Such opinions were not confined to the Brontës. As children we were given to understand that frosted blackberries were clubbed by the devil, who had blown his breath upon them as he passed by; and of course we all knew that the old Enemy, with the club foot, lurked in the blackberry bushes.
Servants and common laborers held to the belief, no doubt prompted and fortified by the action of the Brontës, that the devil went bodily from potato field to potato field, in his work of destruction; and many reports got into circulation, that he had been actually seen among the potatoes, in the form of a black dog or black bull, but that he always vanished in a flash of lurid light when challenged.
Hugh Brontë no more doubted that the devil, in bodily form, had destroyed the potato crop than he doubted his own existence. He saw the prop struck from under the family by a malignant enemy, and he would not tamely submit to the personal injury. It was both cruel and unjust that the devil, who never did any work, should pollute the fruits of their toil. He would shame the fiend out of his foul work; and for this purpose he would go deliberately to the field, and gather a basketful of rotten potatoes. These he would carry solemnly to the brink of the glen, and, standing on the edge of a precipice, call on the fiend to behold his foul and filthy work; and then, with great violence, dash them down as a feast for the fetid destroyer. This ceremony of feasting the fiend on the proceeds of his own foul work was often repeated, with fierce and desperate energy; and the Devil’s Dining-room is still pointed out by the neighbors.
I knew a man who witnessed one of these scenes. He spoke of Hugh Brontë’s address to the devil as being sublime in its ferocity. With bare, outstretched arms, the veins in his neck and forehead standing out like hempen cords, and his voice choking with concentrated passion, he would apostrophize Beelzebub, as the bloated fly, and call upon him to partake of the filthy repast he had provided. The address ended with wild, scornful laughter as Brontë hurled the rotten potatoes down the bank.
The dramatic power of the ceremony was so real, and the spell of Brontë’s earnestness was so contagious, that my informant, who was not a superstitious man, declared that for a few seconds after the challenge was given he watched in terror, expecting the fiend to appear.
III.
THE GREAT BRONTË FIGHT.
The fight between Welsh Brontë and Sam Clarke of Ballynaskeagh was an era-making event. The contest took place long before my time, but I had a precise and full account of the battle from two eye-witnesses. No encounter of the kind in County Down ever made such a noise, or left such a lasting impression. Like the flight of Mahomet or the founding of Rome, it became a fixed point around which other events ranged themselves.
Women would speak of their children as born, or their daughters married, so many years before or after the fight; and old men, in referring to their ages, would tell how they had been present when Welsh Brontë licked Sam Clarke, and that they must have been of such an age at the time. It was one of those famous encounters which only required the pen of Pindar to give it immortality in epic form.
The history of the affair which I here submit embodies the conclusions at which I have arrived, after comparing twenty or thirty versions; but I am specially indebted to the late Mr. John Todd of Croan, who was present at the battle with his brother James, and who narrated the incidents of the contest, with many picturesque details. I should add, however, that the Todds were friends of the Brontës, and told the story with the warmth of partisans.
Welsh Brontë had a sweetheart called Peggy Campbell, and she had a little, delicate, deformed brother who used to go to Ballynafern school on crutches. Some of the big healthy boys thoughtlessly amused themselves by tormenting the little cripple. He often arrived home with his clothes torn and daubed with mud, and sometimes showing in his person the signs of ill-treatment. After the manner of school-boys, he would never tell on his tormentors. Welsh’s sweetheart, however, had discovered the cowardly and cruel treatment to which her little brother had been subjected, and appealed to Welsh to protect him.