The Letters of "Norah" on Her Tour Through Ireland Part 22

He gave some instances of boycotting. One was that travelling in the neighboring county of Longford he had occasion to get a smith to look at his horse's shoes, and was asked for his Land League ticket. On saying he had none, the smith refused to attend to the horse's shoes. Roscommon had boycotted a Longford man who had taken willow rods to sell because he had not a Land League ticket, and a Longford smith in reprisal would not set the shoe on the horse of a Roscommon man unless he had a Land League ticket. When the gentleman explained that he had bought five hundred of those same rods from that same man the smith attended to the horse, and the boycotting was over.

I heard of other cases of boycotting. It is not by any means a new device, although it has come so prominently before the public lately.

From Roscommon I crossed country past Clara and Tullamore, across King's county into Portarlington on the borders of Queen's county.

Portarlington is the centre of a beautiful country full of cultivated farms as well as shut-up and walled-in gentlemen's seats.

Walking down the princ.i.p.al street, I noticed a large placard fastened to a board hanging on a wall; thought it was a proclamation and stopped to read it. It was an exposition of the errors of the Catholic Church in such large type that he that runs may read it. I have some doubts whether this is the best way of convincing people of an opposite belief of their errors. I went into the shop thinking I might perhaps buy a newspaper. I fear me the mistress of the establishment, a timid, elderly woman, imagined me to be a belligerent member of the attacked church come to call her to account, for she retreated at a fast run to the kitchen from which she called an answer in the negative to my enquiry.

Returning to my abiding place, I asked the hostess if the town contained many Catholics. "Oh, dear no," she replied, "there are few Catholics.

The people are nearly all Protestants." In this neighborhood the celebrated John George Adair, of Derryveigh celebrity, has a magnificent residence called Belgrove Park. He has the name of being a very wealthy man. He is not praised here, but has the reputation of being hard- hearted, exacting and merciless. I doubted a little whether it was really the same man, as they called him, irreverently enough, Jack Adair, but to convince me they immediately began repeating the verses with their burden of five hundred thousand curses on cruel John Adair, which they could repeat readily with variations.

The railway facilities are very slow and conservative in their motions.

I could not get on to Limerick the same day, but had to remain over night in Portarlington.

At Limerick Junction there was another wait of two hours, and at last we steamed into Limerick. It is a large city of tall houses, large churches and high monuments. The inhabitants say it was celebrated for its tall houses five or six hundred years ago.

L.

THE CITY ON THE SHANNON.

The Shannon is a mighty river running here between low green banks. The tide comes up to Limerick and rises sometimes to the top of the sea wall. A fine flouris.h.i.+ng busy town is Limerick with its s.h.i.+pping. I have discovered the post-office, found out the magnificent Redemptorist Church. Noticing this church and the swarm of other grand churches with the same emblems and the five convents as well as other buildings for different fraternities, noticing also the queer by-places where dissenting places of wors.h.i.+p are hidden away, one concludes that they are in a Catholic city, and so they are. On Sunday found out a little Presbyterian Church hid away behind some houses and joined its handful of wors.h.i.+ppers.

In the afternoon walked along the streets for some way and found myself all at once in what is called the English part of the town, but which looked more foreign than any place I have yet seen on my own green isle.

The houses were tall, and had been grand in King Donagh O'Brien's time, I suppose. The streets were very narrow. The last week's wash, that looked as if the Shannon was further away than it is, fluttered from the broken windows of the fifth story. All the shops were open; there did not seem to be any buyers, but if there were, they might get supplied.

The very old huckster women sat by their baskets of very small and very wizened apples, and infinitesimal pears that had forgotten to grow. Two women, one in a third-story window and one on the street, were exchanging strong compliments. In fact, as our cousins would say, "there was no Sunday in that English quarter worth a cent." I made my escape with a sick longing for some one to carry a gospel of good tidings of great joy in there.

Next morning I found out the English Cathedral, which is at the very border, so to speak, of that forgotten place. It stands in pretty grounds. The elderly gentleman who has the care of it, and who shows it off like a pet child, happened to be there, and took charge of me. He was determined I should conscientiously see and hear all about that church. This church was built in 1194 by Donagh O'Brien, King of Munster. It was not new even then, for King Donagh made his new church out of an old palace of his.

I followed that old man while he pointed out the relics of the old and the glories of the new, the magnificent painted windows, the velvet of the costliest that covered the altar, the carvings of price, the cus.h.i.+ons and the carpets, and, a few steps away, the fluttering rags, the horrible poverty, the hopeless lives of the English quarter. Truly the fat and the wool are in one place, and the flock on the dark mountains in another. Outside are various stone cupboards, called vaults, where highbred dust moulders in state free from any beggarly admixture.

That old man wished to delude me up unknown steps to the battlements and up to other battlements on the top of the church tower--it was raining heavily, and the gray clouds lying on the house tops, you could hardly have seen across two streets--to see the view forsooth; then he volunteered to set the bells ringing in my honor, but I declined. He then told me of the bells--it was new to me; it may not be new to others. They were--well--taken without leave from Italy. The Italian who cast them pilgrimed over the world in search of them. Sailing up the Shannon he heard his long-lost bells, and it killed him, the joy did.

The puritan soldiers destroyed the profusion of statues that decorated this church. Noticed one simple monument to one Dan Hayes, an honest man and a lover of his country. Near this cathedral is the house where Ireton died, tall and smoky, battered and fallen into age, but very high. Its broken windows showed several poverty-stricken faces looking down on the cathedral grounds, which, of course, are kept locked. King John's castle, very strong, very tall, very grim, seems mostly composed of three great towers, but there are really seven. Inside the walls is a barrack that could lodge 400 men. Limerick is full of old memorials of present magnificence and of past and present need. The inhabitants proudly tell you that it never was conquered, not considering capitulation conquest. The city raised the first monument to O'Connell.

Of course I saw it, and thought it a good likeness. There is a square of gra.s.s and trees near it, where is a monument of Spring Rice, he who, when O'Connell was sick once, a political sickness, was said to be in despair:

"Poor Spring Rice, with his phiz all gloom, Kept noiselessly creeping about the room; His innocent nose in anguish blowing, Murmuring forth, 'He's going, going.'"

I did not hear the sweet bells that charmed the life out of the poor wandering Italian, still I think I have perhaps told enough about the ancient city of Limerick on the Shannon.

From Limerick up through Clare, the railway pa.s.ses along by the river Fergus, a big tributary of the Shannon. A Clare man informed me that Clare returned Dan O'Connell to Parliament. He sank his voice into an emphatic whisper to inform us that Dan was the first Catholic who ever got into Parliament.

I have been taken for this one and that one since I came to Ireland, and have been amused or annoyed, as the case may be, but I am totally at a loss to know whom I resembled or was taken for in the County Clare. A decent-looking countrywoman shook hands with me, telling me she had seen me in some part of Clare a month ago, and I had never set foot into the county until to-day. "You remember me, my lady, I saw you when you stopped at ----" some whispered name with an O to it. The woman's face was strangely familiar, but I was on entirely new ground.

There is enchantment in this western country. I was completely bewildered when a frieze-coated farmer told me, "That was a grand speech you made at Tuam, and true every word of it." It was a little confusing, seeing that I have never been in Tuam, or very near it at all. This old gentleman enquired coaxingly if I were going to speak at Ennis, and a.s.sured me of a grand welcome to be got up in a hurry. Then he and the farmer's wife exchanged thoughts--that "I did not want anybody to know I was in it"--in aggravating whispers as I looked steadily out of the windows to a.s.sure myself that I was I. My friend in frieze then began to draw my attention to certain landmarks, the ruins of this abbey and that castle, and the other graveyard as points of interest with which I was supposed to be familiar.

Truly this part of Clare seemed to have any amount of square castles in ruined grandeur scattered along the line of rail. We stopped at a station and saw Ennis lying below us, and O'Connell's statue rising up between us and the sky. My two friends parted from me here to my immense relief. I felt as if I were obtaining admiration on false pretences. The woman took my hand, and, with a long fond look, began to bless me in English, but her feelings compelled her to slide off into fervent Irish.

The frieze-coated gentleman stood, hat in hand, and bowed and bowed, and "his life was at my service, and if I wished to pa.s.s unnoticed sure he could whisht, and good-by and G.o.d bless you." and away they went. For whom did they take me?

Clare is pretty stony. Again I saw fields from which stones had been gathered to form fences like ramparts. Again I saw fields crusted with stone like the fields of Cong, with the same waterworn appearance, but not so extensive. The little, pretty station of Cusheen seemed an oasis in a stony wilderness.

Past many a little field hemmed in with stony barricades, past many an ancient ruin, sitting in desolation, into Athenry, the ancient Ath-an- righ, the fortress of kings. It was pouring rain, it often is pouring rain. I took shelter in the hotel whose steps rise from the railway station. There, in a quaint little corner room with a broad strip of window, I settled myself to write with the light of a poor candle, and the rain fell outside. Athenry bristles with ruins.

King John has another castle here all in ruins. There is a part of a wall here and there, and the arch of a gate which has been patched up and has some fearful hovels leaning up against it. It has the ruins of an abbey and of a priory. The names of Clanricarde and De Birmingham linger among these ruins; the modern cabins, without window pane or any chimney at all, but a hole in the roof, are mixed up with the ruins also.

The well-fed maid at the hotel informed me that they were very poor.

There is no work and no tillage, the land being in gra.s.s for sheep. "I do not believe any of them know what a full meal means. No one knows how they manage to live, the creatures," said the maid, comfortably. So the night and the morning pa.s.sed at Athenry, and we pa.s.sed on to the village of Oranmore.

LI.

GALWAY AND THE MEN OF GALWAY.

From Athenry and its ruins went to Oranmore and its ruins. The poverty of Athenry deepens into still greater poverty in Oranmore. The country is under gra.s.s, hay is the staple crop, so there being little tillage, little labor is required. They depend on chance employment to procure the foreign meal on which they live. Some depend for help to a great extent on the friends in America.

There is a new pier being built here, for an arm of the sea runs up to Oranmore. They told me that this pier was being built by the Canadian money. It will be a harbor of refuge for fis.h.i.+ng craft and better days of work and food may yet dawn upon the West.

Behind the pier are the ruins of a large castle which belonged to the Blakes, one of the Galway tribes. It was inhabited by the last Blake who held any of the broad acres of his ancestors within the memory of the old people. I stood in the roofless upper room which had been the dancing saloon, penetrated into galleries built for defence lit only by loop holes, went down the little dark stair into the dungeon, tried to peer into the underground pa.s.sage that connected with the seash.o.r.e, ascended to the battlements and looked over the lonely land and explored mult.i.tudes of small rooms reached by many different flights of stone steps.

These people are largely of the Norman blood. Oh, for the time when peace and plenty, law and order shall reign here; when the peasant shall not consider law as an oppressor to be defied or evaded, an engine of oppression in the hands of the rich, but an impartial and inflexible protector of the rights of rich and poor alike!

A young priest told me here that the clergy about this place were opposed to the teachings of the Land League--did not countenance it among their people. A Catholic gentleman in Roscommon told me the same concerning the bishop and clergy of his own locality.

The tillage about Galway is careful and good, what there is of it. I saw great fields of wheat that had been cleared of stones, by generations of labor I should say. I had this fact brought to my mind by some peasants in the neighborhood of Athenry, in this way: "A man works and his family works on a bit of ground fencing it, improving it, gathering off the stones; as he improves his rent is raised; he clings to the little home; he gets evicted and disappears into the grave or the workhouse, and another takes the land at the higher rent; improves from that point; has the rent raised, till he too falls behind and is evicted; and so it goes on till the lands are fit for meadowing and gra.s.s, and the holdings are run together and the homes blotted out." Of course I do not give the man's words exactly, but I give his thoughts exactly.

Galway was something of a disappointment to me at first, it had not such a foreign look as I expected. It is a very busy town, has every appearance of being a thriving town, every one you meet walks with purpose as of one who has business to attend to. It is refres.h.i.+ng to see this after looking at the hopeless faces and lounging gait of the people of many places in the west. Wherever the tall chimneys rise the people have a quick step and an all-alive look.

I wandered about Galway, and to my great delight had a guide to point out what was most worth looking at. Of course I heard of the bravery of the thirteen tribes of Galway, who snapped up Galway from the O'Flaherties and a.s.similated themselves to the natives as more Irish than themselves. After walking about a little I did notice the arched gateways and the highly ornamented entrance doors which they concealed.

The first place of interest pointed out to me was Lynch castle. From one of the windows of this castle Warder Lynch, in 1493, hung his own son.

It is said from this act the name Lynch Law arose. The Lynch family, originally Lintz, came from Lintz in Austria.

This mayor or Warder Lynch was a wealthy merchant trading with Spain. He trusted his son to go thither and purchase a cargo of wine. The young man fell into dissipation, and spent the money, buying the cargo on credit. The nephew of the Spanish merchant accompanied the s.h.i.+p to obtain the money, and arrange for further business. The devil tempted the young Lynch to hide his folly by committing crime. Near the Galway coast the young Spaniard was thrown overboard. All the friends of the family and his father received the young merchant after his successful voyage with great joy. The father consented to his son's marriage with his early love, the daughter of a neighbor, who gladly consented to accept the successful young merchant for his son-in-law. All went merry as a marriage bell. Just before the marriage a confessor was sent for to a sick seaman, who revealed young Lynch's crime. The Warder of Galway stood at the bed of this dying man, and heard of the villany of his beloved son. Young Lynch was arrested, tried, found guilty, and sentenced. The mother of young Lynch, having exhausted all efforts to obtain mercy for her son, flew in distraction to the Blake tribe--she was a Blake--and raised the whole clan for a rescue. When the hour of execution dawned, the castle was surrounded by the armed clan of the Blakes, demanding that the prisoner be spared for the honor of the family. The Warder addressed the crowd, entreating them to submit to the majesty of the law, but in vain. He led his son--who, when he had borne the shame, and came to feel the guilt of his deeds, had no desire to live--up the winding stair in the building to that very arched window that overlooks the street, and there, to that iron staple that is fixed in the wall, he hung him with his own hands, after embracing him, in sight of all the people. The father expected to die by the hands of the angry crowd below, but they, awed, went home at a dead march. The mother died of the shock, and the sternly just old man lived on. I looked at his house in Lombard street. Over the entrance is a skull and cross bones in relief on black marble, with this motto, which I copied,

"REMEMBER DEATH Vanitie of vanities, and all is but vanitie."

There is a fine museum in Queen's College, Galway, which I did not see.

Of course there are many things I did not see, although my eyes were on hard duty while there. I did see specimens of that most beautiful marble of Connemara. It is worked up into ornaments, in some cases mounted with silver. As soon as any one enquires for it they are known to be from America. A book shaped specimen that I coveted was priced at twelve and sixpence. It is there yet for me. It is of every shade and tint of green, and is really very lovely. I saw many specimens of it manufactured into harps stringed and set in silver, with a silver scroll, and the name of Davitt or Parnell on them in green enamel. There were brooches and scarf pins of this kind. I did not notice the name of the great Liberator among these ornaments.

The Claddagh was a great disappointment to me. I heard that it was not safe to venture into it alone. I got up early and had suns.h.i.+ne with me when I strolled through the Claddagh. I saw no extreme poverty there.

Most of the houses were neatly whitewashed; all were superior to the huts among the ruins at Athenry. The people were very busy, very comfortably clothed, and, in a way, well-to-do looking. Some of the houses were small and windowless, something the shape of a beehive, but not at all forlornly squalid. They make celebrated fleecy flannel here in Claddagh. They make and mend nets. They fish. I saw some swarthy men of foreign look, in seamen's clothes, standing about. You will see beauty here of the swarthy type, accompanied by flas.h.i.+ng black eyes and blue black hair, but I saw la.s.ses with lint white locks also in the Claddagh. The testimony of all here is that the Claddagh people are a quiet, industrious, temperate and honest race of people. I am inclined to believe that myself. It is a pretty large district and I wandered through it without hearing one loud or one profane word. I was agreeably disappointed in the Claddagh. Claddagh has a church and large school of its own.