But I ain’t a-goin’ to love them—that’s sartin shor’;
And I don’t want no one-horse pardon for what I was and am,
And I won’t be reconstructed, and I don’t care a damn!
He howls out the verses in disjointed, unmusical bursts. He acts with head and arms, and at places where he is worked up to a particular frenzy he takes a run and gives a buck-jump in the air, blissfully unconscious, I suppose, that he is imitating the manner in which the ballistea, or ancient dancing-songs, were sung by the Romans. At the end of each verse he breaks into a curious chanted refrain like: “Yum tilly-yum-yum-yum-yum-yum”—and then there are more sidlings and buck-jumps. Some of the women throw him money, which he acknowledges by lifting his hat grandiosely. Others of them pass remarks, quite the reverse of complimentary, about his voice and ragged appearance. “Isn’t it terrible he is!” says one woman. “Look at him with the seat out of his trousers, and he lepping like a good one. I could choke him, I could!” Another woman comes out of a shop with a crying child in her arms, and shouts at him: “Will you go away, then? You’re wakening the childer.” “Well, ma’am,” says he, stopping in the middle of a verse, “you may thank the Lord for His mercy that you have childer to waken!” The ducks quack, the dogs howl, the poor ballad-singer roars louder than ever. I listen for a while, amused and interested. Then I get tired of it, and pass on towards Bracky Bridge.
[SUNLIGHT]
Unless you have seen the sun you cannot know anything. Sunlight is better than wisdom, and the red of the fairy-thimble more than painted fans.
[TURF-CUTTING]
In the Lochros district, when the weather begins to take up, about the middle of May, the farmers repair to the moss on the north side of the Point, and start cutting the banks. The turf is then footed (sometimes by girls) along the causeway ditches, and when properly seasoned—say about the middle of July—is piled in stacks on high ground convenient to the moss, and covered on top with a lot of old mouldering “winter-stales,” to keep the rain off it. “Winter-stales” are sods that have been left over from the previous season’s cutting—the wet setting in and leaving the bog-roads in such a state that no slipe or wheeled car could get into them. Of course, most of the carrying in Donegal is done by creel or ass-cart; but in the Lochros district turf is scarce, and the farmers on the Point are obliged to keep horses to draw the turf in from the moss on the north side of the Owenea river, some miles off, and over roads that are none too good for wheeled traffic. In some cases I have noticed the “winter-stales” built up in little beehive-shaped heaps on dry ground, to be carted or creeled away as soon as the weather begins to mend. But it is only the more provident farmers who do this.
[HIS OLD MOTHER]
“My old mother’s ailing this twelvemonth back,” said a man to me to-day. “I’m afeard she’ll go wi’ the leaves.”