There is nothing going on in the barracks this morning which interests me, save perhaps a court-martial, at which I am told that my absence will be very precious. So I stroll off in the soft sunlight through the great gateway, where a sentry holds constant ward and watch, just for appearance sake, I imagine, as it cannot be to keep the boys in or strangers out, for just at yonder corner is a breach in the wall unguarded where any one may come and go at pleasure, and I doubt not many of the boys do go and for pleasure, though there can be little amusement in the sad town which clusters between the barracks and castle. Of young men it seems to hold none, and there are not many children, so that when these few old people pass onward and enter for eternity yonder churchyard, old Buttevant will wither away altogether. Many kindly faces come to the doors to watch me, knowing that I am an American, and their eyes have a questioning look as though to ask for some dear one in the land beyond the sea.
The place is indeed very old and every now and then as I pass through the streets I come across some vestige of its past greatness and a mile beyond its limits reach the ruins of Ballybeg Abbey, in a smiling meadow down by the river Awbeg. Something of a stately structure in its palmy days, there is little of that left now, but on the whole it is all rather sociable. The river is of that sort, and having loitered downward under its trees and through its grasses murmurs confidential bits of gossip about the castle yonder upon its banks. Yellow buttercups push their heads upward through the turf which climbs to the old grey walls of the abbey, and in the abbot's doorway the white face of a ruminating cow is silhouetted against the inner darkness. "They also serve who only stand and wait," must have been written of Ballybeg and its kind, for it has left no trace upon the pages of history. Yet withal, as I have stated, it's a sociable old place and I spend some time in its company, seated on the parapet of a neighbouring stone bridge where 'tis said the fairies dance when the moon is full.
I expected much from the name—Ballybeg—why I can scarcely tell but I cannot say that I am disappointed, though such stately structures as Fountaine and Tintern in Wales would scarce consider Ballybeg to be exactly "in their set."
Wandering up the banks of the Awbeg, I pass beyond the castle. We had tea there last season and a medieval castle which can descend to having afternoon tea served within its walls is not worthy of description. It is owned by an irascible old lady who occupies one part and rents out the other and who generally keeps such a strict eye upon her tenants that it results in driving them out. When we visited it the tenants were an officer and his wife, and just that shortly happened, so that on my second visit to Buttevant, the castle stares at me with vacant eyes of windows, and I pass onward up the river to the centre of the town, where the ruins of its Franciscan abbey raise their arches and columns and guard the dead of long ago, and those who come in this later day to sleep beneath its shadows.
If you enter its crypt, you will stand amazed at the vast quantity of human bones piled pell-mell there. Some say that they are but the natural accumulation of departing humanity and others that they all came from the neighbouring battlefield of Knockninoss,—others believe that when in the flesh they all lived yonder in old Ballybeg.
Be that as it may, they are here now, quietly awaiting that day of days, which shall summon them forth once more, and as I stand in the darkness with my foot on a skull, which might have enclosed the brains of an Irish king, downward through a broken casement comes the sound of a voice and the words "I am the resurrection and the life, he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live," and I roll the skull gently back into denser shadows, wondering, wondering, and then, as we all must do, ceasing to wonder, and just continuing to—trust.
Passing upward into the sunshine and forward amidst the long grasses which cover the humbler dead, I find that one more has but now joined this silent company, and those who brought her here are slowly leaving the churchyard. Poor people, all of them,—there does not appear to be any others in this town of Buttevant,—but death seems to hold no terrors for any one of these and many sit round on the tombstones and do not hesitate to discuss the qualities, good and bad, of those asleep beneath them and to admire the inscriptions. Here is one quaint enough surely:
"Here lies Pat Steele—that's very true;
Who was he? What was he? What's that to you?"