But the Law of Gweedore knew all that happened in Gweedore. A full hour before we had appointed for being called we were called. His Reverence had arranged our conveyance, and paid for it—paid also, I think, for a luncheon-basket. Willy-nilly, we went round by Bloody Foreland and visited the evicted tenants, crouching under scraws and twigs, in shelters which suggested the caves of the earth-dwellers rather than anything fit for man.
Gortahork I remember as a place where we had a good meal of tea and hot cakes and eggs, and other things thrown in, for a shilling. And I remember also the long, long drive to Letterkenny—some forty miles it was, I seem to remember, but shall not pledge myself to it lest I be confuted—and how we dashed along the sides of precipices, we on one side of the car, with our feet almost touching earth, the other side high in air, being weighted only with empty parcel-post hampers, of which Donegal needs no great supply; below us—far, far below—a valley filled in with mighty stones and rocks. The pace was so fast that we could hardly keep our seats, though well accustomed to that car which the unlettered English tripper is apt to call “a jolting car”; and the driver was quite unaware of our discomfort, assuring us with as much jocularity as a Donegal man permits himself that the horses never were known to stumble, and that, although an occasional English tourist did fall off, he or she always “fell soft.”
After all, when I look back to that scamper through Donegal sixteen years ago, I remember the mountains and the priests. Monuments of a beautiful hospitality, the priests for me mark the wild ways up and down Donegal.
CHAPTER X
IRISH TRAITS AND WAYS
AN English person in Ireland may find himself astray because he will have no clue to the minds of the people. I once heard two English ladies returning from an Irish trip say to each other across a railway-carriage, otherwise full of Irish people, that the Irish all told lies. This was a rash judgment and a harsh one; I do not know what the occasion of it was. Sometimes the Irish, through their naturally gracious manners, will say the thing that will please you best to hear rather than the absolute truth by rule of thumb. There is the well-known, well-founded complaint about Irish distances; a peasant will tell you that you are three miles from a place when you are really seven. Now, of course you may be misled by the difference between the Irish and English mile; and thereby hangs a tale. The Irish or Plantation measure was adopted by Cromwell’s planted English, so that they might get a bigger slice of land than was intended for them. But if you are told you have three Irish miles to go and find that you have seven, almost certainly the thought uppermost in your misinformant’s mind was: “The crathur! Sure, he’ll think nothin’ of it if he believes it’s only three miles; and the spring ’ud be taken out of him altogether if he thought he’d seven weary miles before him yet. And, sure, by the time he’s travelled the three miles he won’t be far off the seven.”
The Irish mind, besides being very nimble, is subtle and complicated. It may have gone off on an excursion before answering you which you in your Anglo-Saxon plainness would never dream of; and your truth may not be the Irish truth at all, and yet both of them be the genuine article.
A very small Irish boy of my acquaintance, being rudely accused of having told a lie, responded meekly: “I don’t think it were really a lie; I think it were only an imagination.”
“Are there any priests in the town?” you ask an Irishman; and he replies, there being some half-dozen: “The streets are black with them.”
“You can’t always depend on eggs, not if they comes in fresh from the nest,” said an Irish servant to me, when some of the grocer’s “new-laid” eggs had “popped” in the saucepan. The remark was purely consolatory and was not at all intended to convey that the hens laid stale eggs.
The Irish “bull,” so-called, very often is the result of the nimble-wittedness of the speaker. He has thought more than he has expressed, and the bull implies a hiatus. “I’d better be a coward for ten minutes than be dead all my life” is a famous example of an Irish bull; but it only means “all the days of my natural life”; so much was not expressed.