“I have been doctoring Honor Joyce up in Doone for some days. She has had agonising pain, which the poor creature bore like a Trojan. I asked her to describe it, and she said feebly,
“‘I couldn’t give ye any patthern of it indeed, but it’s like in me side as a pairson ’d be polishin’ a boot, and he with a brush in his hand.’ Which was indeed enlightening. Such a house! One little room, with some boards nailed together for a bed, in which was hay with blankets over it; a goat was tethered a few feet away, and while I was putting the mustard-leaf on, there came suddenly, and apparently from the bed itself, ‘a cry so jubilant, so strange,’ that indicated that somewhere under the bed a hen had laid an egg.
“‘God bless her!’ says Honor, faintly.
“Next I heard a choking cough in the heart of the blankets. It was a sick boy, huddled in there with his mother—quite invisible—buried in the bedclothes, like a dog.... A beautiful day yesterday, fine and clear throughout. To-day the storm stormeth as usual, and the white mist people are rushing after each other across the lawn, sure sign of hopeless wet. Poor Michael (an old tenant) died on Thursday night—a very gallant, quiet end, conscious and calm. His daughter did not mean to say anything remarkable when she told me that he died ‘as quiet, now as quiet as a little fish’; but those were her words. I went up there to see his old wife, and coming into a house black with people, was suddenly confronted with Michael’s body, laid out in the kitchen. His son, three parts drunk, advanced and delivered a loud, horrible harangue on Michael and the Martin family. The people sat like owls, listening, and we retired into a room where were whisky bottles galore, and the cream of the company; men from Galway, respectably drunk, and magnificent in speech.... The funeral yesterday to which I went (Michael was one of our oldest and most faithful friends) was only a shade less horrifying. At all events the pale, tranced face was hidden, and the living people looked less brutal without that terrific, purified presence——”
One other picture, of about the same period, may be given, and in connection with these experiences two things may be remembered. That they happened more than twenty years ago; also, that among these people, primitive, and proud, tenacious of conventions, and faithful to their dead, a want of hospitality at a funeral implied a want of respect for the one who had left them.
Unfortunately, it has not even yet been learnt that hospitality is not necessarily synonymous with whisky.
V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, 1895.)
“William L.’s wife died suddenly, having had a dead baby, two days ago, and was buried yesterday, up at the Chapel on the Hill. I went to the back gate and walked with the funeral from there. It was an extraordinary scene. The people who had relations buried there, roared and howled on the graves, and round the grave where Mrs. L. was being buried, there was a perpetual whining and moaning, awfully like the tuning of fiddles in an orchestra. Drunken men staggered about; one or two smart relations from Galway flaunted to and fro in their best clothes, occasionally crossing themselves, and three keeners knelt together inside the inmost ring by the grave, with their hands locked, rocking, and crying into each other’s hoods, three awful witches, telling each other the full horrors that the other people were not competent to understand. There was no priest, but Mrs. L.’s brother read a kind of Litany, very like ours, at top speed, and all the people answered. Every Saint in the calendar was called on to save her and to protect her, and there poor William stood, with his head down, and his hat over his eyes. It was impressive, very, and the view was so fresh and clean and delightful from that height. The thump of the clods and stones on the coffin was a sound that made one shudder, and all the people keened and cried at it.... There have been many enquiries for you since I came home. Rickeen thinks he never seen the like of a lady like you that would have ‘that undherstandin’ of a man’s work; and didn’t I see her put her hand to thim palings and lep over them! Faith I thought there was no ladies could be as soople as our own till I seen her. But indeed, the both o’ yee proved very bad that yee didn’t get marri’d, and all the places yee were in!’”