Columcille he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieve League to Rosses.
What seems in places in this book a fathomless madhm is in reality bridged over with wonder—dark to the senses here and there, I grant you, but steady and treadable in proportion to the amount of vision one brings to the passage of it. All, I know, will not follow me (the fairies withhold knowledge from the many and bestow it on the few), but if blame is to be given let the fairies get it, and not me. And I may as well warn the reader here that it is unlucky to curse the fairies. Rosses is but a storm’s cry, and—the curse always comes home to roost!
With regard to the pictures illustrating the book, several people who have seen them in the original have criticised their darkness, as if they were all drawn “in twilight and eclipse.” But the darkness of Donegal was the first thing that struck me when I crossed the frontier at Lifford, and the forty miles’ journey through the hills to Ardara bit the impression still more deeply into me. And if I were asked now after a year’s exile what I remember most vividly of the county, I should say its gloom. I can see nothing now but a wilderness of black hills, with black shadows chasing one another over them, a gleam of water here and there, and just the tiniest little patch of sunlight—extraordinarily brilliant by contrast with the general darkness—on half a field, say, with its mearing-stones, to relieve the sense of tragedy that one feels on looking at the landscape.
[THE WANDER-LUST]
Sea-ribbons have I cut, and gathered ling; talked with fairies; heard Lia Fail moaning in the centre, and seen Tonn Tuaidh white in the north; slept on hearth-flags odd times, and under bushes other times; passed the mill with the scoop-wheels and the house with the golden door; following the roads—the heart always hot in me, the lights on the hills always beckoning me on!
[THE DARK WOMAN]
We were talking together the other morning—the publican and myself—outside the inn door at Barra, when a dark woman passed. “God look to that poor creature,” says he; “she hasn’t as much on her as would stuff a crutch.” “Stuff a what?” says I, for I didn’t quite understand him. “The bolster of a crutch,” says he. “And she knows nobody. Her eye-strings is broke.”
