The Charm Of Ireland Part 26

FROM THE FURY OF THE O'FLAHERTIES GOOD LORD DELIVER US.

and one of the by-laws of the town was that no citizen should receive into his house at Christmas or on any other feast day any of the Burkes, MacWilliamses, or Kelleys, and that "neither O' nor Mac shalle strutte ne swaggere thro the streetes of Gallway."

The years wore away this animosity, as they have a fashion of doing in Ireland, and by Cromwell's time, the citizens of the town had become so Irish that they were contemptuously called "the tribes of Galway" by the Puritan soldiers. But, as was the case of the Beggars in Holland, a name given in contempt was adopted as a badge of honour, and the "Tribes of Galway" became a mark of distinction for men who had suffered and fought and had never been conquered. There were thirteen of these tribes; and the Blakes and Lynches and Joyces and Martins who still form the greater part of the old town's population are their descendants--but how fallen from their high estate!

For many years, Galway had a practical monopoly of the trade with Spain, there was always a large Spanish colony here, and it is to this long-continued intercourse that many persons attribute the foreign air of the town. I have even seen it a.s.serted that the people are of a decided Spanish type; but we were unable to discern it, and I am inclined to think the Spanish influence has been much exaggerated. Its period of prosperity ended with the coming of the Parliamentary army, which took the place and plundered it; and the final blow was struck forty years later, when the army of William of Orange, fresh from its victories to the east, laid siege to it and captured it in two days. The old families found themselves ruined, trade utterly ceased, the great warehouses fell to decay, and the mansions of the aristocracy, no longer able to maintain them, were given over to use as tenements. There is to-day about Galway an air of ruin and decay such as I have seen equalled in few other Irish towns; but there are also some signs of reawakening, and it may be that, after three centuries, the tide has turned.

We found the streets crowded, next morning, with the most picturesque people we had seen anywhere in Ireland, for it was Sat.u.r.day and so market day, and the country-folk had gathered in from many miles around.

The men were for the most part b.u.t.toned up in cutaways of stiff frieze, nearly as hard and unyielding as iron; and the women, almost without exception, wore bright red skirts, made of fuzzy homespun flannel, which they had themselves woven from wool dyed with the rich crimson of madder. The s.h.a.ggier the flannel, the more it is esteemed, and some of the skirts we saw had a nap half an inch deep. They are made very full and short, somewhat after the fashion of the Dutch; but the resemblance ended there, for most of these women were barefooted, and strode about with a disregard of cobbles and sharp paving-stones which proved the toughness of their soles.

Galway, as well as most other Irish towns, boasts a number of millinery stores, with windows full of befeathered and beribboned hats; but one wonders where their customers come from, for hats are a luxury unknown to most Irish women, who habitually go either bareheaded, or with the head m.u.f.fled in a shawl. All the women here in Galway were shawled, and beautiful shawls they were, of a delicate fawn-colour, and very soft and thick.

We went at once to the market, and found the country women ranged along the curb, with great baskets in front of them containing eggs and b.u.t.ter and other products of the farm. How far they had walked, that morning, carrying these heavy burdens, I did not like to guess, but we met one later who had eight miles to go before she would be home again. A few had carts drawn by little grey donkeys; and the old woman in one of these was so typical that I wanted to get her picture. She was sitting there watching the crowd with her elbows on her knees, and a chicken in her hands, but when she saw me unlimbering my camera, she shook her head menacingly.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MARKET AT GALWAY]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "OULD SAFTIE"]

There was a constable in the crowd, and he offered to clear the bystanders away, so that I could get a good picture of her. I remarked that she seemed to object, and he said that he didn't see why that made any difference, and that it wouldn't do her any harm. But I preferred diplomacy to force, and finally I asked a quaint-looking old man standing by if I might take his picture.

"Ye may, and welcome," was the prompt response.

So I stood him up in front of the cart and got my focus.

"Will ye be seein' the ould saftie!" cried the woman. "Look at the ould saftie standin' there to get his picter took." And she went on to say other, and presumably much less complimentary things, in Irish; but my subject only grinned pleasantly and paid no heed. If you will look at the picture opposite this page, you can almost see the scornful invectives issuing from her lips. My subject was very proud indeed when I promised him a print; and I hope it reached him safely.

Eggs are sold by the score in Galway, and the price that day was one shilling twopence, or about twenty-eight cents--which is not as cheap as one would expect them to be in a country where wages are so low. But perhaps it is only labour that is cheap in Ireland!

One row of women were offering for sale a kind of seaweed, whose Celtic name, as they p.r.o.nounced it, I could not catch, but which in English they called dillisk; a red weed which they a.s.sured us they had gathered from the rocks along the beach that very morning, and which many people were buying and stuffing into their mouths and chewing with the greatest relish. It did not look especially inviting, but the women insisted, with much laughter, that we sample it, and we finally did, somewhat gingerly. The only taste I detected in it was that of the salt-water in which it had been soaked; but it is supposed to be very healthy, and to be especially efficacious in straightening out a man who has had a drop too much. No matter how tangled his legs may be, so the women a.s.sured us, a few mouthfuls of dillisk will set him right again; and no man with a pocketful of dillisk was ever known to go astray or spend the night in a ditch. I regret that we were not able to experiment with this interesting plant; but if it really possesses this remarkable property, it deserves a wider popularity than it now enjoys.

While I was talking to the women and the constable--who was a Dublin man and very lonesome among these Irish-speaking people, who regarded him with scorn and derision--Betty had been exploring the junk-shops of the neighbourhood, and presently came back with the news that she had discovered a Dutch masterpiece. Now we are both very fond of Dutch art, so I hastened to look at the picture; and, indeed, it may have been an Ostade, for it was a small panel showing two boors drinking, and it seemed to me excellently painted; but when the keeper of the shop saw that we were interested, he named a price out of all reason, and I was not certain enough of my own judgment to back it to that extent. I intended to go back later on and do a little bargaining; but I didn't; and the first connoisseur who goes to Galway should take a look at the picture--it is in a little shop just a few doors from the cathedral--and he may pick up a bargain.

We went on down the street, and crossed the Corrib River to the Claddagh--a picturesque huddle of thatched and whitewashed cottages, the homes of fishermen and their families, Irish of the Irish, who, from time immemorial have formed a unique community, almost a race apart.

Galway, within its walls on the other side of the river, was very, very English; here on this strip of land next to the bay, the despised Irish built their cabins, and formed a colony which made its own laws, which was always ruled by one of its own members, where no strangers were permitted to dwell, and whose people always intermarried with each other. That old semi-feudal condition is, of course, no longer strictly maintained; but the Claddagh people still keep to themselves, the men follow the sea for a living just as they have always done, and the women peddle the catch about the streets of Galway, as has been their custom ever since the English settled there. They wear a quaint and distinctive costume, one feature of which is the red petticoat I have already described, and common to all Connemara women. But in addition to this is a blue mantle, and a white kerchief bound tightly round the head, and then over this, if the woman is unusually well-to-do, a fawn-coloured shawl. The feet are usually bare, and so are the st.u.r.dy legs, some inches of which, very red and rough from exposure to every weather, are visible below the short skirts.

The houses of the Claddagh have been built wherever fancy dictated, and in consequence form a most confusing jumble, for one man's back door usually opens into another man's front yard. How a man gets home from the tavern on a dark night I don't know, but I suspect that the consumption of dillisk is large. We stopped to talk to a woman leaning over a half-door; and her children, who had been playing in the dirt, gathered around, and there is a picture of her quaint little house opposite the next page. Then while I foraged for more pictures, Betty sat down on a stone, and a perfect horde of children soon a.s.sembled to stare at her. They were very shy at first and perfectly well-behaved; but gradually they grew bolder, and finally, under careful encouragement, their tongues loosened, until they were chattering away like magpies.

The people of the Claddagh are said to be a very moral and religious race, who never go to sea or even away from home on any Sunday or religious holiday; and these dirty, unkempt, neglected, but chubby and red-cheeked children were capital ill.u.s.trations of Kipling's lines:

By a moon they all can play with--grubby and grimed and unshod-- Very happy together, and very near to G.o.d.

They were certainly happy enough; and, whether they were near to G.o.d or not, they had all evidently been taught their catechism with great care, for when Betty took from one of them a little picture of the Madonna and asked who it was, they answered in chorus, without an instant's hesitation, "The blessed Virgin, miss."

The Claddagh people are dark as a rule, though here and there one sees a genuine t.i.tian blond, and Spanish blood has been ascribed to them; but they probably date much farther back than the Spaniards--back, indeed, to that ancient, original Irish race, "men of the leathern wallet,"

antedating the Milesians or Gaels who now form the bulk of the Irish people. The older race took refuge in the bleak Connemara hills before the stronger invaders, to come creeping down again and found their colony here at the mouth of the Corrib when the invaders had swept on eastward to the kindlier and more fertile country there. Their whole life is bound up in this topsy-turvy little settlement, where they live just as they have lived for centuries, undisturbed by the march of civilisation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CLADDAGH, GALWAY]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CLADDAGH HOME]

We tore ourselves away, at last, from this primeval place, and recrossed the river to the turf market, with its familiar little carts piled high with the dark fuel.

"The bogs are very wet this year, are they not?" I asked an old man.

"They are, sir, G.o.d save ye," he replied, his wrinkled face lighting up at the chance to talk to a stranger. "There never was such a year for rain. I'm sixty year, G.o.d bless ye, and I've never seen such another."

And then he went on to relate the story of his life, with a "G.o.d save ye" to every clause. A hearty old fellow he was, in spite of his sixty years; and he had driven his cart of turf down ten miles out of the mountains, that morning, and would drive ten miles back that night; and if he was lucky he would get half a crown--sixty cents--for the load of turf which had taken a hard day's labour to cut, and numerous turnings during a month to dry.

We went on past some fragments of the old walls, with a most romantic arched gateway, and through the fish market, over which the red-skirted women from the Claddagh presided--great strapping creatures, with broad hips and straight backs and shining, good-humoured faces. Most of them were selling an ugly, big-mouthed, unappetising-looking fish, whose name I couldn't catch; but they told us it was a fish for poor people, not for the likes of us, G.o.d bless ye--full of bones and scarcely worth the trouble of eating, but plentiful and therefore cheap.

The princ.i.p.al street of Galway is called Shop Street--a name so singularly lacking in imagination that it would prove the English origin of the town at once, were any proof needed--and about midway of this stands a beautiful four-storied building, known as Lynch's Castle, once a fine mansion but now a chandler's shop. The walls are ornamented with carved medallions, and there is a row of sculptured supports for a vanished balcony sticking out like gargoyles all around the top; and over the door there is the stone figure of a monkey holding a child, commemorating the saving of one of the Lynch children from a fire, by a favourite monkey, some centuries ago.

The Lynches were great people in old Galway, and another memorial of them exists just around the corner--a fragment of wall, with a doorway below and a mullioned window above, and it was from this window, so legend says, that James Lynch Fitzstephen, sometime mayor of Galway, hanged his son with his own hands. The princ.i.p.al inscription reads:

This memorial of the stern and unbending justice of the chief magistrate of this city, James Lynch Fitzstephen, elected mayor A. D. 1493, who condemned and executed his own guilty son, Walter, on this spot, has been restored to its ancient site A. D. 1854, with the approval of the Town Commissioners, by their Chairman, Very Rev. Peter Daly, P. P., and Vicar of St. Nicholas.

Below the window is a skull and crossbones, with a much more interesting inscription:

1524 REMEMBER DEATHE VANITI OF VANITI AND AL IS BUT VANITI

[Ill.u.s.tration: A GALWAY VISTA]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MEMORIAL OF A SPARTAN FATHER]

The story of the very upright Fitzstephen runs in this wise: He was a merchant, prominent in the Spanish trade, and fortunate in everything except in his only son, Walter, who was as bad a nut as was to be found anywhere. But he had shown some fondness for a Galway lady of good family, and it was hoped she might reform him; when, unhappily, she looked, or was thought to look, too favourably upon a handsome young hidalgo, who had come from Spain as the guest of the elder Fitzstephen.

So young Walter waited for him one night at a dark corner, thrust a knife into his heart, and then gave himself up to his father, as the town's chief magistrate.

Walter, as is often the way with rake-h.e.l.lies, was a great favourite in the town, and everybody interceded for his pardon, but his father condemned him to death. Whereupon a number of young bloods organised a rescue party, but just as they were breaking into the house, the inexorable parent put a noose about his son's neck, and hanged him from the window mullion above the crowd's head--the same mullion, I suppose, which you can see in the picture opposite the preceding page.

Just behind the reminder of this fifteenth-century Brutus, stands the fourteenth-century church of St. Nicholas, a venerable and beautiful structure, with good windows and splendid doorways, and containing some interesting tombs--one of them in honour of Mayor Lynch, the hero of the tragedy I have just related. On the south wall is a large tablet to "Jane Eyre, relict of Edward Eyre," (I wonder if Charlotte Bronte ever heard of her), who died in 1760, aged 88. At the bottom of the slab the fact is commemorated that "The sum of 300L was given by the Widow Jane Eyre to the Corporation of Galway for the yearly sum of 24L to be distributed in bread to 36 poor objects, on every Sunday forever." The s.e.xton told us that the yearly income from this bequest was now thirty-six pounds, but that the weekly distribution of bread had occasioned so much disturbance that it had been discontinued, and the income of the bequest was now divided equally among twelve deserving families.

As we stood there, the peal of bells in the tower began to ring for service, but their musical invitation went quite unheeded by the crowd in the market-place outside, all of whom, of course, were Catholics. One woman, clad in black, slipped into a pew just before the curate began to read the lesson. We waited a while to see if any one else would come, but no one did, and at last we quietly took ourselves off.

There was one other sight in Galway we wanted to see--the most famous of its kind in Ireland--and that was the salmon making their way up the Corrib River from the sea to sp.a.w.n in the lake above; and the place to see them is from the bridge which leads from the courthouse on the east bank of the river to the great walled jail on the west bank. Just above the bridge is the weir which backs up the water from Lough Corrib to afford power for some dozen mills--though all the mills, so far as I could see, are decayed and ruined and empty. But below this weir the salmon gather in such numbers that sometimes they lie side by side solidly clear across the bed of the stream.

A number of fishermen were flogging the water, and we sat down under the trees on the eastern bank to watch them for a while before going out on the bridge. Two or three of them were stationed on a narrow plank platform built out over the water just in front of us, and the others were on the farther bank, in the shadow of the grey wall of the jail.

This is supposed to be the very best place in all Ireland to catch salmon, and, in the season, more anglers than the short stretch of sh.o.r.e can accommodate are eager to pay the fifteen shillings, which is the fee for a day's fishing there. They fish quite close together, which is somewhat awkward, but has its advantages occasionally; as, for instance, on that day, not very long ago, when one enthusiast, having hooked a n.o.ble fish, dropped dead in the act of playing it. The long account of this sad event which the Galway paper published, concluded with the following paragraph:

Our readers will be glad to learn that the rod which Mr. Doyle dropped was immediately taken up by our esteemed townsman, Mr. Martin, who found the fish still on, and after ten minutes' play, succeeded in landing it--a fine clean-run salmon of fifteen pounds.

One cannot but admire the quick wit of Mr. Martin, who, seeing at a glance that his fellow-townsman was past all human aid, realised that the only thing to do was to save the fish, and saved it!

But no fish were caught while we were there. We had rather expected to see one hooked every minute, but we watched for half an hour, and there was not even a rise; so at last we walked out on the bridge to see if there were really any fish in the stream.

The bridge has a high parapet, worn gla.s.sy-smooth by the coat-sleeves of countless lookers-on, and there are convenient places to rest the feet, so we leaned over and looked down. The water was quite clear, and we could see the stones on the bottom plainly--but no fish.

"Look, there's one," said a voice at my elbow, and following the pointing finger, I saw a great salmon, his greenish back almost exactly the colour of the water, poised in the stream, swaying slowly from side to side, exerting himself just enough to hold his place against the current. Then the finger pointed to another and another, and we saw that the river was alive with fish--and then I looked around to see whose finger it was, and found myself gazing into the smiling eyes of a young priest--not exactly young, either, for his hair was sprinkled with grey; but his face was fresh and youthful.