The Charm of Ireland

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

The stone building over the body well is divided into two parts by a solid wall, and one part is for men and the other for women. The disrobing is done in the outer chamber, which has a low stone bench running around three sides, and then the penitent enters a small inner chamber, descends some six or seven steps into the pool of water, and, I suppose, places himself below the stream which falls into the pool from the end of a pipe. As its name indicates, this well was supposed to have the power of washing away all disease, both physical and moral, and time was when it was very popular. The effect of the cold bath was so exhilarating, and the sudden sense of freedom from sin and disease so uplifting, that the penitents would sometimes rush forth to proclaim their blessed state without pausing to resume their garments. Naturally a lot of impious Orangemen would gather to see the fun; and finally both the secular authorities and the Catholic clergy set their faces against the practices, with the result that they gradually fell into disuse. Only single pilgrims, or small companies, at most, come now to bathe in the magic waters, and their behaviour is most circumspect. The cells, themselves, are well-nigh in ruins. A chapel to Saint Patrick, from whom these waters derive their efficacy, was begun during the day of their popularity, but was never finished, and now only a fragment of it remains.

While I was manœuvring for a photograph of the well of sins, a middle-aged woman came out of a near-by cottage to advise me where to stand. She had seen many pictures taken of the well, she said, and the place that made the best picture was on top of the wall around her garden, and I climbed up on it, and found that she was right.

"'Tis a warm day," she went on, when I descended, "and your honour must be tired with the long walk. Will you not come in and sit a spell?"

"Thank you," I said; "I'll be glad to—it is hot," and I followed her into a lovely old kitchen, with floor of flags, and whitewashed walls gleaming with pots and pans, and with a tall dresser in one corner glittering with a brave array of china. In here it was quite cool, so that after the first moment, the open grate of glowing coals, with the usual bubbling pot above it and the usual kettle on the hob, felt very pleasant.

I expressed surprise that she was burning coal, and she said the landlords of the neighbourhood had shut up the peat-bogs, in order to make every one buy English coal; and it was very hard indeed on the poor people, who had always been used to getting their fuel for the labour of cutting it, besides shutting them off from earning a little money by selling the turf to the people in the town, who would rather have it than coal. But the landlords were always doing things like that, and it did no good to complain. She had two brothers in America, she said, and lived here at Struell and kept house for a third. She and her brother were both unmarried, and would probably always remain so. Then, of course, she wanted to know about my condition in life, and I described it as freely as she had described her own. And then she asked me if I wouldn't like a glass of milk, and when I said I would, she hastened to get it from the milk-house, through which a clear little stream trickled, and very sweet and cool it was.

And then we got to talking about Ulster's attitude toward Home Rule. County Down, you should remember, is one of the nine counties which form the Province of Ulster, and is the most strongly Protestant of all of them outside of Belfast and Antrim, for only about one third of its 200,000 people are Catholic.

"God knows what will happen," said my hostess, very seriously. "I have been hearing a lot of wild talk, but paid no heed to it, for these Orangemen are always talkin' about this or that, and their talk means nothing. But I've come to think it may be more than just talk this time. I heard a few days since that all the Orangemen hereabouts have been getting together three evenings every week in a meadow over beyont, and an officer of the army comes there and drills them till it is too dark to see. And they say, too, that there is a gun ready for each of them, with plenty of powder and lead to put into it; and they've sleuthered a lot of poor boys into joinin' with them who have not the courage to say no. But I'm hoping it will pass by, and that no trouble will come of it. I am a Catholic myself, but we have never had any trouble with the Protestants. We get along very well together, and why shouldn't we? Some of my best friends are Protestants, and I know they wish us no harm. No, no, we are well-placed here, though them ones in the south do be calling us the black north."

I told her something of the destitution and misery I had seen in the south and west; but she showed no great sympathy—rather a contempt, I fancied, for people who could be so easy-going and unambitious. She herself seemed of a very different breed; and the shining kitchen, as clean as a new pin, proved what a delight and pride she took in her home and how energetic a housewife she was. Personally she was just as clean and tidy as her kitchen, with hair neatly brushed and a bit of white about her throat; and the apron she had on was a fresh one, newly-ironed—something I never saw upon any peasant woman of the south. She brought out an album of photographs, presently—photographs of herself and of her brother, and various photographs of the wells, and I promised to send her a print of mine, if it proved to be a good one. And then I bade her good-bye and started back the way I came; but I can still see her shrewd and kindly face, with the little wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, and the cool, sweet-smelling kitchen where I spent that pleasant hour.

I walked about the steep streets of Downpatrick quite a while, after I reached the town, and found them unusually quaint. Like so many other towns in Ireland, this one is all too evidently on the down grade. The tall houses, which were once the residences of the well-to-do, have been turned into tenements, and while they are not so dirty and repulsive as those of Dublin and Limerick, they are still bad enough. Others of the houses are empty and falling into ruin. One curious thing about the place is that from any quarter of it the town-hall is visible, standing in the hollow at the bottom of the hill, for the five principal streets start from it—Irish Street and English Street and Scotch Street and two others whose names I have forgotten, but which were, perhaps, the neutral ground of trade.