Читать книгу A Journey of a Jayhawker - W. Y. Morgan - Страница 10

BY KILLARNEY’S LAKES.

Killarney, June 8, 1905.

We have spent four days in the Irish mountains and have ridden a hundred miles in a jaunting-car and coach. I have had mountain scenery, lake scenery and plain scenery for every meal in the day. I enjoy scenery, but I fear I am getting it in too large quantities and am having it shaken too well while taking. Sunday was spent in Glengariff, a picturesque place where the mountains rise abruptly from the salt water of Bantry bay. Monday we coached from Glengariff to Killarney and Tuesday we did the lakes with a jaunting-car, slightly assisted by a row-boat. The Irish mountains are not as high as the Rocky Mountains, but they are a very good imitation. The Rockies are grand and beautiful. The mountains of Cork and Kerry are pretty and beautiful. The Irish mountains are covered with green. It is as if the Rocky Mountains were smaller, covered with ivy and moss, dotted here and there with whitewashed cottages and flocks of sheep, and topped with a blue sky which is bluer than any indigo and clearer than any crystal.

There are several ruined castles about Killarney. I am already getting to shy at ruined castles. The proposal to visit one makes my feet ache as an approaching thunder-storm affects some people’s corns. We first went to Muckross Abbey, a well-preserved ruin about 400 years old. The Muckross family, which owned the estate, has played out, and the property has been bought by Guinness, the Dublin brewer, who was made a lord by Queen Victoria. Whatever the earl of Kenmare does not own around Killarney belongs to Guinness. You can imagine how Muckross Abbey looked 300 years ago when the old monks lived there and occupied the cells and cloister now unroofed. The banquet hall has a big fireplace and there are dark spiral stairways running up and down such as you read about in Ivanhoe. On the tombstones are inscriptions telling of the virtues and sanctity of knights and lords who would be considered tough bats if they lived nowadays and swaggered around as they did in the good old times. I like to look at old tombstones and wonder what the men who lie beneath them would say if they could read the catalogue of virtues accredited to them. I always think of the little girl who had evidently been visiting Muckross Abbey, or some such place, and anxiously inquired if the people in those days did not bury bad folks, as all who were interred there were supremely good. And then the thought comes up that all of these men were great and strong in their time, making history and imagining that they were cutting a gash in the world. Now they are forgotten and their deeds unknown, and they are the subjects of sportive remarks by tourists from a country they never heard of.

The lakes of Killarney have been praised in prose and verse, and they are up to the advance advertising. They are not large, but they nestle among the mountains and reflect on their clear surface the heights that surround them. There is a legend everywhere and the Irish driver knows them all. Here is a reasonable one: One of the O’Donohues, which family was once the royal power in Kerry, was hunting in the mountains. He met the devil, and the two had an altercation in which O’Donohue got decidedly the best of the argument. The devil became so angry that he bit a big chunk out of a mountain. O’Donohue took his shillelah and hit the devil so hard a crack that he dropped the mouthful of mountain into the lake. This tale must be true, for as the driver said: “There’s the place the devil bit and it is called so to this day, and out in the lake is the little island of rock, just as the devil dropped it into the water.”

Everybody who has read Tom Moore—and if anyone has not he should do so—will remember the lines:

“There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet

As the vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet.”

The meeting of the three Killarney lakes was referred to, and Moore was telling truth as well as poetry. The upper lake and the middle lake narrow to small streams and flow together as they merge into the little rosebud of a mouth which the lower lake puts up to greet them. There is a rapid which the boat shoots for a sixpence, but it was not thrilling. In the triangular park made by lakes and mountains are said to be specimens of every kind of tree known. The driver told this proudly, but when I called for a cottonwood he couldn’t produce. Then I told him all about the wonderful cottonwood, and he promised to see the keeper and find out why they couldn’t have one in Killarney.

That reminds me of my experience with music. The first morning I awoke in Ireland at Queenstown I heard the voices of a number of sailors of the royal navy, and as the melodious sounds rolled into the window I was surprised to realize that they were singing “Under the Anheuser-Busch.” At the hotel in Cork the orchestra played the same. At the theatre that night it was greeted with an encore. The driver on the jaunting-car whistled the tune. And last night when I had made friends with a cottager and was sitting with him by the side of a peat fire and he was telling me of Ireland’s woes, his little girl came in and he proceeded to show her off. First he had her sing an old Gaelic song. Then he said, “Now give us an American song,” and she responded with “Under the Anheuser-Busch.”

I have hardly met an Irishman but has told me he had brothers and sisters in America. At Glengariff the hotel proprietor said at least 2,000 young men and women had gone to America from that parish in the last few years—the brightest and best of the young people, he said—nearly all of them to Boston. From Killarney nearly all go to New York. I told them how Boston and New York were ruled by the Irish, and put the question as to why the Irish couldn’t run Ireland. I am trying to answer that conundrum to my own satisfaction, and am gathering ideas on the subject from everyone I meet.

The ordinary Irish village like Killarney is a quaint picture. The streets are narrow, mostly eight to twelve feet wide. The main street is about thirty feet wide. Nearly all the houses are a story or a story and a half, thatched roof, whitewashed walls, dirt floors except in one room, low ceilings, doors and windows, full of chickens, cats and children. I have not yet seen a pig in the parlor. The pig is kept in a little room at one side. But the chickens have as much liberty of the house as anybody and the goat is monarch of the outside. There is very seldom any yard, the houses being built right up to the street. The house is heated by a fireplace and the cooking is done in the same. Peat is the fuel, and it is cleaner and not sooty like coal. The dirt floor and the chickens in the house sound as though the Irish cottage would be dirty, but the whitewash and the scrubbing-brush fight on the other side, and you don’t get that impression. The women-folks are always neat-looking and everybody is pleasant and cheerful. Every window has a window-box of geraniums. There are usually so many children that the house does not hold them, and the street is always filled with them. Remember when you are driving through a town the street is filled with children, and if you are an American and not used to it your heart will be jumping into your throat for fear some of them will be run over—but I am told they never are.

After the chickens and the children the most novel sight is the donkeys with their two-wheel carts, the only ordinary carriages for passengers or freight of the people. The donkey is the size of our mountain burro, and has the same degree of intelligent expression. All of the hauling is done by this patient animal, and he is looked upon as a valued member of the family.

In riding or walking the rule of the country is the same as in England—turn to the left. I have not yet gotten over the yearning to grab the lines from the driver when he turns to the left to avoid a passing carriage. Fortunately the other driver is always fool enough to also turn to the left. I confided my trouble to an Irish driver, and he said it was ridiculous to turn to the right.

One of my traveling companions is a man who chews tobacco, and he had neglected to lay in a supply before leaving America. No one else used the weed that way and there was no help for him. The Irish chew and smoke the same plug tobacco, very dry and not tasting like American tobacco. For a week my friend had been looking through shops trying to find something that would touch the spot. Last night soon after reaching Killarney he came to me greatly excited and said, “Hurry! the finest scenery since we left home.” Away we went down the narrow street and up to a window in which was a familiar shape and a sign, “Battle Ax.” I don’t chew myself, but I have some bad habits, and I could appreciate the tear of joy that glistened in my fellow-traveler’s eye as he gazed on that sign and felt that he had met an old friend just from home.