was a fine time he had in the asylum.’
She saw my movement of surprise, and went on:
‘There was a son of my own, as fine a lad as you’d see in the county – though I’m his mother that says it, and you’d never think it to look at me. Well, he was a keeper in a kind of private asylum, I think they call it, and when Michael was taken bad, he went to see him, and didn’t he know the keepers that were in charge of him, and they promised to take the best of care of him, and, indeed, he was always a quiet man that would give no trouble. After the first three years he was free in the place, and he walking about like a gentleman, doing any light work he’d find agreeable. Then my son went to see him a second time, and “You’ll never see Michael again,” says he when he came back, “for he’s too well off where he is.” And, indeed, it was well for him, but now he’s come home.’ Then she got up to carry out some groceries she was buying to the ass-cart that was waiting outside.
‘It’s real sorry I do be when I see you going off,’ she said, as she was turning away. ‘I don’t often speak to you, but it’s company to see you passing up and down over the hill, and now may the Almighty God bless and preserve you, and see you safe home.’
A little later I was walking up the long hill which leads to the high ground from Laragh to Sugar Loaf. The solitude was intense. Towards the top of the hill I passed through a narrow gap with high rocks on one side of it and fir trees above them, and a handful of jagged sky filled with extraordinarily brilliant stars. In a few moments I passed out on the brow of the hill that runs behind the Devil’s Glen, and smelt the fragrance of the bogs. I mounted again. There was not light enough to show the mountains round me, and the earth seemed to have dwindled away into a mere platform where an astrologer might watch. Among these emotions of the night one cannot wonder that the madhouse is so often named in Wicklow.
Many of the old people of the country, however, when they have no definite sorrow, are not mournful, and are full of curious whims and observations. One old woman who lived near Glen Macanass told me that she had seen her sons had no hope of making a livelihood in the place where they were born, so, in addition to their schooling, she engaged a master to come over the bogs every evening and teach them sums and spelling. One evening she came in behind them, when they were at work and stopped to listen.
‘And what do you think my son was after doing?’ she said. ‘He’d made a sum of how many times a wheel on a cart would turn round between the bridge below and the Post Office in Dublin. Would you believe that? I went out without saying a word, and I got the old stocking, where I keep a bit of money, and I made out what I owed the master. Then I went in again, and “Master,” says I, “Mick’s learning enough for the likes of him. You can go now and safe home to you.” And, God bless you, Avourneen, Mick got a fine job after on the railroad.’
Another day, when she was trying to flatter me, she said, ‘Ah, God bless you, Avourneen, you’ve no pride. Didn’t I hear you yesterday, and you talking to my pig below in the field as if it was your brother? And a nice clean pig it is, too, the crathur.’ A year or two afterwards I met this old woman again. Her husband had died a few months before of the ‘Influence’, and she was in pitiable distress, weeping and wailing while she talked to me. ‘The poor old man is after dying on me,’ she said, ‘and he was great company. There’s only one son left me now, and we do be killed working. Ah, Avourneen, the poor do have great stratagems to keep in their little cabins at all. And did you ever see the like of the place we live in? Isn’t it the poorest, lonesomest, wildest, dreariest bit of a hill a person ever passed a life on?’ When she stopped a moment, with the tears streaming on her face, I told a little about the poverty I had seen in Paris.
‘God Almighty forgive me, Avourneen,’ she went on, when I had finished, ‘we don’t know anything about it. We have our bit of turf, and our bit of sticks, and our bit to eat, and we have our health. Glory be to His Holy Name, not a one of the childer was ever a day ill, except one boy was hurted off a cart, and he never overed it. It’s small right we have to complain at all.’
She died the following winter, and her son went to New York.
The old people who have direct tradition of the Rebellion, and a real interest in it, are growing less numerous daily, but one still meets with them here and there in the more remote districts.
One evening, at the beginning of harvest, as I was walking into a straggling village, far away in the mountains, in the southern half of the county, I overtook an old man walking in the same direction with an empty gallon can. I joined him; and when he had talked for a moment, he turned round and looked at me curiously.
‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ he said, ‘I think you aren’t Irish.’ I told him he was mistaken.
‘Well,’ he went on, ‘you don’t speak the same as we do; so I was thinking maybe you were from another country.’
‘I came back from France,’ I said, ‘two months ago, and maybe there’s a trace of the language still upon my tongue.’ He stopped and beamed with satisfaction.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘see that now. I knew there was something about you. I do be talking to all who do pass through this glen, telling them stories of the Rebellion, and the old histories of Ireland, and there’s few can puzzle me, though I’m only a poor ignorant man.’ He told me some of his adventures, and then he stopped again.
‘Look at me now,’ he said, ‘and tell me what age you think I’d be.’
‘You might be seventy,’ I said.
‘Ah,’ he said, with a piteous whine in his voice, ‘you wouldn’t take me to be as old as that? No man ever thought me that age to this day.’
‘Maybe you aren’t far over sixty,’ I said, fearing I had blundered, ‘maybe you’re sixty-four.’ He beamed once more with delight, and hurried along the road.
‘Go on, now,’ he said, ‘I’m eighty-two years, three months and five days. Would you believe that? I was baptised on the fourth of June, eighty-two years ago, and it’s the truth I’m telling you.’
‘Well, it’s a great wonder,’ I said, ‘to think you’re that age, when you’re as strong as I am to this day.’
‘I am not strong at all,’ he went on, more despondingly, ‘not strong the way I was. If I had two glasses of whisky I’d dance a hornpipe would dazzle your eyes; but the way I am at this minute you could knock me down with a rush. I have a noise in my head, so that you wouldn’t hear the river at the side of it, and I can’t sleep at nights. It’s that weakens me. I do be lying in the darkness thinking of all that has happened in three-score years to the families of Wicklow – what this son did, and what that son did, and of all that went across the sea, and wishing black hell would seize them that never wrote three words to say were they alive or in good health. That’s the profession I have now – to be thinking of all the people, and of the times that’s gone. And, begging your pardon, might I ask your name?’ I told him.
‘There are two branches of the Synges in the County Wicklow,’ he said, and then he went on to tell me fragments of folklore connected with my forefathers. How a lady used to ride through Roundwood ‘on a curious beast’ to visit an uncle of hers in Roundwood Park, and how she married one of the Synges and got her weight in gold – eight stone of gold – as her dowry: stories that referred to events which took place more than a hundred years ago.
When he had finished I told him how much I wondered at his knowledge of the country.
‘There’s not a family I don’t know,’
