CHAPTER VIII
COUSIN BEE’S FARM IN TONROE
It was an April morning at Cousin Bee’s little farm-house in Tonroe. The kettle was bubbling cheerfully over the burning peat in the fireplace; the cement floor of the kitchen was spotlessly clean; and Patrick, Bee’s husband, was making the children feel quite at home as he talked with them about Donegal and laughed heartily over their little stories.
Danny, Kathleen and Mary Ellen had arrived at the station with the two grandmothers the night before, and nothing would do but they must all leave the train together.
“Sure, we’ve room and to spare for a strong lad like you,” Patrick had told Danny; and Bee had said, “’Twould be a shame for Mary Ellen and Kathleen to be separated so sudden-like.”
So Uncle Barney took the two grandmothers home with him to Killaraght, while Danny and Kathleen went with Mary Ellen to visit Cousin Bee before going on with their journey,—Kathleen to Kilkenny, and Danny to Queenstown, where he was to take the steamer for America.
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York
Cousin Bee’s Farmhouse in Tonroe
Notice the thatched roof and the broad chimneys.
Their first morning in Tonroe opened bright and cheery, outside as well as in, and Kathleen was so excited over all the new sights that she could hardly wait to eat her breakfast. Of course everything had to be described to Mary Ellen, and Patrick’s hearty laugh filled the kitchen when Kathleen told her sister that the village looked as if a giant had taken a great creel filled with houses, and dropped them from a high ladder to the plain below.
“Kathleen never saw so many houses together before, till she went to Letterkenny yesterday to take the train away from Donegal,” Danny explained.
“Then she’ll like to ride over to Boyle with Bee on market days,” said Patrick kindly; “there’s houses a-plenty there. But the plains of Boyle will look flat enough to her after the mountains of her own county.”
“Oh, Mary Ellen, come here!” cried Kathleen, who had gone to the back door for another look at the village. “There’s a church steeple far away beyond a hilleen, and there’s the fine National School building that Grandma Barry used to tell us about. It’s on the little hill, and I can see it every time I look out at the door. But the mountains are far away. There’s not one to be seen near by.”
“Perhaps they have put on a cloak of darkness,” suggested Mary Ellen. “Is there nothing at all where the mountains rightly belong?”
“It’s better than mountains,” said Kathleen decidedly, to Patrick’s delight. “There’s another hilleen of trees just beyond the hedge, and it looks like a picnic garden, for the trees are all covered with creels and creels of pink and white blossoms.”
“She means the rath, and the hawthorn trees,” exclaimed Patrick.
“It is an old fort, darlin’,” Bee explained, “and it was built by a great chief hundreds of years ago; but it looks like a little hill now. There’s another just forninst the church steeple; and one off to the side of the house that you’d best not go too near.”
“Why not?” asked Kathleen curiously.
“An old chief was buried there hundreds of years ago,” answered Bee, “and now the fairies live in it.”
“Oh, Mary Ellen,” whispered Kathleen, “there are fairies here after all, and we were thinkin’ we had left them behind us in Donegal.”
Then she said aloud to Cousin Bee, “It would be a fine place for the fairies to dance under the pink and white trees in the rath beyond the garden. Did the old chiefs have their picnics there?”
“Whist, jewel, the Irish chiefs had other things to do,” said her cousin. “They had to be fighting with other chiefs, and killing the wild beasts; and sometimes they went off hunting foxes and deer through the green forests, but I’m thinking they had no time for picnics.”
Mary Ellen was standing by Kathleen’s side, her sightless eyes looking beyond the green hedge toward the beautiful mound of trees that scented the air with thousands of blossoms.
“What did the chiefs do with the forts?” she asked.
“They lived in them,” answered Bee. “First they built a great circular wall of earth or stone to keep out wild beasts and robbers; and then inside the wall they built their house. Sometimes there were two or three walls, one outside the other. The forts were called raths, and if a king lived in them his house was called a dun.”
“That rath looks like a grove of trees now,” said Kathleen.
“The trees have grown up on the walls, and the houses are all gone hundreds of years ago,” Bee replied.
“What did the houses look like?” asked Mary Ellen.
“The darlin’! she wants to know how it all looked just as if she had the sight,” said Bee, putting her arm around the child.
“Well,” she went on, “the houses were shaped like bee-hives. They were built of poles all woven in and out with twigs, like wicker baskets, so the books say. Many a town in Ireland to-day is built where a chief’s rath or a king’s dun once stood, and it gets its name by that token. There’s Dundalk and Dunglow and Dunmore, Rathmelton, Rathdrum and Rathcormack. There are duns and raths all over the country.”
“There are ‘Kils,’ too,” said Mary Ellen. “Kathleen found them in our old geography, and Father made a little verse about them. He says that ‘Kil’ means church, and that St. Patrick built some of the churches. I don’t remember the verse, though. Do you, Kathleen?”
“That I do,” said her sister, and she sang to an odd little tune:
“Of ‘Killys’ and ‘Kils’ there are many.
There’s Kildare and Kilmaine and Kilkenny,
Killybegs, Kullashee,
Killimore, Killyleagh,
Kilworth and Kilcock and Kilkelly.”
“Good enough,” said Patrick, clapping his hands and laughing so heartily that everyone else laughed.
“There are dozens of ‘ballys,’ too,” said Mary Ellen, when the laughter was over. “Kathleen made a list of them, and Father said they would make a whole string of verses, but he didn’t get time for it yet. ‘Bally means town,’ he said.”
“Did the chiefs ever have any sports besides hunting?” asked Danny, who was fond of sports and had tried many a running race with the boys at Farmer Flynn’s.
“To be sure,” Patrick replied. “Over in Leinster they held a great fair once in every three years, and they had games and chariot races and horse races. People went to the fair from miles around, and the harpers and story-tellers always planned their wanderings so as to be there for the three days.”
“It must have been something like market day,” said Kathleen, who could not forget the crowd she saw at the Letterkenny market.
“There was marketing, too,” said Patrick. “It wouldn’t be Ireland without marketing. There was selling and buying of horses, sheep, and pigs, and all sorts of hand-made gold and bronze ornaments. The country was famous for her hand-crafts then; and she will be so again some day, praise be!”
“There couldn’t have been such pig markets as the one we saw yesterday,” said Danny, laughing at the thought of the hundreds of squealing pigs in the Letterkenny streets.
“I don’t know about that,” said Bee. “It took them two years to get ready for the Leinster fairs, and we go to market in Boyle twice a week.”
“I should be on my way there now, instead of sitting here talking as if I’d nothing to do,” said Patrick. “I want to see Tim Keefe about buying the heifer come Saturday. Have you any eggs to send, Bridget mavourneen? And will you go with me, Danny, my boy?”
Danny went out to help Patrick harness the mule, Mary Ellen held the creel while Kathleen counted out five score of eggs, and Bee packed ten pounds of beautiful, golden butter into the market basket.
“There, Patrick avic,” she said, as she followed him to the barn and put the basket into the trap, “bring me back a good bit of silver for my work, and a ribbon apiece for the children. I’ll have them watching for you when you come home.”
“This is the best day to sell the butter,” she said to Kathleen, as the trap disappeared down the boreen toward the road. “There’ll be people buying everything you can name, from butter and eggs to needles and pins and imitation gold chains, at the Wednesday market.”
“What will they buy in the Saturday market?” asked the child.
“Pigs, calves, sheep and wool, hay, potatoes, and every kind of vegetable that grows,” was the answer. “I’m raising a little pig that I’m going to take to the Saturday market myself some day; and Patrick’s heifer is the best in Boyle for its age. Tim Keefe ought to give him a good price for it.”
Then she took Kathleen into the barn and showed her the heifer and the little pig, the two baby donkeys, the hens and the geese.
“If we get everything well started in the garden we will go on a picnic to Lough Gara come May-day, and you shall stay and go with us,” she said, leading Kathleen into the garden.
Such a pretty garden it was, too! Paths bordered with box led through beds of lilies and roses; and there were beds of cowslips and hollyhocks and many another sweet, old-fashioned flower.
After they had walked up and down the little paths and looked at all the buds and blossoms, they went back into the kitchen, where Kathleen washed the dishes while Bee put the bread to bake in the Irish baking-oven. This oven looks like a kettle and it stands on four feet among the burning peat with more peat heaped on the cover.
“If Mary Ellen could see, and I was going to live here always, and Father could come back and live here, too, and Danny need never go to America, this would be the prettiest farm and the best place in the whole world,” Kathleen said to herself with a long sigh.
Bee heard the sigh and asked what it meant.
“I’m wishing I could find some way to bring Mary Ellen’s eyesight back,” Kathleen told her.
“Was she born blind?” questioned Bee.
“No,” said Kathleen, “but her eyes were weak when she born, and when Grandma Barry came to live with us she said it was the smoke of the peat that had taken the sight away altogether. That was how it came about that Father made a chimney for the cottage, so that the smoke could go out instead of spreading through the room.”
“There has been a good deal of blindness in Ireland from the smoke of burning peat in the houses,” said Bee, looking thankfully at her own broad chimney and deep fireplace.
“Hark!” said Kathleen suddenly, “there’s the child calling this minute,” and she ran out into the garden to see what was the matter.
Mary Ellen had been exploring the little farm for herself. She had found her way through the garden to the old fort and was catching the pink and white petals as they drifted down to her from the trees. An old magpie had built his nest in the tree over her head and he was scolding so angrily that the child was afraid of him.
“Was it only a bird, Kathleen dear?” she asked, when her sister tried to quiet her by telling her just how funny he looked, sitting up there in the tree and opening and shutting his big bill. “Faith, I thought it was an ogre!”
“That’s the very magpie that steals my young turkeys,” said Bee, who had run out after Kathleen. “If you children will find a way to drive him off I will give you a shilling.”
Then she left the little girls to play by themselves, and Mary Ellen lay on the grass among the spring blossoms while Kathleen sat down beside her to tell her a long story.
“This is a truly fairy rath,” she began, “and Cousin Bee’s farm is the fortune fairy’s palace.”
And Cousin Bee, putting her cream into the churn, said to herself, “Sure, the farm is big enough to keep both the children for awhile. I’ll let Kathleen stay on with Mary Ellen till her Aunt Hannah sends for her again.”