[NATURE]
A poor woman praying by a cross; a mountain shadowed in still water; a tern crying; the road ribboning away into the darkness that looks like hills beyond. Can we live every day with these aspiring things, and not love beauty? Can we look out on our broad view—as someone has said of the friars of the monastery of San Pietro in Perugia—and not note the play of sun and shadow? Nature is the “Time-vesture of God.” If we but touch it, we are made holier.
[SUNDAY UNDER SLIEVE LEAGUE]
It is Sunday. The dawn has broken clear after a night’s rain. The sunlight glitters in the soft morning air. The fragrance of peat, marjoram, and wild-mint hangs like a benediction over the countryside. A lark is singing; the swallows are out in hundreds. The road turns and twists—past a cabin, over a bridge—between fringes of wet grass. It dips suddenly, then rises sheer against a wisp of cloud into the dark bulk of Slieve League behind. I see the mountainy people wending in from all parts to Mass. I am standing on high ground, and can see the hiving roads—the men with their black coats and wide-awakes, and the women with their bright-coloured kerchiefs and shawls. Some of them have trudged in for miles on bare feet. They carry their brogues, neatly greased and cleaned, over their shoulders. As they come near the chapel they stop by the roadside or go into a field and put them on. The young girls—grey-eyed, limber slips from the hills—are fixing themselves before they go in of the chapel door. They stand in their ribboned heads and shawls pluming themselves, and telling each other how they look. The boys are watching them. I hear the fresh, nonchalant laugh and the kindly greeting in Irish—“Maidin bhreagh, a Phaid,” and the “Goidé mar tá tú, a Chait?” The men—early-comers—sit in groups on the chapel wall, discussing affairs—the weather, the crops, the new potato spray, the prospects of a war with Germany, the marrying and the giving in marriage, the letters from friends in America, the death and month’s mind of friends. The bell has ceased ringing. The men drop from their perch on the wall, and the last of them has gone in. The road is quiet again, and only the sonorous chant of the priest comes through the open windows—“Introibo ad altare Dei,” and the shriller response of the clerk, “Ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam.”
[THE NIGHT HE WAS BORN]
We were talking together, an old man and myself, on the hill between Laguna and Glen. The conversation turned on ages—a favourite topic with old men[(2)]—and on the degeneracy that one noticed all over Ireland, especially among the young. “And what age would you take me for?” said he, throwing his staff from him and straightening himself up. “Well, I’m a bad hand at guessing,” said I, “but you’re eighty if you’re a day.” “I’m that,” said he, “and more. And would you believe it,” said he, “the night I was born my mother was making a cake!”
[THE LUSMÓR]
The lusmór, or “great herb”—foxglove,
That stars the green skirt of the meadow,
is known to the peasantry by a variety of other names, as for example, sian sléibhe, “sian of the hills” (it grows plentifully on the high, rough places); méarachán, “fairy-thimble”; rós gréine, “little rose of the sun”; and lus na mban-sidhe, “herb of the elf-women, or witch-doctors,” etc., etc. It is bell-shaped, and has a purplish-red colour. As Dr. Joyce observes, it is a most potent herb, for it is a great fairy plant; and those who seek the aid of the Daoine Maithe, or Good People, in the cure of diseases or in incantations of any kind, often make use of