ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
Just where the road that runs by the bay turns northward to run by the Atlantic, a few white houses on either side turn it for a moment into a street. The grey road was not all grey yesterday, in spite of stones, and sea, and clouds, and a mist that blotted out the hills; for July had edged it with yellow rag-weed, the horses of the Sidhe, and with purple heather; and besides the tireless turf-laden donkeys, there were men in white and women in crimson flannel going towards the village. One woman sitting in a donkey-cart was chanting a song in Irish about a voyage across the sea; and when someone asked her if she was to try for a prize at the Feis, the Irish festival going on in the village, she only answered that she was 'lonesome after the old times.'
At the Feis, in the white schoolhouse, some boys and girls from schools and convents at the 'big town' many miles away were singing; and now and then a little bare-footed boy from close by would go up on the platform and sing the Paistin Fionn, or Is truag gan Peata. People from the scattered houses and villages about had gathered to listen; some had come in turf-boats from Aran, Irish-speakers, proud to show that the language that has been called dead has never died; and glad at the new life that is coming into it. Men in loose flannel-jackets sang old songs, many sad ones, but not all; for one that was addressed to a mother, who had broken off her daughter's marriage with the maker of the song, turned more to anger than to grief; and there was the love song, 'Courteous Bridget,' made perhaps a hundred years ago, by wandering Raftery.
A woman with madder-dyed petticoat sang the lament of an emigrant going across the great sea, telling how she got up at daybreak to look at the places she was going to leave, Ballinrobe and the rest; and how she envied the birds that were free of the air, and the beasts that were free of the mountain, and were not forced to go away. Another song that was sung was the Jacobite one, with the refrain that has been put into English—'Seaghan O'Dwyer a Gleanna, we're worsted in the game!'
Some poems were repeated also: Raftery's 'Argument with whiskey,' in which he puts the joys and sorrows of its lovers only too impartially. Another 'Argument' was between two men, herds, I think; each counting up the virtues of his own province, Connaught or Munster. An old man gave a long poem, a recital of Bible history; but the judges rang their bell when he had got to the parable of the Prodigal Son, and was telling how 'the poor foolish boy went away from his home and from his father to some far country'; and he left the platform saying indignantly: 'You might have left me time to bring him back again.' And there was a poem on 'The rising again of Ireland,' telling how, when she has risen, 'ships will be coming to her from France and from Spain, and from all the countries; and there will be no rent on the land; and every poet will be given a fee of twenty-one pounds.'
In the evening there were people waiting round the door to hear the songs and the pipes again. An old man among them was speaking with many gestures, his voice rising, and a crowd gathering about him. 'Tha se beo, tha se beo'—'he is living, he is living,' I heard him say over and over again. I asked what he was saying, and was told: 'He says that Parnell is alive yet.' I was pushed away from him by the crowd to where a policeman was looking on. 'He says that Parnell is alive still,' I said. 'There are many say that,' he answered. 'And, after all, no one ever saw the body that was buried.'
The rising again of Ireland, of her old speech, of her last leader, dreams all, as we are told. But here, on the edge of the world, dreams are real things, and every heart is watching for the opening of one or another grave.