their chests and tied at the back. When it rains they throw another petticoat over their heads with the waistband round their faces, or, if they are young, they use a heavy shawl like those worn in Galway. Occasionally other wraps are worn, and during the thunderstorm I arrived in I saw several girls with men’s waistcoats buttoned round their bodies. Their skirts do not come much below the knee, and show their powerful legs in the heavy indigo stockings with which they are all provided.
The men wear three colours: the natural wool, indigo and a grey flannel that is woven of alternate threads of indigo and the natural wool. In Aranmor many of the younger men have adopted the usual fisherman’s jersey, but I have only seen one on this island.
As flannel is cheap – the women spin the yarn from the wool of their own sheep, and it is then woven by a weaver in Kilronan for fourpence a yard – the men seem to wear an indefinite number of waistcoats and woollen drawers one over the other. They are usually surprised at the lightness of my own dress, and one old man I spoke to for a minute on the pier, when I came ashore, asked me if I was not cold with ‘my little clothes’.
As I sat in the kitchen to dry the spray from my coat, several men who had seen me walking up came in to talk to me, usually murmuring on the threshold, ‘The blessing of God on this place,’ or some similar words.
The courtesy of the old woman of the house is singularly attractive, and though I could not understand much of what she said – she has no English – I could see with how much grace she motioned each visitor to a chair or stool, according to his age, and said a few words to him till he drifted into our English conversation.
For the moment my own arrival is the chief subject of interest and the men who come in are eager to talk to me.
Some of them express themselves more correctly than the ordinary peasant, others use the Gaelic idioms continually and substitute ‘he’ or ‘she’ for ‘it’, as the neuter pronoun is not found in modern Irish.
A few of the men have a curiously full vocabulary, others know only the commonest words in English and are driven to ingenious devices to express their meaning. Of all the subjects we can talk of, war seems their favourite, and the conflict between America and Spain is causing a great deal of excitement. Nearly all the families have relations who have had to cross the Atlantic, and all eat of the flour and bacon that is brought from the United States, so they have a vague fear that ‘if anything happened to America’, their own island would cease to be habitable.
Foreign languages are another favourite topic and, as these men are bilingual, they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms. Most of the strangers they see on the islands are philological students, and the people have been led to conclude that linguistic studies, particularly Gaelic studies, are the chief occupation of the outside world.
‘I have seen Frenchmen, and Danes, and Germans,’ said one man, ‘and there does be a power of Irish books along with them, and they reading them better than ourselves. Believe me there are few rich men now in the world who are not studying the Gaelic.’
They sometimes ask me the French for simple phrases, and when they have listened to the intonation for a moment most of them are able to reproduce it with admirable precision.
When I was going out this morning to walk round the island with Michael, the boy who is teaching me Irish, I met an old man making his way down to the cottage. He was dressed in miserable black clothes which seemed to have come from the mainland, and was so bent with rheumatism that, at a little distance, he looked more like a spider than a human being.
Michael told me it was Pat Dirane, the story-teller old Mourteen had spoken of on the other island. I wished to turn back, as he appeared to be on his way to visit me, but Michael would not hear of it.
‘He will be sitting by the fire when we come in,’ he said, ‘let you not be afraid, there will be time enough to be talking to him by and by.’
He was right. As I came down into the kitchen some hours later, old Pat was still in the chimney-corner, blinking with the turf-smoke.
He spoke English with remarkable aptness and fluency, due, I believe, to the months he spent in the English provinces working at the harvest when he was a young man.
After a few formal compliments he told me how he had been crippled by an attack of the ‘old hin’ (i.e. the influenza), and had been complaining ever since in addition to his rheumatism.
While the old woman was cooking my dinner, he asked me if I liked stories and offered to tell one in English, though he added it would be much better if I could follow the Gaelic. Then he began:
There were two farmers in County Clare. One had a son, and the other, a fine rich man, had a daughter.
The young man was wishing to marry the girl, and his father told him to try and get her if he thought well, though a power of gold would be wanting to get the like of her.
‘I will try,’ said the young man.
He put all his gold into a bag. Then he went over to the other farm and threw in the gold in front of him.
‘Is that all gold?’ said the father of the girl.
‘All gold,’ said O’Conor (the young man’s name was O’Conor).
‘It will not weigh down my daughter,’ said the father.
‘We’ll see that,’ said O’Conor.
Then they put them in the scales, the daughter in one side and the gold in the other. The girl went down against the ground, so O’Conor took his bag and went out on the road.
As he was going along he came to where there was a little man, and he standing with his back against the wall.
‘Where are you going with the bag?’ said the little man.
‘Going home,’ said O’Conor.
‘Is it gold you might be wanting?’ said the man.
‘It is, surely,’ said O’Conor.
‘I’ll give you what you are wanting,’ said the man, ‘and we can bargain in this way – you’ll pay me back in a year the gold I give you, or you’ll pay me with five pounds cut off your own flesh.’
That bargain was made between them. The man gave a bag of gold to O’Conor, and he went back with it, and was married to the young woman.
They were rich people, and he built her a grand castle on the cliffs of Clare, with a window that looked out straightly over the wild ocean.
One day when he went up with his wife to look out over the wild ocean, he saw a ship coming in on the rocks, and no sails on her at all. She was wrecked on the rocks, and it was tea that was in her, and fine silk.
O’Conor and his wife went down to look at the wreck, and when the lady O’Conor saw the silk she said she wished a dress of it.
They got the silk from the sailors, and when the Captain came up to get the money for it, O’Conor asked him to come again and take his dinner with them. They had a grand dinner, and they drank after it, and the Captain was tipsy. While they were still drinking, a letter came to O’Conor, and it was in the letter that a friend of his was dead, and that he would have to go away on a long journey. As he was getting ready, the
