With the World's Great Travellers Volume Iii Part 11

"Shure," quickly replied the Moville wit, "doesn't yer honor know that ye can't use soap in salt water? But I'll go to the pump, so I will."

It was quite a disappointment afterwards to learn that, like Montaigne's page, our beggar was never guilty of telling the truth, that the "sivin small childer" had yet to be born, and that he considered our party the best fools he had met that season.

We were to drive down to Green-Castle, in the vicinity of which the jarvies said we should be sure to hear the cuckoo. Our first experience of a jaunting-car was pleasant, though precarious. It had the dash of danger which spices adventure. A sober foreigner can seldom keep his seat at first; an Irishman may be so drunk that he walks zigzag on the sidewalk, but he never falls off a car--unless he's sober. At first blush, especially in the cities, the jaunting-car seems an ingenious device to furnish Irish surgeons with amputations. As you go tearing along the streets and flying around corners, your legs hanging over the sides in close proximity to other "highway comets" tearing along the opposite way, you have a choice of death by being dashed to "smithereens" on your face by a jerk or dying in desperate collision with a street-car. Our jarvie was a genuine Paddy, full to the brim of wit and song. Between the stretches of his imagination in tale-telling (all his native geese were royal swans, and for the one ruin we were approaching he built a score of castles in the air) he made the road lively with local Irish airs. During the winter these jarvies have little or nothing to do, and one of them, being asked how they spent that season, replied, "Making up stories, sir, to tell the travellers in summer."

However much we were imposed upon in the matter of tale and tradition, there was no deception in the interest of the drive. The sea lay to the right. Along the highway and in many of the fields, though much of the country to the left was barren and hilly, the daisy was peeping up for our first recognition; the primroses lay in rich golden clumps upon the banks; violets, blue, red, and white, little purple bluebells, day-nettles, which the bees and boys love to suck, and many other new and old wild flowers, were pointed out to us as we jogged along.

Sometimes we jumped down to pick them, gathering whole handfuls of the faintly-perfumed primroses and burying our noses in their exquisite blossoms in a way to make an emigrant homesick. On we jolted, and soon came within sight of the romantic hamlet, its picturesque castle and fort facing the sea. With a final quick trot and a jerk our driver pulled up at the Green-Castle Hotel, with the artless hint that its champagne for jintlemen and its whiskey for jarvies had no rival from Malin Head to Cape Clear.

[After giving his readers the legendary history of Green-Castle our author proceeds to describe its present appearance.]

The old castle is now a roofless wreck of time and siege, but enough is left of its walls--eight feet thick--and its deep dungeons to show that it was in its time a strong fortress. We walked over the s.p.a.ce between the walls, about eighty yards by forty, upon which the sun and the rains descend and where the gra.s.s grew knee-deep. Detached bits of wall were covered with splendid ivy. On the walls here and there we saw the little whitlow-gra.s.s, and in the crevices of the rocks the lilac flowers of the toad-flax, which one sees in all such sea-side ruins in Ireland. We climbed the steep crag of the highest portion facing the sea. Many of the stones were loose and slipped out from under our feet. We mounted to the very top of the old battlement,--a glorious spot from which to watch a storm when the great waves roll up in close column and break over the rocks. Creeping from the base of the perpendicular rock a hundred feet below, thick ivy had grown to the very summit, its rootlets and tendrils turning and twisting into and upon each other, binding the stones better than mortar, sucking out the moisture of the wall, and keeping it as dry as punk. Everywhere in Ireland one is struck by the wonderful tenacity of ivy, which creeps along the ground or crawls up and clings to the barest flint. If you lift one of the young shoots, it clings to the earth like a hungry leech to human skin. If you turn it up, you see rootlets, like the legs of a caterpillar, by which it attaches itself to the ground, and which it seems to lose when transplanted to America.

We leaned over on the thick leaves and tendrils to pull the pungent berries, when out flew two scared jackdaws just below. We rustled the tendrils, and away scudded a score or more of birds to tell the sea-gulls of this invasion of their ancient nest. Down near the sh.o.r.e white daisies speckled the green gra.s.s like a first snow-fall.

But hark! Is that the mystic cry of the cuckoo we are hearing for the first time? How plaintive and lonely its monotone!--"Cuckoo! cuckoo!

cuckoo!" We have never heard that sound in America except from wretched Swiss clocks. What a world of delightful a.s.sociations thrills through our veins! How the old familiar stories told us of our parents' romps in the green lanes of the old country come to our memories, and the wonder with which in their childhood days they stopped to listen to this cla.s.sic bird. There it is again, over in the woodland. Hark! "Cuckoo!

cuckoo! cuckoo!" One of our company, born in the old land, and now returned for the first time in thirty years, began to reach the melting-point, when, looking in the direction of the cry, we caught sight of an incautious Irish boy peeping from behind a tree, with one hand to his mouth, just in the act of repeating this old Green-Castle trick of "fooling the people from America who want to hear the cuckoo."

When we came down from the battlement we were told that a drunken sailor of H. M. "Vanguard" had fallen asleep on top of the wall a few weeks before and had rolled off to the bottom, a distance of a hundred feet, but had not been hurt enough to prevent his marriage the day before our arrival. Our informant added that it was the "potheen" that had saved him: "If he'd been sober, sir, shure he'd have wakened up a dead man."

We had a rattling drive back to Moville. The first sight we met on reaching the wharf was our jolly beggar, transformed almost past recognition by soap and water, sneezing and coughing and claiming the promised sixpence: "Shure, yer honor, ye might make it a shillin', for in the washin' I've caught the divil of a cowld." When we came back a few months afterwards we missed him. I made up my mind that he had never recovered from that cleansing; but a more recent visitor tells me that he is still alive, as witty and as dirty as ever.

[The traveller next made his way, _via_ Londonderry, to Antrim, where stands a celebrated round tower.]

There is perhaps nothing of more puzzling interest to the Irish antiquary than the round towers, of which there are about eighty in the island. Their origin and purpose have been variously guessed at, some maintaining that they were erected by the Danes as watch-towers and afterwards changed by the Christian Irish into clock- or bell-towers.

But why should the Danes confine these structures to Ireland, and not build them in England, Scotland, and other regions where they had a much firmer foothold? Others regard them as fire-temples, where the Druids lit the sacred flame and kept it safe from pollution. This view was accepted for a long time as a settlement of the question, on account of the resemblance of these towers to similar structures found in India and thought to have been used in an extinct form of worship. The Irish Druids followed many Eastern customs in their religious rites, but these may have been mere coincidences. The turrets in the vicinity of Turkish mosques, from the summits of which approaching festivals were proclaimed, suggested the hypothesis that the Irish towers were intended for the same purpose. Others held the theory that they were built by the ancient bishops as strongholds for the sacred articles belonging to the churches. In the neighborhood of many of these towers churches still exist. A very picturesque one forms part of a church in Castle-Dermot, in the county Down. At Drumbo, a few miles from Belfast, the ruin of one stands in the church-yard of a Presbyterian chapel.

The Antrim tower is in fine preservation to the very summit, but no trace has been found to indicate that a church existed in its vicinity. It is ninety-three feet high, and about fifty-three feet in circ.u.mference at its base, is built of rough stone, and has a stone flooring, underneath which it is supposed a sepulchre, as at Ardmore, exists. Above the door-way is a bas-relief like a Maltese cross. I climbed into the tower through the entrance, two feet by four. Its width inside is about eight feet, but narrows gradually to the top. The ivy which clung affectionately to its outside had grown into several of the windows and lay in decayed brambles inside. Up at the very top the jackdaws had a gloriously independent life of it all to themselves. The gra.s.s outside was as level as a century's care and rolling could make it. And hark! "Cuckoo! cuckoo! cuckoo!" "No, you don't, my dear fellow!"

I replied. "You are a relative of our cuckoo of Green-Castle." "Cuckoo!"

he replied in denial; and I found out that it was a live cuckoo coaxing me to play at hide-and-seek. I started to accept the challenge,--when "Trespa.s.sers will be Prosecuted" stared me in the face as I mounted an innocent stile. Forty jackdaws--the Forty Thieves--got together on the topmost boughs of trees near by and discussed my intentions: Was I loading a gun, or only making a sketch? Was I painter or poacher? I followed the cuckoo's cry in spite of the trespa.s.s, but caught no second glimpse of him.

Coming back and crossing a picturesque stream, a short walk brought me to the famous Lough Neagh, the fourth largest lake in Europe, twenty miles in length and fifteen in breadth. In size it seemed a mere pond, compared to the great inland seas of America; but the legend of its buried glories, and the belief of the fishermen that when the water is clear they can see round towers and high steeples and churches of the land below, would waken any one's interest. Wonderful petrifactions are found along its margins, referable to some remote geological era, and no doubt these fossil woods gave rise to the fishermen's superst.i.tion. On the borders of the lake you see the ruins of the seat of Lord O'Neill, "Shane's Castle," which is surrounded by as much superst.i.tion as the lake. The banshee of the O'Neills was a firm article of faith of mine host in Antrim, who told me that his father had heard its wail.

As I came back to the town I saw a characteristic scene which reminded me of Father Prout's remark, that "the pig is as essential an inmate of the Irish cabin as the Arab steed of the shepherd's tent on the plains of Mesopotamia." At the door of a thatched mud hut there was a fierce tooth-and-nail contest between two pigs. Out sallied the good woman of the house and belabored the nearest one gently with stick, roughly with tongue: "Whist wid ye! Take that, now! _Come into the house wid ye!_"

With well-trained docility Piggy obeyed. A short distance away I saw a crowd gathered about a cart covered with a pure white sheet. The look of delight upon the faces of those who had peeped under the cover tempted my curiosity, and I lifted the linen. It was a young pig, as white as snow and as fresh as a daisy.

But I intended only to take a peep at the northern coast of Ireland, and here I am _en route_ to Belfast. As you go farther you fare better in the way of fine scenery and interesting people. There is something about the greenness of Ireland which sanctifies its claim to be called the Emerald Isle. I have seen nothing anywhere else to rival the soft luxuriance of nature here. Gra.s.s, ivy, and flowers seem as indigenous as hospitable hearts. I was told that if you flung a clean-cut stick in a County Meath meadow, you might pick it up in a day or two covered with young lichens and moss; but this reminded me too much of the crow-bar planted in some other fertile country in the evening which sprouted out tenpenny nails in the morning. The very primroses have a depth of mellow beauty I never saw in England. Walking through the country you get a good insight into its social and political questions, and, whatever preconceptions you may have, you will be sure--if you have no bigotry in your bones and do not excite people about the burning questions of the hour--to carry from Ireland memories of its lovely scenery which nothing on earth can ever dispel.

PARIS AND ITS ATTRACTIONS.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.

[The city of Paris, the cynosure of European eyes, and the paradise of good Americans, calls loudly for a description at our hands. It is a call which can readily be answered. We suffer, indeed, from a superfluity of riches. Descriptions of every sort, shape, and complexion are so numerous that it is not easy to select with discretion. We take one that has the quality of enthusiastic admiration from the "Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands" of the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." It begins with her entrance into the city, after pa.s.sing the easy ordeal of the custom-house officials.]

We rode through streets whose names were familiar, crossed the Carrousel, pa.s.sed the Seine, and stopped before an ancient mansion, in the Rue de Verneuil, belonging to M. le Marquis de Brige. This Faubourg St. Germain is the part of Paris where the ancient n.o.bility lived, and the houses exhibit marks of former splendor. The marquis is one of those chivalrous legitimists who uphold the claims of Henri V. He lives in the country, and rents his hotel. Mrs. C. occupies the suite of rooms on the lower floor. We entered by a ponderous old gate-way, opened by the _concierge_, pa.s.sed through a large paved quadrangle, traversed a short hall, and found ourselves in a large, cheerful parlor, looking out into a small flower garden. There was no carpet, but what is called here a parquet floor, or mosaic of oak blocks, waxed and highly polished. The sofas and chairs were covered with light chintz, and the whole air of the apartment shady and cool as a grotto. A jardiniere filled with flowers stood in the centre of the room, and around it a group of living flowers--mother, sisters, and daughters--scarcely less beautiful. In five minutes we were at home. French life is different from any other.

Elsewhere you do as the world pleases; here you do as you please yourself; my spirits always rise when I get among the French....

_Monday, June 6._--This day was consecrated to knick-knacks. Accompanied by Mrs. C., whom years of residence have converted into a perfect _Parisienne_, we visited shop after shop and store after store. The politeness of the shopkeepers is inexhaustible. I felt quite ashamed to spend a half-hour looking at everything and then depart without buying; but the civil Frenchman bowed and smiled, and thanked us for coming.

In the evening we rode to L'Arc de Triomphe d'Etoile, an immense pile of ma.s.sive masonry, from the top of which we enjoyed a brilliant panorama.

Paris was beneath us, from the Louvre to the Bois de Boulogne, with its gardens and moving myriads, its sports, and games, and light-hearted mirth,--a vast Vanity Fair, blazing in the sunlight. A deep and strangely-blended impression of sadness and gayety sunk into our hearts as we gazed. All is vivacity, gracefulness, and sparkle to the eye; but ah, what fires are smouldering below! Are not all these vines rooted in the lava and ashes of the volcano-side?...

_Wednesday, June 8._--A day on foot in Paris. Surrendered H. to the care of our fair hostess. Attempted to hire a boat at one of the great bathing establishments for a pull on the Seine. Why not on the Seine as well as on the Thames? But the old Triton demurred. The tide _marched_ too strong,--"_Il marche trop fort._" Onward, then, along the quays; visiting the curious old book-stalls, picture-stands, and flower-markets. Lean over the parapet and gaze upon this modern Euphrates, rushing between solid walls of masonry through the heart of another Babylon. The river is the only thing not old. These waters are as turbid, tumultuous, unbridled, as when forests covered all these banks,--fit symbol of peoples and nations in their mad career, generation after generation. Inst.i.tutions, like hewn granite, may wall them in, and vast arches span their flow, and hierarchies domineer over the tide; but the scorning waters burst into life unchangeable, and sweep impetuous through the heart of Vanity Fair, and dash out again into the future the same grand, ungovernable Euphrates stream. I do not wonder Egypt adored her Nile and Rome her Tiber. Surely, the life artery of Paris is this Seine beneath my feet! And there is no scene like this, as I gaze upward and downward, comprehending in a glance the immense panorama of art and architecture,--life, motion, enterprise, pleasure, pomp, and power. Beautiful Paris! What city in the world can compare with thee?

And is it not chiefly because, either by accident or by instinctive good taste, her treasures of beauty and art are so disposed along the Seine as to be visible at a glance to the best effect? As the instinct of the true _Parisienne_ teaches her the mystery of setting off the graces of her person by the fascinations of dress, so the instinct of the nation to set off the city by the fascinations of architecture and embellishment. Hence a chief superiority of Paris to London. The Seine is straight, and its banks are laid out in broad terraces on either side, called _quais_, lined with her stateliest palaces and gardens. The Thames forms an elbow, and is enveloped in dense fog and smoke. London lowers; the Seine sparkles; London shuts down upon the Thames, and there is no point of view for the whole river panorama; Paris rises amphitheatrically, on either side the Seine, and the eye from the Pont d'Austerlitz seems to fly through the immense reach like an arrow, casting its shadow on everything of beauty or grandeur Paris possesses.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GRAND OPERA-HOUSE, PARIS]

Rapidly now I sped onward, paying brief visits to the Palais de Justice, the Hotel de Ville, and spending a cool half-hour in Notre Dame. I love to sit in these majestic fanes, abstracting them from the superst.i.tion which does but desecrate them, and gaze upward to their lofty, vaulted arches, to drink in the impression of architectural sublimity, which I can neither a.n.a.lyze nor express. Cathedrals do not seem to me to have been built; they seem, rather, stupendous growths of nature, like crystals, or cliffs of basalt. There is little ornament here; that roof looks plain and bare; yet I feel that the air is dense with sublimity.

Onward I sped, crossing a bridge by the Hotel Dieu, and, leaving the river, plunged into narrow streets, exploring a quadrangular market; surveyed the old church of St. Genevieve, and the new, now the Pantheon; went onward to the Jardin des Plantes, and explored its tropical bowers. Many things remind me to-day of New Orleans and its Levee, its Mississippi, its Cathedral, and the luxuriant vegetation of the Gulf.

In fact, I seem to be walking in my sleep in a kind of glorified New Orleans, all the while. Yet I return to the gardens of the Tuileries and the Place Vendome, and in the shadow of Napoleon's Column the illusion vanishes. Hundreds of battles look down upon me from their blazonry.

In the evening I rested from the day's fatigue by an hour in the garden of the Palais Royal. I sat by one of the little tables and called for an ice. There were hundreds of ladies and gentlemen eating ices, drinking wine, reading the papers, smoking, chatting; scores of pretty children were frolicking and enjoying the balmy evening. Here six or eight midgets were jumping the rope, while papa and mamma swung it for them.

Pretty little things, with their flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes, how they did seem to enjoy themselves! What parent was ever far from home that did not espy in every group of children his own little ones,--his Mary or his Nellie, his Henry or Charlie? So it was with me. There was a ring of twenty or thirty singing and dancing, with a smaller ring in the centre, while old folks and boys stood outside. But I heard not a single oath, nor saw a rough or rude action, during the whole time I was there.

The boys standing by looked on quietly, like young gentlemen. The best finale of such a toilsome day of sight-seeing was a warm bath in the Rue de Bac, for the trifling sum of fifteen sous. The cheapness and convenience of bathing here is a great recommendation of Paris life.

They will bring you a hot bath at your house for twenty-five cents, and that without bustle or disorder. And nothing so effectually as an evening bath, as my experience testifies, cures fatigue and propitiates to dreamless slumber....

After visiting the Luxembourg, I resorted to the gardens of the Tuileries. The thermometer was at about eighty degrees in the shade.

From the number of people a.s.sembled, one would have thought, if it had been in the United States, that some great ma.s.s convention was coming off. Under the impenetrable screen of the trees, in the dark, cool, refreshing shade, are thousands of chairs, for which one pays two cents apiece. Whole families come, locking up their door, bringing the baby, work, dinner, or lunch, take a certain number of chairs, and spend the day. As far as eye can reach you see a mult.i.tude seated, as if in church, with other mult.i.tudes moving to and fro, while boys and girls without number are frolicking, racing, playing ball, driving hoop, etc., but contriving to do it without making a hideous racket.

How French children are taught to play and enjoy themselves without disturbing everybody else is a mystery. "_C'est gentil_" seems to be a talismanic spell; and "_Ce n'est pas gentil ca_" is sufficient to check every rising irregularity. Oh, that some _savant_ would write a book and tell us how it is done! I gazed for half an hour on the spectacle. A more charming sight my eyes never beheld. There were gray-headed old men, and women, and invalids; and there were beautiful demoiselles working worsted, embroidery, sewing; men reading papers; and, in fact, people doing everything they would do in their own parlors. And all were graceful, kind, and obliging; not a word or an act of impoliteness or indecency. No wonder the French adore Paris, thought I; in no other city in the world is a scene like this possible. No wonder that their hearts die within them at thoughts of exile in the fens of Cayenne!

But under all this there lie, as under the cultivated crust of this fair world, deep abysses of soul, where volcanic ma.s.ses of molten lava surge and shake the tremulous earth. In the gay and bustling Boulevards, a friend, an old resident of Paris, pointed out to me, as we rode, the bullet-marks that scarred the houses,--significant tokens of what seems, but is not, forgotten.

At sunset a military band of about seventy performers began playing in front of the Tuileries. They formed an immense circle, the leader in the centre. He played the octave flute, which also served as a baton for marking time. The music was characterized by delicacy, precision, suppression, and subjugation of rebellious material.

I imagined a congress of horns, clarionets, trumpets, etc., conversing in low tones on some important theme; nay, rather a conspiracy of instruments, mourning between whiles their subjugation, and ever and anon breaking out in a fierce _emeute_, then repressed, hushed, dying away, as if they had heard of Baron Munchausen's frozen horn, and had conceived the idea of yielding their harmonies without touch of human lips, yet were sighing and sobbing at their impotence. Perhaps I detected the pulses of a nation's palpitating heart, throbbing for liberty, but trodden down, and sobbing in despair.

[A _salon_ experience is next described, followed by a visit to Versailles. Then our auth.o.r.ess plunges into the world of art at the Louvre.]

At last I have come into dream-land; into the lotos-eater's paradise; into the land where it is always afternoon. I am released from care; I am unknown, unknowing; I live in a house whose arrangements seem to me strange, old, and dreamy. In the heart of a great city I am as still as if in a convent; in the burning heats of summer our rooms are shadowy and cool as a cave. My time is all my own. I may at will lie on a sofa, and dreamily watch the play of the leaves and flowers in the little garden into which my room opens; or I may go into the parlor adjoining, whence I hear the quick voices of my beautiful and vivacious young friends.

You ought to see these girls. Emma might look like a Madonna, were it not for her wicked wit; and as to Anna and Lizzie, as they glance by me, now and then, I seem to think them a kind of sprite, or elf, made to inhabit shady old houses, just as twinkling harebells grow in old castles; and then the gracious mamma, who speaks French or English like a stream of silver, is she not, after all, the fairest of any of them?

And there is Caroline, piquant, racy, full of conversation, sharp as a quartz crystal, how I like to hear her talk! These people know Paris, as we say in America, "like a book." They have studied it aesthetically, historically, socially. They have studied French people and French literature, and studied it with enthusiasm, as people ever should who would truly understand. They are all kindness to me. Whenever I wish to see anything, I have only to speak; or to know, I have only to ask. At breakfast every morning we compare notes and make up our lists of wants.

My first, of course, was the Louvre. It is close by us. Think of it. To one who has starved all a life, in vain imaginings of what art might be, to know that you are within a stone's throw of a museum full of its miracles; Greek, a.s.syrian, Egyptian, Roman sculptors and modern painting, all there!...

It was, then, with a thrill almost of awe that I approached the Louvre.

Here, perhaps, said I to myself, I shall answer fully the question that has long wrought within my soul. What is art? and what can it do? Here, perhaps, these yearnings for the ideal will meet their satisfaction. The ascent to the picture-gallery tends to produce a flutter of excitement and expectation. Magnificent staircases, dim perspectives of frescoes and carvings, the glorious hall of Apollo, rooms with mosaic pavements, antique vases, countless spoils of art, dazzle the eye of the neophyte, and prepare the mind for some grand enchantment. Then opens on one the grand hall of paintings arranged by schools, the works of each artist by themselves, a wilderness of gorgeous growths.

I first walked through the whole, offering my mind up aimlessly to see if there were any picture there great and glorious enough to seize and control my whole being, and answer at once the cravings of the poetic and artistic element. For any such I looked in vain. I saw a thousand beauties, as also a thousand enormities, but nothing of that overwhelming, subduing nature which I had conceived. Most of the men there had painted with dry eyes and cool hearts, thinking only of the mixing of their colors and the jugglery of their art, thinking little of heroism, love, faith, or immortality. Yet when I had resigned this longing, when I was sure I should not meet there what I sought, then I began to enjoy very heartily what there was.

In the first place, I now saw Claudes worthy of the reputation he bore.

Three or four of these were studied with great delight,--the delight one feels who, conscientiously bound to be delighted, suddenly comes into a situation to be so. I saw, now, those atmospheric traits, those reproductions of the mysteries of air and of light, which are called so wonderful, and for which all admire Claude, but for which so few admire Him who made Claude, and who every day creates around us in the commonest scenes effects far more beautiful. How much, even now, my admiration of Claude was genuine, I cannot say. How can we ever be sure on this point, when we admire what has prestige and sanction, not to admire which is an argument against ourselves? Certainly, however, I did feel great delight in some of these works.