"Five shillings," I said.
"You may have it for six," he countered.
I hesitated. I didn't like the man; but it was a nice room, and the dining-room looked clean. Probably we should fare worse if we went farther.
"All right," I agreed finally; and I am bound to admit that he never showed any malice, but treated us as nicely as possible during all our stay in Sligo. Perhaps he is a retired jarvey, and this is just his way of doing business.
Sligo, with its well-built houses and bustling streets, has every appearance of being prosperous, and I have been told that it is one of the few towns in Ireland which is growing in population. It has had its share of battles and sieges, for Red Hugh O'Donnell captured it from the English, and then the English captured it from Red Hugh, and camped in the monastery and did what they could to destroy it; but enough of it remains to make a most interesting ruin, and we set out at once to see it.
It is a Norman foundation, dating from 1252, but a good deal of the existing structure is later than that. The most interesting feature, to my mind, is the row of eight narrow lancet windows lighting the choir of the church. I like these early lancets, and I am inclined to question whether the wide windows and elaborate tracery of later Gothic are as dignified and severely beautiful. There is a grace and simplicity about these tall, narrow openings, with their pointed arches, which cannot be surpassed.
There are some interesting monuments, too, in the choir, notably a most elaborate one to O'Conor Sligo against the south wall. O'Conor and his wife, life-size, kneel facing each other in two niches, over and below and on either side of which are sculptured cherubs and saints and skulls and swords and drums and spades and hooks and hour-glasses, together with the arms of the family and an appropriate motto or two. From the choir, a low door gives access to the charnel-house, and beyond that is the graveyard; while from the nave there is an entrance to the cloisters, three sides of which are very well preserved, though the level of the ground almost touches the base of the pillars.
It is, I should say, at least four feet higher than it was when the cloisters were built, and this accretion is mostly human dust, for the graveyard has been in active use for a good many centuries. Burials grew so excessive, at last, that before one body could be placed in the ground, another had to be dug out of it; and gruesome stories are told of the ruthless way in which old skeletons were torn from the graves and thrown out upon the ground and allowed to lie there, a scandal to the whole county. All that has changed now, and there wasn't a bone in sight the day we visited the place. Indeed, the old caretaker waxed very indignant about the way he had been wronged.
"'Tis in that book you have in your hand the slander is," he said, and nodded toward my red-bound Murray, and I read the sentence aloud: