been down in Kilpeddar buying a scythe-stone,’ he began, when I came up to him, ‘and indeed Kilpeddar is a dear place, for it’s threepence they charged me for it; but I suppose there must be a profit from every trade, and we must all live and let live.’
When we had talked a little more I asked him if he had been often in Dublin.
‘I was living in Dublin near ten years,’ he said, ‘and indeed I don’t know what way I lived that length in it, for there is no place with smells like the city of Dublin. One time I went up with my wife into those lanes where they sell old clothing, Hanover Lane and Plunket’s Lane, and when my wife – she’s dead now, God forgive her! – when my wife smelt the dirty air she put her apron up to her nose and, “For the love of God,” says she, “get me away out of this place.” And now may I ask if it’s from there you are yourself, for I think by your speaking it wasn’t in these parts you were reared?’
I told him I was born in Dublin, but that I had travelled afterwards and been in Paris and Rome, and seen the Pope Leo XIII.
‘And will you tell me,’ he said, ‘is it true that anyone at all can see the Pope?’
I described the festivals in the Vatican, and how I had seen the Pope carried through long halls on a sort of throne. ‘Well, now,’ he said, ‘can you tell me who was the first Pope that sat upon that throne?’
I hesitated for a moment, and he went on:
‘I’m only a poor, ignorant man, but I can tell you that myself if you don’t know it, with all your travels. Saint Peter was the first Pope, and he was crucified with his head down, and since that time there have been Popes upon the throne of Rome.’
Then he began telling me about himself.
‘I was twice a married man,’ he said. ‘My first wife died at her second child, and then I reared it up till it was as tall as myself – a girl it was – and she went off and got married and left me. After that I was married a second time to an aged woman, and she lived with me ten years, and then she died herself. There is nothing I can make now but tea, and tea is killing me; and I’m living alone, in a little hut beyond, where four baronies, four parishes and four townlands meet.’
By this time we had reached the village inn, where I was lodging for the night; so I stood him a drink, and he went on to his cottage along a narrow pathway through the bogs.
The People of the Glens
❖
Here and there in County Wicklow there are a number of little known places – places with curiously melodious names, such as Aughavanna, Glenmalure, Annamoe or Lough Nahanagan – where the people have retained a peculiar simplicity and speak a language in some ways more Elizabethan than the English of Connaught, where Irish was used till a much later date. In these glens many women still wear old-fashioned bonnets, with a frill round the face, and the old men, when they are going to the fair, or to Mass, are often seen in curiously-cut frock-coats, tall hats and breeches buckled at the knee. When they meet a wanderer on foot, these old people are glad to stop and talk to him for hours, telling him stories of the Rebellion, or of the fallen angels that ride across the hills, or alluding to the three shadowy countries that are never forgotten in Wicklow – America (their El Dorado), the Union and the Madhouse.
‘I had a power of children,’ an old man, who was born in Glenmalure, said to me once. ‘I had a power of children, and they all went to California, with what I could give them, and bought a bit of a field. Then, when they put in the plough, it stuck fast on them. They looked in beneath it, and there was fine gold stretched within the earth. They’re rich now and their daughters are riding on fine horses with new saddles on them, and elegant bits in their mouths, yet not a ha’p’orth did they ever send me, and may the devil ride with them to hell!’
Not long afterwards I met an old man wandering about a hillside, where there was a fine view of Lough Dan, in extraordinary excitement and good spirits.
‘I landed in Liverpool two days ago,’ he said, when I had wished him the time of day, ‘then I came to the city of Dublin this morning, and took the train to Bray, where you have the blue salt water on your left, and the beautiful valleys, with trees in them, on your right. From that I drove to this place on a jaunting-car to see some brothers and cousins I have living below. They’re poor people, Mister, honey, with bits of cabins, and mud floors under them, but they’re as happy as if they were in heaven, and what more would a man want than that? In America and Australia, and on the Atlantic Ocean, you have all sorts, good people and bad people, and murderers and thieves, and pick-pockets; but in this place there isn’t a being isn’t as good and decent as yourself or me.’
I saw he was one of the old people one sometimes meets with who emigrated when the people were simpler than they are at present, and who often come back, after a lifetime in the States, as Irish as any old man who has never been twenty miles from the town of Wicklow. I asked him about his life abroad, when we had talked a little longer.
‘I’ve been through perils enough to slay nations,’ he said, ‘and the people here think I should be rotten with gold, but they’re better off the way they are. For five years I was a ship’s smith, and never saw dry land, and I in all the danger and peril of the Atlantic Ocean. Then I was a veterinary surgeon, curing side-slip, splay-foot, spavin, splints, glanders and the various ailments of the horse and ass. The lads in this place think you’ve nothing to do but to go across the sea and fill a bag with gold; but I tell you it is hard work, and in those countries the workhouses is full, and the prisons is full, and the crazyhouses is full, the same as in the city of Dublin. Over beyond you have fine dwellings, and you have only to put out your hand from the window among roses and vines, and the red wine grape; but there is all sorts in it, and the people is better in this country, among the trees and valleys, and they resting on their floors of mud.’
In Wicklow, as in the rest of Ireland, the union, though it is a home of refuge for the tramps and tinkers, is looked on with supreme horror by the peasants. The madhouse, which they know better, is less dreaded.
One night I had to go down late in the evening from a mountain village to the town of Wicklow, and come back again into the hills. As soon as I came near Rathnew I passed many bands of girls and men making rather ruffianly flirtation on the pathway, and women who surged up to stare at me, as I passed in the middle of the road. The thick line of trees that are near Rathnew makes the way intensely dark, even on clear nights, and when one is riding quickly, the contrast, when one reaches the lights of Wicklow, is singularly abrupt. The town itself after nightfall is gloomy and squalid. Half-drunken men and women stand about, wrangling and disputing in the dull light from the windows, which is only strong enough to show the wretchedness of the figures which pass continually across them. I did my business quickly and turned back to the hills, passing for the first few miles the same noisy groups and couples on the roadway. After a while I stopped at a lonely public house to get a drink and rest for a moment before I came to the hills. Six or seven men were talking drearily at one end of the room, and a woman I knew, who had been marketing in Wicklow, was resting nearer the door. When I had been given a glass of beer, I sat down on a barrel near her, and we began to talk.
‘Ah, your honour,’ she said, ‘I hear you’re going off in a short time to Dublin, or to France, and maybe we won’t be in the place at all when you come back. There’s no fences to the bit of farm I have, the way I’m destroyed running. The calves do be straying, and the geese do be straying, and the hens do be straying, and I’m destroyed running after them. We’ve no man in the place since himself died in the winter, and he ailing these five years, and there’s no one to give us a hand drawing the hay or cutting the
