With the World's Great Travellers Volume Iii Part 10

FROM CORK TO KILLARNEY.

SARAH J. LIPPINCOTT.

[Mrs. Lippincott, the favorite "Grace Greenwood" of former American readers, was the author of several works of European travel. The following selection is from her "Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe," and includes her interesting description of Blarney Castle, Killarney, and the country between.]

The pa.s.sage from Holyhead to Kingstown was accomplished in four hours; but throughout the trip I felt that I would sooner cross the Styx to the Plutonian sh.o.r.es than attempt it again. I thought that I had sounded the lowest depths of mortal suffering in the way of sea-sickness, but I found that my Atlantic experiences were but a faint prelude to a mild suggestion of this.

A gentleman at Cork told me an anecdote of a company of emigrants who were observed pa.s.sing back and forth on one of the ferry-boats during an entire day, and when questioned in regard to their strange movements, answered, they were bound to America in the next ship, and were "practising at say-sickness, just." So the tourist in the utmost he may endure on an Atlantic voyage, before crossing the Irish Channel, may have the consolation of knowing that he is but "practising at say-sickness."

At Kingstown we were treated to a taste of nationality in the shape of a bit of a row between two carmen. At the Dublin station we took that peculiar and distinctive Irish vehicle, an outside jaunting-car, which has the merit of giving you a variety in the way of exercise,--joltings, backward, forward, and sidewise,--a vigilant and vigorous endeavor to keep yourself and your luggage on, and an alert watchfulness to keep other vehicles off. There are two kinds of jaunting-cars, which are thus distinguished by the Irish carmen: "The outside car, yer honor, has the wheels inside, and the inside car has the wheels outside."...

The route from Dublin to Cork leads mostly through a barren, boggy, miserable country, with here and there an oasis of waving green and gold, telling of careful cultivation and wise husbandry. There are some fine old ruins along the way, among which I best remember those of Kilmallock, Kildare, where the pious nuns once kept the holy fires burning "through long ages of darkness and storm," Loughman Castle, and the Rocks of Dunamore and Cashel. But all along the line the ruins are almost countless. You grow mortally weary of crumbling turrets, tumble-down gate-ways, battered arches, and staggering towers, all standing out boldly in the sun and storm, for the absence of trees and shrubbery is a marked feature in the agricultural districts of Ireland.

Indeed, the larger part of this ill-fated isle seems, in contrast with fruitful, prosperous, beautiful England, a wild, weary, shadowless waste, scathed, peeled, desolated, and abandoned.

On the following morning [after a night spent at Cork], amid golden sunshine and silvery showers, we drove to Blarney Castle, and wandered through those umbrageous grounds immortalized by the poet in the famous song of the "Groves of Blarney." The castle itself is a n.o.ble old ruin, and its situation and surroundings are remarkably picturesque and curious. There are natural subterranean pa.s.sages leading down to the lake, and a black dungeon, where, according to our guide, "Cromwell, the b.l.o.o.d.y nagur," confined his prisoners. The lake is small, but, according to the above-mentioned authority, quite bottomless. He told us, with a grave face, that the late "Lady Jeffers," having taken a whim into her head to draw it off, had a drain dug full three feet below the surface, but not a drop would run out,--a st.u.r.dy, conservative old lake.

We ascended the great tower, at the top of which we all kissed the new Blarney stone,--it being morally and physically impossible for ladies to salute the real Simon Pure, which is outside the wall some feet from the summit. The gentlemen who accomplish this feat must be held by the feet over the wall, one hundred and twenty feet from the ground, by a stout guide, who is liable to be seized with a sudden weakness, and to call out that he must stop "to spit on his hands,"--that he can _howld_ on no longer, unless his fee is double; and the unhappy dog in suspense pledges himself to a treat. Our guide a.s.sured me that the new Blarney stone was quite as good as the "rale,"--that a certain "widdy lady" made a pilgrimage all the way from the north of England, kissed the spurious stone most rapturously, and made a great match soon after. The question arises, Lay the virtue in the stone, or in the pilgrim's faith?

Our return drive was very charming,--the rain was past and sunlight and fresh breezes poured beauty and gladness on our way. I cannot remember to have seen anywhere within so short a distance so many wild flowers.

The shrubbery was more luxuriant, the trees finer and more abundant, than we had ever seen,--everything on our path was beautiful and gracious save the _humanity_, which was wretched and poverty-stricken in the extreme. From the miserable little mud huts along the road ran scores of children, of all sizes, bare-headed, bare-footed, and bare-legged, with rags of all imaginable hues and textures fluttering in the wind, and attached to their bodies by some unknown and mysterious law of attraction, certainly by no visible bond or support. With faces begrimed by smoke, and wild eyes overhung with wilder locks, they stretched out their dirty beseeching palms, and a.s.sailed us on all sides of our outside car,--most a.s.sailable of vehicles,--fit contrivance for a beggared land.

Irish carmen are a race of Jehus,--driving with eccentric flourishes of the whip, and when more than usually excited, with strange barbaric whoops and h.e.l.los, making their odd little vehicles jump along at an astonishing rate. They are commonly communicative and amusing, though by no means the quaint, cunning, delightful, inimitable wags and wits your Lovers and Levers, your Edgeworths and Halls, have pictured. It is a singular thing that, though they are from the first free and easy in word and manner, they are never offensively so. Native tact, good humor, and warmth of heart take from their advances all appearance of boldness or impertinence. Our driver on this occasion was disposed to be particularly sociable, though not in the jocular way. He was a man of much intelligence for his station, of a serious, even sad expression of face, and he talked powerfully and with intense bitterness of the wrongs and sorrows of the Irish peasantry. I was struck by hearing him ascribe most of their sufferings not to the English government but to the _native_ _Irish proprietors_, who, he averred, had revelled in heartless, wasteful extravagance, while the people starved, until, since the failure of the potato, many of them have been reduced to absolute want. It was almost fearful to mark the wild gleam in the man's eye as he spoke his fierce joy in this retributive justice....

On the morning of August 16 we left Cork for Killarney, by way of Bantry and Glengariff. After a short run on the rail we took a stage-coach, choosing outside seats, like enthusiastic tourists as we are, though the day was dark and showery. There was little in the scenery, and less in the condition of the country and people, to repay us for our exposure to wind and weather till we reached Bantry. I can never forget the forlorn unmitigated wretchedness of the people who thronged around us at the little town of Dunmanway. Among the crowd appealing to us, in all possible variations of the whine mendicious and mendacious, we saw not one man or woman in the national costume and cover-all,--the double cape great-coat and the hooded cloak; all was squalor and tatters soul-sickening and disgusting. Here was infancy, nude and needy, reaching out its dirty little hands; and second childhood bent and tottering, with palsied palm extended, eying you with all the mute wistfulness of a starved spaniel. There was a full a.s.sortment of the halt, the hump-backed, and the crippled,--all degrees of sightlessness and unsightliness. I turned away from the miserable creatures with a heart heavy with hopeless sympathy and vain pity, and with a conscience stricken for all my own sins of unthankfulness and discontent.

And here I may as well pause to remark briefly on the condition and appearance of the peasants in the south of Ireland. Knowing that I could not fairly judge of this cla.s.s by the idle and ragged crowd who gather round the coach or car in the towns and hamlets, I took occasion, during my stay at Cork, to visit several of the country cottages of the working peasants in company with one of the landed proprietors. In but one out of six did I find a regular fireplace and chimney; in but one was there a window of gla.s.s, and that consisted of a single pane. The others had--with the exception of the door, and a hole in the roof, from which the smoke, after wandering at its own sweet will through the cabin, found its way out--no opening whatever for light or ventilation.

But I forget--we did remark a sort of improvised window in one other.

In a low, miserable hovel, belonging to a carman, we found a horse occupying full a third of the scanty room; and above his manger a small hole had been made through the mud wall, the good man having found that the health of the animal required what himself and family lived without,--air.

To the mistress of this unique habitation, whose one apartment served for kitchen, sleeping-room, _stable_, and hall, I said, in horrified amazement, "How is it possible you can live with that horse?" "Sure, miss, he's no throuble," she replied; "and it's little room he takes, after all; for the childer can sleep on the straw under him, just, and creep between his legs, and he never harming them at all, the sensible cratur." It is a common thing to see hens drying their feathers by the genial peat glow, and pigs enjoying the pleasures of the domestic hearth. In another cabin we found two curious old crones, living together on apparently nothing, who loaded us with blessings in the original tongue, and actually went on their knees to offer up thanksgiving for a few half-pence, which we gave as a consideration for intruding on their retirement.

Yet, though living in low, smoky, ill-ventilated cabins,--often with mouldering thatches, and always with damp earth floors, with a pool of stagnant water or a dung-hill before the door,--though themselves ill fed and but half clad, it is a singular fact that the peasants of southern Ireland are apparently a healthful and hardy race. You occasionally see fine specimens of manly and childish beauty among them; but a pretty Irish peasant girl we found the rarest of _rara avises_.

There are some families of Spanish origin about Bantry, and of these we encountered one or two dark-eyed, olive-cheeked beggar boys, who seemed to have leaped out of one of Murillo's pictures. The policemen everywhere are a particularly fine-looking set of fellows; indeed, none but well-made, tall, and powerful men have any chance of enrolment in this honorable terror-inspiring, omnipresent corps.

The professional beggars of Ireland seem a peculiarly hopeless and irredeemable cla.s.s,--not because of the poverty of the country alone, but from their own inherent and inherited idleness and viciousness. They are persistent, pertinacious, sometimes impudent, and often quick-witted and amusing. A friend of ours was waylaid by a certain "widdy" woman, with an unlimited amount of ragged responsibilities at her heels. On hearing her doleful story, our friend advised the fair mendicant to take refuge in the poor-house. "The poor-house!" she exclaimed; "sure it's meself that keeps the poorest house in all Cork, yer honor."

I was amused by an appeal made by an elderly dame to one of our fellow-pa.s.sengers: "Here's a fine fat gentleman, sure; sure he'll give a sixpence to a poor bony body that hasn't broken her fast at all the day."

If you wish to take a meditative walk among the hills, the chances are that you will return with a considerable ragged retinue; but the larger detachment of this ign.o.ble army of alms-seekers are stationed along the public roads. They make their startling sorties from the most lonely, wild, and inaccessible places; like Roderick Dhu's men, they leap up from "copse and heath." Every rock hides a waiting mendicant, and every tuft of broom stirs as we approach with a lurking tatterdemalion.

They leap on your way from behind walls, and drop down upon you from overhanging trees,--small footpads, or rather _paddies_, who present palms instead of pistols, and blarney and worry you alike out of pence and patience.

After a day of wet and weary travel through a melancholy country, we enjoyed to the utmost the beautiful approach to Bantry, under a clear and sunny sky, and welcomed with enthusiasm the sight of its lovely and famous bay. But even this bright vision was soon eclipsed by Glengariff, where we spent the night. Thus far on my tour I have seen nothing to compare with the glorious beauty of that place. In all the solemn shadows of its wild loneliness, the dark deeps and frowning heights of its grandeur, in all the sweet lights of its loveliness, it lives, and must ever live, in my charmed memory; but I will not attempt to picture it in words.

After dinner, though a light rain was falling, we took a row around the bay, and remained on the water until the night set in. I think we shall none of us soon forget that row over the smooth and silent bay, in the rain and deepening twilight, under the shadows of mountain and rock.

The scene would have been too wild, solemn, and awfully lonely but for the peculiar wit and story-telling talent of "Jerry," our guide and helmsman. He entertained us with some wonderful legends of a certain Father Shannon, a priest, and a famous character in this region about half a century ago.

[Ill.u.s.tration: QUEENSTOWN HARBOR]

One anecdote ill.u.s.trative of the holy man's quick-wittedness impressed me as an instance of "cuteness" pa.s.sing the cuteness of Yankees. "The good father," says Jerry, "was one day fishing, in his boat, on the bay, when he heard a swarm of bees buzzing about him. Then he begins to rattle with a knife, or spoon, in an iron kettle he had with him in the boat, till he feels that all the bees have settled on his shoulders.

Then he slyly reaches back, and takes hold of the tail of his shirt (begging your pardon, ladies!) and he suddenly turns it over his head, bees and all, and puts it into the kettle, which he covers over in a second just; and so he takes the whole swarm to Lord Bantry, and sells them for three pounds, and gets his shirt back, too, yer honor."...

The mountain road from Glengariff to Killarney is a splendid specimen of engineering, and leads through scenery wild and beautiful in the extreme. On the sunny morning of our leaving Glengariff, landscape and air were fresh and delicious after the night's abundant rain, and with thrills and palpitations of inexpressible joy my heart responded to the gladness of nature. I shall never forget the childish ecstasy of delight with which I gazed around me, and drank in the fragrant air of the morning.

The three lakes of Killarney descended upon by this road are likely to disappoint the tourist, especially if he be an American, more especially if he be a reader of, and a devout believer in, Mrs. Hall's beautiful and most poetical book, "A Week in Killarney." In truth, such fairy sheets of water seem little to deserve the name of lakes at first, but they grow on your respect rapidly as you approach; their beauty is, near or afar, quite exquisite and undeniable, and the mountains which surround them are really very respectable elevations. Our first visit was to the Tore Waterfall, by far the most beautiful cascade I have seen since coming abroad. The fall is between sixty and seventy feet; the glen into which the water comes leaping, and foaming, and flashing is wild and rocky, and overhung with richest foliage....

Our first expedition was to the Gap of Dunloe, a wild and gloomy mountain-pa.s.s, especially interesting to the reader of Gerald Griffin's fine novel of "The Collegians" as the scene of poor Eily Connor's happy honeymoon and tragic taking off. Our guide furnished myself and a pleasant English friend with ponies; the remainder of the party took a car.

Though tolerably well mounted, and able to abruptly cut the company of the old, crippled, and blind of the begging fraternity, we found that we had small advantage over the boys; the fleet-footed little rascals kept up with us for miles,--one juvenile Celt, literally _sans culotte_, but in a shirt of elder-brotherly dimensions, giving us a sort of Tam O'Shanter chase. A pretty, dark-eyed boy, running by my side, held up a bunch of purple heather and wild honeysuckle, saying, with an insinuating smile, "Plase, my lady, buy these ilegant bright flowers, so like yer honor's self, this beautiful summer morning." What woman could resist such an appeal?

At the entrance of the Gap we were met by a detachment of volunteer guides, and a company of "mountain-dew" girls,--maidens with cans of goats' milk and flasks of "potheen," with which they are happy to treat the traveller, for a consideration. After listening to some grand echoes, called forth by the rich bugle-notes of our guide, we proceeded through the pa.s.s. This, by itself, did not equal our expectation; its finest feature is the "Purple Mountain," which in the glorious sunlight of that morning was beautiful beyond conception.

From Lord Brandon's demesne we embarked upon the upper lake, rowed among its fairy islands, and ran down "the long range" to the middle lake, pausing for a little gossip with the echoes of "Eagle Nest," and shooting "Old Wier Bridge" on our way. The bay and mountain of Glena are the gems of Killarney. Even now, looking back upon the scene through the sobered light of recollection, it is all enchantment,--the sh.o.r.e gorgeous with magnificent foliage, the waters flashing with silver gleams, the sky golden with sunset light; and it is difficult for me to believe that there is under the broad heaven a lovelier spot. Even the echoes from this beautiful green mountain seemed clearer, yet softer and more melodious, than any we had heard before.

We took dinner on sh.o.r.e, in a delicious little nook shadowed by arbutus-trees, dining off a large rock, some seated _a la Turc_, some reclining in the ancient Oriental style. Oh, we had merry times! And what with toasts and songs and legends, and joyous laughter ringing out, peal on peal, over the still water, the wonder is we failed to rouse the great O'Donoghue, who, according to popular tradition, dwells in a princely palace under the lake, and only comes to the surface to take an airing on horseback every May morning. Our row homeward, through the soft lingering sunset light, with the plash and murmur of the blue waves, rising with the rising wind, heard in the intervals between the sweet songs of our guide, was a fitting close to a day of shadowless pleasure.

NORTH OF IRELAND SCENES.

W. GEORGE BEERS.

[We have described a run through the south of Ireland, which to the traveller seemed but a brown and barren commentary on the so-called Emerald Island. The traveller from whom we now quote found the aspect of nature verdant enough fully to justify this t.i.tle. But the poverty and shiftlessness which appeared so patent to Dr. Woods proved equally evident to Mr. Beers, to whom the lack of snakes in Green Erin seemed more than replaced by the mult.i.tude of beggars.]

Up in the forecastle of an ocean steamer a group of sea-tired souls look away to starboard, where a faint shape lies on the horizon like an early-morning cloud. "It's only a bit of old-country fog," mutters the Grumbler, and goes back to his bed. A thrush had been playing for over an hour on the spars and rigging, and we fancied we could smell the land from which it had flown to greet us. And by and by the dim line took a more solid shape, and soon we could see the rough rocks of the northern coast. We were nearing Innistrahull light-house and Malin Head, and the ship's engines stopped, for the first time since leaving the New World, to take on a pilot. A short sail along the rocky coast, pa.s.sing the ivy-covered ruins of an ancient castle, the green refreshing gra.s.s, the hedges, and the white houses, and the beautiful panorama of Moville, at the mouth of the Foyle, was unfolded, and Nature tinged the sea and sky with a masterpiece of sunset. Suddenly a few jaunting-cars came flying down the hill like highway comets, and the Grumbler came up again, in time to find that we were only a hundred yards from sh.o.r.e. "That's Ireland," said he. We felt enlightened. It was not long before we were ash.o.r.e at Moville, a quiet watering-place for the people of Derry, Tyrone, and Donegal counties.

Our first reception was from a st.u.r.dy beggar, who apologized for the absence of the mayor and corporation. I had heard of this genius of Moville before. He is a character of the place, and one of the most original hypocrites among the begging fraternity. When I was in Queenstown, a few weeks afterwards, I saw a perfect shoal of his kind, of all degrees of dirt, disease, and disaster,--a sort of ragged resurrection through which pa.s.sengers from an American steamer had to pa.s.s. There were beggars with strong lungs and stout legs; beggars with scarce a lung and but one leg; paupers in all the traditional heraldry of rags and wretchedness,--blind, crippled, crooked, and crazy; with bags and babies, sticks and dogs, canes and crutches, all colors of hair and all sorts of disease, real or feigned; some funny, some furious, some bold, some blushing, nearly all overwhelming in benediction.

One sore-eyed veteran, whose apostolical succession from blind Bartimeus I should have been easily disposed to accept, stuck to my heels, and in a tone that would have melted the Blarney stone implored me, "A pinny, yer honor." With New-World innocence of Old-World wickedness, I gave my Irish Moses a sixpence, upon which the crowd came upon me in a ring of blessing, until I pushed through it with some rough epithet. In the twinkling of an eye the circle of sickly saints fell into a close column of renovated sinners, and yelled after me the characteristic south-of-Ireland curses, from the mild "Bad luck to ye!" to the more historical "The curse of Cromwell upon ye!" One crooked old lady had got close to my ear: "Shure, yer honor, I've been bint up like this these twinty year wid the rheumatiz, and me back's bruk and one of me lungs is gone;" but when I shook her off she straightened up like a giantess and swore at me with as hearty a pair of respiratory organs as any Glasgow fish-wife might boast. I felt as if I had performed a miracle upon the old lady's spine. But I nearly collapsed with laughter when I saw one mild-looking fellow, who had been limping near me with his right leg held up in a wooden crutch and his right hand apparently shrivelled beyond the power of use, holding the crutch, which he had unhitched, under his left arm and shaking the game leg and the lame fist at my back.

Our arrival at the north, however, was less ceremonious. I do not know whether our Moville beggar was the last of the mendicant Mohicans of the coast or had simply stolen a march upon the rest of his fraternity, but there he stood, a monopolist of the art: "Good luck to ye, jintlemen!

Ye're welcome to Ireland. Ye'll give me a few pennies for luck, yer honors, won't ye? Jist whativer ye like, jintlemen. Be good to the motherless and sivin small childer, and niver a bite to ate since yesterday mornin'. Jist whativer ye like, jintlemen." Our first Old-World beggar had caught us in the tide of good nature, and the pennies soon grew to shillings. It was our first experience, and we were on the "Green Isle." We learned to be wiser before we had gone much farther, and by the time we left the island we felt as if we could throttle every beggar we met.

"How long have you been begging?" I asked the Moville suppliant.

"I began wid me mother, sir, soon after I was born."

"And do you never work?"

"Work, is it? Shure, sir, I was niver educated to it. And there's too many people working already, sir."

"How long is it since you used soap and water?" said I.

"Now, yer honor, where'd _I_ get soap, when I can't get bread? Me childer would ate it if there was any in the house."

"Well, I'd like to see what you look like when you're clean. There's another sixpence for you,--half for your stomach and half for your skin.

If you'll get some soap and go down to the sea there and wash yourself well while we're away, I'll give you sixpence more when we come back."