“DOWN THE HILL OF SALRUCK.”
water large enough to mirror the trees. A church is not an absolute necessity, but is generally included in the suite, and even down to this refinement Salruck was thoroughly equipped. Having formulated this theory to our satisfaction, we addressed ourselves to our duties as tourists. We climbed the heathery Pass of Salruck, a stiff windy climb; we viewed from the top of it the lovely harbour of the Killaries, and mountains and islands innumerable and unpronounceable; we came down again by a short cut suggested by my cousin, of a nature that necessitated our advancing in a sitting posture and with inconvenient rapidity down a species of glacier. The pass happily accomplished, we knew there was but one thing more to be done—the graveyard. Our benefactors at the shooting-lodge had told us how to find our way to it, and without such help we certainly should not have discovered it. It was hidden in the side of a wooded hill, a grassy cart-track was its sole approach, a pile of branches in a broken wall was its gate, and, instead of funereal cypresses, tall ash trees and sycamores stood thickly among the loose heaps of stones that marked the graves. At a first glance we might even have thought we had taken a wrong turn and strayed into a stony wood, but the kneeling figure of a woman told us that we had made no mistake. She got up as we came along the winding, trodden path among the trees, and we recognised her as the woman whom we had met on the hill an hour before.
“This is a quare place, ladies,” she said in a loud, cheerful voice. “There’s manny a one comes here from all sides of the world to see it.”
We agreed that it was a queer place, and proceeded without delay into a long conversation. We found out that the high square mound of stones, about the height and length of a billiard-table, was an altar, in which only priests were buried; and she pointed out to us under one of its stones some clay pipes and even a small heap of tobacco, which she told us had been left there by the last funeral for the use of “anyone that comes to say a prayer, like meself.” In fact, all the graves were littered with broken pipes and empty boxes for holding the tobacco—grocery boxes most of them labelled with glowing announcements of Colman’s Mustard and Reckitt’s Blue, lying about in all directions, and almost dreadful in their sordid garish poverty.
“There isn’t one that dies from all round the counthry but they’ll bury him here,” said our friend, “and with all that’s buried in it there’s not a worrum, nor the likes of a worrum in it.”
A little below where we were standing a circle of stones, like a rudimentary wall, stood round some specially sacred spot, and we stumbled over the ghastly inequalities of the ground towards it. Inside the stones the ground was bare and hard, like an earthern floor, and in the centre there was a small, round hole, with the gleam of water in it.
“That’s the Holy Well of Salruck,” said the woman, leaning comfortably against a great ash tree, one of whose largest limbs had been half torn from its trunk by lightning, and hung, white and stricken, above the little enclosure. “There’ll be upwards of thirty sitting round it some nights prayin’ till morning. It’s reckoned a great cure for sore eyes.” This with a compassionate glance towards my second cousin’s pince-nez. “But what signifies this well towards the well that’s out on the island beyond!” went on the country woman, hitching her shoulders into her cloak, and preparing to lead the way out of the graveyard; “sure the way it is with that well, if anny woman takes so much as a dhrop out of it the wather’ll soak away out of it, ever, ever, till it’s dhry as yer hand! Yes faith, that’s as thrue as that God made little apples. Shure there was one time the priest’s sisther wouldn’t put as much delay on herself as while she’d be goin’ over to the other spring that’s in the island, and she dhrew as much wather from the holy well as’d wet her tay. I declare to ye, she wasn’t back in the house before the well was dhry!”
She paused dramatically, and we supplied the necessary notes of admiration.
“Well, when the priest seen that,” she went on, “he comminced to pray, and bit nor sup never crossed