“When I’d come round to see her, I used to find her, times out of number, leaning over the wall, gazing down at Kilcoultra. Always she’d be leaning over the wall, staring down at the house. And one day I said to her, ‘Mary, what in the world makes you stand there like that?’ And she answered me, ‘I’m looking down on the roof that shelters me lovely master!’”
“My lovely master!” A fragrant thing to have become to the poor that live on your soil! When we reach a sphere where things are judged by different standards and higher measures than we can now conceive, how far will not such a title outweigh any paltry worldly honour!
Yet if the memory of its lost master dominates and haunts all Kilcoultra house and lands, there is nothing to sadden one in the thoughts it inspires; and our stay there is altogether full of charm and pleasure.
Not only are the ladies a fund of anecdote, racy of the soil; not only do they live delightfully in touch with their peasantry, with eye and ear ever ready to catch the humour and the pathos about them; but they are cultured, far-travelled beings. Not much in the outer world escapes their knowledge and shrewd apprehension.
Home topics, however, are what appeals to their visitors most.
IRISH WITS
“Carrie,” the younger sister will say to the elder, “I heard Whalen the guard, and Tim Rooney the porter, at Athenmore Station, talking together. And Tim is thinking of making up to a young lady, you know, and I suppose he’s always talking about it, for Whalen was saying to him just as I came up: ‘’Pon me word, I wish you were married, and had your family rared on me!’ They had a great jollification at our station the other night,” she goes on, turning to us. “And they brewed the punch in the station bell! Whalen’s a very humorous man,” she proceeds. “They used to stop the express from Galway at Athenmore when required; but there were complaints of the delay and orders came from Dublin it wasn’t to be done on any account. But it’s a recent regulation and everybody doesn’t know about it. And the other day there was terrible work, for there was Father Blake and the Doctor both counting on it for an urgent sick call—dying, they said the poor man was.
“‘You’ll have to stop the train for this once, Whalen,’ says Father Blake.
“‘I’ll maybe save him yet,’ says the doctor.
“‘I couldn’t, yer riverence,’ says Whalen; ‘it’s as much as me place is worth. Don’t you be askin’ me, doctor. It ’ud be me ruin. The company’s very strict.’