Mearing Stones - free ebook by Joseph Campbell

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 &amp; COMPANY, LTD., 96 MIDDLE ABBEY ST., DUBLIN. 1911. Printed by Maunsel &amp; Co., Ltd., Dublin....

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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: 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

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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!...

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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.” CLADY RIVER, NEAR GWEEDORE. A waste of blown sand. The Atlantic breakers white upon its extremest verge. A patch of sea-bog before, exh

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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....

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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 loo

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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!...

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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.”...

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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....

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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—

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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!”...

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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

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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!”...

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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

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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....

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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

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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. H

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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. H

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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.”...

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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 Mado

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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!”...

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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....

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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....

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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!”...

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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 r

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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

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THE QUEST

Where am I going? Looking for the dew-snail? No, but going till I find the verge of the sky....

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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 ....

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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 a

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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!”...

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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 e

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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?”...

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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 E

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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.”...

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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....

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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

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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!”...

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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 clea

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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 repeate

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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?...

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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: A STREET IN ARDARA. Finally he gives “I

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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....

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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

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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.”...

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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....

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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. FALLING WATER....

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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 o

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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....

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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 the

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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

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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!”...

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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. BOG AND SKY....

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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 p

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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!”...

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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....

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A NOTE

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

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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 kno

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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!”...

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WATER AND SLÁN-LUS

What is more beautiful than water falling, or a spray of slán-lus with its flowers? 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

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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. Fi

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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....

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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 M

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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 ni

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THE LUSMÓR

The lusmór , or “great herb”—foxglove, 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

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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!”...

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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 (miniatu

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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! A WAYFARER....

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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....

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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....

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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, an

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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

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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,

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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

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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.”...

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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

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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....

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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....

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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!”

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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 tethere

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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. A CLACHAN OF HOUSES....

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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

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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....

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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

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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 t

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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.”...

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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—

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THE SORE FOOT

“ It’s a provident thing,” a tramp said to me the other day, “to lay something by for the sore foot.”...

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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

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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!”...

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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.

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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 rainbo

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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! (1) Book of Leinster. (2) He had the Old Age Pension. (3) Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, a contemporary of Conchubhair MacNeassa, who was—so tradition has it—born on the same night as Christ. (4) In fact, a “

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