And so we drove over to this village of Knockcool (Knockcool, by the way, means 'Hill of Sleep'), as much to make amends for Benella's eccentricities as with any idea of falling in with her proposal. The house proved everything she said, and in Mrs. Wogan Odevaine Benella had found a person every whit as remarkable as herself. She is evidently an Irish gentlewoman of very small means, very flexible in her views and convictions, very talkative and amusing, and very much impressed with Benella as a product of New England institutions. We all took a fancy to one another at first sight, and we heard with real pleasure that her son's wife lived only a few miles away. We insisted on paying the evicted lady the three pounds ten in advance for the first week. She seemed surprised, and we remembered that Irish tenants, though often capable of shedding blood for a good landlord, are generally averse to paying him rent. Mrs. Wogan Odevaine then drove away in high good humour, taking some personal belongings with her, and promising to drink tea with us some time during the week. She kissed Francesca good-bye, told her she was the prettiest creature she had ever seen, and asked if she might have a peep at all her hats and frocks when she came to visit us.
Salemina says that Rhododendron Cottage (pronounced by Bridget Thunder 'Roothythanthrum') being the property of one landlord and the residence of four tenants at the same time makes us in a sense participators in the old system of rundale tenure, long since abolished. The good-will or tenant-right was infinitely subdivided, and the tiniest holdings sometimes existed in thirty-two pieces. The result of this joint tenure was an extraordinary tangle, particularly when it went so far as the subdivision of 'one cow's grass,' or even of a horse, which, being owned jointly by three men, ultimately went lame, because none of them would pay for shoeing the fourth foot.
We have been here five days, and instead of reproving Benella, as we intended, for gross assumption of authority in the matter, we are more than ever her bond-slaves. The place is altogether charming, and here it is for you.
Knockcool Street is Knockcool village itself, as with almost all Irish towns; but the line of little thatched cabins is brightened at the far end by the neat house of Mrs. Wogan Odevaine, set a trifle back in its own garden, by the pillared porch of a modest hotel, and by the barracks of the Royal Irish Constabulary. The sign of the Provincial Bank of Ireland almost faces our windows; and although it is used as a meal-shop the rest of the week, they tell us that two thousand pounds in money is needed there on fair-days. Next to it is a little house, the upper part of which is used as a Methodist chapel; and old Nancy, the caretaker, is already a good friend of ours. It is a humble house of prayer, but Nancy takes much pride in it, and showed us the melodeon, 'worked by a young lady from Rossantach,' the Sunday-school rooms, and even the cupboard where she keeps the jugs for the love-feast and the linen and wine for the sacrament, which is administered once in three years. Next comes the Hoeys' cabin, where we have always a cordial welcome, but where we never go all together, for fear of embarrassing the family, which is a large one—three generations under one roof, and plenty of children in the last. Old Mrs. Hoey does not rightly know her age, she says; but her daughter Ellen was born the year of the Big Wind, and she herself was twenty-two when she was married, and you might allow a year between that and when Ellen was born, and make your own calculation.
She tells many stories of the Big Wind, which we learn was in 1839, making Ellen's age about sixty-one and her mother's eighty-four. The fury of the storm was such that it forced the water of the Lough far ashore, stranding the fish among the rocks, where they were found dead by hundreds. When next morning dawned there was confusion and ruin on every side: the cross had tumbled from the chapel, the tombstones were overturned in the graveyard, trees and branches blocked the roadways, cabins were stripped of their thatches, and cattle found dead in the fields; so it is small wonder old Mrs. Hoey remembers the day of Ellen's birth, weak as she is on all other dates.
Ellen's husband, Miles M'Gillan, is the carpenter on an estate in the neighbourhood. His shop opens out of the cabin, and I love to sit by the Hoey fireside, where the fan bellows, turned by a crank, brings in an instant a fresh flame to the sods of smouldering turf, and watch a wee Colleen Bawn playing among her daddy's shavings, tying them about her waist and fat wrists, hanging them on her ears and in among her brown curls. Mother Hoey says that I do not speak like an American—that I have not so many 'caperin's' in my language, whatever they may be; and so we have long delightful chats together when I go in for a taste of Ellen's griddle bread, cooked over the peat coals. Francesca, meantime, is calling on Mrs. O'Rourke, whose son has taken more than fifty bicycle prizes; and no stranger can come to Knockcool without inspecting the brave show of silver, medals, and china that adorn the bedroom, and make the O'Rourkes the proudest couple in ould Donegal. Phelim O'Rourke smokes his dudeen on a bench by the door, and invites the passer-by to enter and examine the trophies. His trousers are held up with bits of rope arranged as suspenders; indeed, his toilet is so much a matter of strings that it must be a work of time to tie on his clothing in the morning, in case he takes it off at night, which is open to doubt; nevertheless it is he that's the satisfied man, and the luck would be on him as well as on e'er a man alive, were he not kilt wid the cough intirely! Mrs. Phelim's skirt shows a triangle of red flannel behind, where the two ends of the waistband fail to meet by about six inches, but are held together by a piece of white ball fringe. Any informality in this part of her costume is, however, more than atoned for by the presence of a dingy bonnet of magenta velvet, which she always dons for visitors.
The O'Rourke family is the essence of hospitality, so their kitchen is generally full of children and visitors; and on the occasion when Salemina issued from the prize bedroom, the guests were so busy with conversation that, to use their own language, divil a wan of thim clapt eyes on the O'Rourke puppy, and they did not notice that the baste was floundering in a tub of soft, newly made butter standing on the floor. He was indeed desperately involved, being so completely wound up in the waxy mass that he could not climb over the tub's edge. He looked comical and miserable enough in his plight: the children and the visitors thought so, and so did Francesca and I; but Salemina went directly home, and kept her room for an hour. She is so sensitive! Och, thin, it's herself that's the marthyr intirely! We cannot see that the incident affects us so long as we avoid the O'Rourkes' butter; but she says, covering her eyes with her handkerchief and shuddering: “Suppose there are other tubs and other pup—Oh, I cannot bear the thought of it, dears! Please change the subject, and order me two hard-boiled eggs for dinner.”
Leaving Knockcool behind us, we walk along the country road between high, thick hedges: here a clump of weather-beaten trees, there a stretch of bog with silver pools and piles of black turf, then a sudden view of hazy hills, a grove of beeches, a great house with a splendid gateway, and sometimes, riding through it, a figure new to our eyes, a Lady Master of the Hounds, handsome in her habit with red facings. We pass many an 'evicted farm,' the ruined house with the rushes growing all about it, and a lonely goat browsing near; and on we walk, until we can see the roofs of Lisdara's solitary cabin row, huddled under the shadow of a gloomy hill topped by the ruins of an old fort. All is silent, and the blue haze of the peat smoke curls up from the thatch. Lisdara's young people have mostly gone to the Big Country; and how many tears have dropped on the path we are treading, as Peggy and Mary, Cormac and Miles, with a wooden box in the donkey cart behind them, or perhaps with only a bundle hanging from a blackthorn stick, have come down the hill to seek their fortune! Perhaps Peggy is barefooted; perhaps Mary has little luggage beyond a pot of shamrock or a mountain thrush in a wicker cage; but what matter for that? They are used to poverty and hardship and hunger, and although they are going quite penniless to a new country, sure it can be no worse than the old. This is the happy-go-lucky Irish philosophy, and there is mixed with it a deal of simple trust in God.
How many exiles and wanderers, both those who have no fortune and those who have failed to win it, dream of these cabin rows, these sweet-scented boreens with their 'banks of furze unprofitably gay,' these leaking thatches with the purple loosestrife growing in their ragged seams, and, looking backward across the distance of time and space, give the humble spot a tender thought, because after all it was in their dear native isle!
'Pearly are the skies in the country of my fathers,
Purple are thy mountains, home of my heart;
Mother of my yearning, love of all my longings,
Keep me in remembrance long leagues apart.'