The shops are wonderfully attractive, especially, of course, in objects made of linen. For Belfast is the world-centre of the linen trade, whose foundations were laid by the Huguenots who found a refuge here after Louis XIV banished them from France. It was the one Irish industry which England did not interfere with, because England produced no linen; and consequently it prospered enormously, until to-day there are single factories at Belfast where four thousand people bend over a thousand looms or watch ten thousand spindles, and the annual value of the trade is more than sixty million dollars. There are great tobacco factories, too, covering acres of ground; and the biggest rope-walk in the world; and a distillery which covers nineteen acres and—but the list is interminable.
The most interesting and spectacular of all these mighty industries will be found along the river banks, where the great ship-building yards are ranged, where such monsters as the Olympic and the fated Titanic were built and launched, and where the rattle and clangour of steel upon steel tells of the labour of twenty thousand men. And surely the clang and clatter of honest toil which rises from Belfast on week days must be more pleasing to the Almighty than the clang and clatter which rises from it on Sunday! I should think He would be especially disgusted with the noises which emanate from about the Custom House!
CHAPTER XXX
THE GRAVE OF ST. PATRICK
The shops of Belfast, with their embroidered linens (duty, forty-five per cent!), proved a magnet too great for Betty to resist, but I hied me away, next day, into County Down, on a pilgrimage to the grave which is said to hold the three great apostles of Erin—Saint Brigid and Saint Patrick and Saint Columba. It is in the churchyard of the village of Downpatrick that the grave lies, and the thirty mile run thither from Belfast is through a green and fertile country covered with broad fields of flax. There are raths and tumuli here and there, and a few ruins topping the neighbouring slopes, but it is not until one reaches Downpatrick that one comes upon a really impressive memorial of the old days.
The cathedral is visible long before the train reaches the town, standing on the edge of a high bluff overlooking the valley of the Quoile, and it was to it I made my way from the station, up a very steep street, for Downpatrick, following the fashion of Irish towns, is built on the side of a hill—and also follows the fashion in having an Irish Street and an English Street and even a Scotch Street, the surviving names, I suppose, of the quarters where the people of those various nations once lived close together for mutual protection.
The cathedral was locked, as Protestant churches have a way of being; but the caretaker lives near by and came running when his wife told him that there was a strange gentleman wished to see the church. He was a very Scotch Irishman, and as he took me around the bare, white interior, he said proudly: "There's not much high church about this. Not a bit of flummery will we have here—no candles or vestments or anything of that sort. Our people wouldn't stand it—it savours too much of Romanism."
"And yet," I said, "it was Saint Patrick who founded this very church, and you have him and Saint Brigid and Saint Columba buried in your churchyard."