See here another bit of chapel interior. A rough, plain little building, too formless to be picturesque, packed with peasant men, women, and children. Where but in Ireland could such a scene take place as I witnessed there? The priest, before the beginning of the service, gave a tremendous swish of holy water to the congregation with a mop out of a zinc pail, from the altar. He had previously heard nearly half the congregation’s confessions, men, women, boys, and girls kneeling in turn beside his chair at one side of the altar, without any sort of screen. I wondered, as they pressed round him, that they did not overhear each other, but indeed I reflected that would be “no matther whativer,” as these people must have but little to tell!
The server ran a match along the earthen floor to light the two guttering, unequal candles on the altar, and at the end of Mass he produced the mop and zinc pail again. Swish went the holy water once more from the mop, wielded by the athletic sword-arm of the gigantic young priest. For fear the nearer people should have been but poorly sprinkled under that far-reaching arc of water, which went to the very end wall of the chapel, he soused the mop again with a good twist and gave everybody in the front benches a sharp whack full in their faces, tactfully leaving us out. They received it with beaming and grateful smiles.
There are wonderful studies of old men’s and women’s heads here full of that character which in the more “educated” parts of Ireland the School Board seems to be rubbing out, and I was delighted to see the women and girls wearing the head-shawls and white caps and the red petticoats that charmed me in Kerry in ‘77. The railway is sure to bring the dreadful “Frenchy” hat here in time, and then good-bye to the comely appearance of these women. Their wild beauty undergoes an extraordinary change under the absurd hat and feathers—these winsome colleens then lose all their charm.
Yet I must thank this same railway for having brought us to this haven of rest, right up to the doors of a charming, very modern hotel, on quite different lines from the dear little inn that fascinated me in the old Glenaragh days. In its way it is fascinating too, for here you have all the up-to-date amenities in the very heart of the wildest country you could wish for. The electric light is generated by the mountain streams and the baths filled from the glorious bay that lies below the hotel terraces, a never-failing delight in all its moods of sun and shadow, wind and calm.
Sad it is to see so many cabins deserted. The strength of the country is ebbing away. The few people that are left are nice and wholesome in mind and manner; they have the quiet urbanity of the true peasant all the world over. They remind me of the Tuscan in this particular, but, of course, they have not his light-heartedness. More seriousness, I should think, these Irish have. I was sketching sheep, for a contemplated picture, in the evenings on the lovely marshes by the sea, and one evening a widow, left completely lonely in her little cabin on the heights above by the departure for America of her last child, came down to fetch home her solitary sheep from amongst the others, and I told her I thought these creatures were leading a very happy life. “Yes,” she answered, pausing for a moment and looking down on the flock, “and they are without sin.”
At the ringing of the Angelus the work in the fields, the bogs, the potato patches stops till the words of St. Luke’s Gospel have been repeated, just as we remember them said in Italy. It was a surprise—and one of great interest to me—when I first saw peasants saying the Angelus under a northern sky.
My studies of the wild mountain sheep on the marshes came to an abrupt close. I was reposing under a rock (it was well on in July) with palette and panels ready, waiting for the sunset and its after-glow, to get final precious notes of colour upon the fleeces. One particular sheep had been a very useful model. It ambled in a graceful way on three legs and we called it “Pacer.” I became aware of an opaque body rising between my closed eyes and the sun, and looking up I beheld the head of “Pacer” peering at me over the edge of the rock over my head. But what had happened to “Pacer’s” neck? Good gracious! I jumped up and beheld a shorn “Pacer” and all the flock in the same lamentable condition. It had all happened in twenty-four hours.
I want to bring before your mind two little rocky islands with green summits off the coast of Clare, not far from here. Of all the wind-swept little islands none could be more wind-swept. On one, the smallest, I heard that a ferocious and unmanageable billy-goat was deposited as a useless member of the community, and one night he was blown out to sea—a good riddance. On the other you perceive, through the spray, little nodules on the turf—the graves of unbaptized infants. And the sea-gulls along the cliffs are for ever crying like legions of children.