The concert glen and romantic brook witnessed very different ceremonies from that just described. At one period an awful drama took the place of lissome glee, when Hugh Brontë, “the giant,” in wild passion, sought to come into actual bodily conflict with the devil.
The potato blight fell as a crushing blow on the hopes of the Brontës, and proved the turning-point of their fortunes. They were growing in prosperity, and had enlarged their farm by the savings of many years. Through industry and frugality they had added field to field until their material success seemed to be assured; but while they were rejoicing in the position to which they had attained, the potato crop blackened, and melted away before their eyes.
Ireland at that period had two kinds of tenant farmers. One resembled the drowsy oriental, who basks in the sun, and seems content, not to live, but to exist.
In Ireland a large number of people on the land simply existed in those days. They knew that if they drained or improved their farms the landlords would raise their rents, so as to sweep away the entire profits arising from their improvements. They were well aware that any enlargement or brightening of their homesteads would cause the agent to scent superfluous money, and put on the screw; for a tenant would be more likely to make an effort to hold on to a comfortable house than to an uncomfortable one. Every staple of thatch put upon the leaky roof, or bucket of whitewash brushed on to the sooty walls of the cabin, gave the landlord a new hold on the tenant, and supplied the agent with a new pretext for increasing the rent for his master, or securing a present for himself. And there were agents so kindly disposed towards the miserable tenants that they preferred one pound as a present to themselves to two pounds added to the landlord’s rent-roll.
Under these circumstances tenants of the indolent type did not drain their lands or improve the appearance of their houses; and if they had thriving cattle they kept them concealed in remote fields when the agent was about; and when they were obliged to meet either agent or landlord, they decked themselves out like Jebusites, in ragged and squalid garments. It thus happened that landlords and land agents never saw their tenantry except in rags, and thus the tenants contrived to order themselves lowly and reverently to their betters.
The land of the thriftless brought forth potatoes in plenty. A little lime and dike scourings, mixed together, sufficed for manure. The potato seed was planted on the lea-sod, and covered up in ridges four or five feet wide. The elaborate preparation for planting potatoes in drills was then unheard of. Cabbage plants were dibbled into the edges of the ridges, and the potatoes and cabbages grew together. Abundant supplies of West-reds and Yellow-legs and Copper-duns, with large Savoy and Drumhead cabbages, only needed to be dug and gathered, to maintain existence.
Oats, following the potato crop, provided rough, wholesome bread, and little yellow rats of Kerry cows supplied milk. Great stalwart men and women lived on potatoes three times a day, with bread and buttermilk and an occasional egg. Sometimes, in the autumn, a lean and venerable cow would be fed for a few weeks on the after grass (flesh put on in a hurry being considered more tender) and then killed, salted, and hung up to the black back in the kitchen for family use. This pièce de résistance was the only flesh-meat ever known in the homes of such people.
Two pigs, fattened yearly on potatoes, and a few lambs, taken from the early clover, met the demands of the landlord. The wool of the sheep, spun, knitted, or woven at home, supplied scant, but sufficient, wardrobes. For fuel they had whins, or furze, cut from the fences, and turf from the bogs. The fire was preserved by raking a half-burned turf every night in the ashes, but a coal to light the fire was occasionally borrowed from more provident neighbors, and carried by a pair of tongs from house to house. Matches were unknown in those days.
The men broke stones by the roadsides, on warm days, for pocket-money or tobacco, and the women obtained their little extras by the produce of their surplus eggs, which they carried to market in little osier hand-baskets.
Existence in such homes flowed smoothly, one year being exactly like another. The people had no prospects, no hopes, no ambitions. They lived from hand to mouth, and, while all went well, the fulness of each day was sufficient for their simple wants. In their diurnal rounds they gathered their creels of potatoes, and drove their Kerry cows to the fields, golden with tufted ragweeds and purple with prickly thistles.