We leaned over on the thick leaves and tendrils to pull the pungent berries, when out flew two scared jackdaws just below. We rustled the tendrils, and away scudded a score or more of birds to tell the sea-gulls of this invasion of their ancient nest. Down near the shore white daisies speckled the green grass like a first snow-fall.
But hark! Is that the mystic cry of the cuckoo we are hearing for the first time? How plaintive and lonely its monotone!—“Cuckoo! cuckoo! cuckoo!” We have never heard that sound in America except from wretched Swiss clocks. What a world of delightful associations thrills through our veins! How the old familiar stories told us of our parents’ romps in the green lanes of the old country come to our memories, and the wonder with which in their childhood days they stopped to listen to this classic bird. There it is again, over in the woodland. Hark! “Cuckoo! cuckoo! cuckoo!” One of our company, born in the old land, and now returned for the first time in thirty years, began to reach the melting-point, when, looking in the direction of the cry, we caught sight of an incautious Irish boy peeping from behind a tree, with one hand to his mouth, just in the act of repeating this old Green-Castle trick of “fooling the people from America who want to hear the cuckoo.”
When we came down from the battlement we were told that a drunken sailor of H. M. “Vanguard” had fallen asleep on top of the wall a few weeks before and had rolled off to the bottom, a distance of a hundred feet, but had not been hurt enough to prevent his marriage the day before our arrival. Our informant added that it was the “potheen” that had saved him: “If he’d been sober, sir, shure he’d have wakened up a dead man.”
We had a rattling drive back to Moville. The first sight we met on reaching the wharf was our jolly beggar, transformed almost past recognition by soap and water, sneezing and coughing and claiming the promised sixpence: “Shure, yer honor, ye might make it a shillin’, for in the washin’ I’ve caught the divil of a cowld.” When we came back a few months afterwards we missed him. I made up my mind that he had never recovered from that cleansing; but a more recent visitor tells me that he is still alive, as witty and as dirty as ever.
[The traveller next made his way, via Londonderry, to Antrim, where stands a celebrated round tower.]
There is perhaps nothing of more puzzling interest to the Irish antiquary than the round towers, of which there are about eighty in the island. Their origin and purpose have been variously guessed at, some maintaining that they were erected by the Danes as watch-towers and afterwards changed by the Christian Irish into clock- or bell-towers. But why should the Danes confine these structures to Ireland, and not build them in England, Scotland, and other regions where they had a much firmer foothold? Others regard them as fire-temples, where the Druids lit the sacred flame and kept it safe from pollution. This view was accepted for a long time as a settlement of the question, on account of the resemblance of these towers to similar structures found in India and thought to have been used in an extinct form of worship. The Irish Druids followed many Eastern customs in their religious rites, but these may have been mere coincidences. The turrets in the vicinity of Turkish mosques, from the summits of which approaching festivals were proclaimed, suggested the hypothesis that the Irish towers were intended for the same purpose. Others held the theory that they were built by the ancient bishops as strongholds for the sacred articles belonging to the churches. In the neighborhood of many of these towers churches still exist. A very picturesque one forms part of a church in Castle-Dermot, in the county Down. At Drumbo, a few miles from Belfast, the ruin of one stands in the church-yard of a Presbyterian chapel.
The Antrim tower is in fine preservation to the very summit, but no trace has been found to indicate that a church existed in its vicinity. It is ninety-three feet high, and about fifty-three feet in circumference at its base, is built of rough stone, and has a stone flooring, underneath which it is supposed a sepulchre, as at Ardmore, exists. Above the door-way is a bas-relief like a Maltese cross. I climbed into the tower through the entrance, two feet by four. Its width inside is about eight feet, but narrows gradually to the top. The ivy which clung affectionately to its outside had grown into several of the windows and lay in decayed brambles inside. Up at the very top the jackdaws had a gloriously independent life of it all to themselves. The grass outside was as level as a century’s care and rolling could make it. And hark! “Cuckoo! cuckoo! cuckoo!” “No, you don’t, my dear fellow!” I replied. “You are a relative of our cuckoo of Green-Castle.” “Cuckoo!” he replied in denial; and I found out that it was a live cuckoo coaxing me to play at hide-and-seek. I started to accept the challenge,—when “Trespassers will be Prosecuted” stared me in the face as I mounted an innocent stile. Forty jackdaws—the Forty Thieves—got together on the topmost boughs of trees near by and discussed my intentions: Was I loading a gun, or only making a sketch? Was I painter or poacher? I followed the cuckoo’s cry in spite of the trespass, but caught no second glimpse of him.
Coming back and crossing a picturesque stream, a short walk brought me to the famous Lough Neagh, the fourth largest lake in Europe, twenty miles in length and fifteen in breadth. In size it seemed a mere pond, compared to the great inland seas of America; but the legend of its buried glories, and the belief of the fishermen that when the water is clear they can see round towers and high steeples and churches of the land below, would waken any one’s interest. Wonderful petrifactions are found along its margins, referable to some remote geological era, and no doubt these fossil woods gave rise to the fishermen’s superstition. On the borders of the lake you see the ruins of the seat of Lord O’Neill, “Shane’s Castle,” which is surrounded by as much superstition as the lake. The banshee of the O’Neills was a firm article of faith of mine host in Antrim, who told me that his father had heard its wail.
As I came back to the town I saw a characteristic scene which reminded me of Father Prout’s remark, that “the pig is as essential an inmate of the Irish cabin as the Arab steed of the shepherd’s tent on the plains of Mesopotamia.” At the door of a thatched mud hut there was a fierce tooth-and-nail contest between two pigs. Out sallied the good woman of the house and belabored the nearest one gently with stick, roughly with tongue: “Whist wid ye! Take that, now! Come into the house wid ye!” With well-trained docility Piggy obeyed. A short distance away I saw a crowd gathered about a cart covered with a pure white sheet. The look of delight upon the faces of those who had peeped under the cover tempted my curiosity, and I lifted the linen. It was a young pig, as white as snow and as fresh as a daisy.
But I intended only to take a peep at the northern coast of Ireland, and here I am en route to Belfast. As you go farther you fare better in the way of fine scenery and interesting people. There is something about the greenness of Ireland which sanctifies its claim to be called the Emerald Isle. I have seen nothing anywhere else to rival the soft luxuriance of nature here. Grass, ivy, and flowers seem as indigenous as hospitable hearts. I was told that if you flung a clean-cut stick in a County Meath meadow, you might pick it up in a day or two covered with young lichens and moss; but this reminded me too much of the crow-bar planted in some other fertile country in the evening which sprouted out tenpenny nails in the morning. The very primroses have a depth of mellow beauty I never saw in England. Walking through the country you get a good insight into its social and political questions, and, whatever preconceptions you may have, you will be sure—if you have no bigotry in your bones and do not excite people about the burning questions of the hour—to carry from Ireland memories of its lovely scenery which nothing on earth can ever dispel.