“How long is it since you used soap and water?” said I.
“Now, yer honor, where’d I get soap, when I can’t get bread? Me childer would ate it if there was any in the house.”
“Well, I’d like to see what you look like when you’re clean. There’s another sixpence for you,—half for your stomach and half for your skin. If you’ll get some soap and go down to the sea there and wash yourself well while we’re away, I’ll give you sixpence more when we come back.”
“Shure,” quickly replied the Moville wit, “doesn’t yer honor know that ye can’t use soap in salt water? But I’ll go to the pump, so I will.”
It was quite a disappointment afterwards to learn that, like Montaigne’s page, our beggar was never guilty of telling the truth, that the “sivin small childer” had yet to be born, and that he considered our party the best fools he had met that season.
We were to drive down to Green-Castle, in the vicinity of which the jarvies said we should be sure to hear the cuckoo. Our first experience of a jaunting-car was pleasant, though precarious. It had the dash of danger which spices adventure. A sober foreigner can seldom keep his seat at first; an Irishman may be so drunk that he walks zigzag on the sidewalk, but he never falls off a car—unless he’s sober. At first blush, especially in the cities, the jaunting-car seems an ingenious device to furnish Irish surgeons with amputations. As you go tearing along the streets and flying around corners, your legs hanging over the sides in close proximity to other “highway comets” tearing along the opposite way, you have a choice of death by being dashed to “smithereens” on your face by a jerk or dying in desperate collision with a street-car. Our jarvie was a genuine Paddy, full to the brim of wit and song. Between the stretches of his imagination in tale-telling (all his native geese were royal swans, and for the one ruin we were approaching he built a score of castles in the air) he made the road lively with local Irish airs. During the winter these jarvies have little or nothing to do, and one of them, being asked how they spent that season, replied, “Making up stories, sir, to tell the travellers in summer.”
However much we were imposed upon in the matter of tale and tradition, there was no deception in the interest of the drive. The sea lay to the right. Along the highway and in many of the fields, though much of the country to the left was barren and hilly, the daisy was peeping up for our first recognition; the primroses lay in rich golden clumps upon the banks; violets, blue, red, and white, little purple bluebells, day-nettles, which the bees and boys love to suck, and many other new and old wild flowers, were pointed out to us as we jogged along. Sometimes we jumped down to pick them, gathering whole handfuls of the faintly-perfumed primroses and burying our noses in their exquisite blossoms in a way to make an emigrant homesick. On we jolted, and soon came within sight of the romantic hamlet, its picturesque castle and fort facing the sea. With a final quick trot and a jerk our driver pulled up at the Green-Castle Hotel, with the artless hint that its champagne for jintlemen and its whiskey for jarvies had no rival from Malin Head to Cape Clear.
[After giving his readers the legendary history of Green-Castle our author proceeds to describe its present appearance.]
The old castle is now a roofless wreck of time and siege, but enough is left of its walls—eight feet thick—and its deep dungeons to show that it was in its time a strong fortress. We walked over the space between the walls, about eighty yards by forty, upon which the sun and the rains descend and where the grass grew knee-deep. Detached bits of wall were covered with splendid ivy. On the walls here and there we saw the little whitlow-grass, and in the crevices of the rocks the lilac flowers of the toad-flax, which one sees in all such sea-side ruins in Ireland. We climbed the steep crag of the highest portion facing the sea. Many of the stones were loose and slipped out from under our feet. We mounted to the very top of the old battlement,—a glorious spot from which to watch a storm when the great waves roll up in close column and break over the rocks. Creeping from the base of the perpendicular rock a hundred feet below, thick ivy had grown to the very summit, its rootlets and tendrils turning and twisting into and upon each other, binding the stones better than mortar, sucking out the moisture of the wall, and keeping it as dry as punk. Everywhere in Ireland one is struck by the wonderful tenacity of ivy, which creeps along the ground or crawls up and clings to the barest flint. If you lift one of the young shoots, it clings to the earth like a hungry leech to human skin. If you turn it up, you see rootlets, like the legs of a caterpillar, by which it attaches itself to the ground, and which it seems to lose when transplanted to America.