But when they descended into Muirisc they could not find a soul who had the remotest notion of what a yawl-rig meant, much less of the identity of the lugger which, even as they spoke, had passed out of sight.
CHAPTER XVI—THE LADY OF MUIRISC.
In the parish of Kilmoe—which they pronounce with a soft prolonged “moo-h,” like the murmuring call of one of their little bright-eyed, black-coated cows—the inhabitants are wont to say that the next parish is America.
It is an ancient and sterile and storm-beaten parish, this Kilmoe, thrust out in expiation of some forgotten sin or other to exist beyond the pale of human companionship. Its sons and daughters, scattered in tiny, isolated hamlets over its barren area, hear never a stranger’s voice—and their own speech is slow and low of tone because the real right to make a noise there belongs to the shrieking gulls and the wild, west wind and the towering, foam-fanged waves, which dashed themselves, in tireless rivalry with the thunder, against its cliffs.
Slow, too, in growth and ripening are the wits of the men of Kilmoe. They must have gray hairs before they are accounted more than boys; and when, from sheer old age they totter into the grave, the feeling of the parish is that they have been untimely cut off just as they were beginning to get their brains in fair working: order. Very often these aged men, if they dally and loiter on the way to the tomb in the hope of becoming still wiser, are given a sharp and peremptory push forward by starvation. It would not do for the men of Kilmoe to know too much. If they did, they would all go somewhere else to live—and then what would become of their landlord?
Kilmoe once had a thriving and profitable industry, whereby a larger population than it now contains kept body and soul together in more intimate and comfortable relations than at present exist. The outlay involved in this industry was very small, and the returns, though not governed by any squalid, modern law of percentages, were, on the whole, large.
It was all very simple. Whenever a stormy, wind-swept night set in, the men of Kilmoe tied a lighted lantern on the neck of a cow, and drove the animal to walk along the strand underneath the sea-cliffs. This light, rising and sinking with the movements of the cow, bore a quaint and interesting resemblance to the undulations of an illuminated buoy or boat, rocked on gentle waves; and strange seafaring crafts bent their course in confidence toward it, until they were undeceived. Then the men of Kilmoe would sally forth, riding the tumbling breakers with great bravery and address, in their boats of withes and stretched skin, and enter into possession of all the stranded strangers’ goods and chattels. As for such strangers as survived the wreck, they were sometimes sold into slavery; more often they were merely knocked on the head. Thus Kilmoe lived much more prosperously than in these melancholy latter days of dependence upon a precarious potato crop.
In every family devoted to industrial pursuits there is one member who is more distinguished for attention to the business than the others, and upon whom its chief burdens fall. This was true of the O’Mahonys, who for many centuries controlled and carried on the lucrative occupation above described, on their peninsula of Ivehagh. There were branches of the sept stationed in the more inland sea-castles of Rosbrin, Ardintenant, Leamcon and Ballydesmond on the one side, and of Dunbeacon, Dunmanus and Muirisc on the other, who did not expend all their energies upon this, their genuine business, but took many vacations and indefinitely extended holiday trips, for the improvement of their minds and the gratification of their desire to whip the neighboring O’Driscolls, O’Sullivans, O’Heas and O’Learys out of their boots. The record of these pleasure excursions, in which sometimes the O’Mahonys returned with great booty and the heads of their enemies on pikes, and some other times did not come home at all, fills all the pages of the Psalter of Rosbrin, beside occupying a good deal of space in the Annals of Innisfallen and of the Four Masters, and needs not be enlarged upon here.