Meanwhile, high up on the invisible mountain, the people were dragging their bleeding knees from altar to altar, flinging stones, and muttering some endless litanies, with the priests standing by. I think I was not sorry that the rain, and the care of my precious health, prevented me from mounting a severe hill to witness a sight that could only have caused one to be shocked and ashamed that servants of God should encourage it. The road home was very pleasant; everybody was wet through, but everybody was happy, and by some miracle we were seven on the car. There was the honest Englishman in the military cap, who sung ‘The sea, the hopen sea’s my ‘ome,’ although not any one of the company called upon him for that air. Then the music was taken up by a good-natured lass from Castlebar; then the Englishman again, ‘With burnished brand and musketoon’; and there was no end of pushing pinching, squeezing, and laughing. The Englishman, especially, had a favourite yell, with which he saluted and astonished all cottages, passengers, cars, that we met or overtook. Presently came prancing by two dandies, who were especially frightened by the noise. ‘Thim’s two tailors from Westport,’ said the carman, grinning with all his might. ‘Come, gat out of the way there, gat along!’ piped a small English voice from above somewhere. I looked up, and saw a little creature perched on the top of a tandem, which he was driving with the most knowing air—a dreadful young hero, with a white hat, and a white face, and a blue bird’s-eye neckcloth. He was five feet high, if an inch, an ensign, and sixteen; and it was a great comfort to think, in case of danger or riot, that one of his years and personal strength was at hand to give help.
‘Thim’s the afficers,’ said the carman, as the tandem wheeled by, a small groom quivering on behind—and the carman spoke with the greatest respect this time. Two days before, on arriving at Westport, I had seen the same equipage at the door of the inn—where for a moment there happened to be no waiter to receive me. So, shouldering a carpet-bag, I walked into the inn-hall, and asked a gentleman standing there, where was the coffee-room? It was the military tandem-driving youth, who with much grace looked up in my face, and said calmly, ‘I dawnt knaw.’ I believe the little creature had just been dining in the very room—and so present my best compliments to him.
The Guide-book will inform the traveller of many a beautiful spot which lies in the neighbourhood of Westport, and which I had not the time to visit; but I must not take leave of the excellent little inn without speaking once more of its extreme comfort; nor of the place itself, without another parting word regarding its beauty. It forms an event in one’s life to have seen that place, so beautiful is it, and so unlike all other beauties that I know of. Were such a bay lying upon English shores it would be a world’s wonder: perhaps, if it were on the Mediterranean, or the Baltic, English travellers would flock to it by hundreds; why not come and see it in Ireland? Remote as the spot is, Westport is only two days’ journey from London now, and lies in a country far more strange to most travellers than France or Germany can be.
CHAPTER XXII
FROM WESTPORT TO BALLINASLOE
THE mail-coach took us next day by Castlebar and Tuam to Ballinasloe, a journey of near eighty miles. The country is interspersed with innumerable seats belonging to the Blakes, the Browns, and the Frenches; and we passed many large domains belonging to bankrupt lords and fugitive squires, with fine lodges, adorned with moss and battered windows, and parks where, if the grass was growing on the roads, on the other hand the trees had been weeded out of the grass. About these seats and their owners the guard, an honest shrewd fellow, had all the gossip to tell. This jolly guard himself was a ruin, it turned out; he told me his grandfather was a man of large property; his father, he said, kept a pack of hounds, and had spent everything by the time he, the guard, was sixteen: so the lad made interest to get a mail-car to drive, whence he had been promoted to the guard’s seat, and now for forty years had occupied it, travelling eighty miles, and earning seven-and-twopence every day of his life. He had been once ill, he said, for three days; and if a man may be judged by ten hours’ talk with him, there are few more shrewd, resolute, simple-minded men to be found on the outside of any coaches or the inside of any houses in Ireland.
During the first five-and-twenty miles of the journey,—for the day was very sunny and bright,—Croaghpatrick kept us company; and, seated with your back to the horses, you could see, ‘on the left, that vast aggregation of mountains which stretches southwards to the Bay of Galway; on the right, that gigantic assemblage which sweeps in circular outline northward to Killule.’ Somewhere amongst those hills the great John Tuam was born, whose mansion and cathedral are to be seen in Tuam town, but whose fame is spread everywhere. To arrive at Castlebar, we go over the undulating valley which lies between the mountains of Joyce country and Erris; and the first object which you see on entering the town is a stately Gothic castle that stands at a short distance from it.
On the gate of the stately Gothic castle was written an inscription not very hospitable: WITHOUT BEWARE, WITHIN AMEND;—just beneath which is an iron crane of neat construction. The castle is the county gaol, and the iron crane is the gallows of the district. The town seems neat and lively; there is a fine church, a grand barracks (celebrated as the residence of the young fellow with the bird’s-eye neckcloth), a club, and a Whig and Tory newspaper. The road hence to Tuam is very pretty and lively, from the number of country seats along the way, giving comfortable shelter to more Blakes, Brownes, and Lynches.
In the cottages, the inhabitants looked healthy and rosy in their rags, and the cots themselves in the sunshine almost comfortable. After a couple of months in the country, the stranger’s eye grows somewhat accustomed to the rags: they do not frighten him as at first: the people who wear them look for the most part healthy enough; especially the small children—those who can scarcely totter, and are sitting shading their eyes at the door, and leaving the unfinished dirt-pie to shout as the coach passes by—are as healthy a looking race as one will often see. Nor can any one pass through the land without being touched by the extreme love of children among the people: they swarm everywhere, and the whole county rings with cries of affection towards the children, with the songs of young ragged nurses dandling babies on their knees, and warnings of mothers to Patsey to come out of the mud, or Norey to get off the pig’s back.
At Tuam the coach stopped exactly for fourteen minutes and a half, during which time those who wished might dine: but instead, I had the pleasure of inspecting a very mouldy dirty town, and made my way to the Catholic Cathedral—a very handsome edifice indeed; handsome without and within, and of the Gothic sort. Over the door is a huge coat of arms surmounted by a Cardinal’s hat—the arms of the See, no doubt, quartered with John Tuam’s own patrimonial coat; and that was a frieze coat, from all accounts, passably ragged at the elbows. Well, he must be a poor wag who could sneer at an old coat because it was old and poor. But if a man changes it for a tawdry gimcrack suit, bedizened with twopenny tinsel, and struts about calling himself his Grace and my Lord, when may we laugh if not then? There is something simple in the way in which these good people belord their clergymen, and respect titles real or sham. Take any Dublin paper,—a couple of columns of it are sure to be filled with movements of the small great men of the world. Accounts from Darrynane state that the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor is in good health—his Lordship went out with his beagles yesterday; or His Grace the Most Reverend the Lord Archbishop of Ballywhack, assisted by the Right Reverend the Lord Bishops of Trincomalee and Hippopotamus, assisted, etc.; or Colonel Tims, of Castle Tims, and lady, have quitted the Shelburne Hotel, with a party for Kilballybathershins, where the august[27] party propose to enjoy a few days’ shrimp-fishing,—and so on. Our people are not witty and keen of perceiving the ridiculous, like the Irish; but the bluntness and honesty of the English have well-nigh kicked the fashionable humbug down; and except perhaps among footmen and about Baker Street, this curiosity about the aristocracy is wearing fast away. Have the Irish so much reason to respect their lords that they should so chronicle all their movements; and not only admire real lords, but make sham ones of their own to admire them?
There is no object of special mark upon the road from Tuam to Ballinasloe, the country being flat for the most part, and the noble Galway and Mayo mountains having disappeared at length, until you come to a glimpse of Old England in the pretty village of Ahascragh. An old oak-tree grows in the neat street, the houses are as trim and white as eye can desire, and about the church and the town are handsome plantations, forming on the whole such a picture of comfort and plenty as is rarely to be seen in the part of Ireland I have traversed. All these wonders have been wrought by the activity of an excellent resident agent. There was a countryman on the coach deploring that, through family circumstances, this gentleman should have been dispossessed of his agency, and declaring that the village had already begun to deteriorate in consequence. The marks of such decay were not, however, visible, at least to a newcomer; and, being reminded of it, I indulged in many patriotic longings for England: as every Englishman does when he is travelling out of the country which he is always so willing to quit.