protestant, or that they ought 
 to become Orangemen for his sake. He is, by 
 the way, claimed as a Catholic, Episcopalian, or 
 Presbyterian, according to the prejudices of those 
 who write about him — in other words, he is a 
 genuinely national figure, satisfying all creeds and 
 classes, 
 
 St. Patrick's Cathedral gets its name from the 
 fact that it is built on a spot^ — originally an island 
 in a stream — where the saint is supposed to have 
 called a holy well into existence in order to 
 baptize Alphin, the King of Dublin, and a 
 multitude of other converts. Apart from this, 
 St. Patrick's relations with Dublin seem to have 
 been slight. His ghost does not haunt Dublin as 
 the ghost of St. Lawrence O'Toole does. His 
 dim church, indeed, with its coloured monuments 
 and its moth-eaten military banners, recalls the 
 fiercely fretful presence of Dean Swift far more 
 than that of St. Patrick himself. 
 
 Dean Swift, one of the fathers of modern 
 Irish Nationalism, and by far the most dis- 
 tinguished clergyman who ever was in charge of 
 St. Patrick's, lies here beside Stella, his simple and 
 at the same time mysterious friend, under a brass 
 plate a little to the right of the porch where you 
 enter. It is a common thing in these times to 
 defame the memory of Swift, making out that 
 he was merely an embittered English clergyman 
 
DUBLIN 277 
 
 who repaid a government that banished him to 
 Dublin by rousing the Irish mob to the mood of 
 rebellion. There is a sort of party politician who 
 always finds an excuse for his own lack of generous 
 idealism by proclaiming that the leaders of 
 movements for political righteousness are self- 
 seekers, humbugs, and sinners in the various other 
 schools of iniquity. Swift's passionate champion- 
 ship of the cause of Ireland was no doubt the 
 expression of a mixed nature. Swift was ambitious, 
 vain, and overbearing as well as sensitive to public 
 injustice and the sufferings of his neighbours. 
 His politics, however, were, in the last analysis, 
 the politics of charity, not the politics of hatred. 
 So charitable was he by nature, we are told, that, 
 when he was Dean of St. Patrick's, he lived on 
 a third of his income, gave another third away, 
 and saved the remainder to leave in charity at his 
 death. " With the first five hundred pounds 
 which he possessed," says Sir Leslie Stephen, 
 " he formed a fund for granting loans to in- 
 dustrious tradesmen and citizens, to be repaid 
 by weekly instalments. It was said that by 
 this scheme he had been the means of putting 
 more than 200 families in a comfortable way 
 of living. He had, says Delany, a whole 
 * seraglio ' of distressed old women in Dublin ; 
 there was scarcely a lane in the whole city 
 where he had not such a ' mistress.' He saluted 
 them kindly, bought trifles from them, and gave 
 
278 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 them such titles as PuUagowna, Stumpa-Nympha, 
 and so forth." 
 
 Naturally, Dublin adored him, though Dublin 
 Castle did not. He arose, a big-hearted and 
 fearless leader of the people, when a leader was 
 most needed against oppression from abroad. 
 His fight against the importation of Wood's 
 Halfpence is as important an event in Irish history 
 as was the men of Boston's fight against the 
 importation of some objectionable tea in the 
 history of the United States. It does not matter, 
 as some critics of Swift seem to think, whether 
 Wood's Halfpence were good halfpence or not, 
 any more than it matters whether the tea thrown 
 into Boston Harbour was good tea or not. 
 
 The point was that Ireland was being exploited 
 by a foreign government which had sold Wood the 
 right to dump his base coin in the country, he 
 having paid ^14,000 for the privilege, and another 
 ^3000 to the Duchess of Kendal, the King's 
 mistress, for helping him to secure the patent. 
 It was against this indecent incident of foreign 
 rule — a symbolic incident — that Swift wrote those 
 lashing political tracts, The Drapier^s Letters. 
 " If his copper were diamonds," he wrote of 
 Wood, " and this kingdom were entirely against 
 it, would not that be sufficient to reject it ? " 
 It was in the fourth letter that he made his famous 
 enunciation of the root-principle of Irish freedom : 
 " All government without the consent of the 
 
DUBLIN 279 
 
 governed is the very definition of slavery." " By 
 the laws of God, of Nature, of nations, and of 
 your own country," he told the people of Ireland, 
 " you are and ought to be as free a people as 
 your brethren in England." 
 
 By the people of Ireland, of course. Swift 
 meant the Protestants of Ireland, but, though 
 his ideal was a Protestant nation, it was an Irish 
 Protestant nation. His spirit was essentially the 
 spirit of a Nationalist, as may be seen in the verses 
 he wrote on the sudden drying up of St. Patrick's 
 Well in 1726. In these verses he impersonates 
 the saint, and puts into his mouth a renunciation 
 of a people who would not struggle, as other 
 nations did, for their liberty. " Oh ! " he cries 
 in a concluding outburst of passion — • 
 
 " Oh ! had I been apostle to the Swiss, 
 Or hardy Scot, or any land but this ; 
 Combined in arms, they had their foes defied, 
 And kept their liberty, or bravely died ; 
 Thou still with tyrants in succession curst, 
 The last invaders trampling on the first; 
 Nor fondly hope for some reverse of fate, 
 Virtue herself would now return too late. 
 Not half thy course of misery is run, 
 Thy greatest evils yet are scarce begun. 
 Soon shall thy sons (the time is just at hand) 
 Be all made captives in their native land ; 
 When for the use of no Hibernian born, 
 Shall rise one blade of grass, one ear of corn ; 
 When shells and leather shall for money pass, 
 Nor thy oppressing lords afford thee brass, 
 
28o RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 But all turn leasers to that mongrel breed, 
 Who, from thee sprung, yet on thy vitals feed ; 
 Who to yon ravenous isle thy treasures bear. 
 And waste in luxury thy harvest there ; 
 For pride and ignorance a proverb grown. 
 The jest of wits, and to the court unknown. 
 I scorn thy spurious and degenerate line, 
 And from this hour my patronage resign." 
 
 This may be political rhetoric rather than 
 poetry, but at least it is eloquent with a vehement 
 Nationalism which was as sincere as any belief 
 that any Dean of St. Patrick's ever held. Those 
 people who speak of Swift's Nationalism as though 
 it were mere crabbedness, can, I am sure, never 
 have read the Irish tracts and verses. There it 
 appears as a very storm of righteousness and good 
 sense. It was only an accident of birth that made 
 Swift an Irishman, — he was born at 2 Hoey's 
 Court, not far from the Cathedral, — but it was an 
 accident which gave Ireland one of her most 
 Promethean children. Even though he was, as 
 it were, a fortuitous and often an unwilling 
 Irishman, he was the greatest Irishman of his 
 time, and did more than any other man to lay 
 the logical foundations of Grattan's Parliament. 
 
 Dean Swift stands for the realism of Irish 
 politics. For the romance of Irish politics, one 
 turns to Lord Edward FitzGerald and Robert 
 Emmet, generous messengers of the French 
 Revolution, one of whom died on the scaffold 
 and the other fell of a mortal wound not far from 
 
DUBLIN 281 
 
 St. Patrick's, in gloomy, crooked Thomas Street. 
 The house where Lord Edward made his last 
 stand, a victim of informers, those ever-sinister 
 agents of the will to misrule, is now the office of 
 some kind of agricultural society ; but a tablet 
 on the wall reminds the passer-by that in 1798 
 it was a place of events. 
 
 Lord Edward is one of the gallant men rather 
 than the great men of Irish history. There is a 
 picturesqueness about his character, as well as a 
 selflessness in his devotion to Ireland, that has 
 endeared him as a popular hero. A melodrama 
 about his rebellious end even to-day makes the 
 small gallery boys in their greasy caps emit loud 
 whistles and interruptions of delight — except in 
 Belfast, where the play is treated as a party 
 question. I have sat in a window opposite the 
 Belfast Opera-House while Lord Edward was 
 being played, and so little were the audience 
 agreed in regard to the sentiments of the piece 
 that all through the evening you could hear a 
 continual wild rivalry of " The Boys of Wexford " 
 and " Rule Britannia " being sung by the op- 
 posing factions in the theatre, while at intervals 
 a number of excited men would be tumbled 
 violently out of one of the doors, cursing and 
 with an occasional cracked head. 
 
 There have been times, indeed, when the 
 heroes of patriotic melodramas have had to die 
 with one eye open in the Belfast theatres, for 
 
282 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 youthful defenders of the Union have on occasion 
 brought an ingenious assortment of missiles to 
 hurl at the impersonators of men who were ignoble 
 enough to give their lives for their country. 
 On the only night on which I ever saw Lord 
 Edzuard myself, the disorder was the disorder of 
 enthusiasm, but the riots of 1898 revived the 
 sporting instincts of the Shankhill Road, and after 
 that for a time, when a patriotic play came to the 
 town, the theatre was a scene of faction-fight. . . . 
 On a platform made of boards and barrels 
 in the middle of the road, nearly opposite St. 
 Catherine's Church, within a few yards of the 
 house in which Lord Edward was captured, Robert 
 Emmet — " the darling of Ireland," as the song 
 calls him — was hanged like a dog in the year 1803. 
 " This," proclaimed the hangman, holding up 
 the severed head to the gaze of the multitude, 
 " is the head of a traitor, Robert Emmet." It was 
 a lie. Never was there a more loyal and gentle 
 redeemer of his country than Robert Emmet, 
 whose blood dripped on the road that day, when 
 brave men and women came forward and dipped 
 their handkerchiefs in it for remembrance, and 
 the dogs gathered to lick it up. He was only 
 twenty-five when he died ; and his slight and 
 boyish figure has ever since been beautiful in the 
 popular imagination with the golden lights of 
 youth and martyrdom. Not that his fame has 
 lived without question. " Never," exclaimed 
 
DUBLIN 283 
 
 O'Connell, the shocked politician, " was there a 
 more rash or foolish enthusiast." But we know 
 how the formulae of rashness and folly are aways 
 applied to the hero who fails. That Emmet was 
 far from rash or foolish is shown by the fact that, 
 in spite of that genius for spying which has been 
 always among the glories of Dublin Castle — the 
 Lord Lieutenant had an allowance of £6000 
 a year for secret service money — the Government 
 could learn in advance nothing of his plans for 
 seizing their citadel. The attempt on the 
 castle failed, as all the world knows, but the 
 important thing is that it was made and that 
 Robert Emmet died for it. His speech from the 
 dock, with its strange, youthful rhetoric that 
 seems to belong to another world than ours, 
 must surely always have a place among the fine 
 things that rebels have said at the mouth of 
 death. Never has any speech won its way into 
 the Irish imagination like this which ends in that 
 solemn music — 
 
 " I am going to my cold and silent grave — my lamp of life 
 is nearly extinguished — I have parted with everything that was 
 dear to me in this life, and for my country's cause with the 
 idol of my soul, the object of my aiFections. My race is run — 
 the grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom. I 
 have but one request to ask. at my departure from this world, it 
 is the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph ; 
 for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, 
 let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them rest in 
 obscurity and peace, my memory be left in oblivion, and my 
 
284 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 tomb remain uninscribed, until other times and other men can 
 do justice to my character. When my country takes her place 
 among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my 
 epitaph be written. I have done." 
 
 There are few better farewells than that in the 
 literature of the dock — which, by the way, is 
 exceedingly good literature from Socrates on- 
 wards. Its beauty is intensified for those who 
 know how easily Emmet might have escaped 
 his tragedy had he been willing to go away after 
 the defeat of his rising without saying good-bye 
 to Sarah Curran. The circumstances of his 
 sacrifice have a fascination that makes not the 
 Nationalist only but the Orangeman eager to 
 listen to his story. Tom Moore, who was his 
 friend, and whose verses on Emmet and Sarah 
 Curran are known to thousands who have never 
 heard Emmet's name, has left it on record that 
 the Duke of Wellington heard the praise of Emmet 
 from him with interest. Lord Norbury, when 
 he was condemning him to be hanged, and 
 denouncing him for the crime of having associated 
 with "hostlers, bakers, butchers, and such persons," 
 had assuredly no idea that he was face to face 
 with one of the martyrs of history — a man whose 
 death would do more for Irish nationality than 
 an army with banners. But every generous 
 Irish boy who reads about Robert Emmet to-day 
 would rather be he than the emperor of the world. 
 
 The revolutionary figure that dominates the 
 
DUBLIN 285 
 
 atmosphere of Dublin for me, however, is not 
 Robert Emmet, but Wolfe Tone. I seldom walk 
 past the pillars of the old Parliament House on a 
 night when the moon is up without an image of 
 Wolfe Tone in his college cap and gown sauntering 
 hy. I think a scene out of a play is responsible 
 for this deception of the imagination. 
 
 Wolfe Tone is to my mind the most fascinating 
 character who ever studied or avoided learning 
 behind the unpretentious walls of Trinity College, 
 and this is no small claim, for many of the world's 
 geniuses, including Burke and Goldsmith, have 
 endured professors there. Goldwin Smith found 
 a parallel for Tone in Hannibal. " Brave, ad- 
 venturous, sanguine, fertile in resource, buoyant 
 under misfortune," Tone, he wrote, " was near 
 being as fatal an enemy to England as Hannibal 
 was to Rome." And Wellington was filled with 
 admiration at the way in which this " extra- 
 ordinary man," the son of a Dublin coachmaker, 
 went to Paris " with a hundred guineas in his 
 pocket, unknown and unrecommended ... in 
 order to overturn the British Government in 
 Ireland," and all but succeeded. 
 
 It is, however, his genius as a man not less than 
 as a statesman of rebellion that gives him such 
 a place in men's affections to-day. There is a 
 Shakespearean breadth about his character which 
 attracts thousands who are insensitive to Emmet's 
 almost lyrical appeal. He had about him a 
 
286 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 touch of the swashbuckler. He was as gay and 
 excessive and daring as any soldier of fortune who 
 was ever set down as a typical Irishman. His 
 journal — which Mr. Thomas Seccombe, in The 
 Age of Johnson, assigns a place in literature — is 
 one of the most spirited autobiographies in the 
 English language. 
 
 Respectable persons turn aside from Tone as a 
 heavy drinker, though I imagine he was no worse 
 a drinker than that idol of the respectable, William 
 Pitt. Tone himself jotted down all the evidence 
 of his insobriety in his diary in a playful-sad 
 spirit that you will find in some of the letters of 
 Charles Lamb. But, grant that he drank ever 
 so much, does that prevent him from having had 
 virtues as well ? I think there must be something 
 wrong with the soul of a man who can read Wolfe 
 Tone's journal and still go on levelling petty 
 accusations at him as though these were the whole 
 story. Tone was a combination of gay dog and 
 hero, and to miss the hero in him is to be dull to 
 the heroic in history. 
 
 His last days are full of the grand play of heroism. 
 When, having arrived with a French fleet in 
 Lough Swilly in October 1798, he saw his hopes 
 once more scattered by the storms and an English 
 squadron bearing down like a company of doom 
 on the French ships, he was urged by the French 
 officers to escape now that the fight had become 
 hopeless, as capture would mean a rebel's death 
 
DUBLIN 287 
 
 to him, while they would be safe as prisoners of 
 war. Tone refused to go. " Shall it be said," 
 he asked them, " that I fled when the French 
 were fighting the battles of my country ? " 
 Like the hero of a novel, it may be thought. 
 And indeed Tone was always something like the 
 hero of a novel. 
 
 When he was recognised by his captors on the 
 way to Dublin, and the General ordered that he 
 should be put into irons as a traitor, Tone 
 indignantly tore off his French uniform with the 
 cry : " These fetters shall never degrade the 
 revered insignia of the free nation which I have 
 served." Then, becoming calm again, he offered 
 himself to the irons. " For the cause which I 
 have embraced," he assured his captor, " I feel 
 prouder to wear these chains than if I were 
 decorated with the star and garter of England." 
 
 Before the court-martial which tried him in 
 Dublin he refused to make any defence. He 
 deliberately and proudly avowed everything of 
 which he was accused. He had engaged in the 
 service of the French Republic, he declared, 
 " with a view to save and liberate my own 
 country." 
 
 " For that purpose I have encountered the chances of war 
 amongst strangers ; for that purpose I have repeatedly braved 
 the terrors of the ocean, covered, as I knew it to be, with the 
 triumphant fleets of that power which it was my glory and my 
 duty to oppose. I have sacrificed all my views in life ; I have 
 
288 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 courted poverty ; I have left a beloved wife unprotected, and 
 children whom I adored fatherless. After such sacrifices in a 
 cause which I have always conscientiously considered as the 
 cause of justice and freedom, it is no great effort, at this day, to 
 add the sacrifice of my life." 
 
 The only favour that he asked of the court was 
 that he might be given the death of a soldier, 
 as the French allowed in the case of rebel emigres. 
 
 " I ask," he said, " that the court shall adjudge 
 me the death of a soldier, and let me be shot hj 
 a platoon of grenadiers. I request this indulgence 
 rather in consideration of the uniform I wear — 
 the uniform of a Chef de Brigade in the French 
 army — than from any personal regard to myself." 
 
 When this was refused, he resolved that at least 
 his enemies should not have the pleasure of 
 hanging him, and in the barracks where he was 
 imprisoned he cut his throat with a penknife. The 
 doctor who was hurried in to attend him declared 
 that, as he had missed the carotid artery, there 
 was hope that he might live — till the execution. 
 
 *' I am sorry," was Tone's comment, " I have 
 been so bad an anatomist." 
 
 Lying between life and death, he was one day 
 told by the doctor that he must not attempt to 
 move or speak, as it would mean immediate death. 
 
 " I can yet find words to thank you, sir," said 
 Tone, with a slight movement ; " it is the most 
 welcome news you give me. What should I 
 wish to live for ? " and, falling back on his 
 
DUBLIN 289 
 
 pallet, he died. Some people will not accept 
 this story, but believe that Tone was murdered in 
 prison. But Irish history is a sufficient banquet of 
 horrors without that. . . . 
 
 There are a hundred other names that one 
 might mention of the great men of Ireland who 
 have been hanged or imprisoned in Dublin ; but 
 the list would run far beyond a chapter. I 
 doubt if there is any other capital in the world 
 where nine out of ten of the heroes of the people 
 have been at one time or another branded as 
 criminals. 
 
 Yonder, not very far from Trinity College, 
 stands the statue of Smith O'Brien — with its 
 recent inscription in Irish on the pedestal — and 
 reminds us how a brave Protestant gentleman was 
 turned by the horrors of the Government-created 
 Famine of the forties from a Liberal into a rebeL 
 He was not an efficient rebel, because he acted as 
 though a rebellion could be carried on without 
 bloodshed or any of the incidents of war, but 
 it is a poor business laughing at the end of his 
 brave little adventure in the cabbage-garden at 
 Ballingarry. 
 
 O'Connell, who gazes from an elaboration of 
 bronze down the street which is sometimes 
 called after him but is still officially known as 
 Sackville Street, was never sentenced to death as 
 Smith O'Brien was, but none the less he, too, 
 graduated in dock and prison. He has been 
 19 
 
290 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 blamed for not rebelling as often as Smith O'Brien 
 has been blamed for rebelling. Had he refused 
 to yield to Dublin Castle, it is held, when it 
 proclaimed the great meeting at Clontarf in 1845, 
 he would have had a million determined men at his 
 back to sweep foreign rule out of the country. 
 O'Connell, however, shrank from such an orgy of 
 bloodshed as a rising would have involved ; and 
 he was no coward. Unfortunately, he suffered 
 from eloquence. He said melodramatic things 
 about his " dead body," and the Young Irelanders 
 who were really prepared to see their dead bodies 
 made the foundations of a free Ireland were cast 
 into the depths of gloom when they found that 
 this leader of the people had only been playing 
 the orator. At the same time, it is a mistake 
 to underestimate the fascinating combination of 
 hero, bully, and jester, which we know as Daniel 
 O'Connell. It was O'Connell and Fenianism 
 between them that raised the Irish Catholic from 
 the servitude of generations and revived in him 
 the spirit of a free man. And Parnell, whose 
 two-coated statue by Saint-Gaudens looks towards 
 O'Connell's from the far end of a long line of 
 similar monuments, finished the work — Parnell, 
 another criminal by the grace of England. 
 
 Parnell, the sphinx of Irish politics, was perhaps 
 the most effective leader the Irish people have 
 ever known off the field of battle. He was a 
 realist, rather than an idealist, in politics. He 
 
DUBLIN 291 
 
 took the material he found to his hand, whether 
 it was the machine of a Parliamentary party or 
 the almost religious republicanism of the Fenians, 
 and used it with the strategy of genius to wring 
 from England the end he desired — an Irish 
 National Parliament. 
 
 He was not a separatist, but wished to see 
 Grattan's Parliament restored. And, when he 
 perceived that all the arguments and forces at his 
 disposal could not persuade Mr. Gladstone to 
 admit the rights of the Irish nation except in a 
 compromising sort of way, he accepted the middle 
 course of Home Rule rather than that Ireland 
 should be without a resident legislature. It was 
 a perfectly frank and open compromise. It was 
 the compromise of a man who believed in the 
 excellence of liberty in whatever form it came. 
 He has no place among the prophets. He had no 
 vision of Utopias. Like Swift, he was one of 
 those who were inflamed less for ideal justice than 
 against real injustice. Thus, there was about 
 him more of the avenging spirit than of the con- 
 ciliator. He saw the evil tree of landlordism and 
 the evil tree of foreign rule spreading disastrous 
 shadows over the land. He decided that to strike 
 at the roots of these monstrous plants was the 
 only way to save the Irish people from starvation 
 of body and soul. If the English Government 
 would not interfere with him in his work, he 
 would do it like a gentleman. If the English 
 
292 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 Government chose otherwise, however, and used 
 the old gaoler's weapons against him, then, rather 
 than see the work remain undone, he would not 
 lift a finger to prevent the less gentlemanly- 
 Captain Moonlight from doing it after the manner 
 of his kind. . . . 
 
 That was what made Parnell the most hated 
 and terrible figure who ever stood on the floor of 
 the British House of Commons. He believed, like 
 the American general, that war is hell — and land 
 war no less than any other war — and with that 
 fierce calmness of his he was prepared to use the 
 hell of war in order to destroy the hell of slavery. 
 
 O'Connell Street is truly a very Thames of 
 memories, with statues rising like masts from its 
 broad bosom — so broad that the quick-eyed men 
 and women who hurry past the fronts of its shops, 
 hotels, and offices seem but diminutive specks in 
 comparison. On its tide are borne along the 
 memories of two centuries of Ireland's struggle 
 against her chains. From the Rotunda, indeed, 
 to Dublin Castle (which is a good way beyond the 
 end of O'Connell Street, not far from the Parlia- 
 ment House) there is not an inch of ground which 
 is not exciting with history. 
 
 Of Dublin Castle itself I know nothing save 
 that it exists in a sort of hiding off the main road, 
 and that over its gate a statue of Justice stands 
 with its back significantly turned on the city. 
 Also I know that it is the place where the jobs 
 
DUBLIN 293 
 
 come from, and that, ever since the Normans 
 entrenched themselves there, it has been a grey 
 distillery of poisons. Thomas Drummond, who 
 was Under-Secretary when Queen Victoria came 
 to the throne of England, tried to make it other- 
 wise, and the Irish people put up a statue to him — 
 the only time this compliment has been paid to a 
 British official in Ireland. But even a dynasty of 
 Drummonds could have done nothing good with 
 Dublin Castle except abolish it. 
 
 The Rotunda, on the other hand, ugly little 
 pot-bellied building though it is, has been the 
 scene of many a glorious and fantastic drama. 
 Perhaps the most gaily theatrical thing in its 
 history was the arrival there of the mad Bishop of 
 Derry at the Volunteer Convention in November 
 1783. This Bishop, who was Earl of Bristol and 
 a Hervey of England, has been denounced as a 
 blasphemer, a debauchee, and an insane egoist, 
 and by the various other titles by which any 
 democrat who is less than a saint is commonly 
 assailed. All we can be sure of in regard to him is 
 that he distributed church livings from his castle 
 at Downhill mighty honestly for a bishop of that 
 time, that he was liked to the point of enthusiasm 
 by the Catholics and Presbyterians of his diocese, 
 and that he was as cheerfully ready for bloodshed 
 as a schoolboy for a fight with snowballs. 
 
 " We must have blood, my lord ; we must have 
 blood," he had once observed to Charlemont, 
 
294 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 the trimmer ; and he was ready to see a good deal 
 of it spattered over the walls and pavements of 
 Dublin in order to make the new Parliament — • 
 Grattan's Parliament, which had won its in- 
 dependence from the English Parliament a year 
 before — really democratic. It is unfortunate for 
 Ireland that this mad Englishman did not get at 
 least part of his way. It was unfortunate for 
 England, too. But Grattan, Charlemont, and 
 the rest were so intoxicated with the sense of 
 having achieved the freedom of the Irish Parlia- 
 ment that they felt like resting on their oars. 
 
 The situation is full of irony as we look back 
 on it. The Volunteers — that national body of 
 sturdy Protestants, with Belfast as their capital — 
 had been praised to the skies so long as they used 
 the quiet threat of their guns to make the Irish 
 Parliament a free Parliament. They now began 
 to be frowned at as rabble when they — or the 
 most determined spirits among them — looked 
 like using those same guns to make the Irish people 
 a free people. For a moment it was doubtful 
 whether the revolutionists or the Whigs among 
 them would win. " Open thou our mouths, O 
 Lord, and our lips shall show forth thy praise," 
 was the inscription which hung across the mouths 
 of the cannon of the Dublin Volunteer Artillery as 
 they rattled along O'Connell Street on the day of 
 the Convention, with Napper Tandy in command. 
 This was the humour of the best of them. It 
 
DUBLIN 295 
 
 was as the chief and regal impersonation of this 
 sentiment that the Bishop made his memorable 
 appearance in the procession that day. 
 
 What a picture he made as he swept into 
 the city may best be gathered from the descrip- 
 tion of Froude. " The Bishop," Froude writes, 
 " entered Dublin with the state and manner of a 
 monarch, as if he expected to be chosen King of 
 Ireland. He sat in an open landau, drawn by six 
 horses, magnificently apparelled in purple, with 
 white gloves, gold-fringed, andgold tassels dangling 
 from them, and buckles of diamonds on knee and 
 shoe. His own mounted servants in gorgeous 
 liveries attended on either side of his carriage." 
 
 It has been hinted that the Bishop did really 
 fancy himself, as the saying is, as King of Ireland, 
 and, if he had ever achieved the position, there is 
 no doubt, judging from his record as a Bishop, that 
 he would have been one of the most practical and 
 beneficent monarchs of his time. He did more 
 than any other man to try to save Ireland for 
 democracy in 1783. If he had succeeded, there 
 would have been no rebellion in 1798, and, if 
 there had been no rebellion in 1798, there 
 would have been no Union in 1800. Instead 
 of accepting democracy, however, the politicians 
 disbanded the Volunteers. Thus ended the 
 Nationalist career of one of the most fantastic 
 Englishmen who ever went to Ireland — a unique 
 member of a unique family, for did not Chester- 
 
296 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 field once say that God had created men, women, 
 and Herveys ? 
 
 It is suggestive of the way in which Irishmen 
 of all creeds rally to any tolerant leader who works 
 for the general good that, when a monument was 
 put up to the Bishop after his death, both the 
 Catholic bishop and the Presbyterian minister 
 of Derry were among the contributors. . . . 
 
 Of the ten thousand other incidents steeped 
 in colour and drama of which Dublin has been 
 the scene, I like to remember three in especial as I 
 walk its streets. The first is the visit of Art 
 MacMurrough and the three other Irish kings to 
 Richard 11. at the palace the latter had built for 
 himself in College Green — then called Hoggin 
 Green from the little hog-backed hills that sur- 
 rounded it and are now smoothed into clamorous 
 streets. 
 
 Richard had come to Ireland with by far the 
 largest army that had ever landed on its shores, 
 but, even so, he achieved no victory that was 
 not writ in water. Froissart quotes Richard's 
 English chief assistant in looking after his new 
 liege-men to the effect that the four kings sub- 
 mitted " more through love and good-humour 
 than by battle or force." 
 
 The reception of the four kings at Hoggin 
 Green is, therefore, interesting, not as a passage 
 in the history of Irish subjection, but because it 
 throws into vivid contrast certain features in the 
 
DUBLIN 297 
 
 civilisations of the Irish and the invaders. The 
 gentleman-butler who was told off to attend upon 
 the guests in the " very handsome house " assigned 
 to them, and who described the whole business to 
 Froissart, looked on the kings, of course, as a 
 perplexing sort of savages. " When these kings 
 were seated at table," he related, as a shocking 
 example of their barbarous manners, " and the 
 first dish was served, they would make their 
 minstrels and principal servants sit beside them, 
 eat from their plates, and drink from their cups. 
 They told me this was a praiseworthy custom in 
 their country, where everything was in common 
 but their bed." 
 
 Nowadays, this Irish civilisation of equality and 
 culture seems to the majority of intelligent people 
 a far from inferior alternative to the feudal 
 civilisation of inequality and militarism. But 
 those who have sought to justify the presence of 
 England in Ireland have always done so only 
 by assuming that because Ireland was different 
 from England, it was therefore uncivilised, even 
 criminally so. John Stuart Mill saw that there 
 were not any other two civilisations in Europe 
 which differed more than the civilisations of 
 England and Ireland. But he saw in this a reason, 
 not for the domination of one over the other, but 
 for leaving each to work out its salvation along 
 its own lines. 
 
 In connection with the visit of the four kings, 
 
298 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 an interesting difference between Irish and 
 foreign chivalryis alsoworth mentioning. Richard 
 wished to make the four kings knights, and his 
 intermediary was profoundly astonished when he 
 was told that they were knights already, and that 
 in Ireland a king's son was made a knight and 
 trained in the elements of chivalry at the age of 
 seven. The kings were induced, however, out of 
 deference to their host to allow themselves to 
 be re-knighted. It was in Christchurch Cathedral 
 that, on the eve of the ceremony, they kept their 
 all-night vigil. 
 
 This was on the occasion of Richard's first 
 visit to Dublin. His second expedition cost him 
 his crown. While he was feasting in Dublin, a 
 rival had arisen in England and made himself 
 King Henry iv. . . . 
 
 The second of the three scenes I spoke of took 
 place not many yards away from the feast of the 
 four kings. This was the coming of Grattan from 
 his sick-bed to plead with the Irish Parliament 
 to stand firm against the Union which Pitt, with 
 a mixture of force, fraud, and corruption, was 
 trying to carry through, and to preserve that 
 independence which had already done miracles for 
 the advancement of Ireland. Grattan, white and 
 worn with illness and a long journey, has been 
 accused of theatricality in the business of this 
 scene. His tottering entrance, his request to the 
 Speaker to be allowed to address the House from 
 
DUBLIN 299 
 
 his seat, have been disparaged as tricks to put 
 posterity into the melting mood. For myself, I 
 could as soon doubt that Hamlet was sad as that 
 the pillared eloquence of that great farewell of 
 Grattan's in the last of his speeches was sincere. 
 Every one knows its prophetic close — 
 
 " Yet I do not give up my country. I see her in a swoon, 
 but she is not dead. Though in her tomb she lies helpless and 
 motionless, there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheek, 
 a glow of beauty. 
 
 * Thou art not conquered : beauty's ensign yet 
 Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks ; 
 And death's pale flag is not advanced there.' 
 
 " While a plank of the vessel holds together I will not leave 
 her. Let the courtier present his loyal sail to the breeze, and 
 carry the barque of his faith with every wind that blows ; I 
 will remain anchored here ; with fidelity to the fortunes of my 
 country, faithful to her freedom, faithful to her fall." 
 
 In those sentences Grattan foretold the coming 
 of a new Irish Parliament. He afterwards moved, 
 a ghost of his old self, about the lobbies of the 
 English House of Commons, and his body lies 
 abroad in Westminster Abbey. But the Grattan 
 whom the world remembers is the Grattan of 
 Grattan's Parliament — the Grattan of Ireland. 
 
 The third of the coloured events took place 
 in Green Street Court-house — the court-house in 
 which, at near ten o'clock at night, Robert Emmet 
 had been condemned to the death of a traitor. 
 
300 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 John Mitchel, perhaps the greatest Irish prose- 
 writer of last century — -a good, strong-jawed 
 traitor from Ulster — stood more than forty years 
 later in the same dock on a comparable charge, 
 and was defended, it is interesting to remember, 
 by Emmet's brother-in-law, Robert Holmes. 
 Mitchel was openly and frankly a revolutionist. 
 "Above all," he had exhorted his countrymen 
 in the columns of The United Irishman, " let 
 the man among you who has no gun sell his 
 garment and buy one." I do not think that 
 Mitchel was a great revolutionary leader. But 
 he was more than that : he was a great soul. He 
 planned an insurrection, but he was so much in 
 love with the impossible that he planned it, not 
 in the secrecy of conspiratorial meetings, but in 
 the columns of a weekly paper. The horrors of 
 the Famine, however — when the country stank 
 with discoloured corpses, when, in Mitchel's 
 words, " maniac mothers stowed away their dead 
 children to be devoured at midnight," when 
 starving creatures were transported for seven 
 years for stealing a few turnips and parsnips — did 
 not create an atmosphere conducive to the patient 
 sort of conspiracies. None the less, even those of 
 us who believe that Gavan Duffy showed more 
 political wisdom than Mitchel in those critical 
 days cannot deny our enthusiastic reverence to 
 that caged lion of genius who attempted to roar 
 Ireland into revolution when she was nearer the 
 
DUBLIN 301 
 
 feebleness of death than she has ever been within 
 the memory of man. Never did the intense 
 passion of Mitchel burn more fiercely than in the 
 last scene in the Green Street dock, as he doubled 
 his treason by calling on his countrymen to 
 imitate it. " I do not," he proclaimed — 
 
 "I do not repent anything that I have done, and I believe 
 the course which I have opened is only commenced. The 
 Roman who saw his hand burning to ashes before the tyrant, 
 promised that three hundred should follow out his enterprise. 
 Can I not promise for one, for two, for three, ay, for 
 hundreds ? " 
 
 We are told that immediately passionate voices 
 from all parts of the court responded to him : 
 " For me ! for me ! promise for me, Mitchel ! 
 and for me ! " The friends who stood near him 
 reached over the dock to clasp him by the hand. 
 And though Dublin did not rise to rescue him as 
 he had expected, and brought down upon itself 
 his scornful denunciation as a city of bellowing 
 slaves and genteel dastards, John Martin and the 
 others who gave their promises that day kept them 
 very well. 
 
 If one goes to Dublin to-day, one finds that the 
 living influence out of the past is not John Mitchel, 
 but his far more constructive and conciliatory 
 contemporary, Thomas Davis. There is a statue 
 to Davis in the Mount Jerome Cemetery at 
 Harold's Cross — not far from the place where 
 
302 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 Robert Emmet was captured — but I could not 
 find his grave, though I have twice looked for it 
 and asked the gardeners of the tombs whereabouts 
 it lay. His statue looks out over that field of 
 graves amid which the misty stones rise with their 
 genteel and Protestant memories, and to any 
 Nationalist it must seem as though this missionary 
 of kindness in politics were claiming his brother- 
 dead for the sweet and reasonable kingdom of the 
 love of Ireland. He is the symbolic figure of 
 constructive Nationalism, the Nationalism of love, 
 as Mitchel is the symbolic figure of destructive 
 Nationalism, the Nationalism of hate. He was 
 the first of the nation-builders. That is why 
 to the Gaelic League and other movements 
 which aim at uniting men of all churches and 
 politics he is something like a patron saint. There 
 are few country gatherings of Gaelic Leaguers 
 where somebody does not quote a verse of his 
 propagandist poetry — especially his appeal for 
 the national brotherhood of all creeds : — 
 
 "What matter that at different shrines 
 
 We pray unto one God — 
 What matter that at different times 
 
 Your fathers won the sod — 
 In fortune and in name we're bound 
 
 By stronger links than steel ; 
 And neither can be safe nor sound 
 
 But in the other's weal." 
 
 Obviously, it would be foolish to argue that this 
 
DUBLIN 303 
 
 is poetry. It is, however, very effective and very- 
 noble political journalism. 
 
 But you will never see a crowd round the 
 Thomas Davis statue in the Mount Jerome 
 Cemetery. Hither no tourists are jarvied as to 
 one of the exciting places of Ireland. Not that 
 the people do not love a cemetery in Dublin 
 as in other parts of the world. The Glasnevin 
 Cemetery at the opposite end of the city, with 
 its thronging and chimneyed monuments, marking 
 the graves of so many of the great men of Ireland 
 — the grave of O'Connell boastfully, and the 
 grave of Parnell quietly, like a haunt of peace — 
 is a crowded resort. Not long ago I was there 
 on a Sunday afternoon to see the monument to 
 John O'Leary, the most picturesque of Fenians, 
 being unveiled. The occasion was especially in- 
 teresting because the authorities of the cemetery 
 at first refused to allow the descriptive words, 
 " the Fenian leader," to appear on the monument. 
 Not that the words were not the exact truth, 
 but that the Fenians — who suffered badly at the 
 hands of priests and bishops — ought not to be 
 allowed to obtrude their revolutionary title 
 among respectable tombs. However, public 
 opinion and common sense won in the end, and 
 the monument is allowed to speak the truth. 
 
 Sunday appears to be the great popular day in 
 Glasnevin. But, of course, the multitudinous 
 holiday-ground of Dublin is not the cemetery, but 
 
304 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 Phoenix Park. Phoenix Park, with its lawns and 
 woods and meadows, is one of the rich gifts of 
 Dublin to the stranger, though the stranger as 
 a rule drives out to it, not to possess himself of 
 its riches, but to be shown the exact spot where 
 a political murder was committed some thirty 
 years ago. The " exact spot " appears to be 
 preserved in the public memory by some bene- 
 factor of the car-drivers, who keeps a mark scraped 
 at the side of the walk where Mr. Burke and Lord 
 Frederick Cavendish met their end. This little 
 scratch of earth, with the Viceregal Lodge 
 peeping out towards it through a lawn of trees, 
 is probably the most gazed-at thing in Dublin — 
 at least so far as visitors are concerned. And 
 indeed the Phoenix Park murders have filled an 
 extraordinarily disproportionate place in a good 
 deal of political thought — or, rather, talk — about 
 Ireland. It became an obsession with some 
 Unionists that they were a representative Irish 
 deed, and I have heard a Scottish Presbyterian 
 clergyman in my father's house declaring that 
 he would not set foot in Ireland an inch outside 
 the province of Ulster — " Parnell's country," he 
 called the barbarous ogre-ridden wilderness beyond 
 the border. I remember, too, when I was a child 
 on my first visit to Dublin, how I expected to find 
 murderers among the fauna of the Park when I 
 was taken out there to see the beasts in the 
 Zoological Gardens. 
 
DUBLIN 305 
 
 The truth is, the imagination of the world has 
 been filled ever since Elizabeth's day with the 
 defamations of Ireland, and it is only at the 
 present time that ordinary people in many places 
 are beginning to realise that Ireland is inhabited 
 by human beings and not by comic criminals 
 with a taste for melancholy songs. When one 
 remembers this, one cannot but honour the 
 nobleness of Lady Frederick Cavendish, whose 
 husband was one of the victims of the Phoenix 
 Park tragedy, and who none the less never 
 wavered in her belief in the Irish people and in 
 their right to be free in their own land. . . . 
 
 But there is no use in trying to sum up the 
 interest and meaning of Dublin in a chapter. 
 To write about Dublin is to write about Ire- 
 land : it is to write about the Gaelic League 
 and the Abbey Theatre, and A. E. and Sir 
 Horace Plunkett, and Sinn Fein and Parnell and 
 the Fenians and Young Ireland, and Emmet 
 and Ninety-Eight and Grattan's Parliament, 
 and Swift and William of Orange and James 11. 
 (who, good Englishman that he was, was not 
 at all pleased when the Irish Parliament that 
 was loyal to him declared itself independent 
 of the English Parliament that was rebelling 
 against him), and Cromwell and Strafford, and 
 Red Hugh O'Donnell and Elizabeth's land-pirates 
 (who were as cruel and as daring as any pirates of 
 the sea), and Trinity CoUege (which was meant to 
 20 
 
3o6 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 make the Irish Protestant, but may be destined to 
 make the Protestants Irish), and Silken Thomas 
 (who put his guns on Howth Head against the 
 invaders), and Lambert Simnel (who was crowned 
 King of Great Britain and Ireland in Christchurch 
 Cathedral), and Art MacMurrough (who levied 
 tribute on the English Government), and Edward 
 Bruce (who came from Scotland and laid the 
 Englishry of Ireland waste, and encamped with his 
 brother Robert where Phoenix Park is, and, crowned 
 with the crown of Ireland, was defeated at last 
 hy famine), and Black Monday (when the O'Byrnes 
 and the O'Tooles swept down from the hills 
 upon the Bristol folk holding Dublin for King 
 John, and most bloodily spoilt a public holiday at 
 Cullenswood in Rathmines), and Dermot of the 
 Foreigners (who let in the Normans, a savage 
 man who mutilated a dead enemy's face with his 
 teeth on the field of battle), and Brian of the 
 Tributes (age-worn conqueror of the Danes, who 
 saw the great battle of Clontarf as it were a host 
 of men felling the trees of a wood), and a thousand 
 years and more before that again when the 
 bright children of the hills were doing those 
 things which have been the matter of the heroic 
 legends and the folk-tales ever since. 
 
 - 1 have already said in this chapter that St. 
 Patrick had very little to do with Dublin, but it 
 was in Dublin — Baile Athe Cliath, the Town of 
 the Ford of Hurdles, as the Irish have always 
 
DUBLIN 307 
 
 called it in memory of an exciting incident which 
 you may read of in the story of the Vengeance of 
 Mesgedra — that St. Patrick was brought face to 
 face with Oisin, the last of the pagans, when 
 Oisin wearied of the Paradise of the Gael, which 
 we know as the Land of the Young, and revisited 
 the glimpses of the moon that shines over Ireland. 
 It was in the fifth century that Patrick came 
 to Ireland, while it was in the third century that 
 Oisin and the Fenian warriors had lived and 
 died. The story of the return of Oisin, tall and 
 beautiful and strong as men no longer were on 
 earth, into a Christian world in which Finn 
 MacCool and Oscar and the rest were mere husks 
 of names, is one of the most appealing of the 
 Irish legends. Here, as it were, in the many 
 imaginative dialogues which record the con- 
 versations between the saint and the returned 
 hero, the golden youth of Paganism fights a 
 running duel with the grave and terrible sanctity 
 of the Christians. " Oisin," says Patrick in one 
 of these dialogues, " unless you let me baptize 
 you, you will go to hell where the rest of the 
 Fenians are." " If," retorts Oisin in scorn, 
 " Dermot and Goll and Finn were to go to hell, 
 they would bring the devil and his forge up out 
 of it on their back." And, when he hears from 
 St. Patrick that all the inhabitants of hell had 
 been condemned because of the eating of a single 
 apple, he bursts out, with pagan common sense, 
 
3o8 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 " If I had known that your God was so narrow- 
 sighted that He damned all those people for one 
 apple, we would have sent three horses and a mule 
 carrying apples to God's heaven for Him." 
 
 Obviously it was Oisin of the battles and not 
 Patrick of the prayers who was surrounded with a 
 divine light in the hearts of the tale-maker who 
 invented this. And, indeed, though Oisin in 
 the end lets himself be baptized, the poets usually 
 give the best of the argument to him and not to 
 St. Patrick. Perhaps it is because the natural 
 man resents the way in which hell is opened 
 to receive the enormous warriors of Finn. Our 
 sympathies leap out to Oisin as, mindful of those 
 companies of warriors who had once been the 
 nonpareil of the earth, he attempts to conceive 
 this new and potent God. 
 
 " If my son Oscar and God," he cries in a song 
 translated by Dr. Douglas Hyde in The Religious 
 Songs of Connacht, " were engaged hand to hand 
 on the Fenians' Hill, and I were to see my son on 
 the ground, I would say that God was a strong 
 man." He tells Patrick, too, that all the virtues 
 which the clergy say are commended by the King 
 of the Stars were in the Fenians of Finn already. 
 And when we remember that among the maxims 
 given by Finn to one of his captains was, " Two- 
 thirds of thy gentleness be shown to women and to 
 little children that creep on the floor, and to poets ; 
 and be not violent to the common people," we 
 
DUBLIN 309 
 
 seem to be on the entrance steps of a civilisation 
 in which culture and gentleness counted for not 
 less than bravery in battle. Legend has it that 
 it was by St. Patrick's orders that the stories of 
 Finn and his companions were taken down from 
 the lips of this ravenant from the youth of the 
 world — a giant world in which, so Oisin assured 
 his hearers, the leg of a lark was as big as a shoulder 
 of mutton in the later degenerate time, and the 
 berries of the wild ash were as big as sheep, and 
 a leaf of ivy was as broad as a knight's shield. . . . 
 Alas ! Oisin himself was but a withered thing and a 
 ghost by this time, for he had broken the com- 
 mand which had been put upon him in the Land 
 of the Young not to dismount from his white 
 horse or to touch the earth during his wanderings 
 among men. He was at Glanismole, near Dub- 
 lin, one day when, seeing some puny moderns 
 labouring to raise a huge stone on to a cart, he 
 stooped to aid them in pity for their feebleness, 
 and suddenly the white horse flew away from him 
 in a mist, and the golden-looming immortal of an 
 instant before was struggling up from the ground, 
 an ancient, skinny man, without strength, without 
 beauty, wrinkled and feeble and grey. It was 
 this ghostly figure that St. Patrick had brought to 
 him where Dublin now is, and with whom he had 
 so many talks and heated words about the old 
 times. . . . 
 
 I will say farewell to you now, Dublin of the 
 
3IO RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 bridges, though it should be in the middle of a 
 paragraph. I will say farewell to you, but not 
 before I have put my curse upon those who have 
 called you dirty and have not noticed except 
 condescendingly that you are beautiful. Perhaps 
 you are dirty, but I have not yet found any city 
 that was clean enough to justify boasting. The 
 Liffey that flows through you in that ugly stone 
 tank — for surely those deep dungeony walls you 
 gave it are unnecessarily joyless — is, I admit, a 
 test of faith, and that baby-food advertisement 
 which curves in letters chosen from a mean and 
 monstrous alphabet with one of your bridges over 
 the sluggish tide is something that a finer civili- 
 sation would make as impossible as an auction 
 from a cathedral pulpit. But then you have other 
 waters besides the Liffey, and other bridges. 
 You are in a girdle, as it were, of canals and 
 streams, and from every grey little bridge that 
 rises and falls over them there is a prospect of 
 hills that mount up in shining green terraces to 
 the glens of Wicklow. 
 
 There is surely no city in which it is easier to 
 get out into the unlabouring world of grass and 
 the perpetual Sabbath of the cattle than Dublin. 
 Even those residential parks on the skirts of the 
 town, that have fallen into disuse and cheapness, 
 seem to house the silences of the primeval forest 
 as their wild loose-fingered trees murmur in the 
 sun in their kingdom of untended grass. Those 
 
DUBLIN 311 
 
 huge grey walls, too, which line so many of the 
 long dusty roads, and make one feel at times as 
 though one were walking past a rich man's gaol, 
 enable one soon to get the impression of a desert 
 solitude. I do not like those excessive blind walls 
 myself. They are forbidding to the point of 
 being inhuman. If they do not imply that an 
 ogre lives behind them, they imply that they may 
 one day be besieged by ogres. They are monuments 
 of mistrust. They are out of harmony with the 
 enchanted laughter that fills the Dublin streets — 
 the laughter that ripples in rags along the kennels 
 of the Coombe, and indeed wherever two or three 
 are gathered together on the shores of Dublin 
 Bay, from the fairy promontory of Howth, a 
 warrior's headland, to Dalkey of the seas and the 
 Sunday bands. 
 
 This reminds me that I read lately of a visitor 
 who found Dublin the saddest city he had ever 
 known. The Dublin of my experience is different. 
 Its leisurely crowds, not yet slaves to the tailor, 
 and its knots of talkative and good-humoured 
 persons among whom the great policemen move, 
 seem to me still to retain some of the old vitality 
 that made Dublin famous for gaiety and wit. 
 It will seem a sad city to those who like to see the 
 streets crowded with lorries of merchandise and 
 busy with the rush of men with narrow money- 
 making faces. For Dublin is no city of quick 
 fortunes and quick lunches. I am of those who 
 
312 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 
 do not entirely regret this, and yet I know very 
 well that Dublin to-day is only leading a bath- 
 chair existence compared to the leaping energy 
 of life that will be hers when she is a capital in 
 liberties and duties as well as in name. When the 
 
 Irish Parliament is reopened But it would 
 
 require another book to tell what Dublin will be 
 like then. 
 
 Printed by Morrison & Gibb Limited, Edinburgh 
 
BOSTON COLLEGE 
 
 3 9031 01646079 2