Irish Idylls

^-.V ; Ar-r-\ 1 Southern Branch of the University of California Los Angeles Form L I PR 4063 B3i FORMAL SCHOOL ,'.i-^-i"j CATTFr>r«||^rATTCrkr«n* *^ STATBNORMALSCHOOL, IRISH IDYLLS STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, BY JANE BARLOW AUTHOR OF " BOGLAND STUDIES ' DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 1894 Copyright, 1893, by DODD, MEAD & COMPANY All righti reserved. PREFACE. In Lisconnel, and other such places, we have a saying that there arc plenty of things besides turf to be found in a bog. This Httle book attempts to record some of these things, inckiding, I hope, a proportion of that " human nature " which a cer- tain humourist has declared to exist in considerable quantities among our species. I hope, too, that the phases of it pictured here may have some spe- cial interest for American readers, to whose shores the wild boglands of Connaught send so many a forlorn voyager "over oceans of say." They will perhaps care to glance at his old home, and learn the reasons why he leaves it, which seem to lie very obviously on the surface, and the reasons, less immediately apparent, why his neighbours bide behind. It is indeed the fact of those emigrants that chiefly encourages me to believe there may be room and a welcome across the Atlantic for this one emigrant more. Jane Barlow. Raheny County, Dublin, May, 1893. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. rAGB LISCONNEL I CHAPTER H. A WINDFALL 14 CHAPTER HI. ONE TOO MANY 40 CHAPTER IV. A WET DAY 76 CHAPTER V. GOT THE BETTER OF I07 CHAPTER VI. HERSELF ^43 viil CONTENTS. CHAPTER VII. PAGE THUNDER IN THE AIR ... 164 CHAPTER VIII. BETWEEN TWO LADY-DAYS 204 CHAPTER IX. BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS 242 CHAPTER X. COMING AND GOING ... ... ... 285 IToT-via yrj, iravSwpt, Sortipa fii\i(ppovog o\0ov, £)Q dfta Ir) ro7g fiiv (pwrHv tvo\Oo<; tTvx9rfQ, O Land our Lady, all-bounteous, whose wealth-giving gladdeth man's heart, To some, in sooth, of thy children thou yieldest how rich a part. Yet to other some, in thine anger, how barren and rugged thoa art. CHAPTER I. LISCONNEL. Thlre is a great deal of room all round and about Lisconnel. That is, perhaps, what strikes one most upon arriving in sight of its half-score cabins, though the impression m.ay have been growing all along the seven Irish miles from Dufif- clane. They could not well be measured on a lonelier road through a wilder bogland. The broad level spreads away and away to the horizon, before and behind, and on either hand of you, very sombrely hued, yet less black-avised than more .frequented bogs. For the turf has been cut only in a few insignificant patches ; so that its dark- ness lies hidden under an ancient coverlid, sad- coloured, indeed, but not sharply incongruous with sunshine. Heath, rushes, furze, ling, and the like, have woven it thickly, their various tints merging, for the most part, into one uniform brown, with a few rusty streaks in it, as if the weather-beaten 2 • 2 IRISH IDYLLS. fell of some huge primaeval beast were stretched smoothly over the flat plain. Here and there, however, the monochrome will be broken : a white gleam comes from a tract where the breeze is deftly unfurling the silky bog-cotton tufts on a thousand elfin distaffs ; or a rich glow, crimson and dusky purple dashed with gold, betokens the profuse mingling of furze and heather blooms ; or a sunbeam, glinting across some little grassy esker, strikes out a strangely jewel-like flash of transparent green, such as may be seen in young moss. But these are very rare, unusually rare, in the bogland between Duffclane and Lisconnel. The picture you bring away with you on most days of the year is of this wide brown floor, sweeping on to meet the distant sky-line. Whenever your eyes follow it to the southward, you become aware of faint, finely-limned shapes that haunt it, looining up on its borders, much less substantial, apparently, in fabric than so many spirals of blue turf smoke. Thoy are big bens, the remotest of them num- bered, it may be, among those twelve towering Conncmarcse peaks, which in Saxon speech have dwindled into Pins. Any country body met on the way would point out which dim wraith is Ben Bawn or Ben Nephin. But I hardly care to iden- tify them ; they sccmti as if they were looking in LISCONNEL. 3 Dut of another world to remind us how far off it is. As for the road, it has determined that the way- farer shall never lose his sense of the great solitudes through which it is leading him. In all its length it has scarcely half a dozen yards of any kind of fence—wall, bushes, or even the humblest ledge of bank. It runs quite flush with the bog on either side, sometimes edged by a narrow strip of the short fine sward, where, if the district were inhabited, geese would waddle and graze ; but there is nothing to shut out the limitless expanses of earth and sky. Travelling on it, a man ma)' learn that a broad hat- brim is not an altogether despicable screen between his imagination and the insistence of an importunate infinity. One autumn season a hapless Neapolitan organ- grinder strayed somehow into these regions, with his monkey clinging round his neck. It is a long time ago, but a generation afterwards people remembered the lost, scared look in the eyes of man and beast. They both fell ill and died in the Town down beyond, as if, poor souls, they had not the heart to keep alive in the vast, murky, sunless world that had been revealed to them. And to this day you are pointed out the French- man's grave— for a foreigner here is always a Frenchman — in the churchyard beside the lough. 4 IRISH IDYLLS. The road, one of Scotch Nimmo's making, is generally drawn straight enough, though now and again it swerves consid^^rably to avoid a wet piece of bog, and, straight or winding, its course may be traced for miles ahead, a streak across the land- scape, not strongly marked, except in very dry weather, when there is white dust on it, yet distinct as a crease in the palm of your hand. One peculiarity of such a road is that you never come upon anybody sitting close beside it. For since in damp climates people habitually avoid seating themselves on the unsophisticated surface of the earth, and since neither stone dyke nor hedgerow bank offers a handy perch, it follows that any one who happens to be keeping an eye on geese or goats, or setting down a heavy creel, or waiting for the loan of a lift, must find a resting-place on some boulder or boss more or less off the beaten track. Hence the passer-by is occasionally given the time of day, or the top of the morning, in a startling shout, which proceeds from some figure whose presence he had not surmised ; as the bog, like a converse chameleon, often has the property of subduing superimposed objects to its own vague tints. Tiiis, however, makes little difference on the Lisconncl road, so few people pass along it. At the Duffclauc end a donkey ma\' now and then LISCOAWEL. 5 be met carrying a tall pyramid of chocolate-brown turf-sods, based on two pendent panniers, between which his large head bobs patiently, while beneath the load his slender, tottering legs take quick staccato steps, each scarcely the length of one of his own ears ; or an old woman comes by \i'ith a creel projecting quaintly under her dark-blue cloak ; or a girl saunters barefooted after a single file of gabbling geese, knitting a long grey stock- ing as she goes, and never seeming to lift her eyes from the twinkle of her needles. But after you have gone a short way the chances are that you will meet nothing more civilised and con- versable than wild birds and very large gnats, until you come in sight of Lisconnel. Just before that, the road starts abruptly, as if it had suddenly taken fright at its own loneliness, and dips down a steepish slope, but quickly pulls itself up, finding that escape is impossible. The hill, whose spur it has thus crossed, is very insignificant, only a knoll-like knockmvn, prolonged on the left hand as a low ridge, soon dwindling into a mere bank, and imperceptibly ceasing from the face of the resurgent bog. Yet it probably fixed the site of Lisconnel, because it offered some protection from the full sweep of the west wind, and because its boulder-strewn slopes, and a narrow strip at their foot, have a covering of poor 6 IRISH IDYLLS. light soil in which potatoes can be set. Such advantages seldom recur- within a radius of several miles. For when I spoke of the spaciousness of Lisconnel I did not mean that there is much room in it for you or me, or anybody who must needs have " a bit of Ian' " to live on. The craggy ridge is surmounted by a few weather-worn thorn bushes, and one ash tree, so strongly warped to the eastward that a glance at it on the stillest day creates an impression of blasts blowing roughly. Also, after the manner of trees thus situated, it seems to draw down and diffuse the very spirit of the desolate surrounding solitudes. The cabins themselves look somehow as if they felt its spell, and were huddling together for company.

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