“It’s a provident thing,” a tramp said to me the other day, “to lay something by for the sore foot.”
[ASHERANCALLY]
A roar, as of breaking seas. We are approaching the open Atlantic, but though its salt is bitter on our lips, our view is obscured by sand-dunes. Then, as we round a bend in the road, the Fall of Asherancally breaks suddenly on us, tumbling through a gut in the mountainside—almost on to the road it seems. We stand under it. We watch the brown bulk of water dropping from the gut-head and dancing in foam on the rocks a hundred feet below. The roar is deafening. One might shout at the top of one’s voice, and yet not be heard. The air is iridescent with spindrift, which shines in the sun and sprays coolingly on our cheeks. We lean on the bridge parapet, watching and listening.
LOCH NACUNG—MOONRISE.
[ORANGE GALLASES]
I came across an old man to-day out in Lochros—a shock-headed old fellow in shirt and trousers, carrying water from a spring well near the Cross, and a troop of dogs snapping at his heels. “You don’t seem to be popular with the dogs?” says I, laughing. “Oh, let them snap,” says he. “It’s not me they’re snapping at, but my orange gallases!”
[THE HUMAN VOICE]
The human voice—what a wonder and mystery it is! “All power,” said Whitman, “is folded in a great vocalism.” I spoke to a man to-day on the roadside, near Maghery. He was a poor, raggedy fellow, with a gaunt, unshaven chin and wild eyes, and a couple of barefooted children played about the mud at his feet. He answered me in a voice that thrilled me—deep, chestfull, resonant; a voice, that had he been an educated man, might have won fame for him, as a politician, say, or a preacher, or an actor. And voices like his are by no means uncommon along the western seaboard of Ireland. Men address you on the road in that frank, human, comrade-like way of Irishmen, out of deep lungs and ringing larynxes that bring one back to the time when men were giants, and physique was the rule rather than the exception. In such voices one can imagine the Fenians to have talked one with the other, Fionn calling to Sgeolan, and Oisin chanting the divine fragments of song he dreamed in the intervals of war and venery. Will Ireland ever recapture the heroic qualities—build personality, voice, gesture—or, as Whitman puts it: “Litheness, majestic faces, clear eyes”—that were hers down to a comparatively late period, and in places have not quite died out even yet? I believe she will.