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Title: Through Connemara in a governess cart

Author: Edith Somerville
        Martin Ross

Release Date: April 25, 2019 [EBook #59349]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

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Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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THROUGH CONNEMARA

IN A

GOVERNESS CART.

BY

THE AUTHORS OF “AN IRISH COUSIN.”

ILLUSTRATED BY W. W. RUSSELL, FROM SKETCHES BY
EDITH Œ. SOMERVILLE.

LONDON:

W. H. ALLEN & CO., LIMITED,

13, WATERLOO PLACE, S.W.

1893.




The following pages, with their accompanying illustrations, originally
appeared in the columns of “THE LADIES’ PICTORIAL,” and are here
reprinted by permission of the Proprietors.




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.


                                                                    PAGE

“IN THE SECLUSION OF THE BACK BEDROOM”                                 5

“IF YE BATE HIM ANY MORE HE’LL LIE DOWN”                              19

“SHE’S A LITTLE GIDDY ABOUT THE HEAD, MISS”                           28

“WE VIEWED THE STOWING OF THE GOVERNESS-CART”                         31

“MR FLAHERTY’S BOY WAS DEMONSTRATING WITH A PITCH-FORK”               35

“WE PURSUED OUR WAY TO RECESS”                                        39

A FISHERMAN AT RECESS                                                 43

THE TWO HOTEL DOGS                                                    49

“NOW”                                                                 53

“BALLINAHINCH CAME SLOWLY INTO SIGHT”                                 65

“WE HEARD WHEELS CLOSE AT HAND”                                       71

“HANGING ON EACH TO OUR REIN”                                         85

“SITTING ON LITTLE STOOLS INSIDE THE BIG FIREPLACE”                   97

“REVEALED A MONSTROUS GREY GOOSE”                                    105

MR. MITCHELL HENRY’S PLACE, KYLEMORE CASTLE                          119

JACK’S FATHER                                                        125

AT TULLY FAIR                                                        129

RENVYLE HOUSE HOTEL                                                  141

“IT WAS THE BROAD WINDOW SEAT, IN CONJUNCTION WITH
THE MOUNTAINS, THAT TURNED THE SCALE”                                147

“SHE WAS AN AMERICAN LADY”                                           149

THE RENVYLE DONKEY                                                   158

“DOWN THE HILL OF SALRUCK”                                           169

“THE HOLY WELL, SALRUCK”                                             175

“EIGHT O’CLOCK BREAKFAST, PLEASE, AND CALL US SHARP
AT SEVEN”                                                            191

“THE REGRET WITH WHICH WE PAID OUR HOTEL BILL
WAS NOT WHOLLY MERCENARY, BUT WAS BLENDED
WITH THE FINER PATHOS OF FAREWELL”                                   197




THROUGH CONNEMARA IN A GOVERNESS-CART.




CHAPTER I.


My second cousin and I came to London for ten days in the middle of last
June, and we stayed there for three weeks, waiting for a fine day.

We were Irish, and all the English with whom we had hitherto come in
contact had impressed upon us that we should never know what fine
weather was till we came to England. Perhaps we came at a bad moment,
when the weather, like the shops, was having its cheap sales. Certainly
such half-hours of sunshine as we came in for were of the nature of
“soiled remnants,” and at the end of the three weeks aforesaid we began
to feel a good deal discouraged. Things came to a climax one day when
we had sat for three-quarters of an hour in a Hungarian bread shop in
Regent Street, waiting for the rain to clear off enough to let us get
down to the New Gallery. As the fifth party of moist ladies came in and
propped their dripping umbrellas against the wall behind us, and
remarked that they had never _seen_ such rain, our resolution first
began to take shape.

“Hansom!” said my second cousin.

“Home!” said I.

By home, of course we meant the lodgings--the remote, the Bayswaterian,
but still, the cheap, the confidential; for be they never so homely,
there’s no place--for sluttish comfort and unmolested
unpunctuality--like lodgings.

“England is no fit place for a lady to be in,” said my second cousin, as
we drove away in our hansom with the glass down.

“I’d be ashamed to show such weather to a Connemara pig,” I replied.

Now Connemara is a sore subject with my second cousin, who lives within
sight of its mountains, and, as is usually the case, has never explored
the glories of her native country, which was why I mentioned Connemara.
She generally changes the conversation on these occasions; but this time
she looked me steadily in the face and said,

“Well, let’s go to Connemara!”

I was so surprised that I inadvertently pressed the indiarubber ball of
the whistle on which my hand was resting, and its despairing wail filled
the silence like a note of horror.

“Let’s get an ass and an ass-car!” said my cousin, relapsing in her
excitement into her native idiom, and taking no notice of the fact that
the hansom had stopped, and that I was inventing a lie for the driver;
“or some sort of a yoke, whatever, and we’ll drive through Connemara.”

In the seclusion of the back bedroom we reviewed the position, while
around us on the lodging-house pegs hung the draggled ghosts of what had
been our Sunday dresses.

“That’s the thing I wore last night!” said my second cousin, in a hard,
flat voice, lifting with loathing finger a soaked flounce. As she did
so, the river sand fell from it into the boots that stood beneath.

“Soil of tea-garden, Kingston-on-Thames. Result of boating-picnic that
has to fly for refuge to an inn-parlour ten minutes after it has
started.”

“It will wash,” I answered gloomily. “But look at that!” Here I pointed
to an evening gown erstwhile, to quote an Irish divine, “the brightest
feather in my crown.” “That’s what comes of trailing through Bow Street
after the opera, looking for a hansom during the police riots. Give me
Irish weather and the R.I.C.! We _will_ go to Connemara!”

       *       *       *       *       *

The Milford and Cork boat starts at eight, and at half-past eight a
doomed crowd was sitting round its still stationary tea-table. My second
cousin was feverishly eating dry toast and drinking a precautionary
brandy and soda, but the others were revelling

[Illustration: “IN THE SECLUSION OF THE BACK BEDROOM.”]

on beefsteak and fried fish. The company was mixed. Opposite to us sat
an American and his bride, both young, and both uncertain of the rules
that govern the consumption of fish; the bride feeling that a couple of
small forks, held as though they were pens, would meet the situation,
while her big, red-headed husband evidently believed that by holding the
fork in the right hand and the knife in the left the impropriety of
using the latter would be condoned. Beside us were two elderly ladies,
returning, like us, to their native land.

“Yes, me dear,” we heard one saying to the other; “I had nothing only my
two big boxes and seven little small parcels, and poor little Charlie’s
rabbit, and that porther wanted to get thruppence out o’ me!”

“D’ye tell me so?” remarked the friend.

“Yes, dear, he did indeed! He wanted thruppence and I gave him tuppence;
he was tough, very tough, but I was shtubborn!”

“Ah, them English is great rogues,” said the friend, consolingly.

“More fish, Miss?” said the unobservant steward to my second cousin,
thrusting a generous helping under her nose. It wanted but that, and she
retired to the doubtful security of the ladies’ cabin.

We have travelled with many stewardesses on the various routes between
England and Cork, and we have found that, as a species, they have at
least two great points in common. They are all Irish, and they are all
relentlessly conversational. They have no respect for the sanctity of
the silence in which the indifferent sailor wishes to shroud herself; it
is impossible for them to comprehend those solemn moments, when the
thoughts are turned wholly inwards in a tumult of questioning, while the
body lies in mummy stillness waiting for what the night shall bring
forth. Their leading object seems to be to acquire information, but they
are not chary of personal detail, and, speaking from experience, I
should say that a stewardess will confide anything to the passenger by
whose berth she has elected to take down her hair. For stewardesses
generally do their hair two or three times in the course of a twelve
hours’ crossing. When you go on board you find them at it. Your evening
ablutions are embittered by the discovery of their hair-pins in the
soap-dish, and at earliest dawn the traveller is aware of the stewardess
combing her shining tresses over the washing-stand. I have sometimes
wondered if from this custom arose the fable that the mermaid, when not
decoying sailors to their fate, is incessantly “racking her poll,” as
they say in the county Cork.

We will not linger on the details of the night, the sufferings of little
Charlie, who, on the plea of extreme youth, had been imported by his
mother into the ladies’ cabin; the rustlings and chumping of the rabbit,
whose basket occupied the greater part of the cabin table, or the
murmured confidences exchanged through the night hours by the stewardess
and the friend of Charlie’s mother. These things are being forgotten by
us as fast as may be; but my second cousin says she never _can_ forget
the waft of pigs that came to her through the porthole as the steamer
drew alongside of the Cork quay.

The exigencies of return tickets had compelled us to go to Connemara
_viâ_ Cork and Milford, and it certainly is not the route we would
recommend; however, it has its advantages, and we were vouchsafed a time
of precious rest before the starting of our train for Limerick at 2.10,
and we reposed in peace on the sofas of the ladies’ drawing-room in the
Imperial Hotel. Much might be said, were there time, of the demeanour of
ladies in hotel drawing-rooms; so hushed, so self-conscious, so eminent
in all those qualities with which they are endued by the artist who
“does” the hotel interiors for the guide-books. It is almost possible to
believe that they are engaged for the season to impart tone, and to show
how agreeable a lounge life can be when spent in the elegant leisure
that is the atmosphere of hotel drawing-rooms.

We crossed Cork on an outside-car; and here, no doubt, we should enter
on a description of its perils which would convulse and alarm English
readers in the old, old way; but we may as well own at once that we know
all about outside-cars; we believe we went to be christened on an
outside-car, and we did not hold on even then--we certainly have not
done so since.

Let us rather embark on a topic in which all, saving a besotted few,
will sympathise. The nursery _en voyage_--the nurse, the nursemaid, the
child, the feeding-bottle. These beset every traveller’s path, and we
had considerably more than our fair share of them between Cork and
Limerick. At Cork they descended upon the train, as it lay replete and
helpless, a moment before starting, and before we had well understood
the extent of the calamity, a nurse was glaring defiance at us over the
white bonnet of a bellowing baby, and a nursemaid was already opening
her basket of food for the benefit of two children of the dread ages of
three and five respectively. Some rash glance on the part of my second
cousin must have betrayed our sentiments to the nurse, and it is hard
to say which was worse, her exaggerated anxiety to snatch the children
from all contact with us, or the imbecile belief of the nursemaid that
we wanted to play with them, and, of the two, enjoyed their wiping their
hands on our rug in the intervals between the oranges. They never ceased
eating oranges, those children. Oranges, seed cake, milk; these
succeeded one another in a sort of vicious circle. An enterprising
advertiser asks, “What is more terrible than war?” We answer
unhesitatingly, oranges in the hands of young children.

However, everything, even the waits at the stations between Limerick and
Athenry, comes to an end if you can live it out, and at about nine
o’clock at night we were in Galway. Scarcely by our own volition, we
found ourselves in an hotel ’bus, and we were too tired to do more than
notice the familiar Galway smell of turf smoke as we bucketted through
Eyre Square to our hostelry. It may be as well at this point to
seriously assure English readers that the word “peat” is not used in
Ireland in reference to fuel by anyone except possibly the Saxon
tourist. Let it therefore be accepted that when we say “turf” we mean
peat, and when, if ever, we say Pete, we mean the diminutive of Peter,
no matter what the spelling.

We breakfasted leisurely and late next morning, serenaded by the screams
of pigs, for it was fair day, and the market square was blocked with
carts tightly packed with pigs, or bearing tall obelisks of sods of
turf, built with Egyptian precision. We cast our eye abroad upon a drove
of Connemara ponies, driven in for sale like so many sheep, and my
second cousin immediately formed the romantic project of hiring one of
these and a small trap for our Connemara expedition.

“They are such hardy little things,” she said, enthusiastically, “we had
two of them once, and they always lived on grass. Of course they never
did any work really, and I remember they used to bite anyone who tried
to catch them--but still I think one of them would be just the thing.”

“I beg your pardon, Miss,” said the waiter, who was taking away our
breakfast things, “but thim ponies is very arch for the likes of you to
drive. One o’ thim’d be apt to lie down in the road with yerself and the
thrap, and maybe it’d be dark night before he’d rise up for ye. Faith,
there was one o’ them was near atin’ the face off a cousin o’ me own
that was enticin’ him to stand up out o’ the way o’ the mail-car.”

My second cousin looked furtively at me, and rose from her seat in some
confusion.

“Oh, I think we should be able to manage a pony,” she said, with a
sudden resumption of the dignity that I had noticed she had laid aside
since her arrival in Galway. “Is there--er--any two-wheeled--er--trap to
be had?”

“Sure there is, Miss, and a nate little yoke it’d be for the two of ye,
though the last time it was out one of the shafts----”

“Is it in the yard?” interrupted my second cousin, severely.

“It is, Miss, but the step took the ground----”

My cousin here left the room, and I followed her. A few moments later
the trap was wheeled into the yard for our inspection. It was apparently
a segment of an antediluvian brougham, with a slight flavour about it of
a hansom turned the wrong way, though its great-grandfather had probably
been a highly-connected sedan-chair. The door was at the back, as in an
omnibus, the floor was about six inches above the ground, and the two
people whom it with difficulty contained had to sit with their backs to
the horse, rocking and swinging between the two immense wheels, of which
they had a dizzy prospect through the little side windows.

“There it is for ye, now!” said the waiter, triumphantly. He had
followed us downstairs and was negligently polishing a tablespoon with
his napkin. “And Jimmy,” indicating the ostler, “’ll know of the very
horse that’ll be fit to put under it.”

“No,” we said faintly, “that would never do; we want to drive
ourselves.”

The ostler fell into an attitude of dramatic meditation.

“Would you be agin dhrivin’ a side-car?”

We said “No.”

Equally dramatic ecstasy on the part of both ostler and waiter. The
former, strange to say, had a friend who was the one person in Galway
who had the very thing we wanted. “Letyees be gettin’ ready now,” said
Jimmy, “for I’ll go fetch it this minute.”

About half an hour later we were standing at the hotel doorsteps,
prepared for our trial trip. On the pavement were clustered about us the
beggarwomen of Galway--an awesome crew, from whose mouths proceeded an
uninterrupted flow of blessings and cursings, the former levelled at us,
the latter at each other and the children who hung about their skirts.
We pushed our way through them, and getting up on the car announced that
we were ready to start, but some delay in obtaining a piece of cord to
tie up the breeching gave the beggars a precious opportunity. My second
cousin was recognised, and greeted by name with every endearment.

“Aha! didn’t I tell ye ’twas her?” “Arrah, shut yer mouth, Nellie
Morris. I knew the fine full eyes of her since she was a baby.” “Don’t
mind them, darlin’,” said a deep voice on a level with the step of the
car; “sure ye’ll give to yer own little Judy from Menlo?”

This was my cousin’s own little Judy from Menlo, and at her invocation
we both snatched from our purses the necessary blackmail and dispensed
it with furious haste. Most people would pay largely to escape from the
appalling presence of this seventy-year-old nightmare of two foot
nothing, and she is well aware of its compelling power.

The car started with a jerk, the driver boy running by the horse’s side
till he had goaded it into a trot, and then jumping on the driving-seat
he lashed it into a gallop, and we swung out of Eyre Square followed by
the admiring screams of the beggars. The pace was kept up, and we were
well out of Galway before a slightly perceptible hill suddenly changed
it to a funeral crawl--the animal’s head disappearing between its
forelegs.

“Give me the reins,” said my second cousin. “These country boys never
know how to drive,” she added in an undertone as she took them from the
boy. The horse, a pale yellow creature, with a rusty black mane and
tail, turned his head, and fixing a penetrating eye upon her, slightly
slackened his pace. My cousin administered a professional flick of the
whip, whereon he shrank to the other side of the road, jamming the step
of the car against a telegraph post and compelling me to hurriedly whirl
my legs up on to the seat. We slurred over the incident, however, and
proceeded at the same pace to the top of the hill. A judicious kick from
the boy urged the horse into an amble, and things were going on
beautifully when we drew near a pool of water by the roadside.

“You see he goes very well when he is properly driven,” my second cousin
began, leaning nonchalantly

[Illustration: “IF YE BATE HIM ANY MORE HE’LL LIE DOWN.”]

across the car towards me. As she spoke, the car gave a lurch and came
to a standstill at the edge of the pool. Apparently the yellow horse was
thirsty. He was with difficulty dragged into the middle of the road
again, but beyond the pool he refused to go. The boy got down with the
air of one used to these things.

“If ye bate him any more he’ll lie down,” he said to my cousin. “I’ll go
to the house beyond and gether a couple o’ the neighbours.”

The neighbours--that is to say, the whole of the inhabitants of the
house--turned out with enthusiasm, and, having put stones behind the
wheels, addressed themselves to the yellow horse with strange oaths and
with many varieties of sticks.

“’Tis little he cares for yer bating,” screamed the mother after several
minutes of struggle. “Let him dhrink his fill o’ the pool and he’ll go
to America for ye.”

We thought that on the whole we should prefer to return to Galway, and
though assured by the boy of ultimate victory, we turned and made for
the town on foot.

“I scarcely think that horse will do,” said my second cousin, after we
had walked about half a mile, turning on me a face still purple from her
exertions with the whip. “We want a freer animal than that.”

She had scarcely finished when there was a thundering on the road behind
us, a sound of furious galloping and shouting, and the car appeared in
sight, packed with men, and swinging from side to side as the yellow
horse came along with a racing stride.

“Ye can sit up on the car now!” called out the boy as they neared us,
“he’ll go aisy from this out.”

The car pulled up, and the volunteers got off it with loud and even
devotional assurances of the yellow horse’s perfections.

But we walked back to Galway.




CHAPTER II.


Shall we admit that, after all, the first stage of our journey was
accomplished by means of the mail-car? We had been assured, on reliable
authority, that Oughterard, fourteen Irish miles from Galway, was the
place where we should find what we wanted, and with a dubious faith we
climbed the steep side of the mail car, and wedged ourselves between a
stout priest and an English tourist. Above us towered the mail baskets,
and a miscellaneous pile of luggage, roped together with that ingenuity
that necessity has developed in the Irish carman, and crowning all, the
patriarchal countenance of a goat looked down upon us in severe
amazement from over the rim of an immense hamper.

We have said in our haste that we never hold on on jaunting-cars, but
as the dromedary to the park hack, so is the mail-car to the ordinary
“outside” of its species. It is large enough to hold six people on each
side, and is dragged by three horses at a speed that takes no account of
ruts and patches of stones and sharp corners, or of the fact that the
unstable passenger has nothing to grasp at in time of need, except his
equally unstable fellow-traveller. We held on to the priest and the
tourist with all the power of our elbows, and derived at least some
moral support from the certainty that when we fell off the car we
should, like Samson, carry widespread disaster with us. But somehow
people do not fall off these cars; and even the most unschooled of
Saxons sits and swings and bows on the narrow seat with a security that
must surprise himself.

An Irish mile is, roughly speaking, a mile and a quarter English, so we
leave to the accomplished reader the computation of the distance from
Galway to Oughterard according to the rightful standard. It is not in
the ordinary sense a very interesting drive; the guide-books pass it
over in a breath in their haste to blossom out into the hotels and
fisheries of Connemara; but to the eye that comes fresh to it from the
offensively sleek and primly-partitioned pastures of England this first
impression of Galway and its untrammelled bogs and rocks will be as
lasting as any that come after. We ourselves might have framed many
moving sentences about the desolate houses standing amongst the
neglected timber within their broken demesne walls, but “all our mind
was clouded with a doubt,” and from the peculiar protrusion of my
cousin’s nether lip, I could gather that her moodiness was the outward
token of an agitated mental parade of all the Oughterard horseflesh with
which she was acquainted.

We spent that night at Oughterard in Miss Murphy’s comfortable little
hotel, and the next morning found us embarked once more in search of a
means of travel. The trap had been unearthed--the trap of our brightest
dreams--a governess-cart that would just hold two people and a
reasonable amount of luggage; but the horse was the trouble. Various
suggestions had been made: some had been feasible, and the one thing on
which we were firmly decided, viz., the governess-cart, seemed an
impossibility.

“Well, Miss, ye see, she’s only just in off grass; sure she’ll rejoice
greatly in the coorse of the next few days, and she’d fit the shafts
well enough so.”

Thus spoke the proprietor of many flocks and herds to whom we had
addressed ourselves. “It’s a pity there’s nothing would suit ye only the
little thrap, but surely ye might thry her whatever.”

“She” was a farm mare of mountainous proportions, who after violent
exertions had been squeezed between the shafts of the governess-cart,
and she now stood gazing plaintively at us, and switching her flowing
tail, while the shafts made grooves for themselves in her fat sides.

“Sit in now, Miss, and dhrive her out o’ the yard.” My second cousin got
in with ease, the step of the trap being almost on the ground, owing to
the unnatural elevation of its shafts, and the mare strode heavily
forward. My cousin clutched the front rail convulsively.

“I am slipping out!” she said with a sudden tension in her voice. Had
she thought of it she might have held on by the tail, which hung down
like a massive bell-rope above her, but as it was, after a moment or two
of painful indecision, she made a hurried but safe exit over the door of
the trap. The fate of the expedition trembled in the balance, and the
group of spectators who had formed round us began to look concerned. The
mare was extracted with some difficulty from the pinioning shafts, and
all things were as they were, the governess-cart with its shafts on the
ground, and my cousin and I with our hearts in our boots, when a voice
came to us from the crowd--

“Johnny Flaherty have a nice jinnet.”

“A betther never shtud in Galway!” said another voice. “She’s able to
kill anny horse on the road.”

An excited discussion followed, in the course of which it was brought
forward as the jennet’s strongest

[Illustration: “SHE’S A LITTLE GIDDY ABOUT THE HEAD, MISS.”]

recommendation that she was the daughter of the lady whose majestic
build had lost to us the enjoyment of her admirable moral qualities.
Finally a portion of the crowd detached itself and ran up the street,
returning in a few minutes with Johnny Flaherty and a long-legged,
long-eared brown animal, which, as it approached, cast an eye of sour
suspicion upon us and its mother. There was no doubt but that this
creature would fit the trap, but with haunting memories of the
iniquities of mules and their like we asked if it was gentle.

“She’s a little giddy about the head, Miss,” said the owner diffidently;
“but if ye’ll not touch the ears she’s the quietest little thing at all.
Back in, Sibbie!”

Sibbie backed in with an almost unwholesome docility, and was harnessed
in the twinkling of an eye, the lookers-on assisting enthusiastically.
She was led out of the yard. We got in with Mr. Flaherty, and before the
crowd had time to cross themselves we were out of sight.

“Perfection!” I gasped, with the wind whistling in my teeth as Sibbie
sped like a rat between the shafts that had given her good mother her
first insight into tight lacing. “She goes splendidly--the very thing!
but now isn’t it time to go back and get in our things?”

My cousin did not answer; she was driving, and something told me that
the same idea had occurred to her. She was leaning rigidly back, and one
of her gloves had burst at the knuckles. Johnny Flaherty extended a
large hand and laid it on the reins.

“She’s over-anxious for the road,” he said apologetically, as he brought
the jennet to a standstill; “but I’ll put a curb-chain on her for ye.”

We turned and wheeled back into Oughterard, a positive adoration for
Sibbie, with her discreet brown quarters and slender, rapier-like legs,
welling up in us. Now, thinking over these things, it seems possible
that her week’s hire approached her net value, but at the time of
bargaining we felt that her price was far above rubies.

As this is the record of a genuine expedition, it is perhaps advisable
to say that our luggage consisted of a portmanteau, a dressing bag, a
well-supplied luncheon basket, and a large and reliable gingham
umbrella, purchased for the sum of three shillings in Oughterard. We
viewed the elaborate stowing of

[Illustration: “WE VIEWED THE STOWING OF THE GOVERNESS-CART.”]

these in the governess cart, and then went to Mr. Flaherty for his final
sailing orders.

“Ye’ll mind her passing Flanigan’s; she have a fashion of running in
there; and as for passing our own place, I have a boy standin’ there now
in the archway with a stick, the way he’d turn her back out of it if
she’d make a dart for the stable, and I’ll put a rope in the thrap for
fear anything might break on ye.”

Mr. Flaherty looked a little anxious as he gave us these directions, and
when he had gone for the rope, an old woman, who had been regarding us
with a sympathetic solicitude, came up to my cousin and took her by the
arm.

“That the Lord may save yees! that’s all I’ll say,” she groaned; “if
’twas a horse itself, I’d say nothin’, but thim mules is nayther here
nor there. Sure asthore, ye couldn’t tell the minnit he’d turn into a
boghole, when he doesn’t know ye, and thim Cunnemarra roads has nothin’
before him to shtop him only the grace of God! and the wather up aich
side of the road by yees as deep as a well!”

It was painful to find that Oughterard credited the jennet with the sole
conduct of the expedition, and regarded us as helpless dependents on her
will and pleasure. But the old woman’s agitation was quite unaffected,
and the last thing we heard, as we flourished down the main street, was
her voice uplifted in prayerful lamentation.

Owing possibly to the fact that Mr. Flaherty’s boy was demonstrating
with the pitch-fork in the archway leading to the stable, Sibbie made no
attempt to “dart” into it as her owner had anticipated, and nothing
marred the dignity of our departure. We turned cautiously over the
crooked bridge, and drove along beside the river, running black under
tall trees, with patches of foam sailing fast on it. Villas with trimly
clipped ivy and flower-beds all ablaze were on our other hand, suburban
in self-respecting neatness, romantic by force of surroundings and of
something old-fashioned and solid in their build.

“This is the best village for its size this side of Galway,” said my
cousin, with a languid indifference that, as I well knew, masked the
seething self-satisfaction of the resident in the neighbourhood. “And
the place has improved so wonderfully. For instance, there’s the Widow’s
Almshouse. It isn’t so very long ago since an old woman said to my
grandmother, ‘That’s the Widdies’ Almhouse, and sorra widdy in it but
one little owld man,’ and now it’s simply bursting with widows--at
least, I mean----”

[Illustration: “MR. FLAHERTY’S BOY WAS DEMONSTRATING WITH A
PITCH-FORK.”]

This remarkable illustration of the prosperity of Oughterard was
suddenly interrupted. We had forgotten that the residence of the too
fascinating Mr. Flanigan was at hand, but not so Sibbie. With the
subtlety of her race, she cloaked her design in a fulsome
submissiveness, as the deadly spirit is sheathed in the syrup of the
liqueur, and turning in full career, without so much as an indication
from her long expressive ears, she made for the gate of which we had
been warned. By a special interposition of Providence it was closed, but
we were both jerked forward in a very humiliating way, and there was
much unseemly hectoring and lashing before we could drag her from the
haven where she would be. The seeds of distrust were from that moment
sown in our hearts, and we proceeded with a want of confidence that we
had never afterwards reason to regret.

A few moments of steep ascent brought us out on to the moor that is the
entrance to Connemara; a wide brown place of heather and bog, with the
sinuous shining of the Oughterard river saving it from the suspicion of
monotony. The level road ran out in front of us till it dwindled into a
white thread, the distant hills were no more than confidential blue
hints of what we were to see, the sun shone, the strong west wind made
us rejoice that we had stitched elastic into our hats, and the
exhilaration of our feelings found vent in one passion-fraught
word--luncheon.

A great many people have asked us why we did not make our journey
through Connemara on tricycles: the roads are so good, the mail-cars
offer such facilities for the transport of baggage, the speed and
simplicity are so great. To this we have our reply--what then of the
luncheon hamper? These objectors have not taken into account the
comfortable wayside halt by the picturesque and convenient lake; the
unpacking of the spirit lamp, and its glittering bride the tin kettle,
the dinner knives at sixpence apiece, the spoons at two-pence-halfpenny;
the potted meats, the Bath Olivers, the Bovril and the Burgundy. In the
abstract we are not fond of picnics, and agree with the Bard of “Ballads
from _Punch_” in thinking that--

    They who in contempt, the Dryad’s haunts
    Profane with empty bottles and loose papers,
    Find tongues in tarts, ants running on their boots,
    Wasps in the wine, and salt in everything!

But a long road and an early breakfast create an earnestness and
sincerity in the matter of luncheon that were lacking in the artificial
junketings of the Bard. Certainly, our stopping-places were not such as
a Dryad could haunt with any degree of comfort. On this first day we
pulled up under the lee of a low bank, one of the few roadside fences we
had come to in that waste of heather and grey-blue lakes, and spread out
our eatables on the seats of the cart with a kind of bashfulness of the
possible passer-by; a bashfulness soon to be hardened by custom into a
brazen contempt for even the passing mail-car and the fraternal backward
grin of its driver. Most people who have wolfed the furtive sandwich in
a crowded railway carriage have felt all of a sudden how gross and
animal was the action, but how, if persevered in, a callous indifference
may be attained; this was the case with us.

After that first lunch the complexion of things changed. The wind
sharpened into a wet whip, the clouds swooped down on the hilltops, the
lakes turned a ruffled black, like a Spanish hen with its plumage blown
the wrong way, and the first mishap to the

[Illustration: “WE PURSUED OUR WAY TO RECESS.”]

expedition occurred. I turned my head to look with mild surprise at the
end of an iron bedstead with which an ingenious farmer had closed an
opening in his stone wall, and as I did so my hat soared upwards from my
head, and flew like a live thing towards the lake by which we were
driving. I followed with as much speed as I possess, while my cousin lay
in idiot laughter in the cart, and had the pleasure of seeing my hat
plunge with the _élan_ of a Marcus Curtius into a bed of waterlilies by
the bank. From this I drew it, pale, half-drowned, but sane and
submissive; and placing it in solitary confinement at the bottom of the
trap, I donned a chilly knitted Tam o’Shanter, and we pursued our way to
Recess.




CHAPTER III.


Decorous black posts, with white tops, on either side of a little
avenue, a five-pound trout laid out on the hall door-steps, with some
smaller specimens of its kind, a group of anglers admiring these, and a
fine, unostentatious rain that nobody paid any attention to--these were
our first impressions of the Royal Hotel, Recess. With many injunctions
as to her “giddiness” about the head, Sibbie was commended to the care
of a stable-boy, and we marched over the corpses of the trout into a
little hall in which the smell of wet waterproofs and fishing tackle
reigned supreme.

Our only information as to the hotels of Connemara had been gathered
from a gentleman whose experience dated some thirty years back. He told
us that on arriving at the hotel to which fate had consigned him, his
modest request for something more substantial than bread and whisky had
been received with ill-concealed consternation. A forlorn hope of
children was sent forth to find and hunt in a chicken for his dinner; he
had watched the search, the chase, the out-manœuvring of the wily
victim; he had heard, tempered by a single plank door, its death screech
in the kitchen, and he had even gone the length of eating it, when it
was at last served up on a kitchen-plate, brown and shrivelled as “She”
in her last moments, and boiled with a little hot water as its only
sauce. As to the bedrooms, our friend had been almost more discouraging.
He said that while he was dining he heard a trampling of feet and the
moving of some heavy body in the passage. The door opened, and a feather
bed bulged through the narrow doorway into the room, and was spread on
the floor by the table. It was then explained that, as he had asked for
dinner and a bed, sure there they were for him, and they were elegant
clean feathers, and he should have them for eightpence a pound. With
some difficulty the traveller made them understand that, though he meant
to carry the dinner away with him, he had no such intentions with regard
to the bed; and after a more lucid setting forth of his requirements,
his host and hostess grasped the position. He was taken into a room
which was quite filled by two immense four-post beds, and having been
given to understand that one was reserved for domestic requirements, he
was offered the other. He was on the point of accepting this couch when
a snore arose from its depths.

[Illustration: A FISHERMAN AT RECESS.]

“Ah, sure, that’s only the priest,” said the lady of the house; “and
he’s the qui’test man ever ye seen. God bless him! He’ll not disturb ye
at all.” This was our friend’s experience, and though possibly it had
gained flavour and body with age, it had, at all events, made us look
forward with a fearful interest to what might be our lot in Connemara.

But the first vision of the long Recess dinner-table dissipated all our
hopes of the comic squalor that is endured gladly for the sake of its
literary value, and I may admit that the regret with which my cousin and
I affected to eat our soup and pursue our dinner through its orderly
five or six courses was not altogether sincere. From one point of view
it might have been called a fish dinner, as from clear soup, to
raspberries one topic alone filled the mouths of the diners--the
outwitting of the wiles of trout and salmon. There was a reading-party
of Oxford men, their blazers glowing rainbow-hued among the murky
shooting coats of the other diners; there were young curates, and
middle-aged majors, and elderly gentlemen--to be an elderly gentleman
amounts to a profession in itself--and all, without exception or
intermission, talked of fish and fishing. Not to talk to the comrade of
your travels at a _table d’hôte_ is an admission of failure and
incapacity, so much so that rather than sit silent, I would if need
were, repeat portions of the Church Catechism to my friend in a low
conversational voice. My cousin and I have seldom been forced to this
extreme, and on this occasion we kept up the semblance of a cultured
agreeability to one another in a manner that surprised ourselves. But
the volume of discussion raging round us overwhelmed us in the end. We
felt the Academy and the jennet to be alike an impertinence; we faltered
and became silent.

Opposite to us sat one of the most whole-souled of the elderly
gentlemen, with a face of the colour and glossy texture of Aspinall’s
Royal Mail red enamel, in vigorous conversation with a callow youth in a
pink blazer, one of whose eyes was closed by midge-bites; and, though
the general chorus might rise and wane in the long intervals between the
courses, their strident bass and piping tenor sustained an unflagging
duet.

“I assure you, my dear sir,” protested the elderly gentleman, earnestly,
with an almost pathetic oblivion of the difference in age between him
and his neighbour, “it is not a matter of a fly with these Glendalough
trout. I have seen a man fail repeatedly with a certain butcher, and
immediately afterwards the same butcher, put _pleasantly_ to a fish, you
understand, rose him at once.”

“H’m,” returned the Pink Blazer, gloomily, receiving this, to us,
surprising statement, with perfect calm, “_my_ experience--and I’ve
fished these lakes for years--is that a full-bodied Jock Scott”--but we
will not betray our ignorance by trying to expound second-hand the
profundities of the Pink Blazer. When they had been given to the world,
he hid his little midge-bitten face in a tumbler of shandygaff, while
his aged companion gravely continued the argument.

There were only two or three other ladies at the table, and they
evidently had, by long residence in the hotel, been reduced to assuming
an interest in the prevailing topic, which we found hard to believe was
genuine. They may, of course, have been enthusiasts, but their looks
belied them.

Next morning we were awakened by the babble of fishermen in the hall,
then the rattle of cars on the gravel told that they had started on
their daily business, and when at a subsequent period we came down to
breakfast, we found ourselves alone, and the hotel generally in a state
of peaceful lethargy. It was, so we had heard excited voices in the hall
proclaiming, a splendid day for fishing. This meant that when we looked
out of the window we saw two blurred shadows that we believed to be
mountains, and heard the rushings of over-fed streams, which, thanks to
the mist, were quite invisible. But the hotel weather-glass stood high,
and at ten o’clock we were hopeful; at eleven we were despairing; at
twelve we were reckless, and we went to our room to get ready for a
walk. We have hitherto omitted all reference to one important item of
our equipment, and even now, remembering that we were travelling in a
proclaimed district, I mention with bated breath the fact that my second
cousin insisted on taking an ancient and rusty revolver with her. She
had secretly purchased a box of cartridges, weighing several pounds,
and at the last moment she had requested me to stow this armoury in the
travelling-bag--“In case of mad dogs and things on the road,” she said.
The pistol, in its leather case, I consented to, but the tin box of
ammunition was intolerable, and we compromised by putting six cartridges
into an “Easy Hair Curler” box, which really might have been made for
them. So far there had been no occasion to use it, but now, as my cousin
struggled into her mackintosh, she remarked tentatively, “Don’t you
think this would be a good day for the revolver?”

I said I was not much of a judge, but she might bring it if she liked;
and having secreted it and a few “easy hair curlers” in her mackintosh
pocket, she was ready for the road.

We paused in the hall for a last vengeful look at the barometer, which
still stood cheerfully at Set Fair (we believe its constructor to have
been a confirmed fisherman), and at the door we encountered the two
hotel dogs--a large silky black creature of the breed that is generally
selected to adorn penwipers, and a smirking fox-terrier, with polite,
and even brilliant manners of a certain flashy hotel sort.

“Would they come for a walk with the ladies?” said I, my voice assuming
the peculiar drivelling tone supposed to be attractive to dogs.

[Illustration: THE TWO HOTEL DOGS.]

The penwiper regarded me with cold amber eyes, and composed itself for
slumber.

“Come along, then!” I said, still more persuasively adding, as I stepped
out into the thick fine mist, “Cats!”

The amber eyes closed, and their owner curled into an inky heap with a
slumbrous growl; while the fox-terrier, having struck a dashing attitude
to keep up his character as a sportsman, affected to believe that the
cats I referred to were in the kitchen, and hurried off in that
direction. We were snubbed; and we went forth reflecting on the
demoralising effect of hotel life. Its ever-changing society and
friendships of an hour had turned the penwiper into an ill-mannered
cynic, and the fox-terrier into an effete and _blasé_ loafer. Thus
moralising, we splashed along the road, past the little post and
telegraph office, where you write your telegrams in an arbour of roses,
and post your letters between the sprays of clematis, and struck
gallantly forward, with the telegraph posts, along the Clifden road.
Glendalough lake lay on our left hand, and the bare mountains towered up
on our right--at least, we were given to understand by the guide-books
and the waiter that they towered, the mist allowing us no opportunity of
judging for ourselves. Across the lake we saw the Glendalough hotel
among the woods that came down to the water’s edge, and on it--we allude
to the lake--were the boats of some of the maniacs who had left their
comfortable asylum in the grey of the morning. We did not see them
catching any fish; in fact, we have been forced to the conclusion that
we had some malign influence on the anglers of Connemara, for, though we
have watched them long and often, we have never seen so much as a rise.

We left the main road at the end of the lake, and turned into one
running in another direction. It was, like every Connemara road, good
and level, and in perfect order. Like all the others, too, it disdained
fence or protection of any kind, unless an occasional deep ditch or lake
on each side can be called a reassurance to the driver. Here and there
on the road the little black demon cattle were standing disgustedly
about, declining to eat the wet grass among the wetter heather, and
concentrating all their attention on us in a manner that, taken in
connection with the most villainous expression of countenance, and
horns like Malay Krisses, made it advisable to throw stones at them
while there was yet time. They at once withdrew, recognising the fact
that is early implanted in the mind of every known Irish animal, that
sermons in stones are unanswerable. We had got on to a long stretch of
bog road, bounded only by the vaguely suggestive mist, and we were
beginning to feel the ardour for a long walk awakening in us, when we
heard a strange yelping on the road behind us, and looking back, saw a
large brindled bulldog advancing out of the mist at a lumbering trot. No
one was with him; a short piece of rope hung round his collar, and his
aspect altogether was so terrific that my cousin and I again provided
ourselves with the national weapon, and stood discreetly aside to let
him pass. He instantly stopped and stared at us in what seemed a very
threatening manner.

“Perhaps he’s mad!” I suggested. “Where’s the gun?”

“In my pocket,” returned my cousin in a low voice “and I can’t get it
out. It’s stuck.”

[Illustration: “NOW!”]

“Well, you’d better hurry,” I said, “for he’s coming.”

The bulldog was moving slowly towards us, uttering strange grunts, and
looking excitedly round at the cattle, who were beginning to close in on
us and him. My cousin with one strenuous effort ripped the pocket off
her mackintosh.

“I’ve got it at last!” she panted, putting in a cartridge with trembling
fingers and cocking the pistol. “It’s awfully stiff, and I know it
throws high, but anyhow, it will frighten him--I don’t really want to
hit him.”

“For goodness’ sake wait till I get behind you,” I replied. “Now!”

There was a report like a cannon, and I saw my cousin’s arm jerk
heavenwards, as if hailing a cab. The next moment the cattle were flying
to the four winds of heaven, and the bulldog, far from being alarmed or
hurt, was streaking through the heather in hot pursuit of the largest
cow of the herd.

This was a more appalling result than we could possibly have
anticipated. Not only had we failed to intimidate, but we had positively
instigated him to crime.

“He’s used to guns,” I said. “He thinks we are cow-shooting.”

“He’s gone to retrieve the game,” replied my cousin in a hollow voice.

In another instant the bulldog had overtaken his prey, and the next, our
knees tottering under us with horror, we saw him swinging from her nose
by his teeth, while her bellowings rent the skies. Back she came down
the hill, flinging her head from side to side, while the bulldog adhered
with limpet tenacity to her nose, and, jumping the bog-ditch like a
hunter, she set off down the road, followed by a trumpeting host of
friends and sympathisers who had re-gathered from the mountain-side on
hearing her cries. The whole adventure had been forced upon us so
suddenly and unexpectedly that we had no time to argue away the
illogical feeling that we were responsible for the bulldog’s iniquities.
I see now that the sensible thing would have been to have gone and hid
about among the rocks till it was all over. But that course did not
occur to us till afterwards. As a matter of fact, my cousin crammed the
pistol into her uninjured pocket, I filled my hands with stones, and we
pursued at our best speed, seeing from time to time above the heaving
backs and brandished tails of the galloping cattle the dark body of the
bulldog as he was swung into the air over his victim’s head. Suddenly
the whole _cortége_ wheeled, and flourished up a bohireen that led to a
cottage, and in the quick turn the cow fell on her knees, and lay there
exhausted, with the bulldog prone beside her, exhausted too, but still
holding on. The presumable owner of the cow arrived on the scene at the
same instant that we did.

“Call off yer dog!” he roared, in a fearful voice.

“He’s not ours!” we panted; “but come on, and we’ll beat him off!” the
bulldog’s evident state of collapse encouraging us to this gallantry.

The man’s only reply was to pick up a large stone, and heave it at the
dog. It struck his brindled ribs a resounding blow, but he was too much
blown to bear malice satisfactorily; to our deep relief he crawled to
his feet, slunk away past us on to the main road, and, setting off at a
limping trot in the direction from which he had come, presently vanished
into the mist.

The man stooped down and examined the poor cow’s torn and bleeding nose,
and she lay, wild-eyed, with heaving sides, at our feet.

“That the divil may blisther the man that owns him!” he said; “and if he
isn’t your dog, what call have you taking him out to be running my
cows?”

“We met him on the road,” we protested. “We couldn’t help his following
us.”

“Aha! thin it’s one of them dirty little fellows of officers that has
the fishing lodge below that he belongs to!” said the man. “I heard a
shot awhile ago, and ye may b’lieve me I’ll have the law o’ them.”

We exchanged guilty glances.

“Yes; I heard a shot, too,” I said nervously. “Well, I--a--I think we
must be getting on now. It’s getting late, and--a--I hope the cow isn’t
very bad. Anyhow”--my voice sinking into the indistinct mumble that
usually accompanies the benefaction--“here’s something to get soft food
for her till her nose gets well.”

The ambition for the long walk was dead. With more hurried good wishes
and regrets we wished the man good evening, and so home, much shattered.

P.S.--We should like to meet the owner of that bulldog.




CHAPTER IV.


Sibbie looked as suspicious and unamiable as ever when she came to the
door next morning; her long day in the stable had evidently not
propitiated her in the least, but to her subtle mind had only augured a
journey of unprecedented length on the following day. We started,
however, with great brilliancy, and with a vulgar semi-circular sweep,
like a shop-boy making a capital letter, that Sibbie considered very
telling when in society. It took altogether by surprise the penwiper
dog, who, with a little more than his usual elaborate ill-breeding, was
standing with his back to us, looking chillingly unconcerned, and
compelled him to show the most humiliating adroitness in order to escape
from Sibbie’s venomous fore-feet. The incident rounded off pleasingly
our last impressions of Recess, and we whirled out on to the main road
in a manner that nearly took our breath away, and probably left the
gate-post in a state of hysterical gratitude at its escape.

It was not raining, but the day had got itself up to look as like rain
as possible, and was having a great success in the part. A rough wind
was blowing the clouds down about us, and, as on the day before, the
hills hid their heads and shoulders in the odious mist, leaving only
their steep sides visible, with the wrathful white watercourses scarring
them, like perpendicular scratches on a slate. It was on one of these
hills that a tourist missed his footing last year in trying to get to
the bottom faster than someone else; the heather clump broke from the
edge of the ravine, and the young fellow went with it. They searched for
him all the summer night, and next morning a shepherd found him, dead
and mutilated, at the foot of the cliff. We drove on steadily by bare
bog and rocky spur for three or four miles, with the wind hard in our
faces, till we came to a cross road, where a double line of telegraph
wires branched from the single one, and following, according to
directions the double one, we left the mail-car road behind. The wind
now screamed into our right ears, and Sibbie’s long tasselled tail,
which before had streamed back out of sight under the cart, turned like
a weather cock and swept out in front of the left wheel. It was not a
pleasant day for seeing one of the show places of Connemara, but it was
the best and only one we could afford; besides, from what we had heard
of Ballinahinch, it seemed as if it would be able to bear an unbecoming
atmosphere better than most places.

It need scarcely be said that the new road ran by a lake, or lakes;
every road we have seen in Connemara makes for water like an otter, and
finds it with seeming ease, sometimes even succeeding in getting into
it. In a forlorn hollow by one of these lakes, we came on a little Roman
Catholic chapel, with its broken windows boarded up, and its graveyard
huddled under a few wind-worn trees on the hill behind. Crooked wooden
crosses, or even a single upright stake, were the landmarks of the
dead; perhaps in a country where trees take more trouble to preserve
than game, and are far more rare, a piece of timber is felt to be more
honourable than the stone that lies profusely ready to the hand. The
graveyard trees quivered rheumatically in the wind, long bending before
it in one direction having stiffened them past waving; the pale water
chafed and sighed in a rushy creek below; even Sibbie chafed and sighed
as we stood still to look back, and she took at least ten yards of the
hill at full gallop when we started her again.

As we drove along the high ground beyond, Ballinahinch came slowly into
sight; a long lake in a valley, a long line of wood skirting it, and
finally, on a wooded height, the Castle, as it is called, a large modern
house with a battlemented top, very gentlemanlike, and even handsome,
but in no other way remarkable.

It was not the sort of thing we had expected. We had heard a great deal
about Mary Martin, who was called the Princess of Connemara forty years
ago; we had read up a certain amount of Lever’s “Martins of Cro’
Martin,” of which she was the heroine, and knew from other sources
something of her gigantic estate, of the ruin of it during the famine,
of the way in which she and her father completed that ruin by borrowing
money to help their starving tenants, and of her tragic death, when she
had lost everything, and had left Ireland for ever. We were prepared for
anything, from an acre of gables and thatch to a twelfth century tower
with a dozen rooms one on top of the other, and a kerne or a gallowglass
looking out of every window, but this admirable mansion with plate-glass
windows, and doubtless hot water to the very garrets, shook down our
sentimentalities like apples in autumn. We drove on in silence. I knew
that my cousin felt apologetic.

“I believe I had forgotten,” she said, “that it was Mary Martin’s father
who built this, sixty or seventy years ago. Of course you couldn’t
expect it to look old.”

[Illustration: “BALLINAHINCH CAME SLOWLY INTO SIGHT.”]

“No, of course not,” I replied, “and even if I did I don’t think it
would be much use. That house is too conscientious to look a day older
than its age.”

We arrived at the gate while I spoke, a modest entrance to what seemed a
back road to the house, and Sibbie turned in at it with her usual
alacrity in the matter of visiting. She would visit at a public-house,
at a pigstye, at a roofless ruin, anywhere rather than go along the
road. The picnic was beginning; certainly the view was. We looked along
the lake and saw how it coiled and spread among its wooded islands; the
shrouded hill behind it gave for the moment some indication of its
greatness; there was no doubt that even at its worst, as it undoubtedly
was, Ballinahinch was worth seeing.

The wind fought with us along the first stretch of the drive, dragging
at our hat pins, lifting the rug off our knees; blowing our hair in our
eyes; but at the first turning a great and sudden calm fell about us.
For the first time in our travels we were in a large plantation. Some
local genius once said that “Connemara got a very wooded look since them
telegraph posts was put up in it,” and after many a drive in which the
line of black posts dwindling to the horizon was the only break in the
barrenness we began to understand this. Here at all events the
civilising hand had done its work, and we slackened pace in the
greenness and shelter, and, fortified by the knowledge that the present
owner of the place was far away, we began to think of luncheon. My
cousin pacified the fly-tormented Sibbie with a few handfuls of fresh
grass, and got out our pewter spoons and other elegances of the luncheon
table, while I, grovelling on the floor of the cart, nurtured there the
spirit-lamp through one of its most implacable moods. There was a
charming stillness, broken only at first by the occasional heavy splash
of a leaping salmon in the lake below, and by Sibbie’s leisurely
mastications, then the first sulky sigh came from the tin kettle, and a
long beckoning finger of blue flame darted from beneath it. That was a
weird habit of the spirit-lamp, to beckon to us when the kettle began
to boil, and on this occasion it did not play us false. We made our
homely cup of Bovril, we devoured our cheese, we crunched our Bath
olivers, and it was just then, when the seats of the trap were covered
with cups and crumbs, and we were altogether at our grimiest, that we
heard wheels close at hand.

My cousin at once showed a tendency to get over the wall and hide,
leaving undivided degradation to me, but the descent to the lake on the
other side was too steep. As she turned back discomforted I was quite
glad to see how dishevelled she looked, and how crooked her hat was, and
before any remedial steps could be taken the Philistines were upon us.
They consisted of four young men, crowded on a car with their
fishing-rods and baskets, and, to do them justice, they, after a first
stare of astonishment, considerately averted their eyes from the picnic.
The narrowness of the road made it necessary that they should pass at a
walk, and it was at that moment, while we were affecting unconsciousness
of all things in heaven and earth, that the nightmare of yesterday rose
up before us--the bulldog. He was close behind the axle of the car,
fastened to it, thank heaven, with a glittering chain, but between the
spokes of the wheel we saw his eyes rolling at us with a bloodshot
amiability or even recognition, while his crooked tail wagged stiffly,
and his terrible nose twitched amorously towards the Bath oliver I held
in my hand. The car quickened up again, and he dragged at his chain as
he was forced into a shuffling trot along with it. “Come in, Stripes,”
shouted one of the youths, and the party passed out of sight.

“Did you see him?” I said excitedly. “I believe he knew us!”

“Of course he did,” returned my cousin, with an offensive coolness that
was intended to carry off any recollections of her dastardly moment of
panic, “but he won’t tell. He knows if he gives us away about the
revolver we will inform about the cow. For my part I’m rather sorry he
isn’t here now,” she went on, as she wiped a knife in the grass, and
then stabbed it

[Illustration: “WE HEARD WHEELS CLOSE AT HAND.”]

into the earth to give it a polish; “no picnic should be without a dog.
When I was a child we used always to wipe the knives on the dogs’ backs
between the courses at a picnic, and then the dogs used to try and lick
that spot on their backs----”

I am not squeamish, but I checked my cousin’s recital at this point, and
we pursued our way to the house. Tall sliding doors, in perfect order,
admitted us to a large quiet yard, so orderly that, as we looked round
it, we felt, like Hans Andersen’s black beetle, quite faint at the sight
of so much cleanliness, and would have been revived by the only familiar
whiff of the cow-shed and pigstye. We gave Sibbie and her luncheon bag
to a man who was hanging about, and were proceeding to ask whether we
might walk about the grounds, when a door into the house opened, and
there issued from it a young woman of such colossal height and figure
that we stared at her awe-struck. She smiled at us with all the
benevolence of the giantess, and advancing, offered to be our guide. We
thanked her like Sunday School children and followed her meekly towards
the hall door, feeling as we looked at her that it would have been
simpler to have climbed on to her tremendous shoulders and got at once a
bird’s-eye view of the demesne. It was apparently part of the programme
that we should see the inside of the house, and she led us through the
rooms in the lower story, billiard-room, dining-room, drawing-room,
library; all comfortable, and in their way imposing, but unfortunately
devoid of special objects to comment on, while the giantess stood and
held the door of each open, with, as it seemed to us, an ogress-like
avidity for approbation. But she proved to be a kindly giantess, and
when we looked, in spite of ourselves, a little unenthusiastic at the
prospect of viewing the upper part of the house she relented and said we
might go out into the grounds.

The hill sloped steeply from the dining-room windows, to the lake in
front, and to a wood at the side, and going down some steps we found
ourselves in a shady walk by the water.

“This is Miss Martin’s seat,” said the giantess, stopping in front of a
curiously-shaped and comfortless-looking stone block, “ye can sit in it
if ye like.”

We did so, gently.

“How very nice,” said my cousin, getting up again, and removing an
earwig and some dead leaves of last year from her skirt, “but I should
have thought she would have liked more of a view. Those laurels two
yards off are very pretty of course, but one can’t see anything else.”

I saw an antagonistic gleam in the giantess’s eye and hastened to
suggest that the laurels might have grown up since the days of Mary
Martin.

“Whether or no, it’s in it she used to sit,” she said, as if that
settled the question of the view. “Maybe ye’d like now to walk a piece
in the woods to see them?”

“I suppose it would take us a long time to walk through such large woods
as these?” I said lusciously, seeing that I was regarded with more
favour than my cousin.

“Is it walk thim woods? Ye’d sleep, before ye’d have them walked. But
there’s a nice road round to the boathouse ye can go.”

“Perhaps you could tell me how many acres there are in this estate?”
said my cousin, trying to make hay in my private streak of sunshine.

“I declare I’m not rightly sure.”

“I suppose they’re past counting?” continued my cousin, with the
fascinating smile of one who is sustaining a conversation brilliantly.

“About that,” responded the giantess lucidly, determined at all hazards
to keep pace with outside opinion. “Here now is the little road I was
tellin’ ye of. Would ye know the way in it?”

We assured her we could find the boathouse without her help, and “so in
all love, we parted.”

As we walked on in the solitude the lake narrowed beside us to a river,
a connecting channel between it and the larger lake beyond, and the
water ran strong and quiet under the meeting branches that leaned above
it from both sides. The dark mirror reflected every twig; brown stems,
green canopy, and opening of grey sky arched away beneath our feet as
well as above our heads; we became at last giddy with the double world,
and felt our eyes cling instinctively to the silver smear on the glassy
surface or the golden gleam in the shallow that testified to where
illusion began. Once or twice there was a splash that sounded, in that
silence, as if a large stone had been thrown in; we were, of course,
looking the wrong way each time, and instead of seeing the flash of a
ten or twenty pound fish we saw only the rift in the crystal, and the
big ripples following each other to the shore. Once only in Galway did
we see live fish without stint or hindrance, when, afterwards, we leaned
over the bridge in Galway town itself, and could have counted by the
hundred the dark backs of the salmon that lie all day still and shadowy
in the clear water below the weir.

We were soon out again by the upper lake, and, much beset by flies and
midges, walked along the edge of the wood till we came to the boathouse.
On its broad steps we sat thankfully down to rest, and commented at our
leisure on the atrocities of the grey weather, and of the cloud that was
cloaking the peak of the mountain opposite. We happened to know that
there ought to be a mountain there, one of the Twelve Pins, in fact, but
for all we could see, it might have flown into the Atlantic Ocean, in
search of something less watery than Connemara. As we sat there, and saw
the invariable fisherman catching the inevitable nothing, and looked at
the dark sheet of water in its beautiful setting of trees, my cousin
told me drowsily several things about Mary Martin. I cannot now recall
the recital very clearly, but I remember hearing how Miss Martin had
taken a guest up the mountain that should have been soaring into the
heavens before us, and, making him look round the tremendous horizon,
had told him how everything he could see belonged to her. If the weather
had been like ours, it would not have been a very overpowering
statement, limited, in fact, to the cloud of mist and Miss Martin’s
umbrella; but as it was, with the inland mountains and moors clear to
the bluest distance, and the far Atlantic rounding her fifty miles of
sea-coast, it was a boast worth making. Perhaps it was the vision that
was clearest to her failing sense when she lay dying on the other side
of that Atlantic without an acre and without an income, a refugee from
the country where her forefathers had prospered during seven hundred
years.

The retrospect became melancholy, and we began to be extremely chilly;
sitting out of doors was too severe a test for this July day, and we
made towards the house again. When we were nearing Mary Martin’s seat we
saw through the trees a brilliant spot of colour, which gradually
developed into a scarlet petticoat, worn shawl-wise about the head of an
old woman who had sat down in a tattered heap to rest on the stone
bench. She put away something like a black pipe as we came up, and began
the usual beggar’s groaning, and when, after some fumbling, my cousin
produced a modest coin, the ready blessings were followed by the ready
tears, that welled from hideously inflamed eyes, and trickled over the
wrinkles in her yellow cheeks. It occurred to us to ask whether she
remembered Mary Martin, and in a moment the tears stopped.

“Is it remember her?” she said, wiping her eyes with some skill on a
frayed corner of the red petticoat. “I remember her as well as yerself
that I’m looking at!”

“What was she like in the face?” said my cousin in her richest brogue.

“Oh musha? Ye couldn’t rightly say what was she like, she was that
grand! She was beautiful and white and charitable, only she had one
snaggledy tooth in the front of her mouth. But what signifies that?
Faith, whin she was in it the ladies of Connemara might go undher the
sod. ’Twas as good for thim. And afther all they say she died as silly
as ye plase down in the County Mee-yo (Mayo), but there’s more tells me
she died back in Ameriky. Oh, glory be to God, thim was the times!”

The tears began again, and she relapsed into the red petticoat. We left
her there, huddled on the seat moaning and talking to herself. We could
do no more for her than hope, as we looked back at her for the last
time, that the pipe in her pocket had gone out. The day was slipping by;
a twelve mile drive to Letterfrack was before us. Taking all things into
consideration, especially Sibbie’s powers as a roadster, we hardened our
hearts to starting at once, without taking the half-mile walk to see the
wonderful stables that cost Colonel Martin £15,000 to build, and are
paved with blocks of the green and white Connemara marble. Let us trust
that our intended admiration was conveyed in some form to that costly
marble flooring, in spite of an unpleasant saying about good intentions
and a certain pavement that is their destination.




CHAPTER V.


It was nearly four o’clock before we got out of the Ballinahinch avenue
on to the Clifden road. A young horse had got loose in the yard just as
Sibbie was having her toilet made for the start, and the clattering of
hoofs and cracking of whips that ensued had so upset her old-maidish
sensibilities, that she refused to leave the stable, till finally, by a
noble inspiration on our part, she was backed out of it. She had started
from the yard in a state of mingled resentment and terror; even still
her ears were fluttering like the wings of a butterfly, and she showed a
desire to canter that seemed to us unhealthy. The shrunken oat bag lay
at our feet; decidedly she had had more luncheon than was good for her
while we were walking ourselves off our legs in the woods of
Ballinahinch. The broad lake lay on our left, showing coldly and
mysteriously through the changing swathes of mist, and above us, on our
left, the long slopes of bog and heather stretched upwards till they
steepened into the dignity of actual mountains.

“If I thought the weather could not hear me,” observed my second cousin,
“I should say it was going to clear up. It looks almost as if there were
sunlight on those children’s petticoats ahead of us.” An enchanting
group was advancing to meet us; half-a-dozen or so of children, boys and
girls petticoated alike in mellow varieties of the dull red or creamy
white Galway flannel, a few cattle wandered in front of them, and in
their midst a long-suffering donkey was being ridden by three of them
and beaten by the remainder. We were so absorbed in sitting with our
heads on one side to better appreciate the artistic unity of the picture
that we took no heed of the dangerous forward slant of Sibbie’s ears. No
one could have supposed that in her short intimacy with “the quality”
she could have already developed a fine-ladyish affectation of horror at
the sight of an estimable poor relation; yet so it was. Casting one
wild look at the appalling spectacle, she sprang sideways across the
road, whirled the trap round, only avoiding the black bog-ditch by a
hair’s breadth, and fled at full speed in the direction from which she
had just come.

My cousin and I were for the moment paralysed by surprise, and by the
sudden horrid proximity of the bog-ditch, which was hospitably prepared
to take us all in and do for us, and think nothing of it. Sibbie’s
strong little brown back was hooped with venomous speed, and her head
was out of sight between her forelegs. The telegraph posts were blended
into a black streak, the lakes swam past us like thoughts in a dream, it
seemed useless to get out to go to her head; obviously, Sibbie was
running away. The governess cart quite entered into the spirit of the
thing, and leaped and bounded along in a way that--considering its age
and profession--we thought very unbecoming. It is perhaps a _façon de
parler_ to say that I was driving. To put it more accurately, I

[Illustration: “HANGING ON EACH TO OUR REIN.”]

had been driving, and now I was trying very hard to do the opposite.
However, after laying the seeds of two blisters in vain, I was
ignominiously compelled to hand one rein to my cousin. Hanging on each
to our rein, we lay back in the trap, getting a good leverage for our
pull over the ridge of the luncheon basket. I shudder to think of the
result had those reins broken. Two human Catherine wheels would have
been seen revolving rapidly over the stern of the governess-cart, and as
for Sibbie---- But the reins were staunch, and though at first a want of
unanimity caused us to swing from side to side of the road in a series
of vandykes, the combined weight of the expedition slowly told, and
Sibbie’s ears were hauled into sight. Back and up they came till they
were laid along her back, and her long nose pointed skywards in a fury
of helpless protest, while her gallop grudgingly slackened.

Of course my hat had blown off early in the proceedings, but nothing
else had happened. I handed my rein to my cousin without a word, and got
out of the trap.

“No doubt this had been extremely amusing,” I said, “but I am going to
buckle the reins as low down on this bit as they will go.”

And I did so. I hate people who do nothing but laugh on an emergency,
simply because they think it looks brave.

As I turned Sibbie round I saw, nearly a quarter of a mile away, a child
standing by a telegraph post, holding in its hand a white disc that I
knew must be my hat, and I also saw with much pleasure that the other
children, with the cows and the donkey, had left the road, and were
climbing up the hillside. So, with hearts overflowing with a great
thanksgiving that “Earl Percy,” _i.e._, the mail-car and its English
tourists, had not “seen our fall,” we drove back again at a cautious
jog, Sibbie obviously as much on the look-out as we were for anything
that she could reasonably shy at. The girl with the hat was regarded by
her with an anguish of suspicion, only allayed by my getting out of the
cart while the hat was smuggled in, and leading her--a process which
always suggests taking a child by the hand to give it confidence.

It was a long way, about six Irish miles, back to the turn that we had
been instructed would take us to Letterfrack, and the invalid sunshine
had already swaddled itself again in cotton wool and retired for the
night. If my second cousin has a failing, it is that she believes
herself to possess “an eye for country,” a gift fraught with peril to
its possessor. Unfortunately, she had, before starting, studied on a map
the relative positions of Ballinahinch, Recess, and Letterfrack, and now
that she was face to face with the situation her eye for country flashed
fire at the idea of having to traverse two sides of a triangle instead
of one, which was pretty much what we were called upon to do.

“It is absurd,” she said, hotly, “to go back almost to Recess to go by
that ‘new line’ to Letterfrack, when I am almost _sure_ I remember
seeing on the Ordnance Map a dear little roadeen that would take us
through the mountains somehow on to the Kylemore road.”

From the use of the affectionate diminutive “roadeen,” I knew that my
cousin was trying to engage my sympathies, and though I tried to steel
my heart against the suggestion, there certainly was something
attractive in the thought of a short cut.

“It ought to be a little further on,” she continued, “by a little lake;
and you know it’s getting pretty late now.”

I now recognise that this was the moment at which to have stamped upon
the scheme, and to have made the time-honoured remark that we had no
time for short cuts. But I let it slide by me, and when we reached a
narrow, but to all appearance sufficient mountain road, bending
plausibly away to the left, we mutually succumbed to its fascinations.
For a mile or so it was really very fair. It certainly did occur to me
that it might be awkward if we met anything larger than a wheelbarrow,
as the governess-cart easily monopolised the space between the usual
bog-ditches, but as, so far, the district seemed quite uninhabited, we
did not trouble ourselves on that account. The road became steeper and
stonier as we advanced, but Sibbie toiled on gallantly, the pride of
having run away clearly still working in her and encouraging her in a
way no mere whip could have done. The cotton-wool into which the sun had
retreated had now covered all the sky, and was wrapping up the mountain
tops as if they were jewellery, which, as they were armoured from head
to foot in sheets of grey rock, seemed to us unnecessary care. We were
getting deeper and deeper into the hills, and the higher we got the
heavier the rain became. It felt as though some important heavenly pipe
had burst, and we were getting near the scene of the explosion. The
three shilling umbrella did its best; it humped its back against the
torrent like an old cab-horse, and really kept my second cousin fairly
dry. But things were going very badly with the luncheon basket, and,
though we did not mention it to each other, the belief in the short cut
was dying in us.

The road ahead was narrowing in a way not to be accounted for by the
laws of perspective; it was becoming suspiciously grassy, and rocks of
a size usually met with only in the highest Druidical circles lay about
so near to the track that steering was becoming a difficulty. A
wild-looking woman, wearing a coarse white flannel petticoat over her
red hair instead of a cloak, came paddling along with barefooted
indifference to the wet, and stopped to stare at us with a frank and
open-mouthed amazement which was not reassuring.

“Shall we ask her the way?” I suggested.

“It’s no good,” replied my cousin, sombrely; “we must go on now. It’s
too narrow to turn round. Let’s get on to those cottages and ask someone
there.”

(The belief in the short cut here heaved its final groan and expired.)

We had climbed to a kind of small plateau in the heart of the hills, and
on the farther side of the little indigo lake round which the track
wound were a couple of cottages. We beat Sibbie into a trot, and made
for the nearer of the two, and the barking of the usual cur having
brought a young man out of the house, my cousin proceeded to discourse
him.

“Are we going right for Kylemore?”

“Yo’re not.”

“Where does this road lead to?”

“To the Widda Joyce’s beyant.”

“And is that the end of it? Can’t we get on any farther?”

The young man looked at us much as an early Roman might have regarded
the Great Twin Brethren.

“Bedad I dunno what yerselves is able to do; but there’s no answerable
road for a cart whatever.”

Our eyes met in dumb despair, but my second cousin still rose above the
waves. (This metaphor is most appropriate, as we could not have been
much wetter if we had been drowned.)

“Where is the nearest hotel?” she asked, with all the severity of an
examining Q.C.

“Back in Recess. Ye’d be hard set to get there to-night.”

“Think now, like a good boy, is there no sort of a place hereabouts
where they’d put us up for the one night?”

The despairing relapse into the vernacular had its effect.

“Well, faith, I wouldn’t say but the Widda Joyce ’d be apt to be able to
do it. There was an English gintleman, a Major, that she had there for
the fishin’----”

In what capacity the English Major was used in the fishing we did not
stop to inquire; he might have been employed as a float for all we
cared; it was about all we felt ourselves fit for.

We did not ask the Widow Joyce if she could take us in. We simply walked
into her house and stayed there. We had heard a good deal of the Spanish
type of beauty that is said to abound in Connemara, but the Widow Joyce
was the first specimen of it that we had seen. A small, pale, refined
woman, with large brown eyes, and dark hair tucked shiningly away under
a snowy white frilled cap, she heard our story with flattering interest
and compassion, and we had hardly finished it before most of her eleven
children were started in different directions to prepare things for us
and “the pony.” By-the-bye, we noticed that during our travels Sibbie
was always given brevet rank, the delicate inference being that we were
far too refined and aristocratic to be associated with anything so
vulgar as a jennet.

A lovely clear fire of turf was burning on the hearth, and Mrs. Joyce
hospitably insisted on our each sitting on little stools inside the big
fireplace, and roasting there, till the steam of our sacrifice showed
how necessary a proceeding it was. In the meantime that sacred place
known as “Back-in-the-room” was being prepared for our reception; as far
though we should have preferred the kitchen with its clean earth floor
and blazing fire, Mrs. Joyce would not hear of our having our dinner
there.

“Sure the Meejer always ate his vittles back in the room,” she said; and
to this supreme precedent we found it necessary to conform.

We certainly owed a great deal to the Meejer. It was the Meejer, we
discovered, who had broken an air-hole in the hermetically-sealed
window. “An’ faith, though he give us the money to put in the glass
agin, we never got it done afther. It’s a very backwards place here.”
The Meejer’s sense of decorum had prescribed the muslin curtains that
shielded the interior from the rude gazer’s eye. The Meejer had
compelled the purchase of a jug and basin, and “a beautiful clane pair
o’ sheets, that not a one ever slep in but himself.” In fact, what of
civilisation there was, was due to his beneficent influence, and we rose
up and said that the Meejer was blessed. Our dinner was an admirable
meal; a blend of the resources of the luncheon-basket and of Mrs. Joyce;
its only drawback being that, forgetful, as she herself admitted, of the
precepts of the Meejer, she had put the teapot down “on the coals to
dhraw,” and the result was a liquid that would have instantly made me
sick, and would have kept my second cousin awake in agony till she died
next morning. So we avoided the tea.

[Illustration: “SITTING ON LITTLE STOOLS INSIDE THE BIG FIREPLACE.”]

“Back in the room” was a small whitewashed place with an earthern floor
as clean, though not quite as dry, as the one in the kitchen. A big
four-poster bed filled one end of it, and a red painted press, a square
table, a huge American chest with the washing apparatus on it, and two
or three chairs, were the rest of the furnishing. But though the
upholstery was of a simple character, it was evident that the decorative
sense was not lacking. The walls were lavishly hung with fervidly
coloured religious prints; two or three sheets of an illustrated fishing
fly-list had a place of honour near the widow’s patron saint over the
fireplace, the gorgeous salmon flies being probably regarded by the
younger Joyces as portraits of some new kind of angel; and drapery’s
adventitious aid was lent by the suspended wardrobe of the family, both
male and female, which relieved the severities of the bedposts, and gave
a little air of interesting mystery to the corners of the room. Rather
more than half the room had a rough ceiling of boards, and near the door
we noticed a ladder leading up to the loft thus made. We had felt
anxious about the bestowal of the widow and her family, not knowing what
duties the four-poster might not be called upon to perform, and as the
witching hour of ten o’clock drew nigh, and the low murmur of Joyce
discourse still continued, we had made up our minds to ask what the
arrangements might be, when there came a tap at the door.

“I beg yer honour’s pardon, Miss,” said our hostess’ soft, polite voice,
“but would there be any harm in meself and the children goin’ above up
to the loft?”

We said no, quite the contrary, and after some whispering and giggling
outside the door, a procession of Joyces slowly filed up the ladder,
headed by the younger sons of the house, and followed by the widow and
the daughters. The last pair of stout red legs was hoisted off the
ladder, the rustling and pounding overhead gradually subsided, and my
second cousin and I found ourselves face to face with the most serious
situation--not excepting either the bulldog or the runaway--of the
expedition. The fear of interruption had hitherto prevented us from
making as thorough investigation as we might have wished, and now we
“stared at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in
Darien.” Then she said--

“I’ll look.”

She turned down the bedclothes with a stiff, nervous hand. “They seem
pretty clean,” she said at last; “they mayn’t perhaps have been washed
very lately, but I think they must have dusted them. I can only see one
crumb and a used wax match.”

The account was not encouraging, but it might have been worse. Of the
sufferings of that night, however, as much cannot be said. After our
occupancy of that bed, not one used match, but twenty, might have been
collected. In explanation of this circumstance, I will merely quote one
line from the charming duet for bass and tenor in _The Lily of
Killarney_--

    To light the way, to flea my love.




CHAPTER VI.


From the indications given in the last chapter, the intelligent reader
will probably have gathered the fact that we did not sleep well.

“It isn’t the little bit they ates I begridges them,” quoted my cousin,
as in one of the long watches of the night she wearily lit her candle
for the nineteenth time, “but ’tis the continial thramplin’ they keeps
up.”

Even when the greater part of these foes was either gorged or slain, the
sleep that hummed its mellow harmonies in the loft over our heads held
far from us, tossing and stifling among feathers and flock pillows. It
must have been about two a.m., and I had just, by various strategies,
induced myself to go to sleep, when I was once more awakened, this time
by a convulsive clutch of my arm.

“Don’t stir!” whispered my second cousin, in a voice so low that it
felt like one of my own dreams, “but listen!”

A stealthy sound, as of a slow, barefooted advance, crept to us, buried
though we were in the perfumed depths of the flock pillows.

“Whatever it is, it came out from under the bed,” breathed my cousin,
“and it has gone twice round the room--looking for our money, I expect!”

The steps ceased for a moment, then there came a sound as of a little
rush towards the bed, and in an instant something with loud flappings
and rustlings had descended upon us, and rested heavily, with hollow
cacklings of contentment, upon our buried forms (for I suppose I need
hardly state that we had both bolted under the bedclothes).

“I believe it’s only the goose after all!” I said, as soon as I was
sufficiently recovered to speak.

“Only the goose!” returned my second cousin, with concentrated fury; “I
don’t see much to be grateful for in that. And how do you know it isn’t
the gander? I’m simply stifling here, but I know the brute would peck
me if I went out from under the clothes. I wish to goodness it _had_
been a burglar. Anyhow, they don’t peck.”

This was indisputable; as was also the fact that the bird had to be
dislodged. She had worked herself into a position that was probably more
satisfactory to her than it was to me, and judging, as I was well able
to do, by her weight, she must have been a remarkably strong and
vigorous bird.

“Get the matches ready,” I said, gathering myself for an effort. Then,
curving myself till the goose must have thought she was sitting on a
camel, I gave a heaving plunge. There was a croak, a flop, and a minute
afterwards the light of a match revealed a monstrous grey goose standing
in pained astonishment on the floor near the bed.

Fortunately the profundities of Joyce repose knew no disturbance, and,
still more providentially, the three shilling umbrella was within reach
of the bed. Opening this as a safeguard against an attack, which in our
then thin costume we should be ill-fitted to

[Illustration: “REVEALED A MONSTROUS GREY GOOSE.”]

withstand, we gently but firmly ushered the majestic goose-lady into the
kitchen, and, getting back to bed slept in peace till the usual hideous
farmhouse clamour began. We need not dilate upon it here. The
war-whoopings of the cocks, the exhausting self-satisfaction of the hens
over a feat which, however praiseworthy in itself, lacks originality;
the yells of the pigs, and their impatient snuffings and bangings
against the kitchen door; all, all, were alike detestable, and we
welcomed almost with ecstasy the lowering of the first pair of Joyce
legs, which told us that the family, like a certain distinguished
cricketer, were going out “leg before.”

My cousin and I are old travellers, and we have two properties, a spirit
lamp and a folding indiarubber bath, without which we never take the
road. It is my belief that if my second cousin were told that a chariot
of fire was at the door, waiting to waft her to the skies, she would
rush upstairs for the indiarubber bath and the spirit lamp. After this I
suppose I need hardly say that they had accompanied us to Connemara. We
do not for an instant wish to insinuate that the bath, as an
institution, does not obtain in those parts. We have every reason to
believe that it flourishes there; but a melancholy experience has taught
us that the age of chivalry is dead, so far as hotels are concerned, and
if there is a scarcity or competition in any department, whether of
newspapers, or green peas, or baths, the most recent paper, and the
first helping, and the last available bath is reserved by the truckling
domestics for the largely-eating, heavily-tipping male traveller. We
have had moments of fury, when violent death has stalked behind the
chambermaid who has just informed us that “the last bat’ in the house is
afther goin’ in to the gentleman in No. 11.”

But at such times the remembrance of the indiarubber bath floats sweetly
into our minds; and we reflect that its tin rival would have cost
sixpence or a shilling. Its gentle influence, combined with a dash of
chill penury, represses our noble rage, and we endure the favouritism of
the hotel _employés_ with calm; knowing also that retribution is coming
for her whose duty it will be to deal with the weird and wobbling thing
that will, on the smallest provocation from the unskilled in its ways,
become a mere mass of gaping mouths, pouring forth accusation of her and
her treatment of the slightest visitor.

At the Widow Joyce’s hot water was unexpectedly abundant, and the spirit
lamp was not called into requisition. We were given to understand that
the Meejer was loud and instant in his demands for “plenty of biled
water,” but how he performed his ablutions with it it is not for us to
say. Except they lent him a churn, there was, so far as we could see, no
vessels competent to undertake the duties of a bath, and a churn in such
a capacity would, we should think, leave a good deal to be desired. We
were, however, independent of such makeshifts. The chief drawback to an
indiarubber bath is its propensity to slop; but on an earthen floor slop
is little accounted, and all would have been well if my second cousin
had not persisted in trying to empty it through the air-hole broken by
the Meejer in the window. She did this nominally out of kindness to the
Widow Joyce, but really because she thought she could pour its contents
on the widow’s cat, who was sunning herself on the window-sill. As a
matter of fact, I think our luncheon-basket suffered more than the
cat--but we will not pursue the subject. My cousin now recognises that
it requires an exceptionally high and hardy intellect to control an
indiarubber bath, even in repose, and few, very few, are able to direct
it in action.

When we went out that morning, we found it was that “gift of God, a
perfect day.” Everything looked washed and brilliant after the rain; the
little lake was twinkling all over in sharp points of light till it
looked as if it were bristling with new pins, and the mountains had left
off their half-mourning costumes of black and grey, and wore charming
confections of softest green and lavender. We stood out in the sunshine,
on the narrow strip that ran between the cottage and the lake, and threw
some languid stones at the widow’s geese, who were bobbing along before
the wind, led on their voyage by the stout disturber of our slumbers.
The air was singing with the noise of streams; each pale blue ravine had
a white line dividing it; at the back of the cottage a little over-fed
river came foaming into the lake at a pace that ought to have given it
indigestion after all it had swallowed the night before, and the plash
of the contents of the indiarubber bath, as the widow emptied it on the
step of the front door, gave the last note in the chord of water-music.

We had had an excellent breakfast, founded on fresh eggs and hot griddle
cake, with a light top dressing of potted meat; we had paid our modest
reckoning, and Pat James, the eldest hope of the house of Joyce, was
harnessing “the pony.” That “the pony” was giving Pat James a time, not
to say seven times and a half time, was obvious from the shouts that
came to us through the stable-door, but finally, round the corner of the
cow-house, Sibbie’s cross, prim face appeared with Pat James leading
her, and the governess-cart reeling over the big ruts in the lane
behind her.

“He’s very crabbed, Miss,” said Pat James, in tones of soft reproach,
“he’s afther hittin’ me the divil’s own puck inside in the stable.”

There was a spiteful gleam in Sybylla’s bright eye that spoke to the
truth of his statement, and we felt sorry for Pat James.

We took a mutually affectionate farewell of the Widow Joyce, promising
to convey her respects to the Meejer if we met him in England, as she
seemed to think probable, and we set forth to make our way back to “the
big road below,” accompanied by Pat James, whose mother had charged him
to see us safe over the first bad bit of the road.

He was an idyllically picturesque creature of seventeen or eighteen,
with large, gentle grey eyes, set in a golden-brown face several shades
darker in value than they were, and the most charming voice and manner
imaginable. The cat, on whom my cousin had basely tried to empty the
bath, came with him; sometimes strolling behind with a set face of
unconsciousness, but with a tail that twitched with inward plottings,
and sometimes making possessed scuttles on ahead, with a sort of
squirrel’s tail held high, and a little dreadful air of being moved by
some unseen power. Pat James was evidently rather ashamed of it, and at
such moments would throw stones at it to cover his confusion.

“We have it for a dog, Miss,” he said in answer to our enquiries, “and
it have the way now to be running with us when we’d be going out.”

Here he threw another stone at the cat who had usurped the position of
household dog, which had the effect of wafting it across the road under
Sibbie’s nose, and thereby alarming her seriously. He left us after
about half a mile, and when we saw him last he was sitting on a big
rock, his slouched felt hat and creamy flannel “bawneen” looking all
that could be desired against their background of clear blue sky, whilst
the cat performed unearthly gambols in the heather at his bare feet.

“After all,” we said to each other, as we turned into the main road, and
set Sibbie’s long nose for Recess, “it was just as well we missed our
way, for if we hadn’t we should have missed Pat James.”

The road that was to be our portion was the one known as the New Line,
leading out of the Recess and Clifden road into another road that leads
through the Pass of Kylemore, and on into Letterfrack, where we meant to
spend the night. Sibbie was fresh and full of going, and the long level
road, following the curves of Lough Inagh and Lough Derryclare, inspired
her with a fine and unusual zeal. The accustomed boats, each with its
little patient whipping figure, were paddling about the lakes, and,
according to our custom, we reined in the fiery Sibbie to watch them.
They were a depressing spectacle, and, as usual, our cold, though
anything but fishy, eye blighted all their chances of a rise. We left
them all flogging away like Dublin cabdrivers, and made up our minds
that if we wanted to spend thirty shillings a day on fish, we would do
it at the Stores.

Our way lay through a long up-sloping tract of heathery, boggy valley,
with the splendid towers and pinnacles of the Twelve Pins hanging high
over the lakes on our left, and on our right the last outworks of the
Maam Turc ranges rising almost from the road. It was an utterly lonely
place. The small black-faced sheep pervaded the landscape, speckling the
mountains like grains of rice, and we could see them filing along the
ledges over purple depths where more than one climber has been killed.
The little black and brindled cattle stared at us defiantly as we drove
along, and the only human creature we met on the road was a grey old
bagpiper, who looked as though he might have lost his way among the
hills some time in the last century, and had only just found the New
Line when we met him.

It certainly was a perfect day and a perfect drive. The delicious
mountain wind, which was charged with all the subtle perfumes drawn from
bog and heather; the marvellous cloud effects on the great crags of the
Twelve Pins; the sparkle and rush of the brown streams under the
innumerable hog-backed bridges; the intense blue of the lakes, even the
yellow whiteness of the slow-climbing road, all combined to fill us with
that vague delightful yearning which can only be satisfied by lunch half
an hour earlier than usual.

One only sign of civilisation did we see between Recess and Kylemore,
and it was of a wholly unexpected type. A middle-sized house,
bow-windowed, gabled, stucco-covered, hideous beyond compare, standing
in the middle of a grass plot at the foot of one of the hills, and
looking as if some vulgar-minded fairy had transported it bodily from
Brixton or Clapham Rise. It had at first the effect of being deserted,
but, as we got nearer, a melancholy old horse strayed out of a sort of
dilapidated shed and stared at us, and an outside car propped against an
elaborately gabled end showed that he was not a mere derelict. As we
drove by, a cat climbed out of one broken pane of glass, and a cock
crept in by another, and then suddenly at three of the upstairs windows
there appeared the faces of three dirty little girls. The hall door was
shut, and the thin wiry grass round the house was untrampled. No other
living thing appeared, and we can only conclude that we stumbled in upon
the middle of a fairy tale. The house, of course, was the work of
enchantment, and the three princesses, who were held there in durance
vile, were about to be rescued by the princely cock whom we had seen
forcing an entrance, while the bad fairy--the cat, naturally--had to
creep out and throw up the sponge (of which, by-the-bye, the princesses
might with advantage have made practical use).

We left the New Line just as we came in sight of the Pass of Kylemore,
and the road on which we now found ourselves wound along the shore of
the lake, according to the custom in Connemara, where, unlike the rest
of Ireland, the roads are not planted along the backs of the highest
hills procurable. We pulled up on one of the bends of the road to look
at the view and make a sketch. That is the supremest of the advantages
of driving your own donkey-cart, you can generally stop when and
wherever you like. The only exception to this rule is when, as happened
at Ballinahinch, your donkey has had too many oats.

On this occasion the donkey was quite ready to stop, and she surveyed,
with a connoisseur’s cold eye, the unsurpassable view, while the evening
clouds thronged the gap between the steep tree-covered sides of Kylemore
on one side, and the stony severities of the Diamond Mountain on the
other, and sent changing lights and shadows hurrying over the wide lake,
and drove the labouring sketcher of these things almost to madness.

Mr. Mitchell Henry’s place, Kylemore Castle, stands close in among the
woods under the side of Kylemore Mountain, with a small lake shutting it
off from the road. It is a great, imposing grey mass of turrets and
towers, and, close by, the white spire of a charming little limestone
church is reflected among the trees in the lake, and gives an amazing
finish of civilisation to the whole view--in fact, civilisation and
fuchsia hedges are the leading notes from Kylemore to Letterfrack, wide
crimson banks of fuchsia lining

[Illustration: MR. MITCHELL HENRY’S PLACE, KYLEMORE CASTLE.]

the road, and prosperous farm buildings presiding over fat turnip
fields, until the road lifts again into the barer uplands whereon is
situated the village of Letterfrack.

No map we have as yet encountered pays Letterfrack the compliment of
marking it, but it is nevertheless a very fine place, with a post and
telegraph office, an industrial school, and a tolerably regular double
row of houses of all sorts. Our various delays of luncheon and
sketching, &c., along the road had made us later than usual, and we were
only just in time for the _table d’hôte_ at Mr. O’Grady’s
fuchsia-covered hotel. There was a wonderful sunset that evening, and
after dinner we wandered out to see as much as we could before bedtime.
It was the strangest country we had yet seen. A long down-sloping tract
of semi-cultivated land, and, starting up round its outskirts, tall,
crudely conical mountains, “such a landscape as a child would draw,” my
second cousin said. There was something volcanic and threatening about
these great dark tents, showing awfully against the red background of
the sunset. We were almost glad when everything melted into a grey
sea-fog--for the sea, though out of sight, was very near--and we had to
walk back the hotel; while from a shadowy cottage back of the road the
piercing screams of a concertina rendered in maddening iteration the
first theme of the “Sweethearts” waltz. Only one incident did we meet
with on our way back. Quite suddenly, out of the greyness, three men
appeared, and as they passed us, one of them turned and said, “Genoong i
dhieri,” which, being translated, is “God speed you.”

We said feebly “Good evening,” and it was not till we were nearing the
hotel that my second cousin remembered that she should have answered,
“Ge moch hay ritth,” which is the Irish method of saying, “The same to
you.”




CHAPTER VII.


There is reason in the roasting of eggs, and presumably in their
poaching, but we are beginning to think we shall never fathom the
principle which ordains that the hotel poached egg shall invariably be
underdone. Charmed we never so wisely, commanded we never so timely, the
same pinkish blobs were placed fluent and quaking before us, the same
lavish gush answered the diffident knife puncture, and in a moment our
plates became like sunrise painted by an impressionist, with red bacon
streaks weltering in the widespread orange glories, and the golden
mustard blob surmounting all as serenely as Phœbus Apollo.

This phenomenon was at all events our only specimen of a Letterfrack
sunrise. As we sat at breakfast in the coffee-room the mist blew softly
against the French windows, and swept past on the road like a
procession of ghostly ball dresses; the furniture seemed clammy to the
touch, and the paper decorations in the grate mocked the eye with their
futile elegance and affectation of summer heat. Our fellow guests,
evidently _habitués_ of the place, took only the most casual notice of
the weather, and talked of local matters with the zest which so
surprises the newcomer; of their single or conglomerated prowess in
scrambling up the Diamond mountain, of their tumbling down it, of their
tea, their sandwiches, and their wet boots; while we moodily ate our
breakfasts, without even self-respect enough to make conversation for
one another. Our depression was deepened soon afterwards, on hearing
that an ancient raw on Sibbie’s shoulder had been touched by the collar
in the drive of the day before, and that unless a person described as
“Jack’s father” could put some additional padding into the collar we
could not get on to Renvyle that day, though it was only a four mile
journey.

The prospect of a day spent in the coffee-room

[Illustration: JACK’S FATHER.]

and the little ladies’ drawing-room goaded us to energy. We determined
to see the damage for ourselves, and putting on our waterproofs, we
paddled out into the yard, and picked our way across it to the stable by
some convenient and apparently recognised stepping-stones. The invalid
Sibbie was in the darkest stall of the stable, standing in severe
preoccupation, with her back to the outer world, and as we delicately
approached her we became aware of an eye like that of a murderess
rolling at us with a white gleam in the obscurity, and saw that her
long, bell-rope tail was drawn tightly in. We hastily agreed that we
would take Jack’s word for the rubbed shoulder, and retired into the
yard again. At the door of another stable we found the person whose only
identity, or indeed profession, seemed to consist in being Jack’s
father, sitting on an upturned bucket, with Sibbie’s collar in his lap
and a monstrous needle in his hand. He explained that he was putting in
a pad at each side, stuffed with cotton wool that he had got “from
Herself, within in the house, because ’twould be kindher than the hay.”
He had a serious face, with a frill of grey beard, like a Presbyterian
minister of the most amiable type, and he looked up as he spoke with an
expression that we felt to be kinder even than the cotton wool. “If that
collar puts a hurt on the pony agin as long as yee’ll be thravellin’
Connemara, ye may--ye may call me blackbird!”

This handsome permission, emphasised by the tug with which the big
needle was dragged through the leather, was evidently the highest
reassurance known to the speaker, but, notwithstanding, we felt that
even to apply the opprobrious name of blackbird to Jack’s father would
be an indifferent consolation if in the midst of a wilderness of moor
and mountain we found the red spot appearing on Sibbie’s shoulder. We
looked, however, as properly impressed as we were able, and returned to
the house in better spirits.

It was not till the afternoon that the weather gave us a chance of
starting, and even then it required courage of a high order to turn out
of our comfortable quarters into the thick, damp air. The volcanic
mountain spikes, that last night had notched the sullen fire of the
evening sky, had with one accord taken the veil, and retired from public
observation, and the sloping pastures and turnip fields looked as nearly
repulsive as was possible for them. Under these circumstances we left
Letterfrack without emotion, and proceeded northward towards Renvyle.

After we had gone a little way we began to speculate as to whether the
road had been made with an eye to the possibility of a future
switchback railway. It seemed to us that at every hundred yards or so we
had to get out and trudge up a hill through the mud, our consciences
approving our consideration for Sibbie, and our every other feeling
bewailing it; then came the scrambling into the trap again at the top,
the tucking in of wet rugs, the difficult closing of the door, and
having driven down the far side, the next hill rose immediately before
us in the mist. The next thing we began to notice was that on every hill
we met a donkey-cart and some young cattle, evidently coming from some
fair or market. There were two courses of procedure on these occasions.
The calves turned and fled before us at full gallop along the way they
had come, until retrieved with huge expense of shouting and bad
language, or they at once jumped the fence by the roadside and stampeded
at large through the fields. The donkey-cart, which generally contained
a pig, and an old woman screaming in Irish, had but one method, which
was to cross to the wrong side of the road at the critical

[Illustration: AT TULLY FAIR.]

moment, and then, abandoning itself to panic, endeavour to retrace its
steps. During three or four miles these _recontres_ became more and more
frequent, till at length, when the mist lifted at the top of a hill, we
found that we had reached their source. In the hollow between the two
hills was a village, its single street black with people, and the roads
leading to it full of cattle and pigs. In other words, we had hit off
the fair of Tully.

My cousin and I began to wonder how we were to get to the other side of
it. We drove down into the town with dignity and circumspection, hoping
that our aristocratic appearance might clear the way for us; but after a
minute or two we were forced to the conclusion that the peasantry were
not impressed. Not till Sibbie’s aggrieved visage was thrust into their
midst did the groups separate, and even then they could scarcely spare
time from the ardours of debate to give us more than a passing stare of
bewilderment. An obstacle that seemed for a time likely to prevent our
ever getting to Renvyle was a donkey-cart, with its shafts propped on a
barrel so as to make a stall for the sale of sugar-stick, gooseberries,
and piles of the massive biscuits known as “crackers.” The press of
customers and their friends round this brought us to a standstill, and
my cousin, in a politely dignified voice, asked those nearest us to move
aside. There was a movement and a turning to stare.

“Holy Biddy! What’s thim?” exclaimed a girl, pushing back against the
donkey-cart, and in so doing sending some of the “crackers” sliding down
into the mud.

The proprietress, an old woman with protruding teeth and generally
terrific aspect, made a futile attempt to avert the catastrophe, and
then whirled round upon us with a ferocity whetted by this disaster and
matured by long combat with small boys.

“That the divil may blisther yerself and thim!” she screamed. “What call
have thim dirty thravellers here throwin’ down all before thim? Aha! I
knew ye,” she said, addressing herself to my second cousin in tones of
thunder, “and yer owld mother before ye, the time ye were thravelling
the counthry in a pack on her back, puckin’ at every hall-doore in the
counthry beggin’ spuds! For so grand as ye are, with yer specs on yer
nose and yer fine sailor hat on the back of yer head!”

My cousin and I should, of course, have passed on with a pale hauteur,
as if we had not heard this amazing effort of biographical romance, but
we are, unfortunately, not of the complexion that turns pale with ease;
on the contrary, we became a violent turkey-cock scarlet, and ended by a
collapse into unsuppressible laughter, in which the crowd joined with
unfeigned delight, as they at length made a way for us to pass.

“Don’t mind her at all, Miss,” said a cattle drover, encouragingly, as
he dragged a calf from before the wheel; “that one’d bother a rookery
with her tongue; there isn’t a fair in the counthry but she’ll be
bawling and fighting in it this way, so it’s little regard the people
pays to her and her chat. Sure, as Shakspeare says, “ye’ll always know a
rale lady wherever ye see her!”

This gallantry was so refreshing, that we did not stop to inquire more
closely into the whereabouts of the quotation, and we slowly made our
way out of the fair, past the bulging, grimy tents where porter and
whisky were sold, and the screaming crowd of children in front of a
showman’s booth, till the last knot of blue-cloaked women was
circumnavigated, and the last incensed pig was dragged from between
Sibbie’s forelegs.

We looked back as we crawled up the hill outside the village, and
wondered what the pleasure could be of standing all day long in the
drizzle, in mud ankle-deep, as many do who have nothing either to buy or
sell. But a fair is not to them merely a place of business, it is a
conversazione, extending from sunrise to sunset, at which the keen
spectacular enjoyment of bargaining is blended with the purely personal
pleasure of getting drunk.

Another mile or two of switchbacking brought us in sight of trees,
which, in Connemara, answers to coming in sight of land, as far as
civilisation is concerned; before long we were driving underneath them,
and pulling up at the entrance gate of a demesne. We drove down a long
avenue (when we say “avenue” in Ireland, we mean it according to the
true sense of the word, and do not necessarily imply that it is
over-arched with trees), with the sound of the sea in our ears, and
became aware that we were on a strip of land like the battlefield of
Lyonesse.

“On one side lay the ocean, and on one lay a great water.”

We wound by the edge of the lake, and might easily have mistaken the
frothy ripple along its shore for the salt lip of the tide, but for the
tall band of reeds that shook stiffly in the mist-laden wind. But we
were nearing the sea every moment. We emerged from a plantation, and
came in sight of it at last, and at the same time came to our
destination, a long, grey, two-storey house, with low Elizabethan
windows, and pale weather-slated walls, wholly unexpected, and
altogether unique, as far, at all events, as this part of Ireland is
concerned.

Anyone who knows Galway at all, knows the name of Blake; and anyone who
read the reports of the Parnell Commission will remember the Mrs. Blake
whose evidence there was thought by both sides to be of so remarkable a
kind. Renvyle House, at whose oaken, iron-studded door Sibbie was now
joyfully coming to a standstill, has been the home of the Blakes for
several centuries; now, in its old age, it is the home of any tourist
who chooses to go there. The bad times and the agitation hit Renvyle
very hard; so hard that when the fight with the Land League was over,
Mrs. Blake was not able to sit down and tranquilly enjoy her victory.
She had, on the contrary, to rise up and give all her energies to
repairing the ruin that such a victory meant. Her plan was a daring one
for a boycotted woman to undertake; but it was carried out to its
fullest intention. Before long, advertisements appeared in the
newspapers and the guide books to the effect that Renvyle House had been
added to the list of Connemara hotels, and the sound of traffic, “the
coorsing and recoorsing” of cars began to be heard on the long avenue
by the lake, as in the old times, when “exclusive dealing” and decrees
of isolation were unknown.

We cannot here say much about the difficulties she had to contend with.
Whatever they were they were overcome. It is both easier and pleasanter
to speak of the advantages at her command. The charming, rambling old
house, with its innumerable panelled bedrooms, the lakes, “shtiff” with
brown trout, the woods and rocks in which hide all manner of strange
beasts--from otters and seals downwards--the untainted Atlantic for the
tourist to disport himself in or upon, as seems good to him, and the
tallest mountains of Connemara to stare at across the bay, while
sprawling at ease on such a level, creamy stretch of sand as is seldom
found except in those places where it is the sole and much-bragged-of
attraction. We had heard of all these things in advance; we were
accustomed to thinking of Renvyle as an hotel; and yet, when we knocked
at the door, and a grave and decorous man-servant appeared, the look of
everything conspired to make us forget that we were tourists, prepared
to exercise our lawful right of “bed and board,” and we came very near
stammering out an inquiry if Mrs. Blake was at home.




CHAPTER VIII.


[Illustration]

When the iron-studded hall-door of Renvyle House Hotel had closed behind
us, we found ourselves in a low-panelled hall, with oaken props for guns
and fishing rods, and long black oaken chests along its walls.
Everything was old-fashioned, even mediæval, dark, and comfortable.
Nothing was in the least suggestive of a hotel, unless it might have
been a row of letters and telegrams on the chimney-piece, and I was
beginning seriously to fear that we had made a mistake, when I noticed
my second cousin’s eye-glasses were at full cock, and following their
direction, I saw the “Innkeepers’ Regulation” Act hanging framed on the
wall. It was both a shock and a relief.

Our various belongings--somewhat disreputable and travel-stained by this
time--having been conveyed from the trap, we were told that tea was
ready in the drawing-room, and followed the servant through two deep
doorways into another room, also mediæval and panelled. “What is so rare
as a day in June?” asks Mr. Lowell. Nothing, we can confidently reply,
except a fire in July, and there on the brick hearth we saw with
gloating, incredulous eyes a heap of burning turf sending a warm, dry
glow into the room, and making red reflections in the antique silver
tea-service that was placed on a table near it. For ever quelled were
our vague anticipations of the hotel drawing-room and its fetishes, the
ornate mirrors, the glass-shaded clocks, and the alabaster chimney
ornaments; and as we extended our muddy boots to the blaze, and sipped
hot tea through a heavy coating of cream, we felt reconciled to the loss
of an ideal.

[Illustration: RENVYLE HOUSE HOTEL.]

After the clank of our tea-cups had continued for a few minutes, there
was a stir under the frilled petticoat of the sofa, and a small
black-and-tan head was put forth with an expression of modest but
anxious inquiry, the raised flounces making a poke bonnet round the
face, and giving it an old-ladyish absurdity, of which its owner was
happily unaware. We laughed--an unkindness which was followed by an
expression of deep but amiable embarrassment, and a tapping on the
floor that told of deprecatory tail waggings. We simultaneously extended
a piece of bread-and-butter, and an animal, allied apparently to the
houses of black-and-tan terrier and dachshund, at once came forward with
its best manner and took our offerings with suave good breeding and
friendliness. A trick of sitting up and waving the fore-paws as a
request for food was exhibited to us without delay, and further
researches discovered a proficiency in that accomplishment of “trust”
and “paid for,” which must be the bitterest problem in dog-education,
and perhaps gives in later dog-life some free-thinking ideas about the
unpractical nature of the exercise, and the flippancy of supreme beings
generally. We said all this to each other, luxuriously and at great
length, and had some pleasure in contrasting the refined behaviour of
the Renvyle dog with the brutal cynicism of the Recess penwiper and the
_blasé_ effeteness of its fox-terrier. Under the influences of dark
mahogany panelling and a low Queen Anne window we became mellow and
thoughtful, and sank into soothing reflection on our natural affinity
to what is cultured and artistic. I am sure, at least, that my second
cousin felt like that; she always has since the disastrous day on which
a chiromantist looked at her hand and told her that it was essential to
her to have nice surroundings.

I was beginning to feel a little acrid at this recollection when the
door-handle turned in its place high up in the panels, and Mrs. Blake
came in to see her visitors. That my cousin belonged to her county
seemed to her a full and sufficient reason that she should welcome us as
friends, and perhaps it gave us throughout our stay an advantage over
the ordinary tourist in the more intimate kindnesses and opportunities
for conversation that fell to our lot.

We looked as hard at Mrs. Blake as politeness would permit, while the
broad columns of the _Times_ seemed to rise before our mind’s eye, with
the story sprinkled down it through examination and cross-examination of
what she had gone through in the first years of the agitation. It
required an effort to imagine her, with her refined, intellectual face
and delicate physique, taking a stick in her hand and going out day
after day to drive off her land the trespassing cattle, sheep, and
horses that were as regularly driven on to it again as soon as her back
was turned. We did not say these things to Mrs. Blake, but we thought
about them a good deal while we sat and talked to her, and noticed the
worn look of her face and the anxious furrows above her benevolent
brows.

It was some time before we went up to see the two rooms of which we had
been offered a choice. Both were low and panelled, both had low, long
windows; in fact it will save trouble if we say at once that everything
at Renvyle was long and low and panelled. The first room looked to the
front of the house, and out over the Atlantic towards the muffled ghosts
of Innis Boffin and Achill Islands; a fine view on a fine day, and
impressive even at its worst; but to us, the room’s chiefest attraction
was the four-poster bed, a magnificent kind of upper chamber, like a
sumptuous private box, with gilded pillars, and carved work, and
stretched canopy; something to admire with the help of a catalogue at
South Kensington. We felt, as we were taken down two long passages to
view the other room, that it was a mere matter of form, and that the
golden bed was too regal a circumstance to be abandoned. But before my
cousin’s eye-glasses were fairly adjusted for the inspection, we had
begun to waver. The other bed was brass instead of gold, there was no
denying that; but these windows looked out to a great ridge of
mountains, crowded about the head of the bay, roses climbed to the sill,
and the grassy stretch below was cut out in gaudy flower-beds. A peacock
screamed just under the windows, and we saw him with his meek spouse
trailing his tail about the grass among the flower-beds that were wired
in from his ravaging beak. I think it was the broad window seat in
conjunction with the mountains that turned the scale--(the peacock also
turned the scale, but in a different way, generally turning it at C in
alt; but, as Mr. Rudyard Kipling says, that is another story). We
forewent the golden glories of the new Jerusalem bed, and remained where
we were.

There was unconfessed peace in the certainty that it was not an
afternoon for sight-seeing; rather for fervent shin-roasting at the
drawing-room fire, blended with leisurely, unsystematic assimilation of
the _Times_ for the last four days. Fishermen, apparently, take a
holiday from newspapers, along with their other duties when they go
a-fishing, and expose themselves to nothing more severe in the way of
literature than the _Field_ or _Land and Water_; at all events, these
and a pre-historic _Illustrated London News_ had been our only
opportunities for keeping ourselves in touch with the outer world since
we had left it. Boaconstrictor-like, we slowly gorged ourselves with
solid facts, and then subsided into a ruminative torpor,
misanthropically delighted at the fact that we had chanced upon an
intermediate period as to tourists, and that the owners of the letters
and telegrams that we had seen in the hall had not arrived to claim

[Illustration: “IT WAS THE BROAD WINDOW SEAT, IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE
MOUNTAINS, THAT TURNED THE SCALE.”]

them and their lawful share of the fire and the newspapers.

[Illustration: “SHE WAS AN AMERICAN LADY.”]

Our most salient recollections of the rest of the evening are connected
with the velvet delicacy of the lobster soup at dinner, and the tortured
bashfulness of the English youth, who crept, mouse-like, into the room
after the rest of the small party were seated, and raised neither his
eyes nor his voice till the meal was ended. Directly he had finished, he
hurried from the room and was seen no more. A lady who sat next us
volunteered the information that he always acted just so, and that he
spent his days, so far as anyone could guess, in slinking around the
mountains. “He’s so shy,” she concluded, “that he’ll scrape a hole in
his plate trying to get the last mite of butter off it rather than ask
me to pass the cooler.” It appeared that she was an American lady who
had come to Renvyle to inquire into the advantages of the Land League
and other kindred institutions, which was perhaps why she was in the
habit of noticing little things. She certainly seemed to have noticed
the Englishman a good deal.

Given a sloping, sunshiny bank of shingle, a mass of yellow
lichen-covered rocks between it and a purple-and-emerald streaked sea, a
large empty morning, and a cock-shot, there is no reason why one should
ever stop throwing stones. That is how my second cousin and I occupied
ourselves the morning after our arrival at Renvyle. We had started
early, with sketching materials and luncheon, full of a high resolve to
explore several miles of coastline, beginning with the famous Grace
O’Malley’s Castle, and ending with afternoon tea and well-earned repose.

No one can accuse these papers of a superfluity of local information. We
have exercised a noble reticence in this respect, owing partly to a
sympathetic dislike of being instructive, and partly also to the
circumstance that we never seemed able to collect any facts. We have
questioned waiters, and found that they came from Dublin, and bothered
oldest inhabitants only to find that they were either deaf or “had no
English.” But Grace O’Malley is a lady of too pronounced a type to be
ignored, and even our very superficial acquaintance with her history
compels us at least to express our regret that such a female suffragist
as she would have made has been lost to our century. If she had lived
now she would have stormed her way into the London County Council, and
sat upon that body in every sense of the word; and had the University of
Oxford refused to allow her to graduate as whatever she wished, she
would indubitably have sacked the town, and borne into captivity all the
flower of the Dons. In the reign of Elizabeth, however, her energies
were confined to the more remunerative pursuit of piracy. She is known
to have had a husband, but he does not seem to have occupied public
attention to any extent, except secondarily, as when it is recorded that
“the Lady Grace O’Malley went to England to make a treaty with the
Queen, and took her husband with her.” One of her strongholds was this
square tower, that looks down with such amiable picturesqueness on the
waters of Renvyle Bay, and we were told that on those rare occasions
when she condescended to sleep ashore instead of afloat, a hawser
leading from her ship was fastened to her bedpost, and the skipper had
orders to haul on it if anything piratically promising should turn up.

I think we had begun to discuss this energetic Grace and her probable
action in modern politics as we strolled across the fields between
Renvyle and the sea. At all events, something beguiled us to sit down
upon that slope of small round stones, when we were as yet but a quarter
of a mile from the hotel, and then a flaunting tuft of white bladder
campion on a point of yellow rock offered itself irresistibly as an
object for stone-throwing. As we write this we are sensible of its
disappointing vulgarity. The word “sketch,” if not, indeed, “sonnet,”
should have closed the sentence; but the humiliating fact remains that
we simply lay there and pelted it till we had used up all the available
pebbles, and stiffened our shoulders for the next three days, and still
the bladder campion flaunted in our despite. We crawled from that too
fascinating shingle beach to the grass above it, and stretched ourselves
there in heated fractiousness. How hot the sun was! How blue and green
the sea! And how enchantingly the purple gloom of the mountains showed
between the grey hairy legs of the thistles! And after an interval of
healing torpor, how admirable was luncheon!

But after luncheon Grace O’Malley’s tower seemed farther off than ever,
and relinquishing the vigorous projects of our morning start, we began
to drift along the shore towards the pale stretches of the sands. We
dawdled luxuriously across a low headland, where the mouths of the
rabbit-burrows made yellow sandy patches in the coarse grass, and we
slid down the crumbling slope on to the hard, perfect surface of the
sand. Its creamy smoothness had something of the romance of new-fallen
snow, and none of its horrors. An insane and infantine ardour possessed
us--to run, to build castles, to paddle! We came very near paddling,
forgetful of our age, our petticoats, and the fact that no one ever yet
was able to paddle as deep as they wanted to. In fact, we resolved that
we _would_ paddle, and we set off down the slanting glistening plane
towards the far-off line of foam. Here and there the blue sky lay
reflected in the wet patches of sand, Achill Island was a cloudy
possibility of the horizon, Croagh Patrick and Mweelrea, immense
certainties of the north-eastern middle distance, and at our feet were
laid lovely realities of long lace-like scarves of red seaweed,
flattened out with such prim precision that we expected to find their
Latin and English names written beneath them on the sand.

Another fifty yards would have brought us to the water’s verge, when
suddenly crossing our path at right angles, we came upon a long line of
footmarks, masculine in size, pointed in shape, fraught with sinister
suggestion of spying eyes. A group of immense rocks, the leaders of a
procession of boulders trailing glacier-wise from the mountains to the
sea, easily suggested an ambush, and the footmarks, as far as we could
see, led in their direction. The same thought of the hidden watcher
struck us both, and instantly and for ever abandoning the paddling
scheme, we resolved to follow up the track of the footprints until we
had routed the unworthy foot-printer from his lair. Little prods, as of
a stick in the sand, accompanied the boot-marks, and at one spot certain
rudimentary efforts in both art and literature made me think that the
wearer of the boots was guiltless of object in his retreat upon the
rocks. Suddenly, however, the marks lost their almost complacent
evenness, and became extended and irregular, as if their owner had given
himself over to ungoverned flight.

“What did I tell you?” remarked my cousin; “he was rushing off to hide
before we should see him!”

We reached the rocks, and, with eyes that must have imparted to her
_pince-nez_ the destructive quality of burning glasses, my cousin swept
their weedy crevices to discover some indication of the spy.

“He must be at the other side,” she began, when our eyes simultaneously
fell upon a small white object.

It was a sandwich.

It lay between two big rocks that leaned to each other, leaving just
room for a slim person to squeeze through; and looking through the
aperture, we saw a long narrow vista of the sands, and on them a
solitary flying speck--the Englishman.




CHAPTER IX.


The sound of the mowing-machine awakened us early on the morning that we
were to leave Renvyle House Hotel. To and fro the rattle came, with a
measured crescendo and diminuendo that slowly aroused our sleepy minds
to the consciousness that the tennis ground was being mown, and that it
was Monday, and that--this finally, after sluggish eyes had become aware
of pink roses swaying in sunshine in and out of the open window--another
fine day had been bestowed upon us whereon to make our journey. The
clatter of the mowing-machine grew louder, and the smell of the cut
grass came in at the window, blending sweetly with the strong language
of the gardener to his underling, as the machine was steered in its
difficult course among the flower beds.

[Illustration: THE RENVYLE DONKEY.]

When we leaned out across the broad window sill, the business was almost
finished, and the panniers of a donkey, who was standing on the gravel
walk with his head drooped between his forelegs, in a half-doze were
spilling over with the short green grass, and the chopped-off heads of
the daisies. We stared at the donkey in a kind of bewilderment. The top
of his head was tufted like a Houdan hen’s, but stare as we might we
could not see his ears, and it was so astonishing a phenomenon that we
went downstairs to investigate it.

It was a genuine summer morning at last; the sun shone hotly down on our
bare heads as we passed the smooth lawn-tennis ground, with the long
alternate grey and green lines ruled on it by the machine, and we stood
for a moment or two in the shade of the thick fuchsia arch that led to
the old-fashioned garden plot, and listened to the bees fussing in and
out of the masses of blood-red blossom over our heads. The donkey was
still dozing under his panniers as we came up to him, and we saw beyond
any manner of doubting that the only ears he possessed were little
circles no higher than napkin-rings, out of which sprouted thick tufts
of wool and coarse brown hair. Just then the men neared us with the
machine, and we asked them for an explanation.

“His ears was cut off in the time of th’ agitation,” the gardener
replied, in a voice that showed that the fact had long ago ceased to
have any interest for him, as he emptied the last boxful of grass into
the panniers. “He was a rale good little ass thim times, faith he was.”

Probably our faces conveyed our feelings, for the gardener went on:
“Indeed, it was a quare thing to do to him; but, whatever, they got him
one morning in the field with the two ears cut off him as even with his
head as if ye thrimmed them with that mow-sheen.”

We passed our hands over the mutilated stumps with a horror that
evidently gratified the gardener. “There was one of the ears left
hanging down when we got him,” he proceeded. “I suppose they thought it
was the most way they could vex us. They grewn what ye see since then,
and no more, and the flies has him mad sometimes.”

We went into breakfast with what appetite we might, and felt what
terrible facts had conduced to the circumstance that we, tourists and
strangers, were able to take our places in the old Renvyle dining-room,
and partake of hot breakfast-cakes and coffee--coffee whose excellence
alone was enough to make us forget we were in an hotel--as if we, and
not the Blakes, had been its proprietors for centuries.

We spent the morning in making a final tour of the house, up and down
the long passages, and in and out of the innumerable charming panelled
rooms. We have left the library to the last, and now that we are face to
face with the serious business of description, our consciences tell us
that we are not competent to pronounce on ancient editions and choice
bindings. It seemed to us that every book in the tall mahogany cases
that stood like screens about the room was old and respectable enough to
have been our great grandfather; we certainly had in our hands a
contemporary edition of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “History of the World,” not
to mention an awful sixteenth century treatise on tortures, with
illustrations that are still good, handy, reliable nightmares when the
ordinary stock runs short. My second cousin has, I fancy, privately set
up a reputation as a book-fancier, among people who do not know her
well, on the strength of her graphic descriptions of one massive tome,
a treatise on Spain, written in Latin, with gorgeous golden
hieroglyphics stamped on its white vellum cover, and a date far back in
1500 on its yellow title-page.

I am sure that Sibbie felt small gratitude to the sulphate of zinc that
brought about the complete healing of her sore shoulder, which took
place during her visit at Renvyle. Probably never before since her
entrance into society had she spent three whole days in a stable on
terms of delightful equality with real horses, and with at least two
feeds a day of real oats. “Beggars can’t bear heat,” is a tried and
trusted saying in Ireland, and it soon became apparent that the moral
and physical temperature in which Sibbie had been living had been too
high for her. When we went to the hall-door to superintend the stowage
of our effects in the governess-cart, we found her on her hind legs,
with a stable-boy dangling from her bit, and flat on his back in front
of her lay the respectable butler, overwhelmed in the rugs which he had
brought out on his arm. We hastened to the rescue; the butler got up,
Sibbie got down, and we proffered apologies for her misconduct.

“Oh, thin that one’s the divil painted!” said the stable-boy, speaking,
probably, on the principle of “Penny plain, tuppence coloured.” “He went
to ate the face off me to-day, an’ I claning out his stall! Faith, ’twas
hardly I had time to climb out over the side of the stall before he’d
have me disthroyed.”

The miscreant’s appearance was that of a swollen sausage propped on
hairpins, and, as having regretfully bade farewell to the hospitable
house of Renvyle, we set off down the avenue at a showy canter, we
promised ourselves that we would not strain the tender quality of mercy
by any philanthropic nonsense of walking up hills.

Our route lay along our old acquaintance the switchback road for two or
three miles, and then we said farewell to it, and turned to our left to
follow the easterly line of the coast. It was not a bad little road in
its way, but it was sufficient to chasten the exuberance of Sibbie’s
gaiety before we had travelled very far along it; in fact, as a
midshipman observed of Madeira, “The scenery was lovely, but very
steep.” The coast thrust long rocky fingers into the sea, and we drove
across the highly-developed knuckles; that is, if not picturesque, the
most practical description that we can give of this stage of our
journey. To try to convey the blueness of the sea, the variety and
colour of the innumerable bays and creeks, the solemn hugeness of
Lettergash mountain that towered on our right, is futility, and a
weariness of the flesh. Rather let us speak of such things as we are
able, of the dogs whose onslaught from each successive cabin made it
advisable to keep a pile of stones in the trap, and justified the time
spent in practice at the bladder campion; of the London Pride and the
great bell-heather that ably decorated the rocks; and, lastly, the
amenities of these are past. This tract of country had a baneful
practice of tempting us to pass by a deferential retreat into the ditch,
and of then instantly starting in emulous pursuit. On one of these
occasions, after a stern-chase of half a mile, in despair of otherwise
putting an end to it, my cousin and I pulled up at a moderate hill, and
got out and walked, hoping that the cart that had been clattering hard
on our heels would now pass us by. Far otherwise; it also pulled up, and
one of its many occupants called out in tones of genial politeness: “Ah!
don’t be sparin’ him that way, ladies. He’s well able to pull the pair
of ye; nourish him wid the whip!”

Our destination was Leenane (pronounced Leenahn), but we had been
advised to turn off the main road in order to see the Pass of Salruck.
Slowly rounding the flank of Lettergash, we turned our backs to the sea
and struck inland again into the now familiar country of lake and
heather. We had been told that a fishing-lodge by a lake would be a sign
unto us that we had arrived at the by-road to Salruck. Here was the
lake, and here the fishing-lodge; but could this be the by-road? If so,
it certainly was not promising; in fact, before we committed ourselves
to its stony ferocities, my cousin alighted in order to collect
information from the peasantry, a task in which she believed herself to
excel. In this instance the peasantry consisted of an elderly man,
breaking stones by the side of the road, and the perspiring stare with
which he received my cousin’s question was not encouraging. She repeated
it. He stared up at the sun, wrinkled his face till it looked like a
brown paper parcel too tightly tied with string, and replied, “I’d say
it’d be somewhere about a quarther behind three--or thereabouts.”

“No,” said my cousin in her shrillest tones, “I asked you whether that
is the road to Salruck?”

“Oh, it will--the day’ll be fine, thank God,” wiping his forehead with
his sleeve, “but we’ll have rain on it soon--to-morrow, or afther
to-morrow. Ye couldn’t put yer thumb bechuxt the shtarr and the moon
lash’ night, an’ they’d reckon that a bad sign.”

“Stone deaf,” remarked my cousin to me in a
“Just-Heaven-grant-me-patience” sort of voice; then, pointing towards
the hill, “Is--Salruck--over--there?” she slowly screamed.

The echoes squealed the inquiry from rock to rock. Even Sibbie looked
round with a cold surprise; but the stonebreaker had not heard.

“Oh, is it _throut_?” in a tone of complete comprehension; “Divil sich
throuts in all Connemara as what’s in that lake! Ye’d shtand in shnow to
be looking at Capt’in Thompson whippin’ them out of it!”

“Thank you,” said my second cousin very politely; “Good morning!”

We thought it better to chance the by-road than to try conversation. It
was the first really bad road we had come upon in Connemara; but, though
there was only a mile of it, it was enough to throw discredit on the
whole district. Half a mile of walking and of pushing the trap from
behind brought us to the top of the hill, and when there an equally
steep descent was in front of us before we could get down to the level
of the little arrow-head shaped bay that thrust its long glittering
spike between the mountains of Salruck. To hang on to the back of a trap
as a kind of improvised drag is both exhausting and undignified, so
much so that we did not drive quite down to the bottom of the valley,
but paused on a perch of level ground outside the gates of a
shooting-lodge, and asked a woman what the further road was like.

“Indeed, thin, God knows, it’s a conthrairy road,” she said, with a
sympathetic glance at our heated faces, “but whether or no ye can go in
it.”

We thanked her, but made up our minds to throw ourselves on the kindness
of the shooting-lodge, at whose gates we were standing; and the trap and
Sibbie having been hospitably given house room there, we were free to
explore Salruck. We went down through a tunnel composed of about equal
parts of trees and midges, and, following the conthrairy road over a
bridge that crossed a little river, we sat ourselves down by the
sea-shore and looked about us.

It may be said at once that Salruck is a place which would almost
infallibly be described as “spot.” A spot should be wooded, sheltered,
sunk between mountains if possible, and, failing a river, a brook of
respectable size should purl or babble into a piece of

[Illustration: “DOWN THE HILL OF SALRUCK.”]

water large enough to mirror the trees. A church is not an absolute
necessity, but is generally included in the suite, and even down to this
refinement Salruck was thoroughly equipped. Having formulated this
theory to our satisfaction, we addressed ourselves to our duties as
tourists. We climbed the heathery Pass of Salruck, a stiff windy climb;
we viewed from the top of it the lovely harbour of the Killaries, and
mountains and islands innumerable and unpronounceable; we came down
again by a short cut suggested by my cousin, of a nature that
necessitated our advancing in a sitting posture and with inconvenient
rapidity down a species of glacier. The pass happily accomplished, we
knew there was but one thing more to be done--the graveyard. Our
benefactors at the shooting-lodge had told us how to find our way to it,
and without such help we certainly should not have discovered it. It was
hidden in the side of a wooded hill, a grassy cart-track was its sole
approach, a pile of branches in a broken wall was its gate, and, instead
of funereal cypresses, tall ash trees and sycamores stood thickly among
the loose heaps of stones that marked the graves. At a first glance we
might even have thought we had taken a wrong turn and strayed into a
stony wood, but the kneeling figure of a woman told us that we had made
no mistake. She got up as we came along the winding, trodden path among
the trees, and we recognised her as the woman whom we had met on the
hill an hour before.

“This is a quare place, ladies,” she said in a loud, cheerful voice.
“There’s manny a one comes here from all sides of the world to see it.”

We agreed that it was a queer place, and proceeded without delay into a
long conversation. We found out that the high square mound of stones,
about the height and length of a billiard-table, was an altar, in which
only priests were buried; and she pointed out to us under one of its
stones some clay pipes and even a small heap of tobacco, which she told
us had been left there by the last funeral for the use of “anyone that
comes to say a prayer, like meself.” In fact, all the graves were
littered with broken pipes and empty boxes for holding the
tobacco--grocery boxes most of them labelled with glowing announcements
of Colman’s Mustard and Reckitt’s Blue, lying about in all directions,
and almost dreadful in their sordid garish poverty.

“There isn’t one that dies from all round the counthry but they’ll bury
him here,” said our friend, “and with all that’s buried in it there’s
not a worrum, nor the likes of a worrum in it.”

A little below where we were standing a circle of stones, like a
rudimentary wall, stood round some specially sacred spot, and we
stumbled over the ghastly inequalities of the ground towards it. Inside
the stones the ground was bare and hard, like an earthern floor, and in
the centre there was a small, round hole, with the gleam of water in it.

“That’s the Holy Well of Salruck,” said the woman, leaning comfortably
against a great ash tree, one of whose largest limbs had been half torn
from its trunk by lightning, and hung, white and stricken, above the
little enclosure. “There’ll be upwards of thirty sitting round it some
nights prayin’ till morning. It’s reckoned a great cure for sore eyes.”
This with a compassionate glance towards my second cousin’s _pince-nez_.
“But what signifies this well towards the well that’s out on the island
beyond!” went on the country woman, hitching her shoulders into her
cloak, and preparing to lead the way out of the graveyard; “sure the way
it is with that well, if anny woman takes so much as a dhrop out of it
the wather’ll soak away out of it, ever, ever, till it’s dhry as yer
hand! Yes faith, that’s as thrue as that God made little apples. Shure
there was one time the priest’s sisther wouldn’t put as much delay on
herself as while she’d be goin’ over to the other spring that’s in the
island, and she dhrew as much wather from the holy well as’d wet her
tay. I declare to ye, she wasn’t back in the house before the well was
dhry!”

She paused dramatically, and we supplied the necessary notes of
admiration.

“Well, when the priest seen that,” she went on, “he comminced to pray,
and bit nor sup never crossed

[Illustration: THE HOLY WELL, SALRUCK.]

his mouth for a night and a day but prayin’; there wasn’t a saint in
Heaven, big nor little, he didn’t dhraw down on the head o’ the same
well. Afther that thin ag’in, he got his books, and he wint back in the
room, and he was readin’ within there till he was in a paspiration. Oh,
faith! it’s not known what he suffered first and last; but before night
the wather was runnin’ into the well the same as if ye’d be fillin’ it
out of a kettle, and it’s in it ever and always since that time. The
priest put a great pinance on the sisther, I’m told, but, in spite of
all, he was bet by the fairies afther that till he was near killed, they
were that jealous for the way he put the wather back. The curse o’ the
crows on thim midges!” she continued, with sudden fury, striking at the
halo of gnats that surrounded her head as well as ours, “the divil sich
an atin’ ever I got.”

We had been slaughtering them with unavailing frenzy for some time, and
at the end of her story we fled from the graveyard, and made for the
high-road.

The hospitalities of the shooting-lodge did not end with Sibbie. Its
hostess was waiting to meet the two strangers as they toiled,
dishevelled and midge-bitten, to its gate, and with a most confiding
kindness, brought them in and gave them the afternoon tea for which
their souls yearned.




CHAPTER X.


We have never met Julius Cæsar, or the Duke of Wellington, or General
Booth, but we are convinced that not one of the three could boast a
manner as martial or a soul as dauntless as the sporting curate on a
holiday. We came to this conclusion slowly at the Leenane _table
d’hôte_, and there also the companion idea occurred to us that in biting
ferocity and headlong violence of behaviour the extra ginger-ale of
temperance far exceeds the brandy-and-soda. Opposite to us sat three of
them--not brandies-and-sodas--curates; and our glasses were filled with
two of them--not curates--bottles of ginger-ale; and so the manners and
customs of both classes were, as it were, forced upon us conjointly. If
our reflections appear unreliable we are not prepared to defend them;
they were formed through the blinding mist of tears that followed each
fiery sip of the ginger-ale.

The curates, as we have said, were three in number; and comprised three
of the leading types of their class--the dark and heavily moustached,
the red-whiskered and pasty, the clean-shaven and athletic. The two
former sat together and roystered on a pint of claret, which they warmed
in the palms of their hands, and smacked their lips over with a reckless
jollity and dark allusions to swashbuckling days at Cambridge. The third
sat apart from his cloth, among a group of Oxford undergraduates, with
whom he interchanged reminiscences, and from the elevation of his three
terms seniority regaled them with tales of hair-breadth escapes from
proctors and bulldogs, and, in especial, of the enormities of one
Greene, of Pembroke, in connection with a breakfast given by a man who
had been sent “a big cake from home.” The story was long, and profusely
decked with terms of the most esoteric undergraduate slang, but we
gathered that Greene, having become what the curate leniently termed “a
little on,” had cast the still uncut cake out of the window at a
policeman, upon the spike of whose helmet it became impaled. We have
since heard with real regret that the Oxford police do not wear spikes
on their helmets; but we adhere to the main facts of the story, and when
we tell it ourselves we call the policeman a volunteer. The robust voice
of the narrator clove its way into the loud current of the fishing talk,
the table paused over its gooseberry pie and custard to laugh, and even
the Cambridge curates were compelled to a compassionate smile. They were
a good deal older than any of the Oxford clan, and it seemed to us that
the superior modernity and flavour of the Oxford stories had a
depressing effect upon them. They finished their claret
unostentatiously, and talked to each other in lowered tones about pocket
cameras and safety bicycles.

It was strange to feel at this hotel--as, indeed, at all the others we
stayed at--that we were almost the only representative of our country,
and, casting our minds back through the maze of English faces and the
Babel of English voices that had been the accompaniment of our meals for
the last fortnight, two painful conclusions were forced on us--first,
that the Irish people have no money to tour with; second, that it was
Saxon influence and support alone that evoluted the Connemara hotels
from a primitive feather-bed and chicken status alluded to in an earlier
article. Not, indeed, that chickens are things of the past. Daily
through Connemara rises the cry of myriad hens, bereft of their infant
broods, and in every hotel larder “wretches hang that fishermen may
dine.” Chickens and small brown mutton, mutton and small brown
chickens--these, with salmon and trout of a curdy freshness that London
wats not of, were the _leit-motif_ of every hotel _table d’hôte_, and so
uniformly excellent were they that we asked for nothing more.

The whole of the next day was wet, utterly and solidly wet. The great
mountains of Mayo on the other side of the bay looked like elephants
swathed in white muslin, and the sea that came lashing up the embankment
in front of the hotel was thick and muddy, and altogether ugly to look
at. We sat dismally in the ladies’ drawing-room, with one resentful eye
on the rain, and the other fixed in still deeper resentment on the
wholly intolerable man who had taken up his position in front of the
fire with a book the night before, and had, apparently, never stirred
since. From the smoking-room on the other side of the hall came drearily
at intervals the twanglings of a banjo; my second cousin read a hotel
copy of “The Pilgrim’s Progress”; the general misery was complete, and I
found myself almost mechanically working a heavy shower into a sketch
that had been made on a fine day.

Towards evening we began to feel homicidal and dangerous, and putting on
our mackintoshes started for a walk with a determination that found a
savage delight in getting its feet wet. No incident marked that walk,
unless the varying depths of puddles and the strenuous clinging to an
umbrella are incidents, but for all that we returned tranquillised and
self-satisfied, and were further soothed by a cloudy vision caught,
through the French window of the smoking-room, of blazers and white
flannelled legs bestowed about the room in various attitudes of supine
discontent. Before we sighted the window we had heard the melancholy
metallic hiccupping of the banjo, but just as we passed by it ceased,
and a furtive glance revealed the athletic curate, prone on a sofa, with
his banjo propped upon the brilliant striped scarf that intervened
between the clerical black serge coat and the uncanonical flannels.

    “Now the hand trails upon the viol string
     That sobs, and the brown faces cease to sing,
     Sad with the whole of pleasure. Whither stray
     Their eyes now, from whose lips the slim pipes creep
     And leave them pouting----”

misquoted my cousin, who has a slipshod acquaintance with Rossetti.

“I should think they strayed towards the Oughterard umbrella,” I
suggested, as we furled the tent of evil-smelling gingham in the hall.
“Since the stuff has come away from two of the spikes it has got the
dissipated charwoman look that is so attractive.”

When we went to bed that night the rain was still dropping heavily from
the eave-shoots, and, in the depressingly early waking that follows an
early going to bed, it was the first sound that I recognised. The hotel
was silent when we came down, and the coffee-room redolent of vanished
breakfasts; the fishermen had evidently betaken themselves to their
trade in an access of despair. The waiter was reserved on the subject of
the weather; he neither blessed nor cursed, but hoped, with offensive
cheerfulness, that it would improve, and we knew in our hearts that he
was certain it would not. We watched him enviously as he came in and out
with plates, and arranged long battalions of forks on a side table. What
was the weather to him, with his house-shoes and evening clothes and
absolute certainty of what he had to do next from now till bed-time? We
would thankfully have gone into the kitchen and proffered our services
to the cook, or even to the boots, but instead of that we had to wander
to the abhorred ladies’ drawing-room, and there to mourn the fallacy of
the statement that Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.

It did clear up in the afternoon, grudgingly and gloomily, but still
conscientiously, and we ordered out Sibbie, with a view to seeing how
much of the country was left above water. We drove along the Westport
road till we had passed the last long bend of the Killaries, and looking
across a wooded valley saw the rush of water and jumble of foam above
the mouth of the Erriff river that marked the chosen resort of the
fishermen. We got a man to hold Sibbie for a few minutes while we went
down and stood on the slender fishing bridge, and looked at a solitary
angler throwing his fly with the usual scientific grace, and with the
usual total absence of result, till we felt it would be kinder to go
away. The midges were not perhaps as giant or as insatiable as the
Salruck variety, but we heard that night at dinner that they had been
enough to drive the whole body of the hotel fishermen back from the
river in the morning; and as we looked down the double row of faces, all
apparently in the first stage of convalescence after small-pox, we
gathered some idea of what their sufferings must have been. One youth,
whose midge-bites had reached the point at which they might almost be
termed confluent, told us that he had lain down on the ground in a kind
of frenzy and covered himself with his mackintosh, and that the midges
had crawled in through the buttonholes and devoured him as he lay.

We continued our drive towards Westport, with the river on one side, and
on the other great green mountains speckled with thousands of sheep; the
road was steep, but we persevered up its long shining grey slope,
without any definite intention except that of seeing what was on the
other side. We found out rather sooner than we had expected. There
appeared suddenly over the top of the hill, where the road bent its back
against the sky, the capering figures of three young horses, and at
that sight we turned Sibbie sharp round and fled down the hill. The
young horses came galloping down after us with manes and tails flying,
and visions of another runaway, with the final trampling of our fallen
bodies by our pursuers, made us “nourish” Sibbie with the whip in a way
that was scarcely necessary. She extended her long legs at a gallop; the
trap swung from side to side; it seemed as if the horses gained nothing
on us; and as the trees of Astleagh Lodge came nearer and nearer there
flashed upon us in an instant the spectacle of a close finish at the
hotel door, and the thought of the godsend that it would be to the
smoking-room. But the smoking-room was fated not to behold it. As
suddenly as the pursuit had begun so did it end. The three colts whirled
up a bohireen towards a farmhouse, and we then became aware of a small
girl running after them down the road with a stick in her hand. It was
only the Connemara version of Mary calling the cattle home, written in
rather faster time than is usual, and with a running accompaniment in
two flats, supplied by ourselves. Sibbie was not thoroughly reassured
even when we reached the hotel, and we drove past it along the road
seaward till we reached a point from which we saw the whole of the long
exquisite fiord of the Killaries, and beyond the furthest of its dark,
over-lapping points the thin silver line of the open sea.

“Eight o’clock breakfast, please, and call us sharp at seven,” were our
last words on our last night at Leenane. The final day of our tour had
come, and two things remained imperatively for us to do. We had to see
Delphi, and we had to accomplish the twenty Irish miles that lay between
Sibbie and her home in Oughterard. Energy and an early start were
necessary, and eight o’clock struck as we walked into the
breakfast-room, expecting to find our twin breakfast-cups and plates
stationed in lonely fellowship at one end of a long desert of
tablecloth. What we did find was a gobbling, haranguing crowd of
fishermen, full of a daily, accustomed energy that made ours seem a very
forced and exotic growth. The waiter, who at 9.30 yesterday morning had
been servilely attentive, now regarded us with a coldly distraught eye.
Clearly he was of the opinion of the indignant housemaid who declared
that “there never was a rale lady that was out of her bed before nine in
the morning.” Breakfast after breakfast came in, but not for us. We saw
with anguish the athletic curate make a clean sweep of the gooseberry
jam, and the last of the hot cakes had disappeared before our coffee and
chops were vouchsafed to us. Consequently it was a good deal later than
we wanted it to be when we went down to the pier and got into the boat
that was to take us across to Delphi.

The weather was grey and rough, and we asked the boatmen their opinion
of it as we crept along in the shelter of the western shore of the bay,
as close as possible to the seaweedy points of rock, the chosen
playgrounds of the seals.

“There’s not much wind, but what there is is very high,” said the
stroke. “Faith, it’s hardly we’ll get

[Illustration: “EIGHT O’CLOCK BREAKFAST, PLEASE, AND CALL US SHARP AT
SEVEN.”]

over to Delphi with the surges that’ll be in it when we’ll be out in the
big wather.”

“Ah, _na boclish_!” struck in the bow, who, judging by his glowing
complexion, was of the sanguine temperament. “I’d say it’ll turn up a
grand day yet. What signifies the surges that’ll be in it?”

We began to think it signified a good deal when, after a pull of nearly
two miles, we forsook the shore, and, turning out into the open water,
met the full and allied strength of the wind and tide. The “surges” were
quite as large as any that we want to see, and the progress of the boat
was like a succession of knight’s moves at chess, two strokes towards
the Delphi shore, and one stroke to bring her head to the advancing
“surge.” Naturally, we took a long time to get across, and when we got
there we had still a walk of two miles before us; only that it really
did “turn up a grand day” our hearts would have failed us, as we felt
the hours slipping from us, and remembered the journey that was before
us in the afternoon.

Delphi was called so by some genius who saw in its lake and overhanging
mountains a resemblance to the home of the oracle. The boatmen were not
able to remember when the little lake had been converted and rebaptized,
or who the missionary had been, but rumour pointed to a Bishop and a
Dean of the Irish Church, who, within the recollection of old
inhabitants, had been the first to impart civilisation to the Killaries;
who had built the charming fishing-lodge at the head of the lake, and
had fished its waters, attired in poke bonnets and bottle-green veils.
We had not been more than five minutes there before we understood the
_rationale_ of the bonnets and veils, and wished that we had been
similarly protected from the blood-thirsty midges, that made our
wanderings by the lake and our lunch by the river a time of torture.

But the stings of the midges have died away, and the recollection of the
glassy curve of the river, the mirrored wild flowers at its brim, the
classical grove of pines and slender white birches, and the luminous
purple reflection of the mountain lying deep in the stream beneath them
are the things that come into our minds when we think of our last day in
Connemara. As a companion picture, belonging, too, to that day, I seem
still to see my cousin’s sailor hat flying from her head like a
rocketing pheasant, in a gust that caught us as we crossed the Killaries
on our return journey. It crested the “surges” gallantly for a few
minutes, but finally filled and sank with all hands, that is to say, two
most cherished hatpins, before we could reach it.

That moment was the beginning of the end. One of the most important
members of the expedition had left it, and the general dissolution was
at hand. The regret with which we paid our hotel bill was not wholly
mercenary, but was blended with the finer pathos of farewell. The cup of
bovril of which we partook when the first five miles of our journey had
been accomplished was “strong as first love, and wild with all regret”;
it was the last of a staunch and long-enduring little pot, and economy
required that no scraping of it should remain at the final unpacking of
the hamper. Gingerbread biscuits that had been hoarded like gold pieces
were flung _en masse_ to a passing tramp before even the preliminary
blessing had flowed from her lips; and the last of the seedcake was
forced into Sibbie’s reluctant mouth. The frugalities of a fortnight
were dissipated in one hour of joyless, obligatory debauch.

It was eight o’clock that evening when, after five or six hours’
driving, we came down the long slope of the moor outside Oughterard. The
mountains of Connemara were all behind us, in the pale distant guise in
which we had first known them, and the only things that remained to us
of our wanderings in their valleys were the governess-cart and the
tired, but still dauntless, Sibbie. Even these would not be ours much
longer; the door of Murphy’s hotel would soon witness our final
separation, and to-morrow we should be, like any other tourists,
swinging into Galway on the mail-car.

“Well, at all events,” said my cousin, as we said these things to each
other, “we have converted Sibbie.

[Illustration: “THE REGRET WITH WHICH WE PAID OUR HOTEL BILL WAS NOT
WHOLLY MERCENARY, BUT WAS BLENDED WITH THE FINER PATHOS OF FAREWELL.”]

I have noticed several little things about her lately that make me sure
she regards us with a stern affection. I daresay,” she went on, “that
she will detest going back to her old life and surroundings.”

My second cousin looked pensively at Sibbie as she said this, and
whipped up through the streets of Oughterard with a kind of melancholy
flourish. Nothing was further from her expectations or from mine than
the eel-like dive which, just as the sympathetic reflection was uttered,
Sibbie made into the archway leading to Mr. Johnny Flanigan’s stable;
and we have ever since regretted that, owing to our both having fallen
on to the floor of the governess-cart, Mr. Flanigan could not have
credited the brilliant curve with which we entered his yard to our
coachmanship. In fact, what he said was:

“Well, now, I’m afther waiting these two hours out in the sthreet the
way I’d be before her to ketch her when she’d do that, and, may the
divil admire me, but she picked the minnit I was back in the house for
a coal to light me pipe, and she have me bet afther all. But ye needn’t
say a word, when she hasn’t the two o’ ye desthroyed!”


FINIS.

       *       *       *       *       *

_JANUARY, 1893._


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            *       *       *       *       *

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_London: 13, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, S.W._

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_W. O’CONNOR MORRIS._

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     Royal 8vo. 21s.

            *       *       *       *       *

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_JOHN AUGUSTUS O’SHEA._

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_COL. F. A. WHINYATES, late R.H.A., formerly commanding the Battery._

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     late “C” Troop, Royal Horse Artillery. With succession of Officers
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            *       *       *       *       *

     =The Young Soldier in India=: His Life and Prospects. By H. S. Crown
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Naval.


_HARRY WILLIAMS, R.N. (Chief Inspector of Machinery)._

Dedicated, by permission, to Admiral H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh.

     =The Steam Navy of England=: Past, Present, and Future. Contents:
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     III.--Naval Engineering; Part IV.--Miscellaneous, Summary,
     Conclusion. Dedicated, by permission, to H.R.H. the Duke of
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_London: 13, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, S.W._


_CAPTAIN H. W. CLARKE._

     =The Sextant.= Small 4to. 2s.


_REAR-ADMIRAL P. H. COLOMB._

     =Naval Warfare=, its Ruling Principles and Practice Historically
     Treated. Royal 8vo. 21s.


_REAR-ADMIRAL H. F. W. INGRAM._

     =Hearts of Oak.= 4to. Illustrated. 15s.


_R. O’BYRNE._

     =James’ Naval History.= Epitomised by ROBERT O’BYRNE, F.R.G.S., &c.
     Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d.


_REV. G. SMALL, Interpreter to the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics._

     =A Dictionary of Naval Terms, English and Hindustani.= For the use of
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Sport.


_G. P. SANDERSON, Officer in Charge of the Government Elephant Keddahs._

     =Thirteen Years among the Wild Beasts of India=; their Haunts and
     Habits, from Personal Observation. With an account of the Modes of
     Capturing and Taming Wild Elephants. With 21 full-page
     Illustrations and 3 Maps. Fourth Edition. Fcap. 4to. 12s.


_LIEUT. G. J. YOUNGHUSBAND, Queen’s Own Corps of Guides._

     =Polo in India.= Crown 8vo. 2s.


_COLONEL PARKER GILLMORE_ (“_Ubique_”).

     =Encounters with Wild Beasts.= By COLONEL PARKER GILLMORE. Third
     Edition. Crown 8vo. Illustrated. 3s. 6d.

     “Mr. Gillmore has well earned his _nom de plume_ of ‘Ubique.’ ...
     Contains twenty-one chapters on the varieties of game to be found
     in the northern states of America, and they form a useful and
     interesting guide to intending visitors.”--_Land and Water._


_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._

     =Prairie and Forest=: A Guide to the Field Sports of North America.
     Second Edition. Crown 8vo. Illustrated. 3s. 6d.


_London: 13, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, S.W._




Biography.


_ALBERT ALBERG._

     =The Floral King=; a Life of Linnæus. Crown 8vo. With Portraits and
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     =The Life and Teachings of Mohammed=; or, the Spirit of Islam. Demy
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_MONSEIGNEUR BESSON._

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     =Biographies of Great Composers=:--

     =Handel.= By J. CUTHBERT HADDEN. With Portrait. Fcap. 1s. 6d.

     =Mendelssohn.= By J. CUTHBERT HADDEN. With Portrait. Fcap. 1s. 6d.


_CAPTAIN MONTAGU BURROWS, R.N., Retired List, Chichele Professor of
Modern History in the University of Oxford._

     =Life of Edward Lord Hawke=, Admiral of the Fleet, Vice-Admiral of
     Great Britain, and First Lord of the Admiralty from 1766 to 1771.
     Demy 8vo. 21s.


_MRS. E. F. CHAPMAN._

     =Sketches of some Distinguished Indian Women.= Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d.


_ALEXANDRE DUMAS._

     =Memoirs of Alexandre Dumas.= (Père.) Being Extracts from the First
     Five Volumes of Mes Memoires. Selected and Translated by A. F.
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_HENRY MARION DURAND, C.S.I., Bengal Civil Service, Barrister-at-Law._

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_London: 13, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, S.W._


     =EMINENT WOMEN SERIES.= Edited by JOHN H. INGRAM. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
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VOLUMES ALREADY ISSUED.

=George Eliot.=                    By MATHILDE BLIND.
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=Mrs. Siddons.=                     “ MRS. A. KENNARD.
=Madame de Staël.=                  “ BELLA DUFFY.
=Hannah More.=                      “ CHARLOTTE M. YONGE.
=Elizabeth Barrett Browning.=       “ JOHN H. INGRAM.
=Jane Austen.=                      “ MRS. CHARLES MALDEN.
=Mary Shelley.=                     “ MRS. ROSETTI.


_SIR J. W. KAYE._

     =Lives of Indian Officers.= 2 vols. Crown 8vo. 6s. each,


_COL. W. F. B. LAURIE._

     =Sketches of some Distinguished Anglo-Indians.= First and Second
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_LADY LOGIN._

     =Login, Sir John and Duleep Singh.= With Introduction by COLONEL G.
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_London: 13, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, S.W._

=STATESMEN SERIES.= Edited by LLOYD C. SANDERS.

A collection of Brief Biographical Studies of Great Men who have
influenced the Political History of the World. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. each.

=Lord Beaconsfield.= By T. E. KEBBEL.
=Viscount Palmerston.= By L. C. SANDERS.
=Daniel O’Connell.= By J. A. HAMILTON.
=Prince Metternich.= By COL. G. B. MALLESON, C.S.I
=Sir Robert Peel.= By F. C. MONTAGUE.
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=Henry Grattan.= By ROBERT DUNLOP.
=Marquis Wellesley, K.G.= By COLONEL G. B. MALLESON, C.S.I.
=Viscount Bolingbroke.= By ARTHUR HASSALL, M.A.
=Lord Derby.= By T. E. KEBBEL.
=Marquis of Dalhousie.= By CAPT. L. J. TROTTER.
=Charles James Fox.= By H. O. WAKEMAN.
=Leon Gambetta.= By FRANK T. MARZIALS.


_CHARLES RATHBONE LOW._

     =Major-General Sir Frederick S. Roberts, Bart., V.C., G.C.B.,
     C.I.E., R.A.=: A Memoir. With Portrait. Demy 8vo. 18s.


_MISS K. O’MEARA._

     =Life of Thomas Grant, First Bishop of Southwark.= Third Edition.
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_MAJOR THOMAS SKINNER, C.M.G._

     =Fifty Years in Ceylon.= An Autobiography. Edited by his Daughter.
     Demy 8vo, with Portrait. 15s.


_CAPTAIN LIONEL JAMES TROTTER, late Beng. Fusiliers._

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Books of Reference.


     =Book of Dignities=, containing lists of the Official Personages of
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     Periods to the Present Time, together with the Sovereigns and
     Rulers of the World from the Foundation of their respective States;
     the Orders of Knighthood of the United Kingdom and India, and
     numerous other lists. Founded on Beatson’s “Political Index”
     (1806). Remodelled and brought down to 1851 by the late JOSEPH
     HAYDN. Continued to the Present Time, with numerous Additional
     Lists, and an Index to the entire Work, by HORACE OCKERBY,
     Solicitor of the Supreme Court. Demy 8vo. £1 11s. 6d.

     “It is probably the most complete official directory in existence,
     containing about 1,300 different lists.”--_Times._

     “The value of such a book can hardly be over-rated.”--_Saturday
     Review._

=Cooper’s Hill Royal Indian Engineering College=, Calendar of. Published
(by Authority) in January each year. Demy 8vo. 5s.

=London in 1893.= Its Suburbs and Environs. Illustrated with 20 Bird’s Eye
Views of the Principal Streets, and Maps. Ninth year of publication.
Revised and Enlarged. Crown 8vo. 2s.

=India List, the--Civil and Military.= Issued half-yearly by permission of
the Secretary of State for India in Council. Demy 8vo. Cloth, 10s. 6d.;
bound, 12s.

=A Gazetteer of the Territories under the Government of the Viceroy of
India.= Revised and Edited by SIR ROPER LETHBRIDGE, C.I.E., formerly
Press Commissioner in India, &c., and ARTHUR N. WOLLASTON, C.I.E., of
H.M.’s Indian (Home) Civil Service, Translator of the “Anvár-i-Sahaili.”
Demy 8vo. 28s.

=The Royal Kalendar for 1893.= AND COURT AND CITY REGISTER FOR ENGLAND,
SCOTLAND, IRELAND, AND THE COLONIES. Strongly bound, with Index. 5s.


_London: 13, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, S.W._




Fiction.


_IRVING MONTAGU_ (_late Special War Correspondent “Illustrated London
News”_).

     =Absolutely True.= A Novel. By IRVING MONTAGU, late Special War
     Correspondent “Illustrated London News.” With numerous
     Illustrations by the Author. Crown 8vo. 6s.


_JULIAN HAWTHORNE._

     =An American Monte Cristo.= A Romance. By JULIAN HAWTHORNE. 2 vols.
     Crown 8vo. 21s. Cheaper Edition, in one volume, price 6s., in the
     press.


_FERGUS HUME._

     =The Harlequin Opal.= A Romance. By FERGUS HUME, Author of “The
     Island of Fantasy.” Crown 8vo. 3 vols. 31s. 6d.


_SURGEON-MAJOR H. M. GREENHOW._

Crown 8vo, 6s.

=The Bow of Fate.= A Story of Indian Life.


_MAY BROTHERHOOD._

Crown 8vo, 6s.

=Caverton Manor; or, Foreshadowed.=


_LOUISA ALCOTT._

=Little Women.= 200 Illustrations. 4to. 18s.


_LEWIS ARMYTAGE._

=The Blue Mountains.= Fairy Tales. Crown 8vo. 5s.


_GEOFFREY DRAGE._

     =Cyril, a Romantic Novel.= Fifth Edition. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.


_REV. G. R. GLEIG._

     =With the Harrises Seventy Years Ago.= Crown 8vo. Boards. 2s.


_ARCHER P. CROUCH, Author of “On a Surf-Bound Coast.”_

2 vols., 21s.

     =Captain Enderis, First West African Regiment.= A Novel.


_London: 13, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, S.W._




History.


_PERCY M. THORNTON._

     =Foreign Secretaries of the Nineteenth Century.= Lord Grenville, Lord
     Hawkesbury, Lord Harrowby, Lord Mulgrave, C. J. Fox, Lord Howick,
     George Canning, Lord Bathurst, Lord Wellesley (together with
     estimate of his Indian Rule by COL. G. B. MALLESON, C.S.I.), Lord
     Castlereagh, Lord Dudley, Lord Aberdeen, and Lord Palmerston. With
     10 Portraits and a View showing interior of the old House of Lords.
     Second Edition. 2 vols. Demy 8vo. 32s. 6d.

     Vol. III. Second Edition. With Portraits. Demy 8vo. 18s.


=Harrow School and its Surroundings.= Maps and Plates. Demy 8vo. 15s.




Science.


_R. BRAITHWAITE, M.D., F.L.S., &c._

     =The Sphagnaceæ=, or Peat Mosses of Europe and North America.
     Illustrated with 29 Plates, coloured by hand. Imp. 8vo. 25s.


_PROFESSOR BRANDE, D.C.L., F.R.S., &c., and PROFESSOR A. S. TAYLOR,
M.D., F.R.S., &c._

     =A Manual of Chemistry.= Fcap. 8vo. 900 pages. 12s. 6d.


_DR. BRANDIS, Inspector-General of Forests to the Government of India._

     =The Forest Flora of North-Western and Central India.= Text Demy 8vo,
     and Plates Royal 4to. £2 18s.


_B. CARRINGTON, M.D., F.R.S._

     =British Hepaticæ.= Containing Descriptions and Figures of the Native
     Species of Jungermannia, Marchantia, and Anthoceros. Imp. 8vo,
     sewed, Parts 1 to 4, each 2s. 6d. plain; 3s. 6d. coloured.


_M. C. COOKE, M.A., LL.D._

     =The British Fungi=: A Plain and Easy Account of. With Coloured
     Plates of 40 Species. Fifth Edition, Revised. Crown 8vo. 6s.

     =British Hepaticæ.= Sewed, 8d.


_London: 13, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, S.W._

     =Rust, Smut, Mildew, and Mould.= An Introduction to the Study of
     Microscopic Fungi. Illustrated with 269 Coloured Figures by J. E.
     Sowerby. Fourth Edition, with Appendix of New Species. Crown 8vo,
     6s.

     =A Manual of Structural Botany.= Revised Edition, with New Chemical
     Notation. Illustrated with 200 Woodcuts. Twenty-fifth Thousand.
     32mo. 1s.

     =A Manual of Botanic Terms.= New Edition, greatly Enlarged.
     Illustrated with over 300 Woodcuts. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d.


_M. C. COOKE, M.A., A.L.S., et L. QUELET, M.D., O.A., Inst. et Sorb.
Laur._

     =Clavis Synoptica Hymenomycetum Europæorum.= Fcap. 8vo. 7s. 6d.


_BARON CUVIER._

     =The Animal Kingdom.= With considerable Additions by W. B. CARPENTER,
     M.D., F.R.S., and J. O. WESTWOOD, F.L.S. New Edition, Illustrated
     with 500 Engravings on Wood and 36 Coloured Plates. Imp. 8vo. 21s.


_THOMAS DAVIES._

     =The Preparation and Mounting of Microscopic Objects.= New Edition,
     greatly enlarged and brought up to the Present Time by JOHN
     MATTHEWS, M.D., F.R.M.S., Vice-President of the Quekett
     Microscopical Club. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d.


_GEORGE E. DAVIS, F.R.M.S., F.C.S., F.I.C., &c._

     =Practical Microscopy.= Illustrated with 257 Woodcuts and a Coloured
     Frontispiece. Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d.


_COL. HEBER DRURY, late Madras Staff Corps._

     =The Useful Plants of India=, with Notices of their chief value in
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_London: 13, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, S.W._


_SIR JOHN F. W. HERSCHEL, Bart., K.H., &c., Member of the Institute of
France, &c._

     =Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects.= Crown 8vo. 6s.


_SIR W. J. HOOKER, F.R.S., and J. G. BAKER, F.L.S._

     =Synopsis Filicum=; or, a Synopsis of all Known Ferns, including the
     Osmundaceæ, Schizæaceæ, Marratisceæ, and Ophioglossaceæ (chiefly
     derived from the Kew Herbarium) accompanied by Figures representing
     the essential Characters of each genus. Second Edition brought up
     to the present time. Coloured Plates. Demy 8vo. £1 8s.


_W. SAVILLE-KENT, F.L.S., F.Z.S., F.R.M.S., formerly Assistant in the
Nat. Hist. Department of the British Museum._

     =A Manual of the Infusoria.= Including a Description of the
     Flagellate, Ciliate, and Tentaculiferous Protozoa, British and
     Foreign, and an Account of the Organisation and Affinities of the
     Sponges. With numerous Illustrations. 3 vols. Super Royal 8vo. £4
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_S. KURZ._

     =Forest Flora of British Burma.= 2 vols. 8vo. £1 10s.


_MRS. LANKESTER._

     =British Ferns=: Their Classification, Arrangement of Genera,
     Structures and Functions, Directions for Out-door and In-door
     Cultivation, &c. Illustrated with Coloured Figures of all the
     Species. New and Enlarged Edition. Cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d.

     =Wild Flowers Worth Notice=: A Selection of some of our Native Plants
     which are most attractive for their Beauty, Uses, or Associations.
     With 108 Coloured Figures by J. E. SOWERBY. New Edition. Crown 8vo.
     5s.


_London: 13, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, S.W._


_E. LANKESTER, M.D., F.R.S., F.L.S._

     =Our Food.= Illustrated. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 4s.

     =Half-Hours with the Microscope.= With 250 Illustrations. Seventeenth
     Thousand, enlarged. Fcap. 8vo, plain, 2s. 6d.; coloured, 4s.

     =Practical Physiology=: A School Manual of Health. Numerous Woodcuts.
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     =The Uses of Animals= in Relation to the Industry of Man.
     Illustrated. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 4s.

     =How to Choose a Microscope.= By a Demonstrator. With 80
     Illustrations. Demy 8vo. 1s.


_JOHANN NAVE._

     =The Collector’s Handy-Book of Algæ, Diatoms, Desmids, Fungi,
     Lichens, Mosses, &c.= Translated and Edited by the Rev. W. W.
     SPICER, M.A. Illustrated with 114 Woodcuts. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d.

            *       *       *       *       *

     =Notes on Collecting and Preserving Natural History Objects.= Edited
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_RICHARD A. PROCTOR, B.A., F.R.A.S._

     =Half-Hours with the Stars.= Nineteenth Thousand. Demy 4to. 3s. 6d.

     =Half-Hours with the Telescope.= Illustrated. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d.

     =Other Suns than Ours.= A Series of Essays on Suns, Old, Young, and
     Dead, Science Gleanings, &c. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s.

     =The Southern Skies.= A Plain and Easy Guide to the Constellations of
     the Southern Hemisphere, &c. True for every year. 4to, with 12
     Maps. 5s.


_MARIAN S. RIDLEY._

     =A Pocket Guide to British Ferns.= Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d.


_R. RIMMER, F.L.S._

     =The Land and Fresh Water Shells of the British Isles.= Illustrated
     with Photographs and 3 Lithographs, containing figures of all the
     principal Species. Crown 8vo. 10s. 6d.


_London: 13, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, S.W._


_J. SMITH, A.L.S._

     =Ferns: British and Foreign.= Fourth Edition, revised and greatly
     enlarged, with New Figures, &c. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d.


_WORTHINGTON SMITH, F.L.S._

     =Mushrooms and Toadstools=: How to distinguish easily the Difference
     between Edible and Poisonous Fungi. Two Large Sheets, containing
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_J. E. TAYLOR, F.L.S., F.G.S., &c._

     =The Aquarium=: Its Inhabitants, Structure, and Management. With 238
     Woodcuts. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.

     =Flowers=: Their Origin, Shapes, Perfumes, and Colours. Illustrated
     with 32 Coloured Figures by Sowerby, and 161 Woodcuts. Second
     Edition. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d.

     =Nature’s Bye-paths=: A Series of Recreative Papers in Natural
     History. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d.

     =Half-Hours at the Seaside.= Illustrated with 250 Woodcuts. Fourth
     Edition. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d.

     =Half-Hours in the Green Lanes.= Illustrated with 300 Woodcuts. Fifth
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_G. H. KINAHAN._

     =A Handy Book of Rock Names.= Fcap. 8vo, cloth. 4s.


_The Late EDWARD NEWMAN, F.Z.S._

     =British Butterflies and Moths.= With over 800 Illustrations. Super
     Royal 8vo. Cloth gilt. 25s.

     The above Work may also be had in Two Volumes, sold separately.
     Vol. I, Butterflies, 7s. 6d.; Vol. II., Moths, 20s.


_MARY A. PRATTEN._

     =My Hundred Swiss Flowers.= With a Short Account of Swiss Ferns. With
     60 Illustrations. Crown 8vo, 12s. 6d.; coloured, 25s.


_London: 13, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, S.W._




Travel.


_CAPTAIN JAMES ABBOTT._

     =Narrative of a Journey from Herat to Khiva, Moscow, and St.
     Petersburg= during the late Russian Invasion of Khiva. With Map and
     Portrait. 2 vols. Demy 8vo. 24s.


_W. F. AINSWORTH, M.D._

     THE KARUN RIVER. An opening to British Commerce. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d.


_S. BARING-GOULD, M.A., Author of “Mehulah,” &c._

     =In Troubadour Land.= A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc. Medium 8vo.
     With Illustrations by J. E. Rogers. 12s. 6d.


_F. O. BUCKLAND._

     =Health Springs of Germany and Austria.= Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d.


_GEORGE DOBSON._

     =Russia’s Railway Advance into Central Asia.= Notes of a Journey from
     St. Petersburg to Samarkand. Crown 8vo. Illustrated. 7s. 6d.

     =Farthest East and South and West.= By an Anglo-Indian Globe Trotter.
     Illustrated. Demy 8vo. 15s.


_HERBERT JUNIUS HARDWICKE, M.D., &c._

     =Health Resorts & Spas=; or Climatic and Hygienic Treatment of
     Disease. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d.


_MAJOR S. LEIGH HUNT, Madras Army, and ALEX. S. KENNY, M.R.C.S.E.,
A.K.C., Senior Demonstrator of Anatomy at Kings College, London._

     =On Duty under a Tropical Sun.= Being some Practical Suggestions for
     the Maintenance of Health and Bodily Comfort, and the Treatment of
     Simple Diseases; with remarks on Clothing and Equipment. Second
     Edition. Crown 8vo. 4s.


_London: 13, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, S.W._

     =Tropical Trials.= A Handbook for Women in the Tropics. Crown 8vo.
     7s. 6d.


_H. C. IRWIN, B.A., Oxon, Bengal Civil Service._

     =The Garden of India=; or, Chapters on Oudh History and Affairs. Demy
     8vo. 12s.


_E. F. KNIGHT, Author of “The Cruise of the Falcon.”_

     =The Falcon in the Baltic=: A Voyage from London to Copenhagen in a
     Three-Tonner. With 10 full-page Illustrations. New Edition. Crown
     8vo. 3s. 6d.


_STANLEY LANE-POOLE, Laureat de l’Institut de France._

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[READY EARLY IN 1893.]

_W. SAVILLE-KENT, F.L.S., F.Z.S., F.I.Inst., &c._

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=HISTORY OF INDIA=,

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=THE INDIAN EMPIRE:

ITS PEOPLE, HISTORY, AND PRODUCTS.=

BY

SIR W. W. HUNTER, K.C.S.I., C.I.E., LL.D.

The Secretary of State for India has had under his consideration the
issue of a complete account of our Indian possessions brought down to
the census of 1891. The two standard works on the subject are Sir
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leading results of the great statistical survey of India, while “The
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works are now out of date, as their administrative, commercial, and
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Indian Empire” has for some time been also out of print. The Secretary
of State has determined to postpone the revision of the larger work
until the next Indian census of 1901, when it will form a great and
permanent account of the condition and progress of India at the close of
the 19th century. Meanwhile he has authorised the issue of a thoroughly
revised edition of “The Indian Empire,” and placed the necessary
materials and assistance at Sir William Hunter’s disposal, to enable him
to carry out the work. The book, which has for some time been under
preparation, will form a complete but compact account of India, its
peoples, history, and products, the revision being based on the
administration reports of the 12 provinces of British India and the
feudatory States for 1891. New and valuable matter has been incorporated
in each division of the work, and important sections have been added.
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reconstructed on the returns of the Indian census of 1891, and the whole
of the administrative, commercial, and economic chapters have been
brought up to the same date. The historical section, occupying several
hundred pages, has been revised, and in part re-written, by the light of
recent researches into Hindo and Mahomedan history, and from the new
materials afforded by the official publication of the Indian records,
under the able editorship of Mr. Forrest and others. The publication of
the work, which will make a large volume of about 800 pages, has been
entrusted to Messrs. W. H. Allen & Co., who hope to be able to issue it
in the Spring of 1893.


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