CHAPTER X
A BANK OF TURF
“Mary Ellen, dear, did you ever think it would be so fine to live out of Donegal?”
“No,” answered the little sister, “I’ve been thinking of the market ever since Saturday; and yesterday was the walk to Lough Gara again, and to-day is the sheep-shearing. Belike by Friday they will begin to cut the turf. It is better than Donegal, even if Father is not with us.”
“Oh, Mary Ellen, I doubt they’ll begin cutting out peat on a Friday. It will bring them bad luck.”
“Perhaps they will begin on Thursday, then,” suggested her sister. “Is there any ill luck in that day?”
It was a beautiful morning toward the end of May, and the two little girls were watching the shearing of the sheep at Uncle Barney’s farm. More than a hundred bleating sheep and lambs were collected near the house, where they were guarded by a trained shepherd dog and watched over by Kathleen.
“Kathleen is the colleen that’s good at everything,” Patrick said one day after the picnic at Lough Gara. “She’ll milk a cow as well as ever her great-grandmother Connell did. She’s got the firm hand for it, and the sweet voice.”
“She can bake as fine a loaf of bread as I can, and that is saying a good deal, too,” said Bee proudly.
“I’ll see what kind of a shepherd lass she will make, come shearing-time,” said Uncle Barney, who had come over from Killaraght to get Danny to help him. “We’ll need some one to keep the sheep from straying away after they have been washed.”
So Kathleen was watching the sheep for her uncle, and talking over the Saturday market with her sister.
“Sure, I thought Bee’s little pig would squeal himself black in the face before she got him sold,” said Mary Ellen.
“I mind Bee did better with her little pig than Patrick did with his big heifer,” Kathleen replied with a laugh.
“Why?” asked Mary Ellen.
“Hasn’t Patrick been trying to sell his heifer to Tim Keefe ever since we came to Tonroe?” Kathleen answered. “Faith, he only finished the bargain last Saturday; and it was Uncle Barney that brought it about then, else they’d still be a-higgling.”
“What’s this you are saying?” asked Patrick, who was selecting another sheep to shear.
“We’re saying that Bee makes a better bargain than you,” Kathleen told him.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“She got half as much for her pig as you did for the heifer, and the heifer was costing her feed all the four weeks you were making the bargain.”
Patrick threw back his head with a great laugh. “Here’s the child for you,” he called to Uncle Barney. “She says I was feeding the heifer for Tim Keefe for four weeks and getting nothing for it.”
“Tim Keefe is a young spalpeen,” said Uncle Barney. “I’d give a pound myself to see somebody get the better of him. It is what nobody ever did yet,” and he smiled down into Kathleen’s gray eyes.
He forgot his words the next minute, but Kathleen remembered them, even after the sheep-shearing was over and the turf-cutting had begun in the bog.
Bog-land is found in almost every part of Ireland; but much of it is dangerous for travel, and all of it has to be drained before the peat can be cut. Causeways lead to the parts that are drained, but there are many deep pools of swampy water in the bogs, which are filled with tufts of spongy moss and slimy tree trunks.
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York
Cutting bricks of peat and stacking them up to dry
The turf is cut out in blocks by a man who uses a long-handled spade. He tosses the blocks to his helper who stands waiting for them, and who carries them to a barrow or creel. When the barrow is filled it is wheeled away to higher ground where the blocks of turf are stacked up and dried in the sun and wind.
Kathleen begged to be Danny’s helper, and on the morning when he began cutting in the bog she stood beside him. As fast as he filled her arms with the peat she trudged sturdily away and stacked it up to dry, just as Patrick had taught her.
As she stood waiting for her twentieth load she asked, “How long will it take for this turf to be dry enough to carry home and stack under the shed?”
“It takes all summer to get the peat dry enough to burn,” Danny told her. “In August and September there will be hundreds of little donkeys, all over the country, going to market loaded with big creels of dry peat. Twenty bricks of the peat are sold for a sixpence.”
Danny was cutting turf for Patrick and Uncle Barney in a bog which lay on the border of Lough Gara, and Kathleen stopped occasionally to rest her arms and watch a boat-load of peasants who had hired the next bank to Patrick’s, and who came across the lake to cut it. It was hard work to carry the wet turf, and she was quite ready to go home when Patrick drove the mule down to the lake for them at five o’clock.
“Two of Mike Drury’s cows were swallowed up in a moving bog over in County Galway last week,” she heard him tell Danny.
It was the first time she had ever heard of a moving bog, and she looked at him with frightened eyes. “Will this bog swallow Danny up?” she asked.
“Hop into the trap and forget it, alanna,” replied Patrick cheerfully. “Nothing of the sort will ever happen here. This bog is too well drained for that. But they do say that in times past whole houses have been swallowed up in the bogs.”
“What made the bog-land?” Kathleen asked, as they rode along toward home.
“The bushes and trees gradually fell into the swamp and decayed, and those that grew above them fell and decayed in the same way,” Patrick told her. “It was going on before ever the giants or fairies lived in the country.”
“Here’s something I found in the bog more than a foot below the surface,” said Danny. “It must have been buried there for hundreds of years, for the turf was solid all around it.”
He took from his pocket a small iron cross of curious design and beautiful workmanship, and Patrick examined it with great interest.
“It is an ancient ornament,” he said, “such as they used to make here in Ireland in olden times. Mayhap it belonged to Queen Maive herself, she that was Queen of the West nearly two thousand years ago. All kinds of things are found in the bogs. Sometimes men find firkins of butter and moulds of cheese which have been buried for years and years. Bee will tell you all about it; ’tis she that has the learning,” he added proudly, and hurried home to show the cross to his wife.
There was a happy ending to Kathleen’s hard day’s work in the bog, when, sitting among the flowers of the old rath, with the soft wind blowing through the trees over their heads, Bee told them about the time when the men of Ireland were famous workers in metal.
“In the National Museum at Dublin there are many of the most precious bits of handiwork to be found in all Europe,” she said. “No doubt they would be glad to have this cross in one of their glass cases.”
But Danny leaned over and put it into Kathleen’s hand. “Those that are slow at knitting stockings are oftentimes quickest at catching turfs,” he said. “You may have the cross to wear, mavourneen, if you like.”
Kathleen hung her head. “I finished the stockings before I left Donegal,” she replied, “and the peddler said they were well-knit.”
“Is there bog-land all over Ireland?” asked little Mary Ellen, who knew that her sister did not like to talk about the stockings.
“Grandmother Barry used to say that Kilkenny was the most favored county in the country,” replied Bee; “and in one of my old reading-books there was a rhyme about Kilkenny, that it had:
Fire without smoke, air without fog,
Water without mud, and land without bog.“
“Kilkenny,” repeated Kathleen. “That is where I am going to visit Aunt Hannah, I suppose; but I know I shall never like it so well as living here with you, Cousin Bee.”
Bee went into the house and came back again in a few minutes, carrying a small flat box from which she took a photograph of a pleasant-faced woman, the very image of dear Uncle Barney.
“There’s your Aunt Hannah Malone,” she said, showing the picture to Kathleen; “she is the best woman in the world, and the mother of ten fine children.” And Kathleen, looking at the twinkling eyes and smiling mouth, knew at once that she should be happy in Kilkenny.