A man hailed me on the road, and we were talking. . . . “If one had nothing but fraochans to eat and water to drink, sure one would have to be satisfied. And remember,” says he, “that a prophet lived on as little.” “Who was that?” says I. “John the Baptist,” says he. “You’ll read that in the books.”
[THE TRANSIENT]
Only the transient is beautiful, said Schiller; and Nature, in the incessant play of her rising, vanishing forms, is not averse to beauty. Beauty, said Turgenev, needs not to live for ever to be eternal—one instant is enough for her.
[WOMEN AND HARES]
It’s curious in Donegal sometimes, when going along the road, or crossing a footpath through the fields, to see a shawled woman, a perch or so off, dropping over the edge of a hill, and then when you get up to the edge there is no sign of her at all. And, maybe, a pace further on you will start a hare out of the hollow where you think the woman should have been, and you begin to wonder is there any truth in the story about women—that have to do with magic and charms and old freets, and the like—changing into hares, after all! I have had many experiences like that in my travels through the county, and in not a few instances have I been puzzled how a figure—silhouetted sharply against the skyline, and only a few yards off—could disappear so quickly out of view.
[THE SMELL OF THE TOWN]
A woman said to me to-day: “You’ll get the smell o’ the town blowed off you in the Donegal hills!”
[GLENGESH]
Darkness and austerity—those are the notes I carry away from this wild glen. Its lines have something of the splendid bareness of early architecture; its colour suggests time-stained walls, with quiet aisles and mouldering altars where one might kneel and dream away an existence. When you meet a stranger going the road that winds through it, like a coil of incense suspended in mid-air, you expect him to look at you out of eyes full of wonder, and to speak to you in half-chanted and serious words, stopping not, turning neither to left nor to right, but faring on, a symbol of pilgrimage:
Le solus a chroidhe,