Leaving Knockcool behind us, we walk along the country road between high, thick hedges: here a clump of weather-beaten trees, there a stretch of bog with silver pools and piles of black turf, then a sudden view of hazy hills, a grove of beeches, a great house with a splendid gateway, and sometimes, riding through it, a figure new to our eyes, a Lady Master of the Hounds, handsome in her habit with red facings. We pass many an 'evicted farm,' the ruined house with the rushes growing all about it, and a lonely goat browsing near; and on we walk, until we can see the roofs of Lisdara's solitary cabin row, huddled under the shadow of a gloomy hill topped by the ruins of an old fort. All is silent, and the blue haze of the peat smoke curls up from the thatch. Lisdara's young people have mostly gone to the Big Country; and how many tears have dropped on the path we are treading, as Peggy and Mary, Cormac and Miles, with a wooden box in the donkey cart behind them, or perhaps with only a bundle hanging from a blackthorn stick, have come down the hill to seek their fortune! Perhaps Peggy is barefooted; perhaps Mary has little luggage beyond a pot of shamrock or a mountain thrush in a wicker cage; but what matter for that? They are used to poverty and hardship and hunger, and although they are going quite penniless to a new country, sure it can be no worse than the old. This is the happy-go-lucky Irish philosophy, and there is mixed with it a deal of simple trust in God.
How many exiles and wanderers, both those who have no fortune and those who have failed to win it, dream of these cabin rows, these sweet-scented boreens with their 'banks of furze unprofitably gay,' these leaking thatches with the purple loosestrife growing in their ragged seams, and, looking backward across the distance of time and space, give the humble spot a tender thought, because after all it was in their dear native isle!
'Pearly are the skies in the country of my fathers, Purple are thy mountains, home of my heart;
Mother of my yearning, love of all my longings, Keep me in remembrance long leagues apart.'
I have been thinking in this strain because of an old dame in the first cabin in Lisdara row, whose daughter is in America, and who can talk of nothing else. She shows us the last letter, with its postal order for sixteen shillings, that Mida sent from New York, with little presents for blind Timsy, 'dark since he were three years old,' and for lame Dan, or the 'Bocca,' as he is called in Lisdara. Mida was named for the virgin saint of Killeedy in Limerick.* "And it's she that's good enough to bear a saint's name, glory be to God!" exclaims the old mother returning Mida's photograph to a hole in the wall where the pig cannot possibly molest it.
* Saint Mide, the Brigit of Munster.
At the far end of the row lives 'Omadhaun Pat.' He is a 'little sthrange,' you understand; not because he was born with too small a share of wit, but because he fell asleep one evening when he was lying on the grass up by the old fort, and--'well, he was niver the same thing since.' There are places in Ireland, you must know, where if you lie down upon the green earth and sink into untimely slumber, you will 'wake silly'; or, for that matter, although it is doubtless a risk, you may escape the fate of waking silly, and wake a poet! Carolan fell asleep upon a faery rath, and it was the faeries who filled his ears with music, so that he was haunted by the tunes ever afterward; and perhaps all poets, whether they are conscious of it or not, fall asleep on faery raths before they write sweet songs.
Little Omadhaun Pat is pale, hollow-eyed, and thin; but that, his mother says, is 'because he is over-studyin' for his confirmation.'