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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41250 ***
+
+  [ Transcriber's Notes:
+
+    Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully
+    as possible, including inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation.
+    Some corrections of spelling and punctuation have been made. They
+    are listed at the end of the text.
+
+    Italic text has been marked with _underscores_.
+  ]
+
+
+
+
+MEARING STONES
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+
+  THE RUSHLIGHT.
+  THE GARDEN OF THE BEES.
+  THE GILLY OF CHRIST.
+  THE MOUNTAINY SINGER.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THE WALL OF SLIEVE LEAGUE.]
+
+
+
+
+  MEARING STONES
+
+  Leaves from my Note-Book on Tramp
+  in Donegal, by JOSEPH CAMPBELL
+  (Seosamh Mac Cathmhaoil), with Sixteen
+  Pencil Drawings by the Author.
+
+  MAUNSEL & COMPANY, LTD.,
+  96 MIDDLE ABBEY ST., DUBLIN.
+  1911.
+
+
+  Printed by Maunsel & Co., Ltd., Dublin.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                     Page
+
+  In the Mountains                                      1
+
+  The Wander-Lust                                       2
+
+  The Dark Woman                                        2
+
+  By Lochros Beag                                       3
+
+  Coaching by the Stars                                 3
+
+  A Rainbow                                             3
+
+  Change                                                4
+
+  Prophet's Food                                        4
+
+  The Transient                                         5
+
+  Women and Hares                                       5
+
+  The Smell of the Town                                 5
+
+  Glengesh                                              5
+
+  Clog-Seed                                             6
+
+  Herbs and Flowers                                     6
+
+  A Young Girl                                          7
+
+  The General Light and Dark                            7
+
+  Soul and Body                                         8
+
+  A Man on Shelty-Back                                  9
+
+  The Fairies                                           9
+
+  Stranorlar Station                                    9
+
+  Stones                                               10
+
+  The Strand-Bird                                      10
+
+  Space                                                10
+
+  Rabbits and Cats                                     11
+
+  The Glas Gaibhlinn                                   11
+
+  A House in the Road's Mouth                          11
+
+  The Quest                                            12
+
+  Muckish                                              12
+
+  The May-Fire                                         12
+
+  Bloody Foreland                                      13
+
+  Twilight and Silence                                 13
+
+  The Poor Herd                                        14
+
+  A Mountain Tramp                                     14
+
+  The Festival of Death                                19
+
+  In Glen-Columcille                                   19
+
+  The Brink of Water                                   20
+
+  A Dark Morning                                       21
+
+  The Swallow-Mark                                     21
+
+  Women Beetling Clothes                               21
+
+  The Sea                                              22
+
+  A Ballad-Singer                                      22
+
+  Sunlight                                             24
+
+  Turf-Cutting                                         24
+
+  His Old Mother                                       25
+
+  A Day of Wind and Light, Blown Rain                  25
+
+  Lying and Walking                                    26
+
+  Glen-Columcille to Carrick                           26
+
+  Ora et Labora                                        29
+
+  Two Things that won't go Grey                        29
+
+  Rundal                                               29
+
+  Púca-Piles                                           30
+
+  The Rosses                                           30
+
+  A Country Funeral                                    30
+
+  Youth and Age                                        31
+
+  Summer Dusk                                          32
+
+  A Note                                               32
+
+  The Peasant in Literature                            32
+
+  An Insleep                                           33
+
+  Water and Slán-Lus                                   33
+
+  By Lochros Mór                                       33
+
+  Rival Fiddlers                                       34
+
+  Nature                                               35
+
+  Sunday under Slieve League                           35
+
+  The Night he was Born                                36
+
+  The Lusmór                                           37
+
+  Derry People                                         37
+
+  A Clock                                              38
+
+  Carrick Glen                                         38
+
+  A Shuiler                                            39
+
+  Turkeys in the Trees                                 39
+
+  A Party of Tinkers                                   39
+
+  Teelin, Bunglass, and Slieve League                  40
+
+  The Shooting Star                                    45
+
+  Sunday on the Road between Carrick and Glengesh      45
+
+  A Roany Bush                                         46
+
+  August Evening                                       46
+
+  Near Inver                                           47
+
+  All Subtle, Secret Things                            47
+
+  A Madman                                             47
+
+  Laguna                                               48
+
+  Near Letterkenny                                     48
+
+  Shan Mac Ananty                                      48
+
+  A Poor Cabin                                         51
+
+  The Flax-Stone                                       51
+
+  After Sunset                                         52
+
+  The Darkness and the Tide                            53
+
+  Errigal                                              54
+
+  The Sore Foot                                        54
+
+  Asherancally                                         54
+
+  Orange Gallases                                      55
+
+  The Human Voice                                      55
+
+  Loch Aluinn                                          56
+
+  The Open Road                                        56
+
+
+
+
+DRAWINGS
+
+
+  The Wall of Slieve League          Frontispiece
+
+  Clady River, near Gweedore        Facing Page 2
+
+  Pass of Glengesh                        "     6
+
+  Lochros Beag                            "     8
+
+  Muckish, with a 'Cap' on                "    12
+
+  On the Road to Doon Well                "    16
+
+  Near Alton Loch                         "    20
+
+  A Street in Ardara                      "    22
+
+  Falling Water                           "    26
+
+  Bog and Sky                             "    30
+
+  Mountainy Folk                          "    34
+
+  A Wayfarer                              "    38
+
+  The Horn                                "    42
+
+  A Clachan of Houses                     "    48
+
+  A Gap between the Hills                 "    50
+
+  Loch Nacung--Moonrise                   "    54
+
+
+
+
+MEARING STONES
+
+
+
+
+IN THE MOUNTAINS
+
+
+"In the mountains," says Nietzsche, "the shortest way is from summit to
+summit." That is the way I covered Donegal. Instead of descending into
+the valleys (a tedious and destroying process at all times), I crossed,
+like the king of the fairies, on a bridge of wonder:
+
+    With a bridge of white mist
+    Columcille he crosses,
+    On his stately journeys
+    From Slieve League to Rosses.
+
+What seems in places in this book a fathomless _madhm_ is in reality
+bridged over with wonder--dark to the senses here and there, I grant
+you, but steady and treadable in proportion to the amount of vision
+one brings to the passage of it. All, I know, will not follow me (the
+fairies withhold knowledge from the many and bestow it on the few),
+but if blame is to be given let the fairies get it, and not me. And
+I may as well warn the reader here that it is unlucky to curse the
+fairies. Rosses is but a storm's cry, and--the curse always comes home
+to roost!
+
+With regard to the pictures illustrating the book, several people
+who have seen them in the original have criticised their darkness,
+as if they were all drawn "in twilight and eclipse." But the darkness
+of Donegal was the first thing that struck me when I crossed the
+frontier at Lifford, and the forty miles' journey through the hills
+to Ardara bit the impression still more deeply into me. And if I were
+asked now after a year's exile what I remember most vividly of the
+county, I should say its gloom. I can see nothing now but a wilderness
+of black hills, with black shadows chasing one another over them,
+a gleam of water here and there, and just the tiniest little patch
+of sunlight--extraordinarily brilliant by contrast with the general
+darkness--on half a field, say, with its mearing-stones, to relieve the
+sense of tragedy that one feels on looking at the landscape.
+
+
+
+
+THE WANDER-LUST
+
+
+Sea-ribbons have I cut, and gathered ling; talked with fairies; heard
+Lia Fail moaning in the centre, and seen Tonn Tuaidh white in the
+north; slept on hearth-flags odd times, and under bushes other times;
+passed the mill with the scoop-wheels and the house with the golden
+door; following the roads--the heart always hot in me, the lights on
+the hills always beckoning me on!
+
+
+
+
+THE DARK WOMAN
+
+
+We were talking together the other morning--the publican and
+myself--outside the inn door at Barra, when a dark woman passed. "God
+look to that poor creature," says he; "she hasn't as much on her as
+would stuff a crutch." "Stuff a what?" says I, for I didn't quite
+understand him. "The bolster of a crutch," says he. "And she knows
+nobody. Her eye-strings is broke."
+
+[Illustration: CLADY RIVER, NEAR GWEEDORE.]
+
+
+
+
+BY LOCHROS BEAG
+
+
+A waste of blown sand. The Atlantic breakers white upon its
+extremest verge. A patch of sea-bog before, exhaling its own peculiar
+fragrance--part fibre, part earth, part salt. Ricks of black turf
+stacked over it here and there, ready to be creeled inland against
+the winter firing. The dark green bulk of Slieve a-Tooey rising
+like a wall behind, a wisp of cloud lying lightly upon its carn. The
+village of Maghery, a mere clachan of unmortared stone and rain-beaten
+straw, huddling at its foot. A shepherd's whistle, a cry in torrential
+Gaelic, or the bleat of a sheep coming from it now and again, only to
+accentuate the elemental quiet and wonder of the place. The defile of
+Maum opening beyond, scarped and precipitous, barely wide enough to
+hold the road and bog-stream that tumble through it to the sea. The
+rainbow air of our western seaboard enfolding all, heavy with rain and
+the fragrance of salt and peat fires.
+
+
+
+
+COACHING BY THE STARS
+
+
+Coaching by the stars, night-walking--all my best thoughts, I find,
+come to me that way. Poetry, like devilry, loves darkness.
+
+
+
+
+A RAINBOW
+
+
+I was watching a rainbow this afternoon--a shimmering ring in the
+sky between the fort at the mouth of the Owentocker river and Slieve
+a-Tooey beyond. "That's a beautiful sight, now," said a beggar,
+stopping on the road to have a word with me--the sort of person one
+meets everywhere in Ireland, friendly, garrulous, inquisitive, very
+proud of his knowledge of half-secret or hidden things, and anxious
+at all times to air it before strangers. "We do have a power of them
+this speckled weather." He looked into the sky with a queer look, then
+started humming over the names of the colours to himself in Irish. "And
+they say, sir, it's unlucky to pass through a rainbow. Did you ever
+hear that?"
+
+
+
+
+CHANGE
+
+
+My heart goes out to the playing and singing folk, the folk who are
+forever on the roads. Life is change; and to be seeing new wonders
+every day--the thrown sea, the silver rush of the meadow, the lights
+in distant towns--is to be living, and not merely existing. I pity the
+man who is content to stay always in the place where his mother dropped
+him; that is, unless his thoughts wander. For one might sit on a midden
+and dream stars!
+
+
+
+
+PROPHET'S FOOD
+
+
+A man hailed me on the road, and we were talking. . . . "If
+one had nothing but fraochans to eat and water to drink, sure one
+would have to be satisfied. And remember," says he, "that a prophet
+lived on as little." "Who was that?" says I. "John the Baptist," says
+he. "You'll read that in the books."
+
+
+
+
+THE TRANSIENT
+
+
+Only the transient is beautiful, said Schiller; and Nature, in the
+incessant play of her rising, vanishing forms, is not averse to
+beauty. Beauty, said Turgenev, needs not to live for ever to be
+eternal--one instant is enough for her.
+
+
+
+
+WOMEN AND HARES
+
+
+It's curious in Donegal sometimes, when going along the road, or
+crossing a footpath through the fields, to see a shawled woman, a
+perch or so off, dropping over the edge of a hill, and then when you
+get up to the edge there is no sign of her at all. And, maybe, a pace
+further on you will start a hare out of the hollow where you think the
+woman should have been, and you begin to wonder is there any truth in
+the story about women--that have to do with magic and charms and old
+freets, and the like--changing into hares, after all! I have had many
+experiences like that in my travels through the county, and in not a
+few instances have I been puzzled how a figure--silhouetted sharply
+against the skyline, and only a few yards off--could disappear so
+quickly out of view.
+
+
+
+
+THE SMELL OF THE TOWN
+
+
+A woman said to me to-day: "You'll get the smell o' the town blowed off
+you in the Donegal hills!"
+
+
+
+
+GLENGESH
+
+
+Darkness and austerity--those are the notes I carry away from this
+wild glen. Its lines have something of the splendid bareness of early
+architecture; its colour suggests time-stained walls, with quiet
+aisles and mouldering altars where one might kneel and dream away an
+existence. When you meet a stranger going the road that winds through
+it, like a coil of incense suspended in mid-air, you expect him to look
+at you out of eyes full of wonder, and to speak to you in half-chanted
+and serious words, stopping not, turning neither to left nor to right,
+but faring on, a symbol of pilgrimage:
+
+    _Le solus a chroidhe,_
+    _Fann agus tuirseach_
+    _Go deireadh a shlighe._
+
+
+
+
+CLOG-SEED
+
+
+"What are you sowing?" "Oh, clog-seed, clog-seed. The childer about
+here is all running barefoot, and I thought I might help them against
+the winter day!"
+
+
+
+
+HERBS AND FLOWERS
+
+
+_Lusmór_, _lus-na-méarachán_, _sian sléibhe_, foxglove, or
+fairy-thimble--whatever you like best to call it--it, I think, is the
+commonest herb of all. One sees it everywhere with its tall carmine
+spray, growing on ditches in the sun, in dark, shady places by the side
+of rivers, and under arches. Then the king-fern, the splendid _osmunda
+regalis_; the delicate maidenhair and hart's-tongue, rooted in the
+crannies of walls; bog-mint and bog-myrtle, deliciously fragrant after
+rain, and the white tossing _ceanabhán_; brier-roses and woodbine; the
+drooping convolvulus; blue-bough; Fairies' cabbage, or London Pride;
+pignuts and anemones; amber water-lilies, curiously scented; orchises,
+purple and white; wild daffodils and marigolds, gilding the wet meadows
+between hills; crotal, a moss rather than a herb, but beautiful to
+look at and most serviceable to the dyer; eyebright and purple mountain
+saxifrage; crested ling; tufts of sea-holly, with their green, fleshy,
+spiked leaves; and lake-sedge and sand-grass, blown through by soft
+winds and murmurous with the hum of bees. Donegal, wild though it be in
+other respects, is surely a paradise of herbs and flowers.
+
+[Illustration: PASS OF GLENGESH.]
+
+
+
+
+A YOUNG GIRL
+
+
+A young girl, in the purr and swell of youth. Her shawl is thrown
+loosely back, showing a neck and breast beautifully modelled. She is
+barefooted, and jumps from point to point on the wet road. At a stream
+which crosses the road near the _gallán_ she lifts her dress to her
+knees and leaps over. She does not see me where I am perched sunning
+myself, so I can watch her to my heart's content.
+
+
+
+
+THE GENERAL LIGHT AND DARK
+
+
+"The words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark." One
+feels the truth of this saying of Walt Whitman's in a place like the
+Pass of Glengesh, or the White Strand outside Maghery. Chanting a
+fragment of the "Leaves" one night in the Pass, when everything was
+quiet and the smells were beginning to rise out of the wet meadows
+below, I felt how supremely true it was, and how much it belonged to
+the time and place--the darkness, the silence, the vibrant stars, the
+earth smells, the bat that came out of the shadow of a fuchsia-bush and
+fluttered across a white streak in the sky beyond. And I have tried
+Wordsworth's sonnet beginning, "The world is too much with us," by a
+criterion no less than that of the Atlantic itself, tumbling in foam
+on the foreshore of Maghery when daylight was deepening into twilight,
+and the moon was low over the hills, touching the rock-pools and the
+sand-pools with flakes of carmine light. When I said the sonnet aloud
+to myself it seemed to rise out of the landscape and to incorporate
+itself with it again as my voice rose and fell in the wandering
+cadences of the verse. Nature, after all, is the final touchstone
+of art. Tried by it, the counterfeit fails and the unmixed gold is
+justified.
+
+
+
+
+SOUL AND BODY
+
+
+"It's a strange world," said a tramp to me to-day. I agreed. "And would
+you answer me this, gaffer?" said he. "Why is it when a man's soul is
+in his body, and he lusty and well, you think nothing of kicking him
+about as you would an old cast shoe? And the minute the soul goes,
+and the body is stiffening in death, you draw back from him, hardly
+daring to touch him for the dread that is on you. Would you answer
+me that, gaffer?" I was silent. "It's a strange world, sure enough,"
+said the tramp. He rose from the gripe where he lay making rings in
+the grass with his stick. "Good-day, gaffer," said he. "God speed your
+journey." And he took the road, laughing.
+
+[Illustration: LOCHROS BEAG.]
+
+
+
+
+A MAN ON SHELTY-BACK
+
+
+A man on shelty-back. He has come in from the mountains to the cloth
+fair at Ardara. He is about sixty-five, black on the turn, clean
+shaven, but for side whiskers. He wears the soft wide-awake favoured by
+the older generation of peasants, open shirt, and stock rolled several
+times round his throat and knotted loosely in front. His legs dangle
+down on either side of his mount, tied at the knees with sugans. His
+brogues are brown with bog mud, very thick in the sole, and laced only
+half-way up. He has a bundle of homespun stuff under his left arm. A
+pipe is in his teeth, and as I approach he withdraws it to bid me the
+time of day. "_Lá maith_," he says in a strong, hearty voice. I return
+the greeting, and pass on.
+
+
+
+
+THE FAIRIES
+
+
+I was in a house one night late up in the Gap of Maum, a very
+lonely place, yarning with two brothers--shepherds--who live there
+by themselves. I had sat a long time over the _griosach_, and was
+preparing to go, when the elder of them said to me: "Don't stir yet a
+bit. Sit the fire out. A body's loath to leave such a purty wee fire to
+the fairies."
+
+
+
+
+STRANORLAR STATION
+
+
+In a quiet corner, seated, I see a woman come in from the mountainy
+country beyond Convoy. She is waiting for the up-train. She is
+dark. Her hair and eyes are _very_ dark. Her lips are threads of
+scarlet. Her skin is colourless, except for a slight tanning due
+to exposure to sun and weather. She has a black shawl about her
+shoulders, and a smaller one of lighter colour over her head. She
+moves seldom. Her hands are folded on her knees. She looks into space
+with an air of quiet ecstasy, like a Madonna in an old picture. Her
+beauty is the beauty of one apart from the ruck and commonness of
+things. . . . . She spits out now and again. I cannot help
+watching her.
+
+
+
+
+STONES
+
+
+"Donegal is a terrible place for stones." "Heth, is it, sir--boulders
+as big as a house. And skipping-stones? Man dear, I could give you a
+field full, myself!"
+
+
+
+
+THE STRAND-BIRD
+
+
+I could sit for hours listening to the "bubbling" of the strand-bird;
+but that's because I am melancholy. If I weren't melancholy I'd hardly
+like it, I think. The tide's at ebb and the bollans and rock-pools
+are full of water. Beyond is space--the yellow of the sand and the
+grey of the sky--and the pipe-note "bubbling" between. A strange,
+yearning sound, like nothing one hears in towns; bringing one into
+touch with the Infinite, and deep with the melancholy that is Ireland's
+. . . and mine.
+
+
+
+
+SPACE
+
+
+In towns the furthest we see is the other side of the street; but
+here there is no limit to one's prospect--Perseus is as visible as
+Boötes--and one's thought grows as space increases.
+
+
+
+
+RABBITS AND CATS
+
+
+Donegal is over-run with rabbits; and sometimes on your journeys
+you will see a common house-cat--miles from anywhere--stalking them
+up the side of a mountain, creeping stealthily through the heather
+and pouncing on them with the savagery of a wild thing. The cats,
+a stonebreaker told me, come from the neighbouring farm-houses and
+cabins, "but they are devils for strolling," says he, and in addition
+to what food they get from their owners "they prog a bit on their own!"
+
+
+
+
+THE GLAS GAIBHLINN
+
+
+"That's a very green field," I said to a man to-day, pointing to a
+field, about two furrow-lengths away, on which the sun seemed to pour
+all its light at once. "Is there water near it?" "There's a stream,"
+says he. "And the Glas Gaibhlinn sleeps there, anyway." "And what's
+that?" "It's a magic cow the old people'll tell you of," says he, "that
+could never be milked at one milking, or at seven milkings, for that,"
+says he. "Any field that's greener than another field, or any bit of
+land that's richer than another bit, they say the Glas Gaibhlinn sleeps
+in it," says he. "It's a freet, but it's true!"
+
+
+
+
+A HOUSE IN THE ROAD'S MOUTH
+
+
+A house in the road's mouth--it is no roundabout to visit, but a short
+cut. Often I go up there of an evening, when my day's wandering is
+done, to meet the people and to hear the old Fenian stories told--or,
+maybe, a tune played on the fiddle, if Donal O'Gallagher, the dark
+man from Falcarragh, should happen to be present. It is as good as
+the sight of day to see the dancers, the boys and the girls out on
+the floor, the old people looking on from the shadow of the walls, and
+Donal himself, for all his blindness, shaking his head and beating time
+with his foot, as proud as a quilt of nine hundred threads!
+
+
+
+
+THE QUEST
+
+
+Where am I going? Looking for the dew-snail? No, but going till I find
+the verge of the sky.
+
+
+
+
+MUCKISH
+
+
+"When you see Muckish with a cap on," said a man to me one day, "you
+may lay your hand on your heart and say: 'We'll have a wet spell before
+long.'" This mountain, like Errigal, has a knack of drawing a hood of
+grey vapour round its head when the rest of the landscape is perfectly
+cloudless--like the peaks of the Kaatskills in _Rip Van Winkle_.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAY-FIRE
+
+
+The May-Fire is still kindled in some parts of Donegal. It is a
+survival of a pagan rite of our forefathers.
+
+"And at it (the great national convention at Uisneach in Meath)
+they were wont to make a sacrifice to the arch-god, whom they adored,
+whose name was Bél. It was likewise their usage to light two fires to
+Bél in every district in Ireland at this season, and to drive a pair
+of each herd of cattle that the district contained between these two
+fires, as a preservative, to guard them against all the diseases of
+that year. It is from that fire thus made that the day on which the
+noble feast of the apostles Peter and James is held has been called
+Bealteine (in Scotch Beltane), _i.e._, Bél's fire."
+
+[Illustration: MUCKISH, WITH A 'CAP' ON.]
+
+The boys and girls of a whole countryside repair to these fires,
+which are usually lit upon a high, commanding hill, and they spend
+the night out telling stories, reciting poems, singing, and dancing to
+the accompaniment of pipes and fiddles. The May-Fire is not quite so
+generally observed as the John's-Fire, which is kindled on the night of
+the 23rd of June, St. John's Eve.
+
+
+
+
+BLOODY FORELAND
+
+
+Bloody Foreland. An old woman comes out of the ditch to talk to
+me. . . . "It's a wild place, sir, God help us! none wilder. And
+myself, sir----sure I've nothing in the world but the bones of one
+cow!"
+
+
+
+
+TWILIGHT AND SILENCE
+
+
+Some places in Donegal seem to me to brood under a perpetual twilight
+and silence--Glen-Columcille, for instance, and the valley running into
+it. And mixed up with the twilight and silence is a profound melancholy
+that rises out of the landscape itself, or is read into it by the
+greyness of one's own experience. Those dark hills with the rack over
+them and the sun looking through on one little patch of tilled land,
+and the stone mearings about it, figure forth the sorrow that is the
+heritage of every Irishman; the darkness the sorrow, the sunshine
+the hope, iridescent and beautiful, but a thing of moments only and
+soon to fade away. I stand on the bridge here where the road forks,
+Slieve League to the left of me, a dim lowering bulk, and the road to
+Glen reaching away into the skyline beyond. The water of a hillstream
+murmurs continually at my feet. A duck splashes, and flaps dripping
+into the greyness overhead. Not a soul is in sight--only a blue
+feather of turf-smoke here and there to show that human hearts _do_
+beat in this wilderness; that there are feet to follow the plough-tail
+and hands to tend the hearth. The sense of wonder over-masters me--the
+wonder that comes of silence and closeness to the elemental forces of
+nature. Then the mood changes, and I feel rising up in me the sorrow
+that is the dominating passion of my life. Do many people go mad
+here? I have heard tell that they do, and no wonder, for one would
+need to be a saint or a philosopher to resist the awful austerity of
+the place.
+
+
+
+
+THE POOR HERD
+
+
+There is a poor herd at Maghery--a half-witted character--who lives
+all his days in the open, with nothing between him and the sky. He
+was herding his cows one evening in a quiet place by the caves when I
+happened on him. "What time o' day is it?" says he. "Just gone four,"
+says I, looking at my watch. "What time is that?" says he, in a dull
+sort of way. "Is it near dark?"
+
+
+
+
+A MOUNTAIN TRAMP
+
+
+Bearing south by the Owenwee river from Maghery, we strike up through
+Maum gorge. Outside Maghery we come on two men--one of them a thin,
+wizened old fellow with no teeth; the other a youngish man, very
+raggedly dressed, with dark hair and features like an Italian. The old
+man tells us in Irish (which we don't follow very clearly) to keep up
+by the river-bed, and we can't possibly lose our direction. A quarter
+of a mile further on we meet another man. He bids us the time of day
+in passably good English. I answer in Irish, telling him that we are
+on the road for Glen-Columcille, and asking him the easiest way over
+the hills. He repeats what the old man told us, viz., to keep to the
+river-bottom, and to cut up then by the fall at the head of Maum to
+Laguna, a cluster of poor houses in the mountain under Crockuna. "When
+you get there," he says, "you cannot lose your road." He comes a bit
+of the way with us, and then we leave him at a point where the track
+ends in the heather, and where a squad of navvies is engaged laying
+down a foundation of brushwood and stones to carry it further into
+the hills. It gives us a shock, in a way, to come on this squad of
+wild-looking men in so lonely and desolate a place.
+
+We are now well into the gorge, and a wild place it is! Half-way up
+we come on a house--if one could call it such--with a reek of blue
+smoke threading out of a hole in the thatch. No other sign of life
+is visible. The walls of the gorge close in darkly on every side
+except the north. On that side is the sea, white on Maghery strand,
+and stretching away, a dull copper-green colour, into the sailless
+horizon beyond. Hearing the voices, a young man comes out from between
+two boulders serving as a sort of gateway to the house. His face is
+tanned with sun and exposure, and he is in his bare feet. We greet him
+in Irish and he answers--a little surprised, no doubt, at hearing the
+language from strangers. Then another man comes forward--a brother,
+if his looks don't belie him. He is in his bare feet also, and hatless,
+with a great glibbe of black hair falling over his eyes. "You have the
+Irish?" he says. "It's newance to hear it from townsfolk." We talk for
+a while, enquiring further as to our direction over the hill, and then
+we push on. Near the head of the gorge we sit down to have a rest,
+sitting on a rock over the stream, and bathing our hands and faces
+in the brown, flooded water. All the rivers of Donegal are brownish
+in colour, and the Owenwee (_recte Abhainnbhuidhe_, "yellow river")
+is no exception. The water stains everything it touches, and I have no
+doubt but that the dark colour of the people's skin is due, partly,
+to their washing themselves in it. Coming through one's boots, even,
+it will stain the soles of the feet.
+
+[Illustration: ON THE ROAD TO DOON WELL.]
+
+We resume our journey, and after some rough and steep climbing reach
+the plateau head. Loch Nalughraman, a deep pool of mountain water, lies
+to the east of us, shimmering in the grey morning light. All around is
+bogland, of a dull red colour, and soaking with rain. We make through
+this, jumping from tuft to tuft, and from hummock to hummock, as best
+we can, going over the shoe-mouth occasionally in slush. In an hour
+or so we come on a bridle-path of white limestones, set on their flat
+in the spongy turf. We follow this for a while, and in time reach the
+poor village of Laguna. Entering into one of the houses I greet the
+bean-a'-tighe in Irish. She rises quickly from her seat by the hearth
+where she has been spinning--a crowd of very young children clinging to
+her skirts. She is a dark woman, with mellow breasts, and fine eyes and
+teeth. She is barefooted, as usual, and wears the coloured head-dress
+of her kind, curtseying to me modestly as I approach. She answers me
+in Irish--the only language she knows--and bids me come in. "_Beir
+isteach_," she says. A young man of five-and-twenty or thereabouts
+is weaving in the room beyond. (I recognised the heavy click-clack,
+click-clack, click-clack of the loom as I entered.) Hearing my enquiry
+he rises up from his seat, drops his setting-stick, and offers to guide
+us as far as the southern edge of the hill. "You will see the Glen road
+below you," he says, coming out in his bare feet into the open, and
+speaking volubly, like one used to good speech. "Look at it beyond," he
+says, "winding from the Carrick side. Keep south, and you will strike
+it after two miles of a descent." The woman brings a bowl of goat's
+milk to my sister. She drinks it readily, for she is thirsty after her
+climb. Then, thanking the poor people for their hospitality, we say,
+"_Slán agaibh_," and press forward on our journey to Glen-Columcille.
+
+We reach the high-road in about half-an-hour, near a school-house,
+shining white in the sun, and busy with the hum of children singing
+over their lessons. Things look more familiar now. We pass many houses,
+with fleeces of dyed wool--green and blue and madder--drying on bushes
+outside the doors, and men busy stacking turf and thatching. Here
+and there on the road flocks of geese lie sunning themselves,
+head-under-wing. As we draw near they get up and face us with
+protruding necks, hissing viciously. Dogs bark at us occasionally,
+but not often. (I had heard ill accounts of the Donegal dogs from
+travellers, but on the whole, my experience of them has not been
+quite so bad as I had been led to expect.) Slieve League rises on
+our left, a dark, shadowy bulk of mountain, shutting off the view
+to the south. All around is moorland, with a stream in spate foaming
+through a depression in it, and little patches of tilled land here and
+there, and the inevitable brown-thatched cabin and the peat-reek over
+it. After some miles' travelling we come on a little folk-shop by the
+road--a shop where one might buy anything from a clay-pipe or a lemon
+to Napoleon's Book of Fate. The window looks tempting, so we go in. The
+shopkeeper is a quiet-mannered little man, not very old, I would think,
+but with greyish hair, and eyes that look as if they were bound round
+with red tape--burnt out of his head with snuff and peat-smoke. We ask
+him has he any buttermilk to sell. He hasn't any, unfortunately--he
+is just run out of it--so we content ourselves with Derry biscuits,
+made up in penny cartons, and half a dozen hen-eggs to suck on the
+way. Some people may shiver at the idea of it, but raw eggs are as
+sustaining a thing as one could take on a journey! We pay our score,
+and get under way again. At a bridge where the road forks we sit down
+and eat our simple repast. A bridge has always a peculiar fascination
+for me--especially in an open country like this where one's horizon
+is not limited by trees and hedges--and I could spend hours dawdling
+over it, watching the play of sun and shadow on the water as it foams
+away under the arches. Here there is a delightful sense of space and
+quietness. The heather-ale is in our hearts, the water sings and the
+wind blows, and one ceases to trouble about time and the multitude of
+petty vexations that worry the townsman out of happiness. Did I say one
+ceases to trouble about time? Even here it comes, starting one like
+a guilty thing. We reach Meenacross Post-office at four-thirty, and
+an hour later see the Atlantic tumbling through rain on the age-worn
+strand of Glen-Columcille.
+
+
+
+
+THE FESTIVAL OF DEATH
+
+
+I met an old man on the road, and his face as yellow as dyer's
+rocket. "Walk easy past that little house beyond," says he in
+a whisper, turning round and pointing with his staff into the
+valley. "There's a young girl in it, and she celebrating the festival
+of death."
+
+
+
+
+IN GLEN-COLUMCILLE
+
+
+Through blown rain and darkness I see the Atlantic tumble in white,
+ghost-like masses on the strand. Beevna is a shadow, the crosses
+shadows. Only one friendly light burns in the valley. The patter of
+rain and the dull boom of the surf ring ceaselessly in my ears. The
+hills brood: my thoughts brood with them. I stare into the sunset--a
+far-drawn, scarlet trail--with mute, wondering eyes. Remoteness
+grips me, and is become a reality in this ultimate mearing of a grey,
+ultimate land.
+
+
+
+
+THE BRINK OF WATER
+
+
+I have often heard it said that what passes for folk-lore is in reality
+book-lore, or what began as book-lore got into the oral tradition
+and handed down through the generations by word of mouth. A young
+Ardara man, a poet and dreamer in his way, told me that poetry most
+frequently came to him when he was near water; wandering, say, by the
+edge of Lochros, or looking down from Bracky Bridge at the stream as
+it forced its way through impeding boulders to the sea. I asked him
+had he ever read "The Colloquy of the Two Sages(1)"? He said that
+he had not. I told him that in that MS. occurred the passage: _ar bá
+baile fallsigthe éicsi dogrés lasna filedu for brú uisci_, _i.e._,
+"for the poets thought that the place where poetry was revealed always
+was upon the brink of water." Nettled somewhat, he confessed that he
+got the idea from his father, a _seanchaidhe_, since dead, who knew
+something of Irish MSS., and who perhaps had read the "Colloquy," or
+at all events, had heard of it. But apart from the fact of the thing
+having been given him by his father, he felt that it was true in his
+own experience--that poetry always came to him more readily when he was
+near water.
+
+  (1) Book of Leinster.
+
+[Illustration: NEAR ALTON LOCH.]
+
+
+
+
+A DARK MORNING
+
+
+A dark, wet morning, with the mist driving in swaths over the hills. I
+met an old man on the road. "There's somebody a-hanging this morning,"
+says he. "It's fearful dark!"
+
+
+
+
+THE SWALLOW-MARK
+
+
+There is a lot of the wanderer in me, and no wonder, I suppose;
+for I have the swallow-mark--a wise man once showed it to me on my
+hand--and that means that I must always be going journeys, whether
+in the flesh or in the spirit, or both. "The swallow-mark is on you,"
+says he. "You will go wandering with the airs of the world. You will
+cheat the Adversary himself, even that he drops his corroding-drop on
+you!" And as I am a wanderer, so the heart in me opens to its kind. I
+love a brown face, a clear eye, and an honest walk more than anything;
+if in a man, good; if in a woman, better. And why people look for the
+cover of a roof, and the sun shining, I never can make out. Sunshine
+and the open, the wind blowing, travelling betimes and resting betimes,
+with my back to the field and my knees to the sky, a copy of Raftery
+or Borrow in my pocket to dip into when the mood is on me--and I am
+supremely happy!
+
+
+
+
+WOMEN BEETLING CLOTHES
+
+
+I see three women by a river: they are so close to me that I can hear
+them talking and laughing. One of them is an oldish creature, the other
+two are young and dark. They are on their knees on the bank, beetling
+clothes. One of them gets up--a fine, white-skinned girl--and tucking
+her petticoats about her thighs, goes into the stream and swishes the
+clothes several times to and fro in the brown-clear water. Then she
+throws them out to her companions on the bank, and the beetling process
+is repeated--each garment being laid on a flat stone and pounded
+vigorously until clean. The women do not see me (I am standing on a
+bridge, with a rowan-bush partly between them and me), so I can watch
+them to my heart's content.
+
+
+
+
+THE SEA
+
+
+The sea is one of those things you cannot argue with. You must accept
+it on its own terms, or leave it alone. And I like a man to be that
+way: calm at times, rough at times, kind at times, treacherous
+at times, but at heart unchanging: _not to be argued with, but
+accepted_. Is not the comparison apter than one thinks? Is not a man
+and his passions as divine and turbulent as anything under the sun?
+
+
+
+
+A BALLAD-SINGER
+
+
+A ballad-singer has come into Ardara. It is late afternoon. He stands
+in the middle of the Diamond--a sunburnt, dusty figure, a typical
+Ishmael and stroller of the roads. The women have come to their doors
+to hear him, and a benchful of police, for lack of something better
+to do, are laughing at him from the barrack front. The ballad he is
+singing is about Bonaparte and the Poor Old Woman. Then he changes his
+tune to "The Spanish Lady"--a Dublin street-song:
+
+    As I walked down thro' Dublin city
+    At the hour of twelve in the night,
+    Who should I spy but a Spanish lady,
+    Washing her feet by candlelight.
+
+    First she washed them, and then she dried them
+    Over a fire of amber coal:
+    Never in all my life did I see
+    A maid so neat about the sole!
+
+[Illustration: A STREET IN ARDARA.]
+
+Finally he gives "I'm a Good Old Rebel," a ballad of the type that
+became so popular in the Southern States of America after the Civil
+war:
+
+    I'm a good old rebel--that's what I am,
+    And for this fair land of freedom I don't care a damn;
+    I'm glad I fought agin it, I only wish we'd won,
+    And I don't want no one-horse pardon for anything I done.
+
+    I followed old Marse Robert for four years nigh about,
+    Got wounded in three places and starved at Point Look-Out:
+    I cotched the rheumatism a-campin' in the snow,
+    But I killed a chance of Yankees, and I'd like to kill some moe.
+
+    Two hundred thousand Yankees is stiff in Southern dust,
+    We got two hundred thousand before they conquered us:
+    They died of Southern fever and Southern steel and shot--
+    I wish it was two millions instead of what we got!
+
+    And now the war is over and I can't fight them any more,
+    But I ain't a-goin' to love them--that's sartin shor';
+    And I don't want no one-horse pardon for what I was and am,
+    And I won't be reconstructed, and I don't care a damn!
+
+He howls out the verses in disjointed, unmusical bursts. He acts with
+head and arms, and at places where he is worked up to a particular
+frenzy he takes a run and gives a buck-jump in the air, blissfully
+unconscious, I suppose, that he is imitating the manner in which the
+_ballistea_, or ancient dancing-songs, were sung by the Romans. At
+the end of each verse he breaks into a curious chanted refrain like:
+"Yum tilly-yum-yum-yum-yum-yum"--and then there are more sidlings and
+buck-jumps. Some of the women throw him money, which he acknowledges
+by lifting his hat grandiosely. Others of them pass remarks, quite the
+reverse of complimentary, about his voice and ragged appearance. "Isn't
+it terrible he is!" says one woman. "Look at him with the seat out
+of his trousers, and he lepping like a good one. I could choke him,
+I could!" Another woman comes out of a shop with a crying child in
+her arms, and shouts at him: "Will you go away, then? You're wakening
+the childer." "Well, ma'am," says he, stopping in the middle of a
+verse, "you may thank the Lord for His mercy that you have childer to
+waken!" The ducks quack, the dogs howl, the poor ballad-singer roars
+louder than ever. I listen for a while, amused and interested. Then I
+get tired of it, and pass on towards Bracky Bridge.
+
+
+
+
+SUNLIGHT
+
+
+Unless you have seen the sun you cannot know anything. Sunlight is
+better than wisdom, and the red of the fairy-thimble more than painted
+fans.
+
+
+
+
+TURF-CUTTING
+
+
+In the Lochros district, when the weather begins to take up, about the
+middle of May, the farmers repair to the moss on the north side of the
+Point, and start cutting the banks. The turf is then footed (sometimes
+by girls) along the causeway ditches, and when properly seasoned--say
+about the middle of July--is piled in stacks on high ground
+convenient to the moss, and covered on top with a lot of old mouldering
+"winter-stales," to keep the rain off it. "Winter-stales" are sods that
+have been left over from the previous season's cutting--the wet setting
+in and leaving the bog-roads in such a state that no slipe or wheeled
+car could get into them. Of course, most of the carrying in Donegal is
+done by creel or ass-cart; but in the Lochros district turf is scarce,
+and the farmers on the Point are obliged to keep horses to draw the
+turf in from the moss on the north side of the Owenea river, some miles
+off, and over roads that are none too good for wheeled traffic. In
+some cases I have noticed the "winter-stales" built up in little
+beehive-shaped heaps on dry ground, to be carted or creeled away as
+soon as the weather begins to mend. But it is only the more provident
+farmers who do this.
+
+
+
+
+HIS OLD MOTHER
+
+
+"My old mother's ailing this twelvemonth back," said a man to me
+to-day. "I'm afeard she'll go wi' the leaves."
+
+
+
+
+A DAY OF WIND AND LIGHT, BLOWN RAIN
+
+
+A day of wind and light, blown rain, with the sun shining through it in
+spells. Aighe river below me, brown and clear, foaming through mossed
+stones to the sea. Trout rising from it now and again to the gnats that
+skim its surface. Glengesh mountain in the middle distance--a black,
+splendid bulk--dropping to the Nick of the Bealach on the left. Meadows
+in foreground bright with marigolds, with here and there by the
+mearings tufts of king-fern, wild iris and fairy-thimble.
+
+
+
+
+LYING AND WALKING
+
+
+To lie on one's loin in the sun is all very well, but walking is
+better. It is over the hill the wonders are.
+
+[Illustration: FALLING WATER.]
+
+
+
+
+GLEN-COLUMCILLE TO CARRICK
+
+
+Saturday. It is about half-past seven o'clock in the evening. The rain,
+which kept at it pitilessly all the afternoon, has cleared off, and we
+have left the little whitewashed inn at Glen-Columcille refreshed, and
+in high fettle, for the further six miles that has to be done before
+we reach Carrick, where we mean to spend the night. We had arrived at
+Glen two hours before in a weary enough condition physically after
+our tramp over the hills from Ardara, and we had almost resolved on
+the advice of the hostess of the inn--a slow, deliberate, slatternly
+sort of woman--to put up with her for the night; but it is wonderful
+what a rest and a meal and, incidentally, a slatternly hostess does,
+and so we finally decided to go on to Carrick. We follow the road up
+by the telegraph posts, and after a stiffish climb of half a mile or
+more, reach the plateau head. We are now about five hundred feet over
+sea level. Turning round to have a last look at the place, we see
+the chapel--a plain white cruciform building, with a queer detached
+belfry--the little grey, straggling village street (some of the houses
+with slate roofs, some with thatch), the crosses standing up like
+gallan-stones on every side of it, the deep valley-bottom green as
+an emerald, Ballard mountain silhouetted against the sunset, and the
+vast Atlantic tumbling through mist on the yellow strand beyond. The
+air smells deliciously of peat. In Donegal one notices the smell of
+peat everywhere; in fact, if I were asked to give an impression of the
+county in half a dozen words I should say: "Black hills, brown rivers,
+and peat." The road is fairly level now, and we continue our course
+in a south-easterly direction. A wild waste of moorland stretches on
+every side of us, brightened here and there by little freshwater lakes,
+out of which we see the trout jumping in hundreds--Loch Unshagh,
+Loch Unna, Loch Divna, and another quite near the road, where we
+got, at the expense of wet feet and knees, some lovely specimens
+of the _lilium aureum_, or golden lily, which grows, I think, on
+every little shallow and flat and bywater in South Donegal. After
+an hour of pleasant walking the road begins to drop and the rain to
+fall again. Slieve League is on our right, but we can only see the
+lower slopes of it, for the cairn is completely covered with driving
+mist. The wind has risen, and the rain beats coolingly on our cheeks,
+and exasperatingly, at times, down our necks. We pass a shepherd on
+the road making for Malin Mór, a shawled figure with a lantern, and
+several groups of boys and asses with creels bringing turf into the
+stackers; and farther on a side-car zig-zagging up hill on its way to
+the Glen. There are two occupants, a priest--presumably the curate of
+Glen parish going over for Sunday's Mass--and the driver. It is quite
+dark now, and the rain increases in intensity. Tramping in a mountainy
+country is a delightful sport--none better! But it is on such a night
+and at the end of such a journey as this that one begins to see that
+it has a bad as well as a good side to it. The rain is coming down
+in sheets, our clothes are soaked through, the darkness is intense,
+the roads are shockingly muddy, we are tired out walking, and still
+we have another stiff mile to go before we see the friendly lights of
+the inn at Carrick. Two of us--R. M. and myself--stop at a bridge
+to have a look at the ordnance sheet which has stood us in such good
+stead all through our journey. Torrential rain beating on a map--even a
+"cloth-mounted, water-proofed" one like ours--doesn't improve it; but
+we have qualms about our direction. We think we should have arrived at
+Carrick ere this, and we just want to make sure that our direction is
+right, and that we haven't taken a wrong turning in the darkness. After
+some trouble we manage to get a match lighted. The first misfires on
+the damp emery, the second blows out, the third is swallowed up in
+rain pouring like a spout through the branches overhead, the fourth
+. . . . "Carrick! Carrick! Carrick!" The frenzied cries of the
+advance guard tell us that the town is in view. We put up our map
+resignedly, shaking great blabs of water out of it, and push ahead. In
+five minutes we have passed the chapel, with its square tower looming
+up darkly in the fog, and in another two we are safe in the inn
+parlour, enjoying a supper of hot coffee, muffins, and poached eggs.
+
+
+
+
+ORA ET LABORA
+
+
+Noon of a summer's day. I see a man in the fields--a wild, solitary
+figure--the only living thing in sight for miles. He is thinning
+turnips. Slowly a bell rings out from the chapel on the hill beyond. It
+is the Angelus. The man stands up, takes off his hat and bows his
+head in the ancient prayer of his faith. . . . The bell ceases
+tolling, and he bends to labour again.
+
+
+
+
+TWO THINGS THAT WON'T GO GREY
+
+
+I met a woman up Glengesh going in the direction of the
+danger-post. She seemed an old woman by her look, but she more
+than beat me at the walking. When we got to the top of the hill I
+complimented her on her powers. "'Deed," says she, with a deprecating
+little laugh, "and I'm getting old now. I'm fair enough yet at the
+walking, but I'm going grey--going fast. A year ago my hair was
+as black as that stack there"--pointing to a turf-stack out in the
+bog--"but now it's on the turn. And I tell you there's only two things
+in the world that won't go grey some time--and that's salt and iron."
+
+
+
+
+RUNDAL
+
+
+I see a green island. It is hardly an island now, for the tide is
+out, and one might walk across to it by the neck of yellow-grey sand
+that connects it with the mainland. It is held in rundal by a score
+of tenants living in the mountains in-by. Little patches of oats,
+potatoes, turnips, and "cow's grass" diversify its otherwise barren
+surface. There are no mearings, but each man's patch is marked by a
+cairn of loose stones, thrown aside in the process of reclamation. The
+stones, I see, are used also as seaweed beds. They are spitted in the
+sand about, like a _cheval de frise_, and in the course of time the
+seaweed carried in by successive tides gathers on them, and is used by
+the tenants for manure.
+
+
+
+
+PÚCA-PILES
+
+
+"What are these?" I asked an old woman in the fields this morning,
+pointing to a cluster of what we in the north-east corner call
+paddock-stools, and sometimes fairy-stools. "Well," said she, "they're
+not mushrooms, anyway. They're what you call Púca-piles. They say the
+Púca lays them!"
+
+
+
+
+THE ROSSES
+
+
+Bog and sky: a boulder-strewn waste, with salt lochs and freshwater
+lochs innumerable, and a trail running up to a huddle of white clouds.
+
+[Illustration: BOG AND SKY.]
+
+
+
+
+A COUNTRY FUNERAL
+
+
+Death, as they say, has taken somebody away under his oxter! I was
+coming into Ardara this morning from the Lochros side, and as I came
+up to the chapel on the hill I heard the bell tolling. That, I knew,
+was for a burying: it was only about ten o'clock, and the Angelus does
+not ring until midday. Farther on I met the funeral procession. It was
+just coming out of the village. The coffin, a plain deal one covered
+with rugs, was carried over the well of a side-car, and the relatives
+and country people walked behind. The road was thick with them--old men
+in their Sunday homespuns and wide-awakes, their brogues very dusty,
+as if they had come a long way; younger men with bronzed faces, and
+ash-plants in their hands; old women in the white frilled caps and
+coloured shawls peculiar to western Ireland; young married women, girls
+and children. Most of them walked, but several rode in ass-carts, and
+three men, I noticed, were on horseback. The tramping of so many feet,
+the rattle of the wheels and the talk made a great stir on the road,
+and the movement and colour suggested anything but a funeral. Still
+one could see that underneath all was a deep and beautiful feeling of
+sorrow, so different to the black-coated, slow-footed, solemn-faced
+thing of the towns. As the coffin approached I stood into the side
+of the road, saluted, and turned back with it the _tri céimeanna na
+trocaire_ (three steps of mercy) as far as the chapel yard.
+
+
+
+
+YOUTH AND AGE
+
+
+An old man came dawdling out of a gap by the road, and he stopped
+to have a word with me. We were talking for some time when he said:
+"You're a young man, by the looks of you?" I laughed and nodded. "Och,"
+says he, "but it's a poor thing to be old, and all your colt-tricks
+over," says he, "and you with nothing to do but to be watching the
+courses of the wind!"
+
+
+
+
+SUMMER DUSK
+
+
+Summer dusk. A fiddle is playing in a house by the sea. "Maggie
+Pickens" is the tune. The fun and devilment of it sets my heart
+dancing. Then the mood changes. It is "The Fanaid Grove" now, full of
+melancholy and yearning, full of the spirit of the landscape--the soft
+lapping tide, the dove-grey sands, the blue rhythmic line of hill and
+sky beyond. The player repeats it. . . . I feel as if I could
+listen to that tune forever.
+
+
+
+
+A NOTE
+
+
+Darkness, freshness, fragrance. Donegal fascinates one like a beautiful
+girl.
+
+
+
+
+THE PEASANT IN LITERATURE
+
+
+It has been said before that there is "too much peasant" in
+contemporary Irish literature, especially in the plays. The phenomenon
+is easily explained. Ireland is an agricultural country, a country of
+small farms, and therefore a nation of peasants; so that a literature
+which pretends to reflect the life of Ireland must deal in the main
+with peasants and the thoughts that peasants think. And peasants'
+thoughts are not such dead and commonplace things that I, who have
+learnt practically all I know from them, can afford to ignore them
+now. The king himself is served by the field. Where there is contact
+with the unseen in this book, with the mysteries which we feel rather
+than understand, it is because of some strange thought dropped in
+strange words from a peasant's mouth and caught by me here, as in a
+snare of leaves, for everyone to ponder. Impressions, with something of
+the roughness of peasant speech in them and something of the beauty,
+phases of a moment breathless and fluttering, the mystery of the sea,
+the thresh of rain, the sun on a bird's wing, a wayfarer passing--those
+are the things I sought to capture in this book.
+
+
+
+
+AN INSLEEP
+
+
+We were talking together the other evening--an old woman and myself--on
+a path which leads through the fields from Glengesh mountain to Ardara
+wood. We had got as far as the stream which crosses the path near the
+wood when she stopped suddenly. She looked west, and scratched her
+eyebrow. "I've an insleep," says she. "I hadn't one this long time!"
+
+
+
+
+WATER AND SLÁN-LUS
+
+
+What is more beautiful than water falling, or a spray of _slán-lus_
+with its flowers?
+
+
+
+
+BY LOCHROS MÓR
+
+
+The heat increases. The osmunda droops on the wall. The tide is at full
+ebb. A waste of sea-wrack and sand stretches out to Dawros, a day's
+journey beyond. I see two figures, a boy and a girl, searching for
+bait--the boy digging and the girl gathering into a creel. The deep,
+purring note of a sandpiper comes to me over the bar. It is like the
+sound that air makes bubbling through water. I listen to it in infinite
+space and quietness.
+
+
+
+
+RIVAL FIDDLERS
+
+
+I was talking with a fiddler the other evening in a house where there
+was a dance, up by Portnoo. I happened to mention the name of another
+fiddler I had heard playing a night or two before in Ardara. "Him,
+is it?" put in my friend. "Why, he's no fiddler at all. He's only an
+old stroller. He doesn't know the differs between 'Kyrie Eleison' and
+'The Devil's Dreams'!" He became very indignant. I interrupted once or
+twice, trying to turn the conversation, but all to no purpose; he still
+went on. Finally, to quiet him, I asked him could he play "The Sally
+Gardens." He stopped to think for a while, fondling the strings of his
+instrument lovingly with his rough hands; then he said that he didn't
+know the tune by that name, but that if I'd lilt or whistle the first
+few bars of it, it might come to him. I whistled them. "Oh," says he,
+"that's 'The Maids of Mourne Shore.' That's the name we give it in
+these parts." He played the tune for me quite beautifully. Then there
+was a call from the man of the house for "The Fairy Reel," and the
+dancers took the floor again. The fiddlers in Donegal are "all sorts,"
+as they say--farmers, blacksmiths, fisher boys, who play for the love
+of the thing, and strollers (usually blind men) who wander about from
+house to house and from fair to fair playing for money. When they are
+playing I notice they catch the bow in a curious way with their thumbs
+between the horsehair and the stick. At a dance it is no uncommon thing
+to see a "bench" of seven or eight of them. They join in the applause
+at the end of each item, rasping their bows together on the strings and
+stamping vigorously with their feet.
+
+[Illustration: MOUNTAINY FOLK.]
+
+
+
+
+NATURE
+
+
+A poor woman praying by a cross; a mountain shadowed in still water; a
+tern crying; the road ribboning away into the darkness that looks like
+hills beyond. Can we live every day with these aspiring things, and not
+love beauty? Can we look out on our broad view--as someone has said of
+the friars of the monastery of San Pietro in Perugia--and not note the
+play of sun and shadow? Nature is the "Time-vesture of God." If we but
+touch it, we are made holier.
+
+
+
+
+SUNDAY UNDER SLIEVE LEAGUE
+
+
+It is Sunday. The dawn has broken clear after a night's rain. The
+sunlight glitters in the soft morning air. The fragrance of
+peat, marjoram, and wild-mint hangs like a benediction over the
+countryside. A lark is singing; the swallows are out in hundreds. The
+road turns and twists--past a cabin, over a bridge--between fringes
+of wet grass. It dips suddenly, then rises sheer against a wisp
+of cloud into the dark bulk of Slieve League behind. I see the
+mountainy people wending in from all parts to Mass. I am standing
+on high ground, and can see the hiving roads--the men with their
+black coats and wide-awakes, and the women with their bright-coloured
+kerchiefs and shawls. Some of them have trudged in for miles on bare
+feet. They carry their brogues, neatly greased and cleaned, over their
+shoulders. As they come near the chapel they stop by the roadside or
+go into a field and put them on. The young girls--grey-eyed, limber
+slips from the hills--are fixing themselves before they go in of the
+chapel door. They stand in their ribboned heads and shawls pluming
+themselves, and telling each other how they look. The boys are watching
+them. I hear the fresh, nonchalant laugh and the kindly greeting in
+Irish--"_Maidin bhreagh, a Phaid_," and the "_Goidé mar tá tú,
+a Chait?_" The men--early-comers--sit in groups on the chapel wall,
+discussing affairs--the weather, the crops, the new potato spray,
+the prospects of a war with Germany, the marrying and the giving in
+marriage, the letters from friends in America, the death and month's
+mind of friends. The bell has ceased ringing. The men drop from their
+perch on the wall, and the last of them has gone in. The road is quiet
+again, and only the sonorous chant of the priest comes through the open
+windows--"_Introibo ad altare Dei_," and the shriller response of the
+clerk, "_Ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam_."
+
+
+
+
+THE NIGHT HE WAS BORN
+
+
+We were talking together, an old man and myself, on the hill between
+Laguna and Glen. The conversation turned on ages--a favourite topic
+with old men(2)--and on the degeneracy that one noticed all over
+Ireland, especially among the young. "And what age would you take _me_
+for?" said he, throwing his staff from him and straightening himself
+up. "Well, I'm a bad hand at guessing," said I, "but you're eighty if
+you're a day." "I'm that," said he, "and more. And would you believe
+it," said he, "the night I was born my mother was making a cake!"
+
+  (2) He had the Old Age Pension.
+
+
+
+
+THE LUSMÓR
+
+
+The _lusmór_, or "great herb"--foxglove,
+
+    That stars the green skirt of the meadow,
+
+is known to the peasantry by a variety of other names, as for example,
+_sian sléibhe_, "sian of the hills" (it grows plentifully on the high,
+rough places); _méarachán_, "fairy-thimble"; _rós gréine_, "little
+rose of the sun"; and _lus na mban-sidhe_, "herb of the elf-women, or
+witch-doctors," etc., etc. It is bell-shaped, and has a purplish-red
+colour. As Dr. Joyce observes, it is a most potent herb, for it is a
+great fairy plant; and those who seek the aid of the _Daoine Maithe_,
+or Good People, in the cure of diseases or in incantations of any kind,
+often make use of
+
+                  Drowsy store,
+    Gathered from the bright _lusmór_,
+
+to add to the power of their spells. It is a favourite flower in
+Highland, otherwise Gaelic Scotland; and the clan Farquhar, "hither
+Gaels," have assumed it for their badge.
+
+
+
+
+DERRY PEOPLE
+
+
+Donegal is what I call "county-proud." Speaking of Derry--the marching
+county--an old woman said to me the other day: "Och, there's no
+gentility about the Derry people. They go at a thing like a day's
+work!"
+
+
+
+
+A CLOCK
+
+
+I was going along the road this evening when I came on a clock
+(some would call it a black beetle), travelling in the direction of
+Narin. The poor thing seemed to have its mind set on getting there
+before dark--a matter of three miles, and half an hour to do it in! The
+sense of tears in me was touched for the clock, and I stooped down
+to watch it crawling laboriously along in the dust, over a very rough
+road, tired and travel-stained, as if it had already come a long way;
+climbing stones (miniature Errigals) twenty times as high as itself;
+circumventing others, falling into ruts headlong, and rising again none
+the worse for its awful experience; keeping on, on, on, "with a mind
+fixed and a heart unconquered." I couldn't help laughing at first,
+but after five minutes I felt a sort of strange kinship with the
+clock--it was a wayfarer like myself, "a poor earth-born companion
+and fellow-mortal"--and I stood watching it, hat in hand, until it
+disappeared out of view. The last I saw of it was on the top of a stone
+on rising ground, silhouetted against the sunset. Then it dropped over
+. . . and I resumed my journey, thinking.
+
+
+
+
+CARRICK GLEN
+
+
+Here there is quiet; quiet to think, quiet to read, quiet to listen,
+quiet to do nothing but lie still in the grass and vegetate. The water
+falls (to me there is no music more beautiful); a wayfarer passes now
+and again along the road on his way into Carrick; the sea-savour is
+in my nostrils; the clouds sail northward, white and luminous, far up
+in the sky; their shadows checker the hills. If the Blue Bird is to be
+found this side of heaven, surely it must be here!
+
+[Illustration: A WAYFARER.]
+
+
+
+
+A SHUILER
+
+
+I was talking to a stonebreaker on the road between Carrick and Glen
+when a shuiler passed, walking very fast. "A supple lad, that," says
+the stonebreaker. "The top o' the road's no ditch-shough to him. Look
+at him--he's lucky far down the hill already." He dropped his hammer,
+and burst into a fit of laughing. "He's as many feet as a cat!" says
+he.
+
+
+
+
+TURKEYS IN THE TREES
+
+
+One of the gruesomest sights I ever saw in my life--turkeys roosting
+among the branches of the trees at a house above Lochros. You would
+think they were birds with evil spirits in them, they kept so quiet in
+the half-darkness, and looked so solemn.
+
+
+
+
+A PARTY OF TINKERS
+
+
+A party of tinkers on the high road--man, wife, children, ass and
+cart. A poor, back-gone lot they are surely. The man trails behind
+carrying one of the children in a bag over his back. The woman pushes
+on in front, smiling broadly out of her fat, drunken face. "Oh,
+God love ye for a gentleman," she whines in an up-country _barróg_
+which proclaims her a stranger to the place. "Give us the lucky hand,
+gentleman, and may the Golden Doors never be shut against ye. Spare a
+decent poor body a copper, and I'll say seven 'Hail Mary's' and seven
+'Glory be to the Father's' for ye every night for a week. Give us the
+lucky hand, gentleman." I throw her a penny, not so much out of charity
+as to get rid of her, and the cavalcade moves on. Over the hill I hear
+her voice raised in splendid imprecation on the husband. Such coloured
+speech one only hears from peasants and strolling folk, who are in
+touch with the elemental things--the wonders and beauties and cruelties
+of life.
+
+
+
+
+TEELIN, BUNGLASS, AND SLIEVE LEAGUE
+
+
+It is a lovely summer's day, warm and fragrant and sunny. We have just
+come from Mass at Carrick chapel, and are following the road that leads
+south by the harbour up to Teelin village. Numbers of people are on
+the road with us--mostly women and girls, for the men have remained
+behind to smoke and to talk over the week's happenings in the different
+ends of the parish. The groups go in ages--the old women with the old
+women, the marriageable girls with the marriageable girls, the younger
+girls with the girls of their own age. There is a crowd of little boys,
+too--active as goats, dressed in corduroys or homespuns, and discussing
+in Irish what they will do with themselves in the afternoon. Some
+will go bathing in the harbour, others will go up to the warren by
+Loch O'Mulligan to hunt rabbits, others will remain in the village
+to watch the men and bigger boys play at skittles in a cleared space
+by the high road. I pick up with a quiet-eyed lad--the makings of a
+priest or a scholar, by his look--and in a short time I am friends with
+the crowd. If one could see me behind I must look like the Pied Piper
+of Hamelin, so many children have I following alongside me and at my
+heels. They come to know by my talk that I am interested in Irish--an
+enthusiast, in fact--and they all want to tell me at once about the
+Feis at Teelin, and about the great prizes that were offered, and how
+one out of their own school, a little fellow of eight years, won first
+prize for the best telling of a wonder-tale in the vernacular. The
+quiet-eyed lad asks me would I like to see Bunglass and the great view
+to be had of Slieve League from the cliff-head. I tell him that I am
+going there, and in an instant the crowd is running out in front of us,
+shouting and throwing their caps in the air--delighted, I suppose,
+at the prospect of a scramble for coppers on the grass when we get
+to the end of our journey. For boys are boys the world over, let the
+propagandists carp as they will! and when I was young myself I would
+wrestle a ghost under a bed for a halfpenny--so my grandmother used to
+tell me, and she was a very wise and observant woman. We have come to
+Teelin village--a clean, whitewashed little place on a hill, built "all
+to one side like Clogher"--and from there we strike up to the right by
+a sort of rocky, grass-covered loaning which leads to the cliffs. We
+pass numbers of houses on the way, each with a group of gaily-dressed
+peasants sunning themselves at the door. The ascent is gradual at
+first, but as we go on it gets steeper, and after a while's climbing
+we begin to feel the sense of elevation and detachment. The air is
+delightfully warm, and the fragrance of sea and bracken and ling is in
+our hearts. In time we reach Carrigan Head, with its martello tower,
+seven hundred feet odd over the Atlantic. Southwards the blue waters of
+Donegal Bay spread themselves, with just the slightest ripple on their
+surface, glinting in the warm sunlight. In the distance the heights of
+Nephin Beag and Croagh Patrick in Mayo are faintly discernible, and
+westwards the illimitable ocean stretches to the void. From Carrigan
+Head we follow a rough mountain trail, and in a short time reach
+Loch O'Mulligan, a lonely freshwater tarn, lying under the shadow of
+Slieve League. Back of the loch a grassy hill rises. We climb this,
+the younger boys leading about fifty yards in front, jumping along the
+short grass and over the stones like goats. Arrived at a point called
+in Irish _Amharc Mór_, or "Great View," a scene of extraordinary
+beauty bursts on us. We are standing on Scregeighter, the highest of
+the cliffs of Bunglass. A thousand and twenty-four feet below us, in a
+sheer drop, the blue waters of Bunglass advance and recede--blue as a
+sapphire, shading into emerald and white where they break on the spit
+of grass-covered rock rising like a _sceilg-draoidheachta_, or "horn of
+wizardy," out of the narrow bay. Right opposite us is Slieve League,
+its carn a thousand feet higher than the point on which we stand. In
+the precipitous rock-face, half-way up, is a scarped streak called
+_Nead an Iolair_, or the Eagle's Nest. The colouring is wonderfully
+rich and varied--black, grey, violet, brown, red, green--due, one
+would think, to the complex stratification and to the stains oozing
+from the soft ores, clays, and mosses impinging between the layers. We
+step back from the cliff-edge, and sit down on a flat slab of stone,
+the better to enjoy the view, and the boys spread themselves out in
+various attitudes over the short grass before and behind us. They
+are conversing among themselves in Irish, speaking very rapidly, and
+with an intonation that is as un-English as it can possibly be. The
+thickened l's and thrilled r's are especially noticeable. To hear these
+children speak Irish the way they do makes one feel that the language
+of Niall Naoi Giallach is not dead yet, and has, indeed, no signs of
+dying.
+
+[Illustration: THE HORN.]
+
+One could spend a day in this place sunning oneself on the cliff-head,
+or loafing about on the grass, enjoying the panorama of mountain and
+sea and sky spread in such magnificence on all sides. But we have
+promised to be back in Carrick for lunch, and already the best part
+of the forenoon is gone. "_Cad a-chlog é anois?_" I ask one of the
+boys. He looks into the sky, calculates for a while, and answers: "_Tá
+sé suas le h-aon anois. Féach an ghrían_." (It is upwards of one
+o'clock now. Look at the sun.) In a remote, open country like this the
+children are wonderfully astute, and well up in the science of natural
+things. Coming up the hill I had noticed a number of strange birds, and
+when I asked the crowd the names of them in Irish they told me without
+once having to stop to think. We are ready to go now, but before
+setting out we decide on having a scramble. My friend, R. M., takes
+a sixpence from his pocket, puts it edge down on the turf, and digs it
+in with his heel, covering it up so that no sign of it is visible. He
+then brings the boys back over the grass about a hundred yards,
+handicapping them according to age and size. One boy, the youngest, has
+boots on, and he is put in front. At a given signal--the dropping of
+a handkerchief--the race is started, and in the winking of an eye the
+crowd is mixed up on the grass, one boy's head here, another's heels
+there, over the spot where the sixpence is hidden. Five minutes and
+more does the scramble last, the boys pushing and shoving for all they
+are worth, and screaming at the top of their voices. Then the lad who
+reached the spot first crawls out from underneath the struggling mass,
+puffing and blowing, his hair dishevelled, the coat off him, and the
+sixpence in his hand!
+
+We have got back to Carrick, an hour late for lunch, and with the
+appetites of giants. We met many people on the road as we returned,
+all remarkably well-dressed--young men in the blue serge favoured by
+sailors, and girls in white; a clerical student, home on holidays from
+Maynooth, discussing the clauses of Mr. Birrell's latest Land Bill
+with a group of elderly folk; big hulking fellows with bronzed faces,
+in a uniform that I hadn't seen before, but which a local man told me
+was that of the Congested Districts Board; and pinafored children. One
+young man we noticed sitting on a rock over the water with his boots
+off, washing his feet, and several boys sailing miniature boats made
+out of the leaves of flaggers.
+
+
+
+
+THE SHOOTING STAR
+
+
+I was out the other evening on the shore to the northward of Lochros,
+watching the men taking in the turf from the banks where it had been
+footed and dried. The wind was quiet, and there was a great stir of
+traffic on the road--men with creels, horses and carts, asses and
+children driving them. An old woman (a respectable beggar by her look)
+came by, and we started to talk. We were talking of various things--the
+beauty of the evening, the plentifulness of the turf harvest, the
+sorrows of the poor, and such like--when she stopped suddenly, and
+looked up into the sky. She gripped my arm. "Look, look," she said, "a
+shooting star!" She blessed herself. There was a trail of silver light
+in the air--a luminous moment--then darkness. "That's a soul going up
+out of purgatory," she said.
+
+
+
+
+SUNDAY ON THE ROAD BETWEEN CARRICK AND GLENGESH
+
+
+Sunday on the road between Carrick and Glengesh. It is drawing
+near sunset. We pass a group of country boys playing skittles in
+the middle of the road--quite a crowd of them, big, dark fellows,
+of all ages between twenty and thirty-five. Some are lolling on the
+ditch behind, and one has a flute. Farther on we come on a string
+of boys and girls paired off in twos with their arms about each
+other's waists, like a procession on Bride's Sunday. The front pair
+are somewhat ill-matched. The man is old and awkward in his walk,
+yet cavalierly withal; the girl is young and pretty, with a charming
+white laundered dress and flowers in her hair. As our car passes they
+wave their hands to us as a sign that they are enjoying the fun quite
+as much as we are. We are rising gradually towards the Pass. Below us
+the road ribbons away through miles of bog to Slieve League. There is
+a delightful warmth and quietness in the air. The smoke of the cabin
+chimneys, as far as one can see, rises up in straight grey lines,
+"pillaring the skies of God." The whole landscape is suffused with
+colour--browns and ambers and blues--melting into infinity.
+
+
+
+
+A ROANY BUSH
+
+
+"Do you see that bush over there?" said an old man to me one day on the
+road near Leckconnell--a poor village half-way between Ardara and Gull
+Island. "It's what they call a roany bush. Well, it's green now, but in
+a month's time it'll be as red as a fox's diddy, and you wouldn't know
+it for berries growing all over it."
+
+
+
+
+AUGUST EVENING
+
+
+August evening, moonrise. A drift of ponies on the road. I heard the
+neighing of them half an hour ago as I came down the glen, and now I
+can see them, a red, ragged cavalcade, and a cloud of dust about their
+heels. There are some fourteen ponies in the drift, and three young
+fellows with long whips are driving them. They give me the time of
+day as I pass. One of them turns back and shouts after me: "Would you
+happen to have a match on you, gaffer?" He is a stout-built lad, with
+a red face, and a mat of black hair falling over his eyes. I feel in my
+pocket for a box, and give him share of what I have. He thanks me, and
+I pass on. The air is damp and fragrant, and wisps of fog lie along the
+ditches and in the hollow places under the hills. The newly-risen moon
+touches them with wonder and colour.
+
+
+
+
+NEAR INVER
+
+
+A yellow day in harvest. A young girl with a piece of drawn-thread work
+in her lap, sunning herself in the under wisp of her father's thatch. I
+come on her suddenly round a bend in the road. She is taken by surprise
+(almost as completely as _I_ am) . . . draws her legs in, settles
+her clothing, half smiles, then hangs her head, blushing with all the
+_pudor_ of abashed femininity. I pass on.
+
+
+
+
+ALL SUBTLE, SECRET THINGS
+
+
+All subtle, secret things--the smell of bees, twilight on water, a
+woman's presence, the humming of a lime-tree in full leaf, a bracken
+stalk cut through to show the "eagle" in it--all speak to me as to an
+intimate. I know and feel them all.
+
+
+
+
+A MADMAN
+
+
+I passed an old fellow to-day between Ardara and Narin, doubled up in
+the ditch with his chin on his knees, and staring at me out of two red
+eyes that burned in his head like candles.
+
+"Who's that old fellow?" I asked of a stonebreaker, a perch further
+down the road.
+
+"Oh, never heed him," says he--"he's mad. This is the sixth. There's a
+full moon the-night, and he ever goes off at the full o' the moon. Was
+he coughing at you? God, you'd think he was giving his last 'keeks,'
+to hear him sometimes!"
+
+
+
+
+LAGUNA
+
+
+Under Crockuna; a thousand feet up. Interminable red bog. A
+cluster of hovels on the tableland; one set this way, another that,
+huddling together for company sake, it seems, in this abomination of
+desolation. A drift of young children play about on a green cleared
+space between the holdings. (In Donegal one sees young children
+everywhere.) They run off like wild-cats at our approach, screaming
+loudly and chattering in Irish as they run. A rick of turf, thatched
+with winter-stales; a goat tethered; a flock of geese; tufts of dyed
+wool--red and green and indigo--spread on stones to dry; the clack of a
+loom from the house nearest us; a dog working sheep beyond.
+
+
+
+
+NEAR LETTERKENNY
+
+
+A sheepdog with a flock of geese (a most unusual charge, I'm sure)
+halted by a bridge on their way to market. The owner squats smoking
+under the parapet--a darkavis'd man, with the slouch hat, slow eye, and
+wide, mobile mouth of Donegal. I greet him, and pass on.
+
+[Illustration: A CLACHAN OF HOUSES.]
+
+
+
+
+SHAN MAC ANANTY
+
+
+Up Glengesh. The hills of the Pass close in darkly on either side of
+me. The brown road rises between them in devious loops and twists to
+the sky beyond. There is the smell of bog-myrtle and ling in the air,
+and the sound of running water. The silence is awful. I am going along
+quiet and easy-like, with hardly a thought in my head, when near a
+sodded shelter, almost hidden from view in a cluster of fuchsia bushes,
+I come on a little lad of about three years of age. He can't be older,
+I fancy, he is so small. He runs out in front of me, scared somewhat at
+my approach, as quaint a figure as ever I looked at. I shout at him and
+he stops, pulling the hat which he wears--and it is big enough to be
+his father's--over his face, and laughing shyly at me out of one corner
+of it. His hands are wet, I notice, a blae-red colour, and sticking
+with grass--as if he had been "feeling" for minnows in the stream which
+runs alongside the road. He has a pair of homespun jumpers on, very
+thick, and dyed a crude indigo colour, a shirt and vest, and his legs
+are bare and wet up to the knees. I ask him in English "where he comes
+from," "who is his father," "who is his mother," "where he lives?" He
+doesn't answer, only pulls the hat deeper over his head, and laughs
+into it. I put the question to him then in Irish. . . . . The
+words were hardly out of my mouth when he gave a leap in the air. I
+felt as if something had struck me in the face--something soft and
+smothering, like a bag of feathers--and I was momentarily blinded. When
+I looked again who should I see but Shan Mac Ananty, my _leaprachán_
+friend from Scrabo in Down, running out in front of me, in a whirl of
+dust, it seemed--a white, blinding cloud--giving buck-jumps in the air,
+and dancing and capering about in the most outlandish fashion possible.
+
+"So it's you, Shan?" I said, when I had recovered my breath. I wasn't a
+bit afraid, only winded.
+
+"Ay," says he. "I didn't know you at first. The English is strange to
+me." Then with a quaint grimace: "What are _you_ doing up here?"
+
+"And what are you doing up here yourself, Shan?" says I. "I thought
+Scrabo was your playground."
+
+"You're right, son," says he. "The old fort _is_ my playground, but the
+smoke--the smoke from the mill chimneys--chases me away at times, and
+I come up here for an airing. And, anyway, you mustn't forget that I'm
+king of the fairies of Leath-Chuinn," says he.
+
+"And so you are," says I. "I clean forgot that. And do you be in
+Donegal often?" I asked.
+
+"Once in a spell," says he. "I travel the townlands in turn from
+Uisneach to Malin," says he, "and it takes me a year and a day to do
+the round. I saw you at Scrabo in June last," says he, "but you didn't
+see me."
+
+"When was that, Shan?" says I, thinking.
+
+"On the night of the twenty-third," says he. "There wasn't a fire
+lighting as far as I could see; and I could see from Divis to the Horns
+of Boirche, and from that over to Vannin."
+
+[Illustration: A GAP BETWEEN THE HILLS.]
+
+A shadow darkened his queer little face. "Ah," says he, "they're
+changed times. I was an old man when Setanta got his hero-name,(3)
+and look at me now," says he, "clean past my time. No one knows me,
+barring yourself there. No one can talk to me; and at Scrabo it's
+worse than here. They're all planters there," says he, "all strange,
+dour folk, long in the jaw and seldom-spoken, and with no heart in the
+old customs. Never a John's-Fire lighted, never a dance danced, never a
+blessing said, never a . . . ."
+
+  (3) Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, a contemporary of Conchubhair
+  MacNeassa, who was--so tradition has it--born on the same night as
+  Christ.
+
+He stopped, and I turned to answer . . . . but Shan was
+gone! Nothing in sight for miles--nothing living--only a magpie walking
+the road, and a _toit_ of blue smoke from a cabin away down in the
+glen.
+
+
+
+
+A POOR CABIN
+
+
+A poor cabin, built of loose whin rubble; no mortar or limewash; thatch
+brown and rotting. Dung oozing out of door in pig-crew to north, and
+lying in wet heaps about causey stones. A brier, heavy with June roses,
+growing over south gable-end; rare pink bloom, filling the air with
+fragrance.
+
+
+
+
+THE FLAX-STONE
+
+
+Outside nearly every house in Donegal--at least in the north-western
+parts of it--is the _Cloch Lín_, or "Flax-Stone." This is a huge
+wheel of granite, half a ton or more in weight, revolving on the end
+of a wooden shaft which itself turns horizontally on an iron spike
+secured firmly in the ground. The purpose it serves is to "break"
+the flax after it has been retted and dried. On the long arm of the
+shaft tackling is fixed for the horse supplying the motive power--much
+in the same way as it is in a pug-mill or puddling machine used in
+the old days by brick-makers. The flax is strewn in swaths under the
+wheel, which passes over it repeatedly, disintegrating the fibre. The
+scutch-mill, of course, is a more expeditious way of doing the work,
+but Donegal folk are conservative and stick to the old method--which
+must be as old, indeed, as the culture of flax itself is in the
+country.
+
+
+
+
+AFTER SUNSET
+
+
+I was coming through Ardara wood the other evening just after
+sunset. There was a delightful smell of wet larch and bracken in the
+air. The road was dark--indeed, no more than a shadow in the darkness;
+but a streak of silver light glimmered through from the west side
+over the mountains and lay on the edge of the wood, and thousands
+of stars trembled in the branches, touching them with strangeness
+and beauty. As I approached the village I met an old woman--I knew
+she was old by her voice--who said to me: "Isn't it a fine evening,
+that?" "It is," said I. "And look," said she, "at all the stars hung
+up in the trees!" Farther on I came on a number of women and girls,
+all laughing and talking through other in the half-darkness. I was out
+of the wood now and almost into the village, and there was light enough
+to see that they were carrying water--some with one pail, others with
+two--from the spring well I passed on my way up. This, I believe, is
+a custom in Ardara.(4) The grown girls of the village go out every
+evening after dark-fall, if the weather happens to be good. They meet
+at the well, spend half an hour or so chatting and talking together,
+and then saunter home again in groups through the darkness, carrying
+their pails, just as I saw them on this particular evening. When I
+got to the village the windows were nearly all lit up. The white and
+white-grey houses looked strange and unearthly in the darkness. The
+doors were open, and one could see a dark figure here and there out
+taking the air. Over the roofs the stars shone and the constellations
+swung in their courses--the Dog's Tail, the Dragon, the Plough, the
+Rule, and the Tailor's Three Leaps; and although there was no moon one
+could see the smoke from the chimneys wavering up into the sky in thin
+green lines. The fragrance of peat hung heavily on the senses. There
+wasn't a sound--only a confused murmur of voices, like the wind among
+aspen-trees, and the faint singing of a fiddle from a house away at
+the far end of the street. Even the dogs were quiet. I passed through
+the Diamond, down the long main street next the shore, and like Red
+Hanrahan of the stories, into "that Celtic twilight, in which heaven
+and earth so mingle that each seems to have taken upon itself some
+shadow of the other's beauty."
+
+  (4) In fact, a "go of water" is a byword there--"Many a girl met
+  her man in a go of water!"
+
+
+
+
+THE DARKNESS AND THE TIDE
+
+
+"What time o' day is it?" My interrogator was an old man I met the
+other evening in a loaney running down from the back of Lochros to
+the sands of Lochros Beag Bay, near where the old fish-pass used to
+be. I looked at my watch, and told him it was five-and-twenty past
+seven. "Oh," said he, "is it so much as that? The darkness and the
+tide'll soon be coming in, then."
+
+
+
+
+ERRIGAL
+
+
+The hill of Errigal climbs like a wave to the sky. A pennon of
+white cloud tosses on its carn. Its sides are dark. They slope
+precipitously. They are streaked and mottled here and there
+with patches of loose stone, bleached to a soft violet colour
+with rain. Not a leaf of grass, not a frond of fern roots on these
+patches. They are altogether bare. Loch Nacung, a cold spread of water,
+gleams at the bottom, white as a shield and green at the margin with
+sedge. Dunlewy chapel, with its round tower--a black silhouette in the
+'tweenlight--and the walls of the Poisoned Glen beyond.
+
+
+
+
+THE SORE FOOT
+
+
+"It's a provident thing," a tramp said to me the other day, "to lay
+something by for the sore foot."
+
+
+
+
+ASHERANCALLY
+
+
+A roar, as of breaking seas. We are approaching the open Atlantic,
+but though its salt is bitter on our lips, our view is obscured
+by sand-dunes. Then, as we round a bend in the road, the Fall of
+Asherancally breaks suddenly on us, tumbling through a gut in the
+mountainside--almost on to the road it seems. We stand under it. We
+watch the brown bulk of water dropping from the gut-head and dancing
+in foam on the rocks a hundred feet below. The roar is deafening. One
+might shout at the top of one's voice, and yet not be heard. The air is
+iridescent with spindrift, which shines in the sun and sprays coolingly
+on our cheeks. We lean on the bridge parapet, watching and listening.
+
+[Illustration: LOCH NACUNG--MOONRISE.]
+
+
+
+
+ORANGE GALLASES
+
+
+I came across an old man to-day out in Lochros--a shock-headed old
+fellow in shirt and trousers, carrying water from a spring well near
+the Cross, and a troop of dogs snapping at his heels. "You don't seem
+to be popular with the dogs?" says I, laughing. "Oh, let them snap,"
+says he. "It's not me they're snapping at, but my orange gallases!"
+
+
+
+
+THE HUMAN VOICE
+
+
+The human voice--what a wonder and mystery it is! "All power," said
+Whitman, "is folded in a great vocalism." I spoke to a man to-day
+on the roadside, near Maghery. He was a poor, raggedy fellow, with a
+gaunt, unshaven chin and wild eyes, and a couple of barefooted children
+played about the mud at his feet. He answered me in a voice that
+_thrilled_ me--deep, chestfull, resonant; a voice, that had he been
+an educated man, might have won fame for him, as a politician, say, or
+a preacher, or an actor. And voices like his are by no means uncommon
+along the western seaboard of Ireland. Men address you on the road in
+that frank, human, comrade-like way of Irishmen, out of deep lungs and
+ringing larynxes that bring one back to the time when men were giants,
+and physique was the rule rather than the exception. In such voices
+one can imagine the Fenians to have talked one with the other, Fionn
+calling to Sgeolan, and Oisin chanting the divine fragments of song he
+dreamed in the intervals of war and venery. Will Ireland ever recapture
+the heroic qualities--build personality, voice, gesture--or, as Whitman
+puts it: "Litheness, majestic faces, clear eyes"--that were hers down
+to a comparatively late period, and in places have not quite died out
+even yet? I believe she will.
+
+
+
+
+LOCH ALUINN
+
+
+A grey loch, lashed into foam by wind from nor' westward,
+lapping unquietly among reeds that fringe its margin. Boulders
+everywhere--erratics from the Ice Age--bleached white with rain. Crotal
+growing in their interstices, wild-mint, purple orchises and the kingly
+osmunda fern. A strip of tilled land beyond--green corn, for the most
+part, and potatoes. Slieve a-Tooey in the distance, a blue shadowy
+bulk, crossed and recrossed by mist-wreaths chasing one another over it
+in rapid succession. A rainbow framing all.
+
+
+
+
+THE OPEN ROAD
+
+
+The open road, the sky over it, and the hills beyond. The hills beyond,
+those blue, ultimate hills; the clouds that look like hills; the
+mystery plucked out of them, and lo, the sea, stretching away into the
+vast--white-crested, grey, inscrutable--with a mirage dancing on its
+furthest verge!
+
+
+
+
+  [ Transcriber's Note:
+
+    The following changes have been made to the original text. The first
+    line presents the text as printed in the original, the second the
+    amended text.
+
+  "The words of the maker o poems are the general light and dark." One
+  "The words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark." One
+
+  survival of a pagan right of our forefathers.
+  survival of a pagan rite of our forefathers.
+
+  better. It is ove the hill the wonders are.
+  better. It is over the hill the wonders are.
+
+  'Glory be to the Father's, for ye every night for a week. Give us the
+  'Glory be to the Father's' for ye every night for a week. Give us the
+
+  ]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Mearing Stones, by Joseph Campbell
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41250 ***