[AN INSLEEP]
We were talking together the other evening—an old woman and myself—on a path which leads through the fields from Glengesh mountain to Ardara wood. We had got as far as the stream which crosses the path near the wood when she stopped suddenly. She looked west, and scratched her eyebrow. “I’ve an insleep,” says she. “I hadn’t one this long time!”
[WATER AND SLÁN-LUS]
What is more beautiful than water falling, or a spray of slán-lus with its flowers?
[BY LOCHROS MÓR]
The heat increases. The osmunda droops on the wall. The tide is at full ebb. A waste of sea-wrack and sand stretches out to Dawros, a day’s journey beyond. I see two figures, a boy and a girl, searching for bait—the boy digging and the girl gathering into a creel. The deep, purring note of a sandpiper comes to me over the bar. It is like the sound that air makes bubbling through water. I listen to it in infinite space and quietness.
[RIVAL FIDDLERS]
I was talking with a fiddler the other evening in a house where there was a dance, up by Portnoo. I happened to mention the name of another fiddler I had heard playing a night or two before in Ardara. “Him, is it?” put in my friend. “Why, he’s no fiddler at all. He’s only an old stroller. He doesn’t know the differs between ‘Kyrie Eleison’ and ‘The Devil’s Dreams’!” He became very indignant. I interrupted once or twice, trying to turn the conversation, but all to no purpose; he still went on. Finally, to quiet him, I asked him could he play “The Sally Gardens.” He stopped to think for a while, fondling the strings of his instrument lovingly with his rough hands; then he said that he didn’t know the tune by that name, but that if I’d lilt or whistle the first few bars of it, it might come to him. I whistled them. “Oh,” says he, “that’s ‘The Maids of Mourne Shore.’ That’s the name we give it in these parts.” He played the tune for me quite beautifully. Then there was a call from the man of the house for “The Fairy Reel,” and the dancers took the floor again. The fiddlers in Donegal are “all sorts,” as they say—farmers, blacksmiths, fisher boys, who play for the love of the thing, and strollers (usually blind men) who wander about from house to house and from fair to fair playing for money. When they are playing I notice they catch the bow in a curious way with their thumbs between the horsehair and the stick. At a dance it is no uncommon thing to see a “bench” of seven or eight of them. They join in the applause at the end of each item, rasping their bows together on the strings and stamping vigorously with their feet.
MOUNTAINY FOLK.