32 chapters
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32 chapters
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
The boat showed many evidences that the Irish Sea can be savage when it chooses. Everything movable about the decks was carefully lashed down; there were railings and knotted ropes everywhere to cling to; and in the saloon the table-racks were set ready at hand, as though they had just been used, and might be needed again at any moment. But, on this Saturday evening in late May, the sea was in a pleasant, even a jovial, mood, with just enough swell to send a thin shower of spray across the deck
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
These appalling alleys are always in the background of my thoughts of Dublin; and yet it is not them I see when I close my eyes and evoke my memory of that ancient town. The picture which comes before me then is of the wide O'Connell Bridge, with the great monument of the Liberator guarding one end of it, and the curving street beyond, sweeping past the tall portico of the old Parliament House, past the time-stained buildings of Trinity College, and so on along busy Grafton Street to St. Stephen
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CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
Among her memorials and treasures, are four of absorbing interest—the grave of Swift, the tomb of Strongbow, the Cross of Cong and the Book of Kells. It was for the first of these, which is in St. Patrick's Cathedral, that we started Monday morning, and to get there we mounted for the first time to the seats of a jaunting-car. I suppose I may as well pause here for a word about this peculiarly Irish institution. Why it should be peculiarly Irish is hard to understand, for it furnishes a rapid, e
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CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER IV
The day was so bright and pleasant that we decided to spend it somewhere in the country, and as we wanted to see a round tower, and as there is a very handsome one at Clondalkin, a few miles west of Dublin, we decided to go there. The ride thither gave us our first glimpse of rural Ireland—rather unkempt, with the fields very lush and green; and then, when we got off the train, we were struck by a fact which we had occasion to remark many times thereafter: that railroads in Ireland are built wit
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CHAPTER V
CHAPTER V
The forty-mile run from Dublin to Rathdrum is by the very edge of the sea. The roadway has been cut high in the face of the cliffs that fringe the coast—sometimes piercing a projecting headland, sometimes spanning a deep gully, sometimes skirting a sheer precipice—and the view at every turn is very romantic and beautiful. The train pauses at Bray, and then, still hugging the coast, reaches Wicklow, where it turns inland and mounts toward the hills along a pleasant valley to Rathdrum, perched in
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CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VI
Drogheda is about thirty miles north of Dublin, near the mouth of the River Boyne, and the ride thither, for the most part close beside the sea, is not of special interest, as the coast is flat and the only town of any importance on the way is Balbriggan, celebrated for its hosiery. Drogheda itself is an up-and-down place, built on the side of a hill. I suppose the castle which was the nucleus of the town stood on top of the hill, and houses were gradually built from it down to the ford from whi
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CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VII
"What will ye be wantin' for breakfast, miss?" "What can we have?" "Oh, anything ye like, miss." "Well, what, for instance?" "There's bacon and eggs, miss, and there's fish." We usually took bacon and eggs, for fish seemed out of place on the breakfast-table. Besides, we were sure to encounter it later at dinner. "And will ye have coffee or tay, miss?" the maid would continue. We took coffee once, and after that we took tea. The tea is good, though strong, and it seems somehow to suit the climat
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CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER VIII
The train had been comparatively empty thus far, and we had rejoiced in a compartment to ourselves; but as we drew into the station at Charleville, we were astonished to see a perfect mob of people crowding the platform, with more coming up every minute. The instant the train stopped, the mob snatched open the doors and swept into it like a tidal wave. When the riot subsided a bit, we found that four men and two girls were crowded in with us, and the corridor outside was jammed with people stand
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CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER IX
When we got back to the town, we decided we could spend an hour very pleasantly driving about and seeing the place; and, since the day was fine, we voted for an outside car. Be it known, there are two varieties of car in Cork: one the common or garden variety, the outside car, and the other a sort of anti-type called an inside car. The difference is that, in an outside car you sit on the inside, that is in the middle with your feet hanging over the wheel, while in an inside car you sit on the ou
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CHAPTER X
CHAPTER X
It was shortly after nine o'clock that our train pulled out of the station at Cork, and at first the line ran between small, well-tilled fields, each with its cosy cottage. The whole country-side had an air of content and passable well-being; every wall was gay with the yellow gorse, and in the fields the green of potato and turnip was just beginning to show above the dark earth of the ridges in which they were planted. These ridged fields, which we were to see so often afterwards in the west of
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CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XI
I saw but one variety, however, the flower of which has a dark blue trumpet and scarlet bell, but this is perhaps the most showy of all, and nothing could be more gorgeous than a hedge in full bloom. In the woods, or in gardens where they are left untrimmed, the bushes will grow into veritable trees, twenty-five or thirty feet high. We went back to the hotel, when Betty had gathered all she could carry, and she sent the flowers up to our room by a maid who laughed sympathetically—I fancy she had
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CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XII
Now Killarney is to Ireland what the Trossachs are to Scotland and Niagara Falls to America—in other words, its most famous show-place; and so it has passed more or less under the control of that ubiquitous exploiter of show-places, Thomas Cook. Cook arranges all the excursions, Cook controls most of the vehicles, Cook's boats are the biggest and safest, and so, if you wish to see Killarney "in the least fatiguing manner," you must resign yourself to Cook. Let me say here that I admire Cook; the
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CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIII
The day was bright and warm, and after breakfast we walked in to the town to take a look at our films. We found the road even more beautiful in the morning than it had been in the evening, and, since we knew how long it was, it did not seem long at all. But we were rather disappointed in the films. I had not appreciated how much the moisture in the atmosphere diminished the intensity of the sun, and so most of the films were under-exposed. Amateur photographers in Ireland will do well to remembe
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CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XIV
But the view from the window soon made us forget our fellow-passengers. The road runs for a time close beside the Flesk, one of the prettiest of Irish rivers, while away to the south rose the beautiful Killarney hills, peak upon peak, with mighty Mangerton dominating all of them. And then came the Paps, two conical elevations separated by a deep ravine; and then the bleak brown slopes of the Muskerry hills, with a ruined castle of the McCarthys guarding the only pass into the valley. To the nort
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CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XV
There were two or three pictures I wanted to take—one of the old castle and another of the crooked little lane I had wandered through the night before; so I set forth to get them, along busy George Street, with its bright shops, and then across the river to English Town, and so to the castle front. I found it very hard to get anything like a satisfactory picture of it, because the parapet of the new bridge is in the way, and because the angle of my lens was not wide enough to take in both the to
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CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVI
The most beautiful portion of the river lies between Lough Derg, at whose lower end stands the ancient town of Killaloe, and Limerick, which marks the limit of the tideway. In this twenty-mile stretch, the river, for the first and last time in its course, is crowded in between high hills, and runs swift and deep and strong. It was this stretch we started out from Limerick, that day, to explore, and our first stopping-place was Castleconnell, about halfway to Killaloe. We found it a perfect gem o
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CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVII
Ruins are more numerous here than almost anywhere else in Ireland, for this western slope of the Shannon valley, so fertile and coveted, was famous fighting-ground. There are one or two in sight all the time, across the beautiful rolling meadows. Near Cratloe there are three, their great square keeps looming above the trees, and looking out across the wide Shannon estuary. A little farther on is the famous seat of the Earls of Thomond, Bunratty Castle, a fine old fortress, with all the approved
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CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XVIII
There is a good hotel connected with the railway, and we had dinner there, and then went forth to see the town. We were struck at once by its picturesqueness, its foreign air. The narrow curving streets do not somehow look like Irish streets, nor do the houses look like Irish houses; rather might one fancy oneself in some old town of France or Belgium. We were fascinated by it, and wandered about for a long time, along dim lanes, into dark courts, looking at the shawled women and listening to th
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CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XIX
The train skirts the shore of Lough Corrib, and one has beautiful glimpses of the lake and the hills beyond; and then it plunges into a wild and desolate country, strewn with great glacial boulders, some of them poised so precariously on hill-side and cliff-edge that it seems the rattle of every passing train would bring them crashing down. And then we came out upon wide moors, crossed by innumerable little streams, and then ahead of us the great Connemara mountains began to loom against the sky
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CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XX
The original Joyces were Welshmen, so it is said, who came to Ireland about 1300, and, with the permission of the all-powerful O'Flaherties, settled in this country between Lough Mask and the sea. Why they should have chosen so inhospitable a region I don't know—perhaps because no one else wanted it. Certainly the O'Flaherties didn't; for they preferred to live along the sea, where fish was plentiful. But the Joyces were an agricultural people; they turned as much of the hillside as they could i
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CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXI
He called the roll, and it was delightful to hear the soft, childish voices answer "Prisent, sorr," "Prisent, sorr." Then he counted heads to be sure, I suppose, that some child hadn't answered twice, once for himself and once for some absent friend. There were about thirty children present, ranging in age from six to fifteen; and they were all barefoot, of course, and such clothing as they had was very worn and ragged, and most of them had walked four or five miles, that morning, down out of th
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CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXII
The first town out of Westport is Castlebar, which, as Murray puts it, "has all the buildings usual in a county town, viz. Asylum, Gaol, Court-house and Barracks," and they can be seen looming up above the other buildings as the train passes, some half mile away. Beyond Castlebar, the line crosses the so-called plains of Mayo, a vast expanse of naked limestone rock, very ugly and sinister; and then to the left is a village dominated by a round tower; and finally we came to Claremorris, where we
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CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIII
That afternoon, I happened to see a sign over a shop announcing that posting was done in all its branches. Remembering the glitter in the landlord's eye, I stopped in and asked the woman in charge if a car could be had for the trip around Lough Gill. She said it might, and the price would be twelve shillings, including the driver. I closed with her on the spot, and told her to have the car ready at nine o'clock next morning; and somewhat to my surprise it was; and we set forth on what was to pro
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CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXIV
There is nothing Irish about Bundoran except its climate—not, at least, if one stays at the hotel which has been built there by the Great Northern Railroad, and which is one of the most satisfactory hotels I was ever in. And perhaps it would be as well to say a word here about Irish hotels. The small, friendly inn, which is one of the delights of European travel, does not exist in Ireland; or, if it does, it is so carelessly managed that it is not endurable. Commercial hotels are also apt to be
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CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXV
Donegal we found by daylight to be a pleasant little town, with a single street of two-storied houses curving down over the hill toward the river, and a few narrow lanes branching off from it, after the traditional fashion of the Irish village. The castle is nestled in a bend of the river, which defends it on two sides, and there is still a trace of the moat which used to defend the other two. The best view of it is from the bridge crossing the river, and surprisingly beautiful it is, with its g
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CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVI
The cause of the difference between the north and south of Ireland has been hotly debated for a hundred years. Why is the north energetic and prosperous, while the south is lazy and poverty-stricken? Some say it is the difference in climate, others the difference in religion. I could perceive no great difference in the climate, and as for religion—strange as it may seem to those who think of Ulster only in the light of Orange manifestoes—there are almost as many Catholics as Protestants in the n
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CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVII
And, just as there is no more dismal sight than a line of deserted quays, so there is no more interesting sight than a line of busy ones, and we loitered for a long time, next morning, along those of Derry, on our way to the Midland station, on the other side of the river. There is a big iron bridge across the river just above the quays, but that seemed a long way around, so when we came to a sign-board announcing a ferry we stopped. My first thought was that the ferry-boat was on the other side
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CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXVIII
There is a path which follows the edge of the cliff closely, and a more magnificent view I have never seen. At Chimney Point the rollers were breaking in especial violence over the black rocks, on which one of the galleons of the Armada went to pieces. Her name was the Gerona, and some of her guns were rescued from the surf and added to the armament of Dunluce castle. Legend has it that she brought her disaster upon herself by running in too near the coast to fire at the chimney rocks, which she
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CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXIX
It was a better-dressed crowd than the Dublin one, but I fancied its cheeks were paler and its bodies less robust. Indeed, I am inclined to think the average stature in Belfast an inch or so under the average elsewhere. Great numbers of the men and women we saw on the streets that night were obviously undersized. I am by no means tall; five feet eight inches is, here in America, about the average; but when I walked among that Belfast crowd, I overtopped it by half a head. It was this strange sen
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CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXX
The cathedral is visible long before the train reaches the town, standing on the edge of a high bluff overlooking the valley of the Quoile, and it was to it I made my way from the station, up a very steep street, for Downpatrick, following the fashion of Irish towns, is built on the side of a hill—and also follows the fashion in having an Irish Street and an English Street and even a Scotch Street, the surviving names, I suppose, of the quarters where the people of those various nations once liv
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CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXI
It was, then, for Drogheda that I set out next morning, Betty having voted for another day in the Belfast shops; and by a singular coincidence it was the first day of July, the anniversary of that other day in 1690 when the army of William of Orange defeated the battalions of Irishmen who had rallied around James—and surely never had braver men a poorer leader! But it was not really the anniversary, for the change in the calendar has shifted the date to July 12th, and it is on that day the Orang
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CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXII
As I came up on the tram from the station, we ran into a mob of people, marching along in the middle of the street and yelling at the tops of their voices, and we had to wait until they had passed. I asked a fellow-passenger what was going on, and he answered with a little smile that the Orange societies had all been given new banners that night and were flinging them to the breeze for the first time. I asked him who had given the banners, and he said he didn't know. At the hotel, I found that B
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