Under Crockuna; a thousand feet up. Interminable red bog. A cluster of hovels on the tableland; one set this way, another that, huddling together for company sake, it seems, in this abomination of desolation. A drift of young children play about on a green cleared space between the holdings. (In Donegal one sees young children everywhere.) They run off like wild-cats at our approach, screaming loudly and chattering in Irish as they run. A rick of turf, thatched with winter-stales; a goat tethered; a flock of geese; tufts of dyed wool—red and green and indigo—spread on stones to dry; the clack of a loom from the house nearest us; a dog working sheep beyond.
[NEAR LETTERKENNY]
A sheepdog with a flock of geese (a most unusual charge, I’m sure) halted by a bridge on their way to market. The owner squats smoking under the parapet—a darkavis’d man, with the slouch hat, slow eye, and wide, mobile mouth of Donegal. I greet him, and pass on.
A CLACHAN OF HOUSES.
[SHAN MAC ANANTY]
Up Glengesh. The hills of the Pass close in darkly on either side of me. The brown road rises between them in devious loops and twists to the sky beyond. There is the smell of bog-myrtle and ling in the air, and the sound of running water. The silence is awful. I am going along quiet and easy-like, with hardly a thought in my head, when near a sodded shelter, almost hidden from view in a cluster of fuchsia bushes, I come on a little lad of about three years of age. He can’t be older, I fancy, he is so small. He runs out in front of me, scared somewhat at my approach, as quaint a figure as ever I looked at. I shout at him and he stops, pulling the hat which he wears—and it is big enough to be his father’s—over his face, and laughing shyly at me out of one corner of it. His hands are wet, I notice, a blae-red colour, and sticking with grass—as if he had been “feeling” for minnows in the stream which runs alongside the road. He has a pair of homespun jumpers on, very thick, and dyed a crude indigo colour, a shirt and vest, and his legs are bare and wet up to the knees. I ask him in English “where he comes from,” “who is his father,” “who is his mother,” “where he lives?” He doesn’t answer, only pulls the hat deeper over his head, and laughs into it. I put the question to him then in Irish. . . . . The words were hardly out of my mouth when he gave a leap in the air. I felt as if something had struck me in the face—something soft and smothering, like a bag of feathers—and I was momentarily blinded. When I looked again who should I see but Shan Mac Ananty, my leaprachán friend from Scrabo in Down, running out in front of me, in a whirl of dust, it seemed—a white, blinding cloud—giving buck-jumps in the air, and dancing and capering about in the most outlandish fashion possible.
“So it’s you, Shan?” I said, when I had recovered my breath. I wasn’t a bit afraid, only winded.
“Ay,” says he. “I didn’t know you at first. The English is strange to me.” Then with a quaint grimace: “What are you doing up here?”
“And what are you doing up here yourself, Shan?” says I. “I thought Scrabo was your playground.”