Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as told by herself / with additions by the author, and introduction by Blanche Atkinson

by Frances Power Cobbe

Let us now consider the people who dwelt amid all this squalor. They were mostly field-labourers, working for the usual wages of seven or eight shillings a week. Many of them held their cabins as freeholds, having built or inherited them from those who had “squatted” unmolested on the common. A few paid rent to the noble landlord before-mentioned. Work was seldom wanting, coals were cheap, excellent schools were open for the children at a penny a week a head. Families which had not more than three or four mouths to fill besides the breadwinners’, were not in absolute want, save when disease, or a heavy snow, or a flood, or some similar calamity arrived. Then, down on the ground, poor souls, literally and metaphorically, they could fall no lower, and a week was enough to bring them to the verge of starvation.

Let me try to recall some of the characters of the inhabitants of Balisk in the Forties.

Here in the first cabin is a comfortable family where there are three sons at work, and mother and three daughters at home. Enter at any hour there is a hearty welcome and bright jest ready. Here is the schoolmaster’s house, a little behind the others, and back to back with them. It has an attempt at a curtain for the window, a knocker for the door. The man is a curious deformed creature, of whom more will be said hereafter. The wife is what is called in Ireland a “Voteen;” a person given to religion, who spends most of her time in the chapel or repeating prayers, and who wears as much semblance of black as her poor means may allow. Balisk, be it said, is altogether Catholic and devout. It is honoured by the possession of what is called “The Holy Griddle.” Perhaps my readers have heard of the Holy Grail, the original sacramental chalice so long sought by the chivalry of the middle ages, and may ask if the Holy Griddle be akin thereto? I cannot trace any likeness. A “griddle,” as all the Irish and Scotch world knows, is a circular iron plate, on which the common unleavened cakes of wheatmeal and oatmeal are baked. The Holy Griddle of Balisk was one of these utensils, which was bequeathed to the village under the following circumstances. Years ago, probably in the last century, a poor, “lone widow” lay on her death-bed. She had none to pray for her after she was gone, for she was childless and altogether desolate; neither had she any money to give to the priest to pray for her soul. Yet the terrors of purgatory were near. How should she escape them? She possessed but one object of any value—a griddle, whereon she was wont to bake the meal of the wheat she gleaned every harvest to help her through the winter. So the widow left her griddle as a legacy to the village for ever, on one condition. It was to pass from hand to hand as each might want it, but every one who used her griddle was to say a prayer for her soul. Years had passed away, but the griddle was still in my time in constant use, as “the best griddle in the town.” The cakes baked on the Holy Griddle were twice as good as any others. May the poor widow who so simply bequeathed it have found long ago “rest for her soul” better than any prayers have asked for her, even the favourite Irish prayer, “May you sit in heaven on a golden chair!”

Here is another house, where an old man lives with his sister. The old woman is the Mrs. Gamp of Balisk. Patrick Russell has a curious story attached to him. Having laboured long and well on my father’s estate, the latter finding him grow rheumatic and helpless, pensioned him with his wages for life, and Paddy retired to the enjoyment of such privacy as Balisk might afford. Growing more and more helpless, he at last for some years hobbled about feebly on crutches, a confirmed cripple. One day, with amazement, I saw him walking without his crutches, and tolerably firmly, up to Newbridge House. My father went to speak to him, and soon returned, saying: “Here is a strange thing. Paddy Russell says he has been to Father Mathew, and Father Mathew has blessed him, and he is cured! He came to tell me he wished to give up his pension, since he returns to work at Smith’s farm next week.” Very naturally, and as might be expected, poor Paddy, three weeks later, was again helpless, and a suppliant for the restoration of his pension, which was of course immediately renewed. But one who had witnessed only the scene of the long-known cripple walking up stoutly to decline his pension (the very best possible proof of his sincere belief in his own recovery) might well be excused for narrating the story as a miracle wrought by a true moral reformer, the Irish “Apostle of Temperance.”

Next door to Paddy Russell’s cabin stood “The Shop,” a cabin a trifle better than the rest, where butter, flour, and dip candles, Ingy-male (Indian meal), and possibly a small quantity of soap, were the chief objects of commerce. Further on came a miserable hovel with the roof broken in, and a pool of filth, en permanence, in the middle of the floor. Here dwelt a miserable good-for-nothing old man and equally good-for-nothing daughter; hopeless recipients of anybody’s bounty. Opposite them, in a tidy little cabin, always as clean as whitewash and sweeping could make its poor mud walls and earthen floor, lived an old woman and her daughter. The daughter was deformed, the mother a beautiful old woman, bedridden, but always perfectly clean, and provided by her daughter’s hard labour in the fields and cockle-gathering on the sea-shore, with all she could need. After years of devotion, when Mary was no longer young, the mother died, and the daughter, left quite alone in the world, was absolutely broken-hearted. Night after night she strayed about the chapel-yard where her mother lay buried, hoping, as she told me, to see her ghost.

“And do you think,” she asked, fixing her eyes on me, “do you think I shall ever see her again? I asked Father M—— would I see her in heaven? and all he said was, ‘I should see her in the glory of God.’ What does that mean? I don’t understand what it means. Will I see her herself—my poor old mother?”

After long years, I found this faithful heart still yearning to be re-united to the “poor old mother,” and patiently labouring on in solitude, waiting till God should call her home out of that little white cabin to one of the “many mansions,” where her mother is waiting for her.

Here is a house where there are many sons and daughters and some sort of prosperity. Here, again, is a house with three rooms and several inmates, and in one room lives a strange, tall old man, with something of dignity in his aspect. He asked me once to come into his room, and showed me the book over which all his spare hours seemed spent; “Thomas à Kempis.”

“Ah, yes, that is a great book; a book full of beautiful things.”

“Do you know it? do Protestants read it?”