The Project Gutenberg eBook of Kathleen in Ireland
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Title: Kathleen in Ireland
Author: Etta Blaisdell McDonald
Julia Dalrymple
Release date: May 21, 2024 [eBook #73665]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1923
Credits: Fiona Holmes, Andrew Sly and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KATHLEEN IN IRELAND ***
Transcriber's Note
In the Vocabulary section on the last 4 pages of the project there are
many diacritical characters that won't render properly on many ereaders.—
See the end of the book.
Hence the following explanation:
[a+] = the letter 'a' with an uptack above.
Double vowels ee, aa, oo, show extended macron above.
Joining two letters such as oi, ow, ou shows the extended breve
below.
The use of =L= around a word indicates bold lettering.
Hyphenations have been standardised.
[Illustration: KATHLEEN AT HOME]
LITTLE PEOPLE EVERYWHERE
KATHLEEN
IN IRELAND
BY ETTA BLAISDELL McDONALD
AND JULIA DALRYMPLE
Authors of "Manuel in Mexico," "Umé San in
Japan," "Rafael in Italy," etc.
[Illustration]
Illustrated
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1912
_Copyright, 1909_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
Printers
S. J. PARKHILL & CO., BOSTON, U. S. A.
PREFACE
There is surely no country in the world where hearts so thinly covered
beat so warmly as in the Emerald Isle. Wherever one travels,—over the
bare mountains of Donegal and the rocks and cliffs of the northern
coast, or among the blue lakes and green fields of the South,—he will
always find a merry greeting and a hearty Irish welcome. The boys and
girls have a smile and a cheerful word for every wind that blows;
and that day is a rare one, indeed, which is not sunny with laughter
and singing, even while clouds hide the blue sky and Irish rains are
falling.
The wonder is that Irish boys and girls can find it in their hearts to
leave their beautiful, loving land of the shamrock. So many fairy lakes
were never found in any other country. Green meadows never offered
sweeter resting places than those of the Emerald Isle; yet its young
people turn their backs to it, and their blue eyes toward the more
barren worlds beyond the seas.
This story of Irish Kathleen gives glimpses of ancient Ireland, as
well as pictures of the life of to-day with its tales of wee folk and
giants, its picnics and turf-cutting, its dancing and sheep-shearing,
its hunting and farming.
Kathleen lives first with her father up among the mountains of lonely
Donegal; she goes with her little sister to spend a summer in County
Sligo, and she lives a year with her ten cousins, the Malones of old
Kilkenny, and a jolly, rollicking brood she finds them. She learns
something of the history of Ireland from her father, and hears the
story of the life of the good Saint Patrick; but she enjoys also the
Gaelic tales which her grandmother tells her about the fairies, and the
story of Finn MacCool, which she hears when she goes with her uncle to
see the Giant's Causeway.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE SHOEMAKER OF DONEGAL 1
II. IN THE FAIRY RATH 9
III. THE OLD WOMAN IN RED 13
IV. ERIN'S HARP 19
V. THE LITTLE GREEN SHAMROCK 26
VI. GOOD SAINT PATRICK 31
VII. A RIDE WITH THE POSTMAN 39
VIII. COUSIN BEE'S FARM IN TONROE 46
IX. MAY-DAY ON LOUGH GARA 56
X. A BANK OF TURF 64
XI. KATHLEEN EARNS A POUND 71
XII. THE YOUNG MALONES 78
XIII. KATHLEEN'S COMPOSITION 85
XIV. THE WISHING SPRING 91
XV. GOOD NEWS FROM COUSIN BEE 99
XVI. THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY 104
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Kathleen at Home _Frontispiece in Color_
"The old grandmother was spinning at the door" 2
The Hills of Donegal 21
"They are playing 'Green grow the rushes-O'" 42
Cousin Bee's Farmhouse in Tonroe 47
"A neighbor was driving his family down to the lake
in a jaunting-car" 58
Cutting bricks of peat and stacking them up to dry 67
O'Connell Street, Dublin 102
The Giant's Causeway 111
KATHLEEN IN IRELAND
CHAPTER I
THE SHOEMAKER OF DONEGAL
"Tell me the story again, Kathleen."
"I can't tell it to you here, Mary Ellen," whispered her sister. "Sure,
he might be under the hedge this minute and hear me talking about him.
Come to the top of the hill and I'll tell you."
Mary Ellen slipped her hand into Kathleen's, and the two children stole
softly away from the door-stone where they had been playing. Their
bare feet made no sound on the green grass, and the old grandmother,
who was spinning at the door of the cottage, did not even look up as
they passed.
A thick fuchsia hedge bordered the plot of green grass that surrounded
the cottage, shutting out the barren field behind the house. Slipping
through the hedge, the little girls followed the narrow foot-path that
led across the field to the top of the hill.
"I'm thinkin' of a riddle Danny gave me the morn," said Kathleen, as
they ran along the path.
"Give it to me," said Mary Ellen eagerly, and Kathleen laughed merrily
as she repeated:
"From house to house it goes,
A wanderer small and slight;
And whether it rains or snows,
It sleeps outside in the night."
"I'll never guess it; tell it to me now, alanna," begged her sister.
"If your blue eyes could see the little _path_ under your feet you
would _see_ the answer," replied Kathleen, as she led the blind child
carefully over the steep pathway to the long stone slab where they
loved to play. "We'll sit here a bit," she added, and drew Mary Ellen
down beside her on the stone.
"Now tell me why you put the dish of stirabout under the hawthorn bush
last night, and what became of it," asked the child, who could wait no
longer for the story.
"It was for the leprecaun," Kathleen told her. "He is the fairy
shoemaker, and he sits under the hedge all day tapping away on an old
shoe. He wears a scarlet cap and a green coat, and there are two rows
of buttons on his coat, with seven buttons in each row. He has a fairy
purse which is filled with gold, and he puts it down beside him on the
grass while he works; but he is always watching it. If I could just see
him once and hold his eye for a minute, I could snatch the purse of
gold and run away with it."
[Illustration:
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York
"THE OLD GRANDMOTHER WAS SPINNING AT THE DOOR"
The cottage is of stone, plastered and whitewashed _Page 1_]
"Did you ever see him?" whispered Mary Ellen.
"No," replied her sister; "but I have heard him tapping on his shoe
many a time. Once I saw his scarlet cap under the hedge, but when I
knelt down to look closer he threw sand in my eyes, as he always does,
and was gone in a winkin'."
"Belike it was a humming-bird," said Mary Ellen. "Danny says the hedge
is full of their nests. But what would you do with the purse, Kathleen
dear?"
Kathleen's eyes filled with tears and she looked at her sister with
a sad face. "Oh, darlin', it's for you," she said, "to give you the
sight in your pretty blue eyes. I'm thinkin' of it all the time, and
faith, some day I'll find a way. That's why I took the dish of oaten
stirabout and put it under the hawthorn bush last night, and why I put
the bowl of milk on the window ledge. It's for the 'good people,' so
that they'll know we take thought of them."
"Did the 'good people' drink the milk?" asked the blind child eagerly.
"No, Mary Ellen," said her sister, "but, listen! The stirabout was gone
this morning, dish and all. The leprecaun must have taken it. I shall
watch for him the night, and if I do catch the old shoemaker's eye,
I'll hold it till he gives me his purse."
"I'm thinkin' that no one has ever held it yet," said Mary Ellen,
snuggling against Kathleen's shoulder, as if there might be some danger
in holding a fairy dwarf spellbound with the look of one's eye.
Kathleen lowered her voice and asked mysteriously, "Whist, Mary Ellen,
do you mind old Granny Connor?"
"She that lives beyond the bog?" questioned Mary Ellen.
"Yes," said Kathleen.
"I mind that she lives all alone, and that the father tells us not
to go near her," answered her sister. "She's too friendly with the
fairies."
"Last night," said Kathleen, taking her sister's hand, and looking into
her blue eyes while her own grew big and dark, "when I was driving the
little cow home across the bog, who should I meet under the old oak
tree but Granny Connor herself.
"I picked a bit of shamrock and held it tight in my hand, but she
stopped me and made me talk to her, and she told me that it is our own
father, himself, that has a purse from the leprecaun."
"I'll not believe it," said her sister quickly. "If he had, he'd not be
making shoes all day by himself."
But Kathleen shook her head. "Granny Connor told me," she confided,
"that he has made a bargain with the fairy dwarf, and must make shoes
all day long, or go wandering over the mountains a-tinkerin'."
"What's that you're saying, Kathleen?" a voice behind them asked
suddenly, and the children jumped up in surprise.
A man with a leather apron tied round his waist was standing beside the
stone slab. It was hard to tell where he had come from so quickly, for
there had been no sign of any one near when Kathleen climbed to the top
of the hill.
"It is the father himself," said Mary Ellen.
The shoemaker seated himself on the big stone and drew his little
daughters down beside him; but it was such an unusual thing for him to
spare any time from his work that they sat awkwardly within the shelter
of his arms, waiting for him to speak.
Kathleen wondered how much of their talk he had heard, and whether he
would scold her for listening to old Granny Connor, and repeating the
tales to her little sister. She hung her head in silence, and Mary
Ellen felt as if the sunshine had been darkened by a cloud; but the
father's arms were around both little girls to hold them, although he
did not speak for some time.
"So you have been listening to old Granny Connor," he said at last.
Kathleen stole a look into his face, which always had a kindly smile
for everyone. "I did not mean any wrong," she said timidly. "I was
only wanting to find some way to help Mary Ellen."
"What would you be doing for Mary Ellen?" he asked.
"I'd like to find some way to get money so that she might go to Dublin
and have a doctor cure her eyes," said the child simply.
"And so you put a dish of stirabout where the little old shoemaker
might see it?" asked her father.
Both the children nodded their heads.
"How did you find out about the fairy dwarf?"
"Great-grandmother Connell and Grandmother Barry talk about him in
Gaelic. Sometimes Grandmother Barry tells us what they are saying,"
answered Kathleen. "And last night I asked old Granny Connor to tell me
more."
"What did she say?" asked her father.
"She said that people call you the leprecaun of Donegal, because of the
two rows of buttons in sevens on your green frieze coat."
The shoemaker laughed. "And where do they think I keep my money?" he
asked.
"They say you have it hidden in a purse that can never grow empty, and
that you keep it in the place where you mend your shoes," the child
replied, looking away from her father and off across the bog to the
purple mountains. "And no one knows where it is that you have your
work-bench," she added with a sigh.
"Look at me, Kathleen," said her father.
The child turned her gray eyes up to his, gray and honest like her own.
"Did you think when you put the dish of stirabout under the hawthorn
bush last night, that you would see me take it up?"
"Oh, no, no!" cried Kathleen. "Sure, I thought it would be the tiny
man, himself, who would find it."
"But it was myself who found it and took it away, when you were sound
asleep in your bed," said her father.
Kathleen jumped up in surprise, but Mary Ellen nodded her curly head,
as if she knew all the time that it was not the fairy.
"I saw Granny Connor's red cloak bobbing across the bog last night, as
I stood at my bench mending an old shoe," her father continued, "and
I watched you stop under the oak tree to talk with her. When I found
the dish of stirabout under the hawthorn bush I knew it was time for
me to put an end to these foolish notions about the good people, and
tell you the true words about Ireland's brave men and women. You should
be learning about Brian Boru, who drove the Danes out of Ireland, and
Daniel O'Connell, the greatest orator ever born on Irish soil. Those
are the men for you to be thinking of, instead of the leprecaun."
Kathleen looked at him earnestly. "It's not one word I'm believin' of
all they say about you, Father," she said.
"It is what they say about the fairy people that's not for you to
believe," he answered, and rising from the stone slab, he took a hand
of each of the children and led them across the top of the hill to a
grassy mound which was encircled by a ring of jagged rocks.
CHAPTER II
IN THE FAIRY RATH
"Oh, Mary Ellen, it's the fairy rath," said Kathleen under her breath,
and she clasped her father's hand more tightly.
Grandmother Barry, who talked often in Gaelic about the fairies with
Great-grandmother Connell, had told the children many times not to play
too near the fairy rath.
"There be many such mounds scattered over the hills and glens of ould
Ireland," she said. "The good people live in them and may do harm to
childer that make too bold with their haunts."
"They must be bad people if they would do harm to little Mary Ellen,"
Kathleen replied.
"Hush, child!" her grandmother reproved her. "They are like all men and
women, liker to _do_ good if they be called good."
Now, as they drew near the fairy rath, Kathleen tiptoed over the rocky
path, thinking every moment to see a fairy slip behind a pebble or a
blade of grass. She felt sure that when they stepped within the rocky
ring, a door would open in the grassy mound and show to her eager eyes
long rooms glittering with jewelled walls, leading one after another
into the depths of the earth.
What was her surprise then, when they entered the enclosure, to find,
not a magic door leading to fairyland but a single tiny room dug out of
the mound, sheltered from wind and rain by sods and stones, with just
room enough for a man to work at his bench, and no more.
Her father pointed out to the child's disappointed eyes a leather pouch
lying among the tools on the work-bench.
"That is the only purse I've got, Kathleen," he said, "and my fingers
have never seen the magic day when they could fill it with silver."
Poor Mary Ellen's blind eyes could see nothing of the shoemaker's
bench and the empty purse, but her heart felt all the loving thought
that moved her sister to ask, "Then why did you not leave the dish of
stirabout under the hawthorn bush? The little elf shoemaker sits there
every night mending his shoe, with his purse of gold beside him. Belike
you might snatch it yourself."
"Oh, Kathleen, it's myself will be the only shoemaker in these parts,"
her father answered. "Put the foolish fancies out of your head now. No
good ever came of such thoughts."
It was not the first time he had told Kathleen to forget the fairy
lore, and he had often checked Grandmother Barry when her unruly tongue
touched upon the forbidden subject. "The childer's heads should not be
filled with such nonsense," he said.
But it was not easy to check Great-grandmother Connell. She had lived
ninety long years among a fairy-loving people, and liked to tell the
Gaelic stories of old Ireland over and over again.
She it was who believed that Ireland was first inhabited by a race of
giants. "They lived here with the birds and beasts before ever a man
rode through the green forests," she told Grandmother Barry.
"What became of them, then?" inquired her daughter.
"Sure, they turned themselves into the wee folk when men came here from
over the seas, and they live under the rocks and trees and in the fairy
mounds."
"True it is," agreed Grandmother Barry, and she told Kathleen what
the great-grandmother had been saying in Gaelic about the giants and
fairies.
That was how Kathleen came to know so many of the tales of old Ireland,
and why she was always thinking of the wee folk.
"How can I put the thoughts out of my head?" she asked her father.
"Sure, the fairies are putting them in again all the time, with their
doings."
"What are they doing, the day, to make you think of them?" asked the
shoemaker.
"There's the ring of green grass beyond the hawthorn bush," she said
timidly. "Danny borrowed the plow from Farmer Flynn and plowed through
it over and over, but it came up again as round and green as ever. What
else could make it but the fairies with their dancing feet?"
The shoemaker shook his head hopelessly at the child's simple faith in
her old grandmother's stories. "It's not like you, with your sense and
handy ways about the house, to believe the fairy nonsense," he said.
"It must be because you have never learned the reading. After this you
must come up here when your work in the house is done, and I'll teach
you the words. If you don't believe it from my telling, you will from
the books, that there are no fairies in Ireland."
So it came about that on sunny afternoons through the winter two little
girls played on the top of the hill near a fairy rath in far Donegal,
in the north of Ireland. And often the shoemaker put his work down on
the bench and called the children to his side, where he told them true
stories of Irish history, and taught Kathleen to read from the pages of
an old Irish book.
CHAPTER III
THE OLD WOMAN IN RED
"How many miles to Dublin town?
Threescore and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?
Yes, and back again!"
With the last words the two little girls clasped hands and ran round
and round the great stone slab, not hearing their father's voice
calling to them from his bench.
As the children dropped upon the stone he called more sharply,
"Kathleen! Do you hear me?"
"I hear you, but I do not fear you," answered Kathleen, leading Mary
Ellen to her father's side. She put her arm around his neck and kissed
his patient face, then seated herself on his knee.
"I used to fear you," she said with a laugh, "after Granny Connor told
me you had made a bargain with the leprecaun, and that you had a secret
hiding-place."
"And now it's no secret at all, at all," her father said. "The
grandmother has learned it, too, and will be calling you down to run
errands the minute she lays eyes on you here."
"We were both helping her, the morn," said Mary Ellen.
"What were you doing, jewel?" asked the father of the little blind
child.
"Oh, reddin' up the house," replied Mary Ellen. "Kathleen swept the
floor, and I wiped the dishes, and then I held the yarn for Grandma
Connell. She is knitting you some stockings."
"Yes," added Kathleen, "and I drove the little dun cow to the pasture
beyond the bog; and on my way home I pulled some rushes to make a new
brush for the hearth."
"I helped Grandma Barry with the churning, too," said Mary Ellen. "We
churned and churned, but not a bit of butter did we get till Kathleen
came home and put a sod of burning peat under the churn. Then the
butter came soon enough, and Kathleen said the good people had put a
spell upon the cream."
"Faith, you're always thinking of the fairies," exclaimed her father.
"Do you like old Granny Connor's witch tales better than the stories I
tell you of brave Irish men, like Brian Boru and Conn of the Hundred
Battles?"
Kathleen looked at him quickly. "You tell us that Conn lived many
hundred years ago, and Brian Boru has been dead these eight hundred
years; but Granny Connor says that the fairies are living now. They
have a council hall in a cave between here and Letterkenny. The cave is
under the great Rock of Doon, and—"
"I like not to hear you speak so much of old Granny Connor and her
tales," her father interrupted her. "It's her and her red cloak have
put sorrow and shame on me these many years.
"Do you mind how green the grass is already, down there in front of the
door, Kathleen, child?" he added.
"Yes," she said. "I'm fond of the feeling of it to my bare feet."
"You might travel over the whole of Donegal without seeing another yard
so green," he said sadly, "and it's a shame to me to have it so."
"Why?" asked Mary Ellen, who thought the soft grass the best playground
in the whole world.
"Because no stranger ever stops before our door to beg a bite or a
night's shelter from us," he replied.
"True it is," said the child, "but Grandma Barry says it is lonely here
and no one cares to come."
"I mind it is because Granny Connor put the curse upon me years ago,
when first I came here," her father repeated. "She said, 'May the grass
be always green before your door,' and green it has been ever since."
"But why should that be a curse?" asked Kathleen.
"Because Ireland is the kindest country under the sun," he answered.
"Open house and open heart is our motto, and if a yard is green, 'tis
because no friendly foot has worn it bare."
Kathleen's cheeks flushed. "Danny and I will dig up every blade of
grass before we sleep the night," she declared.
"Whist," said her father. "It is as it is. But it might have been
different if I had said the kind word to the old woman in red when I
brought your mother to these parts years gone."
"What did she do?" asked Mary Ellen, taking her father's big hand in
her two little ones and holding it fast.
"We were just after lighting the first sod of peat on the hearth, when
Granny Connor stood at the door, dressed all in her red cloak, and so
still that no one had heard her step. ''Tis a haunted country that
you've come to,' she said, and it frightened your mother to hear her.
"There were the three of you children, and Mary Ellen but a wee baby.
Your mother was ailing, and I was angered at the old woman's tongue.
'Be off with your crazy talk!' I said, seeing that your mother was
scared, and Granny went away across the bog, but first she said the
curse."
"I wouldn't have bided here after that," said Kathleen, but her father
shook his head.
"I had worked a long time to build the little cottage and get it
dry-thatched," he said, "and I had a fine flock of sheep to pasture
on the hillside. But the mother was lonely and fearsome after Granny
Connor's visit, and she pined away and died."
The children nestled closer to his side to comfort him, and he put a
hand on each little head,—Kathleen's dark and straight-haired, Mary
Ellen's yellow and curly.
"Then I sent into County Sligo for your two grandmothers to come and
bide," he went on, "and soon I had to do something else to earn a
living, because the sheep fell sick and died in the pasture."
"What did you do?" questioned Mary Ellen.
"I went over the mountains a-tinkering," replied her father. "But your
mother used to say that bad luck follows those that have no steady
biding-place, and so it was for me. Wherever I went there was a whisper
that I was like to have trouble for company, and faith, in those days
he seemed my best friend."
"Grandma Barry says to look trouble in the eye and he'll turn away,"
said Kathleen.
"Sure I've seen no more of him since Danny got big enough to lend a
hand," said her father. "Danny's the good lad and will do a hand's
turn of work with the best of them."
"'Tis Danny that keeps the house dry-thatched," said Kathleen, looking
down at the brown-thatched, white-walled cottage at the foot of the
hill.
"'Tis Kathleen that reds up the house and helps the two grandmothers,"
suggested Mary Ellen.
"She's a fine slip of a girl," replied her father heartily, "and you
too, Molly jewel; there's a pair of ye."
CHAPTER IV
ERIN'S HARP
March winds blew across the valley and ruffled Mary Ellen's yellow
curls as she sat in the ring of green grass made by the fairies'
dancing feet, and played with some sea-shells and pebbles Danny had
found in the seaweed he gathered for Farmer Flynn.
She had been playing contentedly for a long time when she suddenly
jumped up, scattering a handful of pebbles from her lap. "Kathleen,"
she called, "I hear the peddler's cart. Sure, he's comin' across the
bridge this minute."
Kathleen rushed out of the house, clasped her sister's hand tightly in
her own, and ran up the little path to the top of the hill as fast as
she could go.
"Oh, Mary Ellen!" she panted; "I made sure I'd finish the stockings
before the peddler came this way again; but here he is now and only
one done. The blue dress will be worn out before the other stocking's
finished."
The peddler drew up his cart before the door of the little cottage, and
Grandmother Barry went out to bargain with him for a piece of linen in
exchange for her butter and eggs. Great-grandmother Connell hobbled out
to see that the bargain was well made, and the three laughed heartily
over Kathleen's hurried flight.
In the winter the peddler had given the child a piece of blue homespun
for a dress, and she had promised to knit a pair of stockings for him
in payment; but there were so many more interesting things to do every
day that the knitting proved slow work, and Kathleen had often wished
the blue dress back in the peddler's cart.
"Faith, Kathleen makes it harder work to keep out of my sight than to
do the knitting," the peddler said, as he opened his cart and took out
the linen.
Grandmother Barry laughed as she answered, "I'm thinkin' it will teach
the child a good lesson. It's best to keep well out of debt, and a
dress is better paid for before it is worn. But she shall finish the
stockings this day week, or I'll knit them myself."
She went into the house to fetch her butter and eggs, and after much
weighing and measuring and talking, they were exchanged for a piece of
coarse linen and a pound of good honey.
In the meantime the two little girls hid behind the fairy rath and
whispered together about the stockings.
[Illustration:
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York
THE HILLS OF DONEGAL
The road over which Danny brought the seaweed for Farmer Flynn. _Page
21_]
"The minute the peddler drives down the road I'll go and get the
knitting, and I'll keep the needles clickin' while I'm out of my bed
till it's done," Kathleen declared.
Mary Ellen held up her hand. "Whist, alanna," she said softly, "'tis
fairy music I hear."
Kathleen listened eagerly for a moment. "True for you," she said. "I
hear it myself. Belike it's the sea-gods over at Horn Head. There was a
big storm last night, and Grandmother Barry says that after a big storm
thousands of the sea-gods ride over the waves on their white-maned
steeds winding their battle horns."
It is ten miles across the country to Horn Head, which is one of the
rocky headlands on the north coast of Ireland, where the waves of
the Atlantic Ocean beat against the dark cliffs. Highland lakes and
mountain rivers lie between, and the road over which Danny brought the
seaweed for Farmer Flynn leads across purple hills that would surely
deaden the sound of surf miles away.
"It's nearer than Horn Head," said Mary Ellen. "There may be fairies in
the rath after all."
"Let's go and see," Kathleen suggested, and the two children tiptoed
carefully around the circle of rocks, forgetting all about the peddler,
and the stockings, and Kathleen's good resolution.
As they crept softly up to the open door of the grassy mound the sweet
notes became a little tune, and a voice began singing the familiar
words of an old Irish song.
Kathleen stood still, hardly daring to breathe, but Mary Ellen stepped
boldly into the tiny room. "It's the father himself," she said, and
Kathleen followed her sister, astonished indeed to find her father
sitting on his work-bench and gently touching the strings of a small
harp.
"I'm glad it wasn't the fairy music we heard," she said, after the
surprise was over. "Grandma Barry says a spell is cast over him that
hears it, and after the spell is taken off he pines away and dies in a
year and a day."
"Is it your own harp, Father?" asked Mary Ellen, thinking he might
perhaps have borrowed it from the fairies.
"It was your mother's," he answered. "It was in her family from the
days of the old Irish chiefs, and she showed me how to pick the
strings."
Mary Ellen touched it softly with her fingers. "It almost seems alive,"
she said, as the strings gave out their sweet sounds.
"There was once a god in Ireland who owned a harp that was alive," her
father said with a smile. "He used to be called the 'Mighty Father of
Ireland,' and his harp could do strange things when it had a mind.
Sometimes he would go to the top of the mountain and play the whole
procession of the seasons—spring, summer, autumn, winter—out of the
strings of the harp.
"Once the god was captured by the giants, and was taken away to their
castle, but he called to his harp for help, and it heard and answered.
It flew through the air straight to its master, and killed nine of the
giants as it flew."
"Listen to him, telling us tales of the giants," whispered Kathleen,
but Mary Ellen was thinking of the harp and paid no attention to her
sister.
"Danny says there is a harp on the green flag of Ireland," she said.
"Yes," said her father, "it was an Irish god who made the harp and
played upon its strings."
"Tell us about it," begged Kathleen, who loved the gods and giants as
well as she did the fairies.
"The god's name was Dagda," her father told her, "and once when he was
walking beside a blue lake he saw a beautiful maiden and wished to have
her for his wife. But the maiden feared him and ran away through the
forest.
"Dagda followed her and she went on running away; and so at last they
came to a beautiful curving beach, with the waves washing the yellow
sands.
"As the maiden fled swiftly across the wet sands she heard a strange,
mournful sound, and stopped to listen to the music.
"The bones of a fish lay on the sand at her feet, and the dry skin,
stretched from rib to rib, made a harp for the wind to play upon.
"When Dagda saw that the sweet sounds pleased the maiden, he took a
piece of wood and made a harp after the same pattern, playing upon the
strings with his fingers as the wind had taught him to do. After that
the maiden followed him gladly for love of the music.
"It was the first music ever heard in all Ireland, but since that day
we have had harpers from one end of the land to the other. 'Tis a
wonderful country for music, and we put the harp on our green flag to
show that we're proud of the sweet songs of Erin."
Kathleen sighed when the story was finished. "I wish it were the days
of gods and giants and beautiful maidens now," she said.
"I'd wish for the days of the harpers and story-tellers," said Mary
Ellen wistfully.
"Right you are, Molly jewel," said her father, putting the harp
carefully away in its case. "The giants were just plain men like
myself, but with no learning at all, at all. Faith, they could neither
read nor write, and but for the harpers we'd know nothing about them."
"How do we know from the harpers?" asked Kathleen.
"Sure, the harpers and story-tellers made up grand songs and stories
about the gods and the giants of old Ireland, and travelled up and down
the length and breadth of the land singing their songs and telling
their stories wherever they went. It was the only way of learning that
people had in the days when there were no books."
"The people must have been glad to see the harpers coming," said Mary
Ellen, thinking how much she would like to hear their songs.
"That they were," replied her father. "Even the kings made them
welcome, and gave great feasts in their honor. The feasts were held
in a long banquet hall with rows of tables up and down the sides,
and there were sometimes more than a hundred men at the tables. The
king sat at the head of the hall, with a harper on one side and a
story-teller on the other, and there was merry-making through half the
night."
"Those old kings of Ireland must have been great men," said Kathleen.
"That they were," replied her father, "and Brian Boru was the best of
them all."
"The grandmother is callin'," interrupted Mary Ellen. "I hear the sound
of her bell."
"She's always callin'," Kathleen complained, but she took her sister's
hand and hurried obediently down the hill.
CHAPTER V
THE LITTLE GREEN SHAMROCK
"Look, Kathleen," said Grandmother Barry, as the two children reached
the cottage door, "there's not another sod of peat in the house. Run
down to Farmer Flynn's to meet Danny, and tell him to bring some home
with him."
"I'll get the small creel Danny made for me, and bring some home
myself," said Kathleen, running into the cottage.
She was out again in a moment with two light wicker baskets. "Here's
your creel, too, Mary Ellen," she said, and hung it carefully over her
sister's shoulders.
Farmer Flynn lived a mile away on a big sheep farm, and Kathleen was
glad to be sent there for peat. She liked the work and bustle of the
farm life and always saw something new and interesting. Sometimes there
were baby lambs in the sheepfold, sometimes she saw a calf or a pair of
young donkeys, and then, best of all, there was the big flock of white
geese that belonged to the farmer's wife.
Kathleen loved to watch the geese, and she often told Mary Ellen funny
stories about them and their strange ways. "I'm going to ask Mrs. Flynn
to let me tend them for her next summer," she had confided to her
sister. "That will be one way to earn pennies for your eyes, darlin'."
Danny had worked for the farmer ever since the winter his father had
brought them all to live in Donegal. He had been a pale, shy little lad
at first, but now he was grown strong and sturdy, "able to do a day's
work with the best of them," he said proudly.
Farmer Flynn was proud of him, too, and often said, "I made of Dan
Barry the man that he is. He can thatch a roof or shear a sheep to-day
as well as I can myself."
And whenever little Kathleen caught the farmer's eye she would stand
straighter to hear him say, "There's a fine slip of a lass. She'll be a
good woman and a pride to you, Danny my boy."
The two children, with their creels on their backs, ran down the little
lane behind the house, followed the brook which chattered over the
rocks at the foot of the heather glen, crossed the bog and climbed the
hill, and then, at a quick turn of the path, there they were at the
peat-shed, and there was Danny standing at the door.
He was talking with a strange man who carried a bundle of blackthorn
sticks on his back; but just as the little girls came around the
corner Danny shook his head and turned to go into the shed.
"Oh, Mary Ellen," said Kathleen, "there's a peddler and he's trying to
sell Danny a shillalah."
"He'll not do it," said Mary Ellen. "Sure, Danny's saving every odd
shilling he earns. He has them in an old stocking, and he shook them
out and let me count them. He has near a pound."
"The peddler has a bundle of fine big sticks," said Kathleen, "but not
one of them is as thick and strong as the blackthorn Father has from
Great-grandfather Connell. I'm thinkin' Danny will have that some day."
The peddler smiled pleasantly at the two little girls as they drew
nearer, and put his hand so gently on Mary Ellen's curly head that
Kathleen took a liking to him at once.
"Where's your bit of green ribbon?" he asked with a laugh, looking at
the blue homespun dresses as if he thought they ought to be trimmed
with green.
Kathleen looked up into her brother's face to see if he knew what the
stranger meant by the question.
Before Danny could tell her the peddler added, "Mayhap you never heard
of our good St. Patrick in these parts," and he laughed again as if he
thought this question a better joke than the other.
"We know St. Patrick well," said Kathleen. "It's not more than a day's
journey from here to his mountain in County Mayo, where he drove all
the snakes out of Ireland into the sea."
"Then you should be wearing the green for him this day," said the
peddler, and he showed proudly a big knot of green ribbon on one of the
black-thorn sticks he carried, and a smaller knot on his worn coat.
"Tell the truth now, that you clean forgot this is the seventeenth of
March and St. Patrick's Day in the morning."
"Go away with you!" exclaimed Danny. "Where are your eyes, man? Don't
you see the green in my cap?"
Ireland is often called the Emerald Isle because of its setting of
green fields and hills, and the national color, which is green, is seen
everywhere. The English flag floats over the public buildings, but on
holidays and feast-days the green flag of Erin decorates the houses,
and on St. Patrick's Day every one wears a bit of green in memory of
the patron saint, and in honor of Ireland.
Danny, who had no green ribbon to wear to show his love for his
country, had tucked a sprig of green shamrock into his cap, but now the
tender leaves were wilted and hung drooping from their slender stems.
"It's St. Patrick's own little plant, and it was fresh and green
enough when I found it beside the brook this morning," he said, taking
off his cap and touching the withered leaves tenderly as if he loved
them.
"Come home with us now," he added, turning to the peddler, "and we'll
give you a good Irish welcome and a bite and a sup."
"I'll gladly go with you and the childer here," said the peddler
heartily. So he helped the little girls fill their creels with the sods
of dry peat and fastened a bit of shamrock on their dresses "for St.
Patrick and old Ireland." Danny finished up his work in a hurry, and
soon they were all on their way back along the lonely path. But it was
lonely no longer, for they sang as they marched along:
"There's a dear little plant that grows in our Isle,
'Twas Saint Patrick himself, sure, that set it;
And the sun on his labor with pleasure did smile,
And with dew from his eye often wet it.
It shines thro' the bog, thro' the brake, and the mireland,
And he called it the dear little shamrock of Ireland.
The dear little shamrock,
The sweet little shamrock,
The dear little, sweet little, shamrock of Ireland.
CHAPTER VI
GOOD ST. PATRICK
Grandmother Barry heard the song, and went to the door to see who was
singing it so heartily. When she saw the peddler with the children she
hurried to put an extra bowl and plate on the table, and bustled about
the room setting out the simple meal.
The potatoes were baking in the embers, the kettle was boiling
cheerfully over the burning peat, and a big dish of oaten stirabout was
already steaming on the table.
"I'll make a good cup of tay, and well have a supper fit for the king,"
Grandmother Barry said aloud to herself, as she measured out the tea
carefully and poured the boiling water over it. Then she went again to
the door to give the stranger a hearty welcome.
Kathleen rang the bell to call her father down from his work-bench,
Danny milked the little cow, and "in just no time at all" they were
ready for supper.
"'Tis a sin and a shame that Kathleen is not wearing her green dress
for St. Patrick," said Grandmother Barry, as she saw the knot of green
ribbon in the peddler's coat. "I put it on her to wear to Mass, but
'tis her best and not to be worn common when she's here at home. 'Twas
a grand morning, and Father Burke gave the children a good talk about
St. Patrick."
"A fine morning it was, woman dear," said the peddler, "and a grand day
for the best saint that ever lived in ould Ireland.
"Tell us what Father Burke said about him," he added, turning to
Kathleen.
Poor Kathleen flushed and hung her head. "Sure, I know he stood on
Croagh Patrick, over in County Mayo, and drove all the snakes out of
the whole country into the sea," she said, wishing she could remember
some of the stories the good priest had told them.
"I'm not so sure about that," said the peddler; "but it is true that
there is not one to be found in the whole island. Some say there was
never a snake here, and some say the good saint drove them all out with
one stroke of his big stick. However it is, he is the best saint that
ever lived, and a glory to Ireland, praise be to him!"
"Father Burke says he was only a lad when he was stolen away from his
father and mother in Scotland, and brought to Ireland to tend swine
for one of the chiefs," said Mary Ellen shyly.
"He was sixteen years old, and as straight and handsome a lad as ever
lived," said the peddler.
"Was he a saint then?" asked Kathleen.
"Whist, child," exclaimed Grandmother Barry, "would a saint tend wild
pigs on the mountains for any man, chief or no chief?"
"He was a brave lad," repeated the peddler. "It should be told oftener
how he served one of the chiefs for six long years, and served him
well. He set a good example to the flighty gossoons nowadays that can't
stick to one thing for as long as a month at a time."
"Danny has worked for Farmer Flynn ten years," said Mary Ellen, fearing
the peddler might think her brother a "flighty gossoon."
"Father Burke said that St. Patrick went all over Ireland, ringing his
bell and preaching to the people," said Kathleen, beginning to remember
some of the story.
"So he did; he was a wonderful preacher," said Grandmother Barry, "and
he was Bishop of all Ireland for many years."
"Was that when Great-grandmother Connell was a little girl?" asked Mary
Ellen, who thought her great-grandmother very old.
"Whist, jewel; it was nearly fifteen hundred years ago that St.
Patrick died," her father told her, "and your great-grandmother's only
ninety."
"Tell us the story of St. Patrick," begged Kathleen. "I'll remember it
this time, for sure."
"Well, now," the peddler began, "when Patrick was a lad of sixteen he
was brought to Ireland and sold as a slave to one of the rich chiefs,
who sent him to tend swine on the mountains. At first he was no doubt
sad and lonely, but he bore his troubles bravely and thought often of
the good Father in Heaven."
Kathleen's father rose quickly, and going to a box in the corner of the
room, he took out a book and brought it back to the fire.
"This is what the good saint himself wrote about those lonely days in
the mountains," he said, and turning the page he began to read slowly:
"I was daily employed tending flocks; and I prayed frequently during
the day, and the love of God was more and more enkindled in my heart,
my fear and faith were increased, and my spirit was stirred; so much so
that in a single day I poured out my prayers a hundred times and nearly
as often in the night. Nay, even in the woods and mountains I remained,
and rose before the dawn to my prayer, in frost and snow and rain;
neither did I suffer any injury from it; for the spirit of the Lord was
fervent within me."
"He was a good lad," said Grandmother Barry, wiping a tear from her
wrinkled cheek, and taking up her knitting again.
"That he was, praise be to him," the peddler agreed. "He tended the
swine for six years, and then he escaped and made his way back to his
home in Scotland; but he could not forget the Irish people and he
longed to go back and teach them to be Christians. He studied for many
years in France and other countries, but all the time his thoughts
turned back to Ireland and he had dreams and visions about it.
"At last the Pope gave his permission, and Patrick set out for Ireland,
landing on the north coast, in what is now County Down. Dicho, the
chief of the district, thought that Patrick and his companions were
pirates, and went to meet them and drive them out of the country; but
when he saw their calm and peaceful ways he saluted them and invited
them to his castle.
"Here Patrick told the chief his story and explained his belief in God,
and Dicho and his whole family became Christians and were baptized."
"He was a wonderful preacher," repeated Grandmother Barry, with a nod
of her head.
"Father Burke says that no missionary, since the time of the apostles,
ever preached the gospel with more success than St. Patrick," said
Danny.
"That was because he cared nothing for riches and honor," said the
peddler. "He loved the people of Ireland and longed to make them all
good Christians.
"After living with Dicho for some time and converting all the people
roundabout, he bade good-bye to his friends and sailed down to the
mouth of the river Boyne. From there he walked to the Hill of Tara,
where the high-king of all Ireland lived in a great palace.
"He arrived at the palace on Easter morning, and presented himself
before the king and his court. Patrick was robed in white, as were also
his companions, and he wore his mitre and carried his crosier in his
hand. He converted many of the king's followers, and preached to the
people throughout all the king's dominions.
"'Twas so all over Ireland,—wherever Patrick went he turned pagans to
Christians and built churches.
"He died in the very place where he first preached to Dicho, on the
seventeenth day of March, about the year 465."
"Is that why we call the seventeenth of March St. Patrick's Day?" asked
Mary Ellen.
"Yes," replied her father, "it is the day that he died. We don't
rightly know just what day he was born."
"How do you know so many things about St. Patrick, then, if he lived so
many hundred years ago?" asked Kathleen.
"The old books tell us," her father said. "Patrick, himself, wrote
about his wanderings, and the monks copied these books and many others,
painting pictures on the pages to illustrate them. It is from these
ancient Gaelic books that we learn much about the life and customs of
the people."
"There were books of laws for the kings and the people, too," said the
peddler.
"Did the kings have to obey laws?" asked Kathleen, who supposed kings
did just as they chose.
"That they did," replied the peddler. "There was a law that no man
could rule at Tara who was not perfect in his looks; so when Cormac mac
Art lost an eye he had to give up being king."
"'Twas a shame, too, for he was a good king," said the father.
"It was also against the law for the sun to rise while the king was
lying in bed at Tara," said the peddler.
The children laughed merrily, and Danny asked, "How could they keep the
sun from rising till the king was out of his bed?"
"Faith, they made the king get up before the sun did," the peddler
answered.
While the children were laughing over his joke, Grandmother Barry put
down her knitting and went to the cupboard for a plate of oat-cakes and
her precious pound of honey.
Everyone was quiet for a few minutes over the feast, and little Mary
Ellen was the first to break the silence. "Father told us a story
about St. Columbkille one day," she said. "He was born here in our own
Donegal and he had little cakes baked for him with the letters of the
alphabet on them. I'm thinkin' if I had cakes like that I could learn
the letters with my fingers."
"Faith, he must have had a fine time picnicking on his letters," said
the peddler.
"There was St. Bridget, too," said Grandmother Barry; "she was a fine
woman and took great pride in learning and teaching. And I doubt not
her fingers had magic in them to turn wool into yarn and yarn into
stockings, like any colleen of Donegal," she added, with a look at
Kathleen.
But Kathleen was sound asleep in her chair and had forgotten all about
the stocking she was going to finish knitting that very day.
"The child is tired out with our stories," said her father.
"I mind we should all be in our beds," said Grandmother Barry, and soon
they were tucked away comfortably for the night.
CHAPTER VII
A RIDE WITH THE POSTMAN
"My blessing go high, my blessing go low,
My blessing go with you wherever you go."
It was Mary Ellen's sweet Irish way of saying good-bye to the peddler
when he went away the next day; and he replied heartily, "If I should
travel over the whole of Ireland between sun-up and sun-down, I'd hear
no better word."
At the cross-roads he met the postman in his red jaunting-car, riding
toward the thatched cottage at the foot of the hill, and he stopped to
pass the time of day with him.
"Give the two little girls a ride," said the peddler. "If 'tis to the
National School you are going, with a letter for the teacher, this
way is as short as the other, and 'tis a lonely life the two children
lead,—a mile from any other house, and never another child to play
with."
"'Tis a letter for Jerry, himself, that I have, and 'twill take me
by the cottage, anyway," answered the postman; and looked the letter
over, thinking that it was probably from Grandmother Barry's daughter,
Hannah Malone, as the postmark was "Kilkenny."
He found the great-grandmother crooning an old Gaelic milking tune
over her wheel, instead of the spinning song which she usually sang;
and Grandmother Barry greeted him with, "Ah, Larry O'Day, this is just
such a morning as the one when you and I went with the rest on the
pilgrimage to 'Tobar N'alt,' the holy well in County Sligo, to cure us
of our rheumatism."
The postman laughed. "That was forty years ago, and I'd forgot all
about it," he said, throwing out a letter from the pack. "It's a dozen
pilgrimages to holy wells that I've made since then," he went on, "and
there's not a heartier man for his age, than myself, in all Ireland."
Then he called to the children and asked if they cared to ride with him
as far as the National School, four miles back of the hill, to carry a
letter to the teacher.
"Oh, Molly darlin', a ride!" gasped Kathleen, hardly believing her
ears; while Mary Ellen was so excited that she climbed over the seat
and would have tumbled into the well of the jaunting-car if Kathleen
had not held her back.
"Steady, there, steady!" said Larry O'Day. "There be all sorts of
wells in holy Ireland, from the blessed ones filled with the water
that cures all ailments, to the empty one between the seats of a
jaunting-car; but not a one is there built to hold little girls in red
dresses."
Both children laughed merrily, and held tight to each other as the old
horse jogged up hill and down dale toward the far-away schoolhouse.
The blue waters of a lake glistened afar off among the heather, and the
postman said, "I mind me that somewhere in these parts there is a long
flat stone that marks the place where the good Saint Columba was born.
I've heard that if a body sleeps on it for one night before leaving
dear old Ireland, he'll never be homesick."
"Perhaps 'tis the same flat stone by Father's bench, where we play
betimes," said Kathleen. "I'll tell Danny about it. He's thinking of
going to find his fortune in America."
Then the children asked about the schoolhouse and the children who went
to school in it. "How old are they?" asked Kathleen. "Are there any as
little as Mary Ellen?"
"There are some smaller than Mary Ellen and some bigger than you,"
answered the postman. "There are both boys and girls."
"What do they learn?" she asked again, while Mary Ellen asked, "What do
they play?"
"I've seen them playing some kind of a game where they hold hands in
a circle," he told Mary Ellen, and both little girls cried at once,
"That's 'Green grow the rushes-O.'"
"Belike it is," he said cheerfully, and went on, "they learn reading,
and writing, and the church catechism."
"Don't they learn about the grand places there are in the other parts
of the world?" asked Kathleen wistfully. One of her few great pleasures
was to get out an old geography-book belonging to her father, and study
the pictures in it.
"Perhaps there's something of the sort for the older ones," said the
postman, "but if a body can't travel the world over, to see such
places, I'm doubtful if there's any good in learning about them."
"Oh, no, no!" cried Kathleen, aghast at such a thought; while Mary
Ellen said softly, "If I could see just one little green shamrock, I'd
walk to the end of the world."
Then they turned into another road and saw the children playing in the
school-yard, and a sudden shyness fell upon Kathleen at the sight of so
many children.
After the teacher had taken her letter and the red cart was jogging
back over the road, there was no end to the questions Larry O'Day had
to answer.
[Illustration:
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York
"THEY ARE PLAYING 'GREEN GROW THE RUSHES-O'"
_Page 42_]
"Would those little girls feed the chickens and pigs, and drive the cow
to pasture, as Kathleen did? Would the boys plant potatoes and work in
the bog just the same as Danny? Was that the very school where Danny
himself walked eight miles a day, one winter, to learn to figure?"
Before they reached the thatched cottage again, the postman had talked
more than he had for many a day before, and Kathleen helped her little
sister down from the car in a great hurry to run to Grandmother Barry
and ask still other questions.
But Grandmother Barry had questions of her own to ask. "Sure, Kathleen
alanna," she began, "and how would you like to go down to Kilkenny and
live with your Aunt Hannah?"
"When?" asked Kathleen breathlessly.
"As soon as the plans can be made," answered her grandmother. "Your
Aunt Hannah has sent the word in the letter the postman left; and your
father has gone to fetch Danny and talk it over with him."
"There they are now," said Mary Ellen, her quick ear catching the sound
of their footsteps, and the next moment Danny and his father were
turning into the yard.
Then Mary Ellen held the wonderful letter while Kathleen looked it over
and Father Jerry told what it said.
"Himself has been doing well in his business, praise be!" Aunt Hannah
wrote, "and I'd like to do something for a child of my youngest
brother, though he did take up with the tinker's trade against my
wishes; and him with the schooling."
"That's true," said the shoemaker, looking up at the circle of faces.
"Hannah begged me to take up teaching for a living. I had the learning
for it, and it is an honorable calling in Ireland, and always has been.
But I longed to see the whole of the green island, so I took on a trade
that gave me a chance to travel over it."
"'Tis of the chair in the chimney-corner at Barney's house in Sligo,
I've been thinking all the morn," said Great-grandmother Connell. "Do
you believe Barney has kept it waiting for me these ten years as he
said he would?"
"I doubt not there's a chair each side of the chimney, one for you and
one for Mother Barry," said Father Jerry gently.
"'Tis Ireland that never forgets the old mother," said the older woman,
"and my heart is crying out for the dear old home where I lived for
eighty years."
"Why shouldn't we all go?" asked Danny boldly. "I've money enough for
my passage to America, and I'd like to try my fortune in the world."
"But what will become of me?" asked little Mary Ellen.
"'Tis you and I will buy a great dog to keep us company, and we'll go
travelling together up north to listen to the waves beating around the
Giant's Causeway, Molly darling," her father told her.
But Danny had to give a month's warning to Farmer Flynn, and before the
time was up, a letter had reached them from Tonroe. It said that Cousin
Bee, Uncle Barney's daughter who had married a Donovan, would be glad
to have Mary Ellen bide with her for a while, at her home in Roscommon
County.
"So you and the doggie must travel alone to the North," whispered Mary
Ellen to her father.
And that was the way of it.
CHAPTER VIII
COUSIN BEE'S FARM IN TONROE
It was an April morning at Cousin Bee's little farm-house in Tonroe.
The kettle was bubbling cheerfully over the burning peat in the
fireplace; the cement floor of the kitchen was spotlessly clean; and
Patrick, Bee's husband, was making the children feel quite at home
as he talked with them about Donegal and laughed heartily over their
little stories.
Danny, Kathleen and Mary Ellen had arrived at the station with the two
grandmothers the night before, and nothing would do but they must all
leave the train together.
"Sure, we've room and to spare for a strong lad like you," Patrick had
told Danny; and Bee had said, "'Twould be a shame for Mary Ellen and
Kathleen to be separated so sudden-like."
So Uncle Barney took the two grandmothers home with him to Killaraght,
while Danny and Kathleen went with Mary Ellen to visit Cousin Bee
before going on with their journey,—Kathleen to Kilkenny, and Danny to
Queenstown, where he was to take the steamer for America.
[Illustration:
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York
COUSIN BEE'S FARMHOUSE IN TONROE
Notice the thatched roof and the broad chimneys.
_Page 47_]
Their first morning in Tonroe opened bright and cheery, outside as well
as in, and Kathleen was so excited over all the new sights that she
could hardly wait to eat her breakfast. Of course everything had to be
described to Mary Ellen, and Patrick's hearty laugh filled the kitchen
when Kathleen told her sister that the village looked as if a giant had
taken a great creel filled with houses, and dropped them from a high
ladder to the plain below.
"Kathleen never saw so many houses together before, till she went to
Letterkenny yesterday to take the train away from Donegal," Danny
explained.
"Then she'll like to ride over to Boyle with Bee on market days," said
Patrick kindly; "there's houses a-plenty there. But the plains of Boyle
will look flat enough to her after the mountains of her own county."
"Oh, Mary Ellen, come here!" cried Kathleen, who had gone to the back
door for another look at the village. "There's a church steeple far
away beyond a hilleen, and there's the fine National School building
that Grandma Barry used to tell us about. It's on the little hill, and
I can see it every time I look out at the door. But the mountains are
far away. There's not one to be seen near by."
"Perhaps they have put on a cloak of darkness," suggested Mary Ellen.
"Is there nothing at all where the mountains rightly belong?"
"It's better than mountains," said Kathleen decidedly, to Patrick's
delight. "There's another hilleen of trees just beyond the hedge, and
it looks like a picnic garden, for the trees are all covered with
creels and creels of pink and white blossoms."
"She means the rath, and the hawthorn trees," exclaimed Patrick.
"It is an old fort, darlin'," Bee explained, "and it was built by a
great chief hundreds of years ago; but it looks like a little hill now.
There's another just forninst the church steeple; and one off to the
side of the house that you'd best not go too near."
"Why not?" asked Kathleen curiously.
"An old chief was buried there hundreds of years ago," answered Bee,
"and now the fairies live in it."
"Oh, Mary Ellen," whispered Kathleen, "there are fairies here after
all, and we were thinkin' we had left them behind us in Donegal."
Then she said aloud to Cousin Bee, "It would be a fine place for the
fairies to dance under the pink and white trees in the rath beyond the
garden. Did the old chiefs have their picnics there?"
"Whist, jewel, the Irish chiefs had other things to do," said her
cousin. "They had to be fighting with other chiefs, and killing the
wild beasts; and sometimes they went off hunting foxes and deer
through the green forests, but I'm thinking they had no time for
picnics."
Mary Ellen was standing by Kathleen's side, her sightless eyes looking
beyond the green hedge toward the beautiful mound of trees that scented
the air with thousands of blossoms.
"What did the chiefs do with the forts?" she asked.
"They lived in them," answered Bee. "First they built a great circular
wall of earth or stone to keep out wild beasts and robbers; and then
inside the wall they built their house. Sometimes there were two or
three walls, one outside the other. The forts were called raths, and if
a king lived in them his house was called a dun."
"That rath looks like a grove of trees now," said Kathleen.
"The trees have grown up on the walls, and the houses are all gone
hundreds of years ago," Bee replied.
"What did the houses look like?" asked Mary Ellen.
"The darlin'! she wants to know how it all looked just as if she had
the sight," said Bee, putting her arm around the child.
"Well," she went on, "the houses were shaped like bee-hives. They were
built of poles all woven in and out with twigs, like wicker baskets, so
the books say. Many a town in Ireland to-day is built where a chief's
rath or a king's dun once stood, and it gets its name by that token.
There's Dundalk and Dunglow and Dunmore, Rathmelton, Rathdrum and
Rathcormack. There are duns and raths all over the country."
"There are 'Kils,' too," said Mary Ellen. "Kathleen found them in our
old geography, and Father made a little verse about them. He says that
'Kil' means church, and that St. Patrick built some of the churches. I
don't remember the verse, though. Do you, Kathleen?"
"That I do," said her sister, and she sang to an odd little tune:
"Of 'Killys' and 'Kils' there are many.
There's Kildare and Kilmaine and Kilkenny,
Killybegs, Kullashee,
Killimore, Killyleagh,
Kilworth and Kilcock and Kilkelly."
"Good enough," said Patrick, clapping his hands and laughing so
heartily that everyone else laughed.
"There are dozens of 'ballys,' too," said Mary Ellen, when the laughter
was over. "Kathleen made a list of them, and Father said they would
make a whole string of verses, but he didn't get time for it yet.
'Bally means town,' he said."
"Did the chiefs ever have any sports besides hunting?" asked Danny,
who was fond of sports and had tried many a running race with the boys
at Farmer Flynn's.
"To be sure," Patrick replied. "Over in Leinster they held a great fair
once in every three years, and they had games and chariot races and
horse races. People went to the fair from miles around, and the harpers
and story-tellers always planned their wanderings so as to be there for
the three days."
"It must have been something like market day," said Kathleen, who could
not forget the crowd she saw at the Letterkenny market.
"There was marketing, too," said Patrick. "It wouldn't be Ireland
without marketing. There was selling and buying of horses, sheep, and
pigs, and all sorts of hand-made gold and bronze ornaments. The country
was famous for her hand-crafts then; and she will be so again some day,
praise be!"
"There couldn't have been such pig markets as the one we saw
yesterday," said Danny, laughing at the thought of the hundreds of
squealing pigs in the Letterkenny streets.
"I don't know about that," said Bee. "It took them two years to get
ready for the Leinster fairs, and we go to market in Boyle twice a
week."
"I should be on my way there now, instead of sitting here talking as
if I'd nothing to do," said Patrick. "I want to see Tim Keefe about
buying the heifer come Saturday. Have you any eggs to send, Bridget
mavourneen? And will you go with me, Danny, my boy?"
Danny went out to help Patrick harness the mule, Mary Ellen held the
creel while Kathleen counted out five score of eggs, and Bee packed ten
pounds of beautiful, golden butter into the market basket.
"There, Patrick avic," she said, as she followed him to the barn and
put the basket into the trap, "bring me back a good bit of silver for
my work, and a ribbon apiece for the children. I'll have them watching
for you when you come home."
"This is the best day to sell the butter," she said to Kathleen, as the
trap disappeared down the boreen toward the road. "There'll be people
buying everything you can name, from butter and eggs to needles and
pins and imitation gold chains, at the Wednesday market."
"What will they buy in the Saturday market?" asked the child.
"Pigs, calves, sheep and wool, hay, potatoes, and every kind of
vegetable that grows," was the answer. "I'm raising a little pig that
I'm going to take to the Saturday market myself some day; and Patrick's
heifer is the best in Boyle for its age. Tim Keefe ought to give him a
good price for it."
Then she took Kathleen into the barn and showed her the heifer and the
little pig, the two baby donkeys, the hens and the geese.
"If we get everything well started in the garden we will go on a picnic
to Lough Gara come May-day, and you shall stay and go with us," she
said, leading Kathleen into the garden.
Such a pretty garden it was, too! Paths bordered with box led through
beds of lilies and roses; and there were beds of cowslips and
hollyhocks and many another sweet, old-fashioned flower.
After they had walked up and down the little paths and looked at
all the buds and blossoms, they went back into the kitchen, where
Kathleen washed the dishes while Bee put the bread to bake in the Irish
baking-oven. This oven looks like a kettle and it stands on four feet
among the burning peat with more peat heaped on the cover.
"If Mary Ellen could see, and I was going to live here always, and
Father could come back and live here, too, and Danny need never go to
America, this would be the prettiest farm and the best place in the
whole world," Kathleen said to herself with a long sigh.
Bee heard the sigh and asked what it meant.
"I'm wishing I could find some way to bring Mary Ellen's eyesight
back," Kathleen told her.
"Was she born blind?" questioned Bee.
"No," said Kathleen, "but her eyes were weak when she born, and when
Grandma Barry came to live with us she said it was the smoke of the
peat that had taken the sight away altogether. That was how it came
about that Father made a chimney for the cottage, so that the smoke
could go out instead of spreading through the room."
"There has been a good deal of blindness in Ireland from the smoke of
burning peat in the houses," said Bee, looking thankfully at her own
broad chimney and deep fireplace.
"Hark!" said Kathleen suddenly, "there's the child calling this
minute," and she ran out into the garden to see what was the matter.
Mary Ellen had been exploring the little farm for herself. She had
found her way through the garden to the old fort and was catching the
pink and white petals as they drifted down to her from the trees. An
old magpie had built his nest in the tree over her head and he was
scolding so angrily that the child was afraid of him.
"Was it only a bird, Kathleen dear?" she asked, when her sister tried
to quiet her by telling her just how funny he looked, sitting up there
in the tree and opening and shutting his big bill. "Faith, I thought it
was an ogre!"
"That's the very magpie that steals my young turkeys," said Bee, who
had run out after Kathleen. "If you children will find a way to drive
him off I will give you a shilling."
Then she left the little girls to play by themselves, and Mary Ellen
lay on the grass among the spring blossoms while Kathleen sat down
beside her to tell her a long story.
"This is a truly fairy rath," she began, "and Cousin Bee's farm is the
fortune fairy's palace."
And Cousin Bee, putting her cream into the churn, said to herself,
"Sure, the farm is big enough to keep both the children for awhile.
I'll let Kathleen stay on with Mary Ellen till her Aunt Hannah sends
for her again."
CHAPTER IX
MAY-DAY ON LOUGH GARA
"It's the cute way nature has with her!" exclaimed Kathleen, holding
up her face for the white-thorn petals to blow down upon it. She and
Mary Ellen had been to the old rath after flowers for the May-baskets,
and were returning to the cottage, where Cousin Bee was waiting to take
them to Lough Gara for the May-day picnic. A breeze was scattering the
petals from the trees, which were "as white with bloom as the snow of
one night," and Mary Ellen turned her face to the sky so that she, too,
might feel the soft shower.
"Sure, nature has a cute way," Kathleen repeated. "When a cloud hides
the bright sun and you'd think an Irish rain was going to fall the
next minute, the wind gives a laugh and sends a snowstorm instead; and
here it is the first day of May, and the blackbirds are singing in the
meadow."
"Can you see the snow on the mountains far away?" asked Mary Ellen.
"No, but the white chalk cliffs shine like snow," replied Kathleen.
"It seems as if we must forget, here in Tonroe, about the mountains
and the cold, snowy winter. When I wake up in the morning and hear the
lark singing his way up into the sky, and smell the May-bloom through
the window, I almost forget the gray stones and low clouds of purple
Donegal."
"Do you mind the old black crows that used to call over the hills all
day long?" asked Mary Ellen.
"Of caws! Of caws!" croaked Kathleen, so much like an old crow that her
sister made her do it again and again, "to remind her of home," she
said.
The children had been at Cousin Bee's little farm in Tonroe for over
two weeks, and Danny had made himself so useful that Patrick offered
him good wages to stay and help him through the planting season.
"Sure, I care more for work than for anything else just now," Danny
made answer, and he rolled up his sleeves and went to work with a will.
"There's no need for Kathleen to go to Kilkenny either, now that the
school is near to closing for the summer," Bee suggested.
So Kathleen washed the dishes and watched the young turkeys. She fed
the hens and found their eggs when they stole nests in the little
village of grain-stacks in the hay-haggard. And, best of all, she found
an old cow-bell in the barn and set Mary Ellen to ringing it every
time the thieving magpie came back to his nest, until he was glad to
take his family away to live in a quieter neighborhood and leave the
young turkeys to wander through the old rath in safety.
In fact, she made herself so useful that Uncle Barney, over in
Killaraght, nodded his head when he heard of it, and Grandmother
Connell said in the old Gaelic, which looks in print as if it might be
fairy speech, "Kathleen always had good sense and handy ways."
And now it was May-day at last, and the little family had been busy all
the morning getting ready for the picnic.
"Come, children," called Bee from the house door, "here are Norah
Higgins and Hannah Kelley waiting for us, and Patrick and Danny have
gone on ahead for the boat."
Then off they all went down the lane, between the hedges of pink
hawthorn, purple lilac and gleaming golden gorse, across the fields,
and along the green bank of the river.
A neighbor who was driving his family down to the lake in a
jaunting-car stopped to ask them why they weren't riding themselves,
but Bee said she thought it was far more pleasant to walk, and they
trudged along, talking and laughing merrily.
[Illustration:
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York
"A NEIGHBOR WAS DRIVING HIS FAMILY DOWN TO THE LAKE IN A JAUNTING-CAR."
The jaunting-car has side seats, with a "well" between them for parcels.
_Page 58_]
Pink and white mayflowers, blue wall-flowers and yellow
daffies grew under their feet, and the fields were full of blue-bells.
Robins and thrushes sang over their heads, and in the distance they
heard the sound of a hunting horn and the baying of the hounds.
Danny was waiting for them at the boat landing, and Patrick made haste
to gather his party into a boat and row them out upon the blue water,
so that they could watch the happy crowds coming and going along the
shore. Kathleen looked back across the fields and saw hundreds of men,
women, and children, all dressed in their very best, trooping toward
the lake, carrying lunch-baskets for their May-day picnic on Lough Gara.
"Oh, Molly darling," she whispered, "it's better than anything we ever
thought of in Donegal. It's a wish come true."
Mary Ellen clung to her sister's hand, listening to the happy voices
calling from boat to boat, and from water to shore. "It must be the
place Grandma Barry used to tell us about," she said,—"the place where
happiness is so common you can buy it for a ha'penny."
Kathleen's eyes were fixed on the green island toward which Danny was
rowing them. "It looks more like the home of the fairies than does the
Rock of Doon," she told Bee.
"They do say that the fairies haunt Lough Gara," her cousin answered.
"At night, when there's no one to see them, they gallop round and round
the lake, winding their hunting horns and following the fairy hounds
just as the ladies and gentlemen do at the meets on the big estate at
French Park."
Just then the boat touched the shore of the little island and there was
no more time to talk of fairies. Pretty Mary Hever and her brother John
were waiting for them under the trees, and every one was ready to help
in the merry fun of setting out the lunch.
The girls plaited wreaths of flowers and oak leaves, and crowned Bee
and Mary Ellen; John Hever found a spring of clear water and filled
the cups; and Bee set out the sandwiches and cheese and some of her
delicious cookies which were the best in all Tonroe.
"There'll be just time enough for the lunch before we go to Kingsland
for the sports," Patrick said, as he sat down on the grass between
Kathleen and Mary Ellen and began to help them to cookies the very
first thing.
"Be off with your joking," said Bee. "We can't hurry the picnic like
that. Half the fun of the lunch is the blarney that goes with it."
"Faith, John Hever will do the eating while we take care of the
blarney," replied her husband, laughing at the boy's first mouthful.
"Tell us about Donegal," Hannah Kelley said to Kathleen.
"There's nothing to tell," replied Kathleen. "There are just purple
mountains and rocky hills and bogs, and Mary Ellen and I had no one to
play with at all."
"You should see the great cliffs over at Horn Head," said Danny
proudly. "That's something to tell about! When there has been a storm,
the waves pound against them and the spray dashes up so that it is a
grand sight."
"I'm thinking it was up there that the giant used to step from cliff to
cliff when he was walking round the island to be sure everything was
all right for the night," said Bee, who seemed to know stories of all
the giants and fairies.
John Hever looked down at his own short legs with a sigh. "Sure, he
must have been a big giant," he said, "to walk around all Ireland every
night of his life."
"That he was," replied Patrick with a laugh. "Were you thinking you'd
catch up with him on his next round?"
"I was not," answered John, "but I'll soon be beating you in a race to
Dublin town."
"It's ten years and more since I played that game with fifty other boys
and girls; and that, too, around the policeman's legs in the streets
of Cork!" exclaimed Patrick. "But come on then, and we'll see how it
seems to go doubling among these tree-trunks."
He seized Bee's hand and they began singing "How many miles to Dublin
Town?" just as Kathleen and Mary Ellen had sung it so often in far
Donegal. But now there were many to join in the game, and one after
another the children caught hold of hands and ran in and out among the
trees, singing and shouting.
When Patrick thought they had had enough of the game he led them all
down to the boat and pushed off for the sports at the Kingsland shore.
Never before, Kathleen thought, had so many things happened in one day.
There were bicycle-races, hurdle-races, foot-races, sack-races and a
tug-of-war. There was leaping, and jumping, and running, and it seemed
as if Danny was in everything.
Such shouting and cheering she had never even dreamed of! And when
Danny won the long-distance run, she found herself jumping up and down
and shouting as loudly as any one.
"I could have won that first dash, too, if Tim Keefe hadn't stolen the
start," said Danny wrathfully, as he brought up his prize to show to
his cousins.
"The prize for that race was a mirror, anyway," said Patrick
consolingly, "and you've little use for one now. But as for Tim Keefe,
with his old pipe in his mouth, he needs it to see himself for a
spalpeen."
After the fun was all over they went home together across the fields,
filling their arms with great branches of the pink and white hawthorn
blossoms; but at the boreen they had to start running, for a sudden
shower fell to drive them into the house the quicker.
Just as the children were going off to bed that night, Kathleen went
softly up to Bee and put her arm shyly around her cousin's plump
waist. "It's thankful I am to you and Patrick for the happy day," she
whispered.
Bee gave her a good hug and a hearty kiss as she answered, "'Tis you
and little Mary Ellen that make all the days happy for me."
CHAPTER X
A BANK OF TURF
"Mary Ellen, dear, did you ever think it would be so fine to live out
of Donegal?"
"No," answered the little sister, "I've been thinking of the market
ever since Saturday; and yesterday was the walk to Lough Gara again,
and to-day is the sheep-shearing. Belike by Friday they will begin to
cut the turf. It is better than Donegal, even if Father is not with us."
"Oh, Mary Ellen, I doubt they'll begin cutting out peat on a Friday. It
will bring them bad luck."
"Perhaps they will begin on Thursday, then," suggested her sister. "Is
there any ill luck in that day?"
It was a beautiful morning toward the end of May, and the two little
girls were watching the shearing of the sheep at Uncle Barney's farm.
More than a hundred bleating sheep and lambs were collected near the
house, where they were guarded by a trained shepherd dog and watched
over by Kathleen.
"Kathleen is the colleen that's good at everything," Patrick said one
day after the picnic at Lough Gara. "She'll milk a cow as well as ever
her great-grandmother Connell did. She's got the firm hand for it, and
the sweet voice."
"She can bake as fine a loaf of bread as I can, and that is saying a
good deal, too," said Bee proudly.
"I'll see what kind of a shepherd lass she will make, come
shearing-time," said Uncle Barney, who had come over from Killaraght
to get Danny to help him. "We'll need some one to keep the sheep from
straying away after they have been washed."
So Kathleen was watching the sheep for her uncle, and talking over the
Saturday market with her sister.
"Sure, I thought Bee's little pig would squeal himself black in the
face before she got him sold," said Mary Ellen.
"I mind Bee did better with her little pig than Patrick did with his
big heifer," Kathleen replied with a laugh.
"Why?" asked Mary Ellen.
"Hasn't Patrick been trying to sell his heifer to Tim Keefe ever since
we came to Tonroe?" Kathleen answered. "Faith, he only finished the
bargain last Saturday; and it was Uncle Barney that brought it about
then, else they'd still be a-higgling."
"What's this you are saying?" asked Patrick, who was selecting another
sheep to shear.
"We're saying that Bee makes a better bargain than you," Kathleen told
him.
"How's that?" he asked.
"She got half as much for her pig as you did for the heifer, and the
heifer was costing her feed all the four weeks you were making the
bargain."
Patrick threw back his head with a great laugh. "Here's the child for
you," he called to Uncle Barney. "She says I was feeding the heifer for
Tim Keefe for four weeks and getting nothing for it."
"Tim Keefe is a young spalpeen," said Uncle Barney. "I'd give a pound
myself to see somebody get the better of him. It is what nobody ever
did yet," and he smiled down into Kathleen's gray eyes.
He forgot his words the next minute, but Kathleen remembered them, even
after the sheep-shearing was over and the turf-cutting had begun in the
bog.
Bog-land is found in almost every part of Ireland; but much of it is
dangerous for travel, and all of it has to be drained before the peat
can be cut. Causeways lead to the parts that are drained, but there
are many deep pools of swampy water in the bogs, which are filled with
tufts of spongy moss and slimy tree trunks.
[Illustration:
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York
CUTTING BRICKS OF PEAT AND STACKING THEM UP TO DRY
_Page 67_]
The turf is cut out in blocks by a man who uses a
long-handled spade. He tosses the blocks to his helper who stands
waiting for them, and who carries them to a barrow or creel. When the
barrow is filled it is wheeled away to higher ground where the blocks
of turf are stacked up and dried in the sun and wind.
Kathleen begged to be Danny's helper, and on the morning when he began
cutting in the bog she stood beside him. As fast as he filled her arms
with the peat she trudged sturdily away and stacked it up to dry, just
as Patrick had taught her.
As she stood waiting for her twentieth load she asked, "How long will
it take for this turf to be dry enough to carry home and stack under
the shed?"
"It takes all summer to get the peat dry enough to burn," Danny told
her. "In August and September there will be hundreds of little donkeys,
all over the country, going to market loaded with big creels of dry
peat. Twenty bricks of the peat are sold for a sixpence."
Danny was cutting turf for Patrick and Uncle Barney in a bog which lay
on the border of Lough Gara, and Kathleen stopped occasionally to rest
her arms and watch a boat-load of peasants who had hired the next bank
to Patrick's, and who came across the lake to cut it. It was hard work
to carry the wet turf, and she was quite ready to go home when Patrick
drove the mule down to the lake for them at five o'clock.
"Two of Mike Drury's cows were swallowed up in a moving bog over in
County Galway last week," she heard him tell Danny.
It was the first time she had ever heard of a moving bog, and she
looked at him with frightened eyes. "Will this bog swallow Danny up?"
she asked.
"Hop into the trap and forget it, alanna," replied Patrick cheerfully.
"Nothing of the sort will ever happen here. This bog is too well
drained for that. But they do say that in times past whole houses have
been swallowed up in the bogs."
"What made the bog-land?" Kathleen asked, as they rode along toward
home.
"The bushes and trees gradually fell into the swamp and decayed, and
those that grew above them fell and decayed in the same way," Patrick
told her. "It was going on before ever the giants or fairies lived in
the country."
"Here's something I found in the bog more than a foot below the
surface," said Danny. "It must have been buried there for hundreds of
years, for the turf was solid all around it."
He took from his pocket a small iron cross of curious design and
beautiful workmanship, and Patrick examined it with great interest.
"It is an ancient ornament," he said, "such as they used to make here
in Ireland in olden times. Mayhap it belonged to Queen Maive herself,
she that was Queen of the West nearly two thousand years ago. All kinds
of things are found in the bogs. Sometimes men find firkins of butter
and moulds of cheese which have been buried for years and years. Bee
will tell you all about it; 'tis she that has the learning," he added
proudly, and hurried home to show the cross to his wife.
There was a happy ending to Kathleen's hard day's work in the bog,
when, sitting among the flowers of the old rath, with the soft wind
blowing through the trees over their heads, Bee told them about the
time when the men of Ireland were famous workers in metal.
"In the National Museum at Dublin there are many of the most precious
bits of handiwork to be found in all Europe," she said. "No doubt they
would be glad to have this cross in one of their glass cases."
But Danny leaned over and put it into Kathleen's hand. "Those that are
slow at knitting stockings are oftentimes quickest at catching turfs,"
he said. "You may have the cross to wear, mavourneen, if you like."
Kathleen hung her head. "I finished the stockings before I left
Donegal," she replied, "and the peddler said they were well-knit."
"Is there bog-land all over Ireland?" asked little Mary Ellen, who knew
that her sister did not like to talk about the stockings.
"Grandmother Barry used to say that Kilkenny was the most favored
county in the country," replied Bee; "and in one of my old
reading-books there was a rhyme about Kilkenny, that it had:
Fire without smoke, air without fog,
Water without mud, and land without bog."
"Kilkenny," repeated Kathleen. "That is where I am going to visit Aunt
Hannah, I suppose; but I know I shall never like it so well as living
here with you, Cousin Bee."
Bee went into the house and came back again in a few minutes, carrying
a small flat box from which she took a photograph of a pleasant-faced
woman, the very image of dear Uncle Barney.
"There's your Aunt Hannah Malone," she said, showing the picture to
Kathleen; "she is the best woman in the world, and the mother of ten
fine children." And Kathleen, looking at the twinkling eyes and smiling
mouth, knew at once that she should be happy in Kilkenny.
CHAPTER XI
KATHLEEN EARNS A POUND
"There's to be a big meet to-day," Patrick said, as Danny and Kathleen
were getting ready to start for the bog the next morning.
There had been a shower or two in the night, and raindrops sparkled on
every blade of grass and twinkled among the green leaves of the trees;
but the sun was breaking through the clouds and promised a fair day for
the turf-cutting.
It was, indeed, a fair day and a fair green country, and Patrick, who
had started for the barn with his milk pails, began singing in his
hearty voice:
"Oh, Ireland, isn't it grand you look,
Like a bride in her rich adornin'!
And with all the pent-up love of my heart,
I bid you the top of the mornin'."
"What is a meet?" Kathleen asked, as she and her brother trudged down
the road to the bog.
"It's a hunting-party, and the ladies and gentlemen from the country
round about meet together for it," Danny answered, stopping a moment
to look at the tiny green sloes on the blackthorn hedge.
"What do they hunt?" she asked.
"Sometimes they hunt a deer; and sometimes it's foxes or rabbits they
are after," he replied.
"If they are hunting a deer I hope they won't catch it," Kathleen said
earnestly.
But when the sound of the hunting-horn rang merrily across the bog,
from the direction of Uncle Barney's house in Killaraght, she was full
of excitement over the chase.
"Listen!" she cried, standing with outstretched arms to catch the brick
of turf Danny was ready to throw to her; "listen, there's the horn now!
It sounds so sweet I'd almost think it was the fairies."
Danny waited until they heard the baying of the hounds and the halloo
of the riders, and then he went on with his work.
"They may kill harmless animals if they like; but I'd rather be able to
hit your hands with a brick of turf," he said, suiting the action to
the word, "than to hit a handsome deer with a bullet."
Kathleen's thoughts were busy with the hunters for a long time and she
asked her brother endless questions about them,—Where did they live?
What did they do with the deer? How did the horses go over the stone
walls and fences? Why did the riders wear scarlet coats?
"How many hunters are there?" she asked at last.
"Oh, fifteen or more," Danny answered carelessly. "But if they needed
thirty men to catch one poor deer, they could find them easily. There's
the surgeon from the hospital in Boyle, for one. Bee says he is over
here to-day for the hunting."
"The surgeon from the Boyle hospital," Kathleen repeated, under her
breath.
"Oh, if I could just see him, and tell him about Mary Ellen's eyes!"
she thought. "Perhaps he could make her well before I have to go to
Kilkenny, if I only had the money."
She forgot the hunters for a while, and gave all her thought to her
work, and to planning how she could earn more shillings after the
turf-cutting was finished. Over and over again, as she trudged from the
bog to the stack of wet turf, she heard the music of the horn,—now
near, now far. When it grew faint her hope died away, but when it rang
loud and clear her heart grew light, as if she had received a promise
of help for her sister.
Once she saw a flash of scarlet-coated riders far beyond the bog, the
horses at a gallop; and again a stray hound bounded past her, within a
few yards of the mound where she was stacking the turf.
A little before noon Danny sent her home for her dinner. "You are too
little to work as steadily as you did yesterday," he said kindly.
"Uncle Barney and Patrick are coming down this afternoon, and they are
going to bring two more to help, so the work will go faster."
So Kathleen left her work and hurried down the road, little dreaming
that she herself was soon to take part in the hunt.
Just as she reached the little lane that led up to Cousin Bee's house
she heard a noise, and looking off across the fields she saw a horseman
coming towards her, shouting and waving his arms.
At first she took him for one of the hunters; but he wore a dark suit
and an old straw hat, and his horse looked as if it could do better at
drawing a plow than at jumping a fence.
Kathleen ran to the barn and stood beside the open door to see which
way the rider was going, when suddenly she saw something else that made
her heart stand still with excitement.
A beautiful deer was bounding across the fields! He leaped the wall
into the road, and came down the little lane toward the house at a
gallop.
The horseman pounded down the road behind him, the hounds were baying
in the distance, and almost before Kathleen knew what was happening,
the deer had run into the wide-open barn door and she had closed it
behind him and was listening in terror to the sound of his plunging
hoofs.
Then the excitement really began, for the strange hunter, who was no
one but Tim Keefe himself, rode into the yard on his old farm-horse,
and Patrick, Bee and Mary Ellen ran out of the house to see what was
the matter.
Patrick heard the noise in the barn and ran to see if his cows had gone
crazy; Kathleen ran to hold the door and tell him about the deer, and
Tim Keefe began to shout at the top of his voice that it was his deer
because he had seen it first.
He had been riding to the Kingsland bog to hire a bank of turf, he
said, and the deer had crossed his path. He remembered that a pound
reward is always given to the one who holds the deer for the hunters,
and he had ridden after it, hoping by some means to gain the reward.
Patrick smiled his broad smile. "It will be Kathleen who will get the
pound, after all," he said.
"But it was myself that whipped him down the road," said Tim hotly.
Patrick's smile broke into a laugh. "'Twas Kathleen that shut him into
the barn," he said, "and 'tis a fine whipper-in you make, Tim Keefe."
Tim's coat was ragged and his trousers had seen the rains of many
an Irish summer, an old pipe smoked in his mouth, and he was such a
sorry-looking figure altogether that even Bee laughed at the sight of
him.
And while they all laughed, there came the "tally-ho!" of the hunters
just beyond the old fort; the dogs swept into sight, and the real
whipper-in rode up to the very door of the barn.
In a moment the yard turned red to Kathleen's eyes, for a dozen
mounted horsemen in scarlet coats and buff riding-breeches galloped
close behind him, with ladies in gray and ladies in black, all riding
splendid horses.
Patrick sent the children out of the way of the horses' feet, while he
explained how it happened that his barn was stabling a deer.
Then the whipper-in quieted his hounds, and the ladies and gentlemen
looked at bashful Kathleen, who had quite lost her voice in the midst
of so much excitement. But when she was offered the pound that Tim
Keefe had expected to receive, she shook her head.
"Tell them I want the deer to go free," she whispered to Patrick.
How everyone laughed at the idea! But in the end they agreed to it,
telling her that she might open the barn door whenever she pleased.
Then they all went away down the boreen, "as goodly a cavalcade as ever
rode on Irish soil," Bee said.
As for Patrick, in one breath he laughed at Kathleen's wit and courage,
and in the next he praised her tender heart. "You're a good lass," he
said, "and you've earned a good dinner anyway. Come into the house and
we'll see what Bee has been baking the morn. Then, after the hounds are
well out of the way, we'll open the barn door and see the deer take
himself off to the woods."
That afternoon, when they were all working in the bog, Kathleen heard
Patrick telling Danny and Uncle Barney the story of her deer hunt.
"There was Tim Keefe, on his old nag, with his pipe in his mouth," he
said, "thinking he was the grand whipper-in, and would get the pound
for himself."
"It's a fine day that sees Tim Keefe outwitted for once," exclaimed
Uncle Barney, slapping his knee with his hand.
Kathleen heard his words and turned to him quickly. "You said that you
would give a pound to hear that Tim Keefe had been outwitted," she said.
Uncle Barney laughed till his sides shook. "Good for you! Good for
you!" he said, and actually took out the money and gave it to her.
She looked at it doubtfully, and he laughed again. "You earned it fair,
and 'twas worth it," he told her.
So Kathleen folded the money and put it carefully away in her pocket,
thinking as she did so that, after all, the hunting-horn had brought a
promise of help for little Mary Ellen.
CHAPTER XII
THE YOUNG MALONES
The oldest one is Tara,
Next Captain Connemara,
And Moira and Norah, each a twin;
Then "Save-a-Shilling Deena"
And little Princess Feena,
But hold the door,—there's others to come in;
There's Hannah and there's Anna,
We call them both "alanna,"
Then young Columba, he's the gentle dove;
And last of all Victoria,
She's not the one to frighten ye,
For she's the youngest one, the one ye'll love.
_Chorus_
Oh, would ye learn to count the young Malones?
Ye've only just to trip it two by two;
Of couples there's a many,
At Malone's in old Kilkenny,
And we'd like to count you two, too, at Malone's!
Never did two travellers receive a noisier or heartier greeting than
the ten young Malones gave to Danny and Kathleen on the night of their
arrival from Tonroe. From twenty-four-year-old Tara to three-year-old
Victoria there was nothing but bright faces, merry voices, and
outstretched hands.
No one could be shy or homesick in the midst of so much jollity, and in
no time at all Kathleen was laughing and talking as gaily as if she had
lived with "the Malones in old Kilkenny" all her life.
When, at last, she fell asleep for the night, two of the happy family
stood out most clearly in her memory. One was Connemara, who had
slipped her motherly arm around the little girl's tired shoulders
to draw her away from the hubbub and put her to bed. The other was
Columba, who followed her to the foot of the stairs to say, "I'll tell
you to-morrow why they call me 'the gentle dove.' It's because I have
such an awful temper. And up at St. Kieran's College they call Deena
'Save-a-Shilling Malone,' because he advertises in the _Weekly Budget_
that the students can save a shilling on their books if they buy them
of him," he added, shouting the last words as Connemara led Kathleen
down the long hall to her own little bedroom.
As she lay in her bed, thinking over all the happy events of the day,
she heard the thirteen-year-old twins, Hannah and Anna, shouting with
laughter over a joke of Deena's. Then the two older twins began a duet
on the piano, and just as she was trying to think of the tune they were
playing she shut her eyes and was lost in the land of Nod.
In the meantime good Uncle Tom Malone had taken Danny into his library
to talk with the lad about his plans. It was a simple story that Danny
had to tell. He was going at once to Queenstown to take the steamer
there for America.
"Do you know any one over there?" asked his uncle, looking at him with
shrewd eyes.
"No," replied Danny, "but I know how to work, and that's something."
"What did Patrick say to it?" asked Uncle Tom.
"He said he had no fear but that I would do well," said Danny modestly,
"but he wanted me to stay in Ireland. He said I could do well here,
too."
"Did he want you to stay with him on the farm?"
"Yes, but I'm thinking I can do better in some other line than
farming," said Danny. "I'd like to get into a shop and work my way up."
"If you are in no hurry to go to America you might stay and have a try
at working for me," suggested his uncle. "I have a linen shop here in
Kilkenny. Next year, if you do well, I'll send you and Tara to one of
the great linen mills in Belfast to learn the business."
"I'd like nothing better," replied Danny heartily, "and I'll do my best
to make the most of the chance."
"There's as good a place for you here as you will find in America,"
said his uncle, "and we can't afford to let all our lads leave their
own country."
So the next day found Danny in the linen shop with Tara, while
Kathleen, at home with her cousins, was learning to know and love them
all.
But it was to pretty Fiona, "Princess Feena" the children called her,
with the curly hair, brown eyes, and fluttering ribbons, that Kathleen
took the greatest fancy, and she followed her about everywhere, just
to watch the gleams of sunshine shake out from the rippling waves that
crowned her cousin's head.
As for Fiona, having been named for an Irish princess, she talked
by the hour about kings, queens, and castles, and the royal times
she hoped to enjoy some day; while Kathleen listened as if she were
enchanted.
It was useless for the twins, Hannah and Anna, to try to entice her
away for a game. She preferred to listen while Feena told stories, or
read aloud from some old book of the time when Ireland was ruled by "a
king with flowing golden hair, his crimson cloak held at the breast by
a magnificent jewelled brooch, his shirt interwoven with gold threads,
and his girdle sparkling with precious gems."
Columba, too, was sadly disappointed at not finding a playmate in
Kathleen. He had even given way to his temper one day when, instead of
going for a ride in the trap with him, she had chosen to walk along
the bank of the River Nore with Feena to see the beautiful ivy-covered
Kilkenny Castle.
He went to Connemara, or "Captain Conn" as she was always called, with
his grievance. "She's gone off with Feena again," he said wrathfully,
"and here I've been planning to show her St. Canice's Church and the
Round Tower ever since she came. I can tell her plenty of stories about
the old Round Tower, if it's stories she wants."
"Perhaps she would not like your stories," suggested Connemara. "Feena
would never tell her that great stones were dropped from the top of the
Round Tower, down one hundred feet on the heads of men, murdering Danes
though they were."
"Well, the Danes deserved all the trouble they found; they made enough
for us, the spalpeens!" said Columba, the gentle dove. "We were a
peaceable nation, content to fight among ourselves, when the Danes came
crowding into the land. I'm glad Brian Boru was man enough to drive
them out again.
"But then," he added, "if she doesn't like to hear about the priests
carrying stones to the top of the tower to drop them on the heads of
the Danes, I can tell her that they carried their precious books into
the tower for safety; and that they used to stand at the four little
windows at the top looking out over the country to watch for the
approach of an enemy.
"Or I can take her down to Kilkenny Castle and tell her how Strongbow,
the Governor of Ireland, built his fortress there nearly a thousand
years ago, and brought his bride, the daughter of the King of Leinster,
to live in the Castle. Then I can show her St. Canice's Cathedral,
where the soldiers of Cromwell's army, when they were besieging the
city in 1650, used to amuse themselves by smashing the beautiful
windows and throwing the bells down out of the tower."
Connemara could not help laughing as she looked at her brother's
earnest face. "'Tis plain that you know the history of the city," she
said, "but your stories are all about wars. To-morrow is market-day.
Ask Kathleen to go with you down through the city streets to see the
old peddler women in their bright shawls, selling their wares in the
little booths and tents. That will be a strange sight to the child,
after lonely Donegal; and she'll like it better than battles."
After supper that night she took Kathleen within the cosy shelter of
her arms and talked with her about little Mary Ellen and her life in
Tonroe.
"She's like Victoria," said Kathleen, "gentle and loving. I wish she
could be here instead of me. She used to wish that whole troops of boys
and girls would come over the bare Donegal hills to play with us."
But when, on the next afternoon, Columba took her in the donkey-trap
and drove in and out among the streets of Kilkenny, she almost forgot
Tonroe and the little sister.
They went first to the market, and Kathleen spent one of the precious
shillings she had earned stacking peat to buy a string of pink beads to
send to Mary Ellen. Then they drove past the Cathedral and down to the
Castle, and came home along the bank of the River Nore, which is one of
the prettiest rivers in all Ireland.
"Sure, you are the fine driver," Kathleen said admiringly to Columba,
as he sent the little donkey along at a rattling pace behind a
jaunting-car filled with tourists.
And of the two it would have been hard to tell which was the happier
that day,—Kathleen, whirling along the beautiful tree-shaded river
seeing the city, or Columba, showing to her admiring eyes how much at
home he was among such grand sights.
CHAPTER XIII
KATHLEEN'S COMPOSITION
"Oh, Deena Malone, ye've a wonderful way with ye,
All the young childer are wild for to play with ye!"
Captain Conn sang, as she led little Victoria, all freshly dressed for
supper, to the group near the piano.
Deena made a deep bow to her, as he kept up his part of the jig in the
three-hand reel, while Hannah and Anna, who were dancing with him,
called "Faster, faster!" to Moira, who was playing on the piano.
The street door banged, and Columba dashed into the house, shouting,
"Danny won the hundred-yard dash,—Danny won! Hooray!"
Immediately the reel became a breakdown, and when Danny entered the
room, followed by Tara and Uncle Tom, everyone fell upon him, eager to
give him a rousing whack of good-will.
The supper bell sounded above the din, and out into the dining-room
tumbled the twelve, singing at the top of their lungs, "For lightness
of foot there was not his peer;"—and clasping hands in a great
circle, they danced round and round the table before taking their
places.
The only one to keep her hair unruffled through the performance was
Princess Feena. No matter how often the young Malones ended a reel in
"all hands around," she looked as royally calm at the end as at the
beginning.
After living with the Malones for a whole winter, Kathleen found the
dainty little lady as adorable as ever. Now, on St. Patrick's Day,
just a year from the time Aunt Hannah's letter had reached her in far
Donegal, Kathleen had grown so fond of the whole jolly, noisy family,
that she wondered how she had ever lived anywhere else.
Danny, also, had made a place for himself and was earning good wages in
the linen shop. Not a holiday had he taken in the whole winter until
this seventeenth of March, when he entered the sports.
"Ireland was always famous for her athletes," said his uncle, as he
began serving supper to the hungry brood.
"Haven't you been doing anything to make your name famous, Kathleen
mavourneen?" he asked kindly.
Kathleen blushed to find everyone looking at her and waiting for her
answer.
"Speak up, for the honor of old Donegal," said Deena.
"I saw her standing before the whole class with a paper in her hand the
other day," said Anna. "It looked as if she were reading it."
"Confess, confess!" cried Deena. "Don't hide anything from us. Let us
know the worst at once."
Kathleen had seen so much good-natured fun among the children that
winter that she knew it would be impossible to avoid telling what it
was she had been reading to her classmates. Sooner or later it would
have to come out under the children's quizzing, so she spoke frankly,
saying, "It was only a paper we had to write about the learning in
Ireland."
Up went the hands in admiration. "Our little Kathleen a writer!" said
Hannah in mock astonishment, while Deena said reproachfully, "And she
would have concealed it from her loving family!"
"It _is_ a blow," murmured Anna; and Norah said, "Go fetch it, and read
it at once."
"Yes!" shouted everybody. "Go fetch it and read it."
Kathleen looked at Captain Conn, who usually decided everything for the
whole family.
"Yes," said Conn with a merry smile; "there's no harm in reading it to
us."
So Kathleen fetched the little composition and read it with flaming
cheeks and beating heart. It was called:
LEARNING IN IRELAND
There must be a great deal of learning still left in Ireland, but the
books do not say so much about it as about the learning of long ago.
When St. Patrick lived, he built a great many monasteries here in the
green country, and set the fashion to study and learn in them.
Other saints followed him and built more monasteries, and wherever
there was a monastery there was sure to be a school where the sons of
Irish chiefs might study. There were a great many chiefs and they must
have had a great many sons; but the sons of the common people could
also learn from the monks, and very often there were rich and poor
studying together in the same house.
The fame of these Irish schools spread outside of this country, and
in the different countries of Europe it became the fashion to go to
school in Ireland, until, five hundred years after St. Patrick's time,
this was the most learned country in the world.
The scholars built little huts in which they lived, but whenever the
weather was pleasant they recited out of doors.
I wish it was the fashion to recite out of doors nowadays.
KATHLEEN BARRY.
_B. A._ You can see by the ruins scattered all over Ireland how many
monasteries and schools there were. There are ruins in every county,
but those in Kilkenny are the most interesting of all.
K. B.
There was a great clapping of hands when Kathleen finished reading, and
cries of "Bravo! Bravo!"
In the midst of the uproar Deena pounded with his knife-handle on the
table and shouted "Tally-ho! Tally-ho! Tally-ho-o-o-o!"
As soon as the hunting call quieted them he said, "Pray tell us the
meaning of your Ogham characters 'B. A.' toward the close of your
essay."
The Ogham writing is older than the oldest writing in Ireland, and a
laugh went up again to hear Kathleen's letters likened to it.
Kathleen laughed, too, and looked at the "B. A." innocently enough, as
she replied, "It means 'begin again.' Isn't that what you write when
you forget something and say it afterwards?"
"It will do," said Tara, patting her on the head, while Connie asked,
"And what did the teacher say to your paper?"
"She said it would do, better than some papers that wouldn't do so
well," answered the little girl, and wondered why the laughing began
again.
Aunt Hannah smiled at her across the table. "Sure, 'tis 'B. A.' with
the fun and laughter at Malone's most of the time. Don't mind them,
mavourneen," she said to the little girl, and then she told the
children how she had learned the names of Ireland's thirty-two counties
when she was a child.
"The children marched round and round the school-room," she said,
"saying it like a poem, and all in concert. It began, 'Cork and Kerry,
Londonderry,' and went on through the whole thirty-two names. And when
any one forgot a name he had to drop out and take his seat."
After the supper was over and she went into the den for a cosy chat
with Uncle Tom, she said, "Sure, 'tis a great pity that Jerry couldn't
be here to see how well both Danny and Kathleen are doing."
"They're fine children," agreed Uncle Tom. "Kathleen will be great
at the learning some day, if she keeps on. Perhaps she'll turn out a
teacher, as her father Jerry was meant to be."
"They're all fine children," murmured Aunt Hannah, listening to the
happy voices around the piano as they began singing one of their
favorite songs; and she rose and followed Uncle Tom to the other room,
where they all sang together, "The Day When the Green Flag Flies."
CHAPTER XIV
THE WISHING SPRING
"What was that you picked up, Kathleen?" Columba asked, as the two were
walking home from school together one sunny afternoon in June.
"Oh, just an old nail," replied Kathleen, dropping it quickly into her
pocket.
"What will you do with an old nail?" questioned Columba. "Are you
thinking of building a house?"
Kathleen hesitated so long before replying that her cousin repeated,
"What's an old nail good for?"
"I don't know exactly," Kathleen replied. "Granny Connor told me over
a year ago that Mary Ellen should carry nine old nails in her pocket,
and I found them and sewed them up in a little bag for her; but they've
done no good that I can see. Now I'm finding nine more to send to her.
Perhaps they will do better than the others. Oh, how I wish Mary Ellen
could see! She has such pretty blue eyes, but no sight in them."
"I'll tell you what you ought to do," said Columba. "There's a spring
in the woods down beyond the ruins of Jerpoint Abbey at Thomastown,
and they say if you drink a cup of the water, and wish three times,
your wish will come true. We might all go down there on a picnic and
you could wish about Mary Ellen's eyes. I wished for a pony once, and I
got it," he added, by way of encouragement.
"Oh, Columba, did you really?" Kathleen asked eagerly. "How I'd like
to try it! Do you suppose your mother would let us have the picnic
to-morrow?"
"We'll ask her," Columba said decidedly, and the two walked along
in silence for a little while, Kathleen thinking of her sister, and
Columba planning what he would like to have in the lunch baskets.
"There's a wishing arch near the Giant's Causeway," Kathleen said
finally. "I wrote to Father about it weeks ago and asked him to go
there and wish for Mary Ellen's sight, but I've not heard a word
from him yet. Perhaps he is waiting till the last Sunday in June.
Grandmother Barry says that is the day the pilgrims go to the well in
County Sligo to be cured of their rheumatism."
"Day after to-morrow will be the last Sunday in June, but we had better
try the wishing spring, too, if Mother will let us," said Columba.
"I'll ask her now," he added, and rushed into the house, shouting first
for his mother and then for Captain Conn, sure that one or the other
would be ready to plan for the next day's frolic.
"I've been thinking this two months that I ought to go down to see your
Aunt Ellen Butler at Thomastown," said his mother, when he asked her
about the picnic. "We'll take the early morning train and have a good
visit with her, and perhaps she will take her children over to the
Abbey and we'll all picnic together."
It was a merry party that gathered under the old oak tree beside the
ruins of Jerpoint Abbey the next day, and the four big lunch baskets
looked as if they could hardly hold enough for so many hungry children.
"We'll help you set out the lunch," suggested Deena, taking off one of
the covers and helping himself to a sandwich.
"You'll not touch it till it's ready," replied Captain Conn. "Run away,
every one of you, and stay until I call you."
"Come to the tower," called Columba, and all the children followed him
as he clambered through one of the windows and climbed the ancient
stone steps that led to the top of the square tower.
As they looked out over the beautiful, smiling country, with its green
fields and peaceful river, Kathleen drew a long breath. "It makes me
think of Donegal, it's so different," she said. "Up there it is cold
and bleak and bare, and down here it is all so quiet and happy."
"It wasn't always quiet and happy here," said Deena. "This old Abbey
has seen days of fighting and bloodshed."
"Tell us about it," said Hannah, who liked stories of battles.
"Yes, do," added Anna, who tried to like them.
"Well, you see," began Deena, "this old ruin was once a magnificent
church. It was built over seven hundred years ago, at the time when
the English lords came over to live in Ireland and set the fashion of
building grand churches and monasteries all over the country. This was
one of the finest of them all, and would be to this day, perhaps, but
for Cromwell's army."
"Yes, go on," said Hannah, as Deena stopped to look off toward the
distant hills. "Was it a big battle?"
"It was no battle at all," replied her brother. "When Cromwell's army
came marching through the country the monks shut themselves up in this
tower; but the soldiers went by without even stopping to look for them."
"What made the ruins, then?" asked Columba. "I thought you said it was
Cromwell's army."
"So it was," replied Deena; "for when they had gone only two miles away
the monks climbed up here to the top of the tower and rang the bells
for joy. The soldiers heard the bells, and were so angry that they came
back and destroyed the monastery and the Abbey."
"Did they kill the monks?" asked Hannah.
"I don't know, but I suppose they did," replied her brother. "They
destroyed many fine buildings and did many cruel deeds here in Ireland."
"They didn't destroy the Round Tower in Kilkenny," said Columba. "Those
round towers must have been good hiding-places for the monks."
"That they were," replied Deena. "The old stones would tell many
wonderful tales if they could speak."
"Are there many round towers in Ireland?" asked Kathleen.
"There are eighty still standing," Deena told her, "and twenty of them
are perfect; but the others are more or less in ruins."
"What were they like?" asked little Tommy Butler. "I never saw one of
them."
"They were round, stone towers, from sixty to one hundred and fifty
feet tall," Deena replied. "Some of the tallest had six or seven
stories, each story lighted by one window, and at the top there were
four windows, facing north, south, east and west. There was only one
small door, ten feet or more from the ground, which was reached by a
ladder, and there were ladders inside to climb from one floor to the
next."
"What were the towers for?" asked Kathleen.
"They were built hundreds of years ago, in connection with the ancient
churches, and were probably used as belfries, and also as a place of
refuge for the monks," answered Deena.
"Are there many ruins in Ireland?" asked Mary Butler.
"Yes," replied Deena, "there are hundreds and hundreds of them. There
is the 'Seven Churches of Kells,' over beyond Stonyford, for one, and
the 'Seven Churches of Glendalough,' too. You should see the Round
Tower at Glendalough."
"Connie is calling," interrupted Feena.
"Hurrah, lunch is ready!" shouted Columba, and they all clattered down
the stone steps in a hurry.
The four baskets did hold a good deal after all, and the lunch looked
so inviting, spread out on a white cloth in the shade of the big oak
tree, that the ten hungry children made short work of it.
"Now let's go to the wishing spring," suggested Columba, taking a
cookie in one hand and a pickle in the other, and starting off across
the field.
"I wish you all good luck in your wishing, and I'll stay here in the
shade to wish it the heartier," said his mother, taking out her
knitting and making herself comfortable under the tree.
"And I wish you may not be hungry again for an hour," added Captain
Conn, gathering up the empty plates and cups and putting them in the
baskets.
"There's the spring," shouted Deena, as they turned into a little lane.
"It's under that big tree in the edge of the woods."
"Come on, Feena," called Columba, "here's the cup. Take a good drink
and wish for the moon."
"I shall do no such thing," replied his sister. "I shall wish for a
book of fairy stories, and I shall get it, too, for Father promised it
to me last night."
"I wish for a new knife," said Deena, as he took the cup.
"And Hannah and I want a pair of white gloves to wear with our new
white dresses," said Anna, as she and her twin sister took their drink
together.
"What is your wish, Kathleen?" asked Princess Feena.
"It is a very big wish," replied Kathleen, so soberly that everyone
stopped laughing and became quiet in a moment. "It is bigger than a
knife, or a book, or a pair of gloves. It is almost bigger than the
moon. I'm wishing that little Mary Ellen could see."
"I wish it, too," said Hannah earnestly.
"And I!" "And I!" cried the others, gathering close around Kathleen as
she knelt before the bubbling spring and filled the cup with the clear,
cold water.
"Perhaps it will come true, then," said Kathleen, "if we are all
wishing so hard," and she smiled bravely up at them through her tears,
as she drank the very last drop of water in the cup.
CHAPTER XV
GOOD NEWS FROM COUSIN BEE
"Here are two letters for you, Kathleen mavourneen," said her Uncle
Tom, one morning about a week later, as the family were seated at the
breakfast table.
"Two letters for me!" exclaimed Kathleen in surprise. "Perhaps one of
them is from Father," and she jumped out of her chair and ran around
the table to get them.
"It is, it is!" she cried, looking at one of the letters. "The postmark
is Portrush in County Antrim, and that's near the Giant's Causeway."
"Open it, and see what it says, alanna," suggested her Aunt Hannah, as
Kathleen continued to study the envelope; and all the ten young Malones
stopped eating their breakfast, and turned eager eyes upon their cousin.
Kathleen opened the letter and read the first lines. "Oh, Feena," she
said, looking up with shining eyes, "he did go to the wishing arch, and
he wished for Mary Ellen's sight, just as I asked him to."
Then she read the rest of the letter while everyone waited. "Oh, Aunt
Hannah!" she cried with delight, "Father says he is going on to the
Giant's Causeway, and I'm to come up there to meet him, and then we'll
go over to Tonroe to see Mary Ellen."
Never did so short a letter cause so much excitement. All the Malones
began talking at once and no one stopped to listen to what any one was
saying. Feena jumped up to put her arms around her cousin, crying,
"Kathleen, darling, you'll never go away and leave me, will you?"
Columba begged his father to let him go along with Kathleen to see that
no harm came to her, and Danny repeated over and over that the child
should go nowhere without himself to look after her.
When the chatter ceased for a moment, Aunt Hannah found a chance to
say, "There were two letters, Kathleen. What's become of the other?"
Sure enough, the second letter had been forgotten, and all was still
for a moment while Kathleen found it and looked at the postmark.
"It is from Cousin Bee," she said, and opened it quietly enough; but in
a second she dropped it and ran to throw herself into her Aunt Hannah's
arms. "Mary Ellen can see!" she cried; "Mary Ellen can see!"
Then, indeed, there was an uproar. Columba pounded on the table with
his knife and fork, shouting, "Hurrah, I told you so! It was the
wishing spring that did it!" Feena danced around the room, clapping
her hands and stopping at every turn to kiss Kathleen; Hannah and Anna
hugged each other with delight; and little Victoria was so frightened
that she clambered out of her high-chair and ran to Captain Conn to be
comforted.
"Hush, children, hush!" commanded Captain Conn. "See what you've done
now. You've made Victoria cry with all your noise. Be quiet while Danny
reads the letter."
"Sure, it's not a long letter," said Danny; "but there's good news in
every line of it," and he read it aloud while the Malones listened
breathlessly.
"KATHLEEN DEAR:—" wrote Cousin Bee, "I've wonderful news for you,—so
good that I don't know how to begin it. Mary Ellen can see. It's the
truth that I'm writing. She can see as well as you can this minute.
"Patrick had the surgeon from the Boyle Hospital come over to see the
child's eyes in the winter, and he said it was a shame that nothing
had been done for them before. Since then Mary Ellen has been going
to Boyle every market-day, and at the last she was two weeks in the
hospital there.
"The doctor said it wasn't the smoke of the peat after all, but
something else which I don't understand; but he's cured it, praise be!
"Mary Ellen wouldn't let me tell you before, because she didn't want
you to be disappointed if nothing came of it; but now she's sitting
here beside me, looking at the words that will tell you the good news.
"We are all well and Patrick has a fine new heifer, but he says he'll
not sell it to Tim Keefe if he has to give it away."
"It is wonderful news, indeed," said Uncle Tom. "Our eyesight is a
blessing we don't appreciate till we miss it."
"I wonder if Father knows about it," said Kathleen. "I'd like to be the
first one to tell him."
"Perhaps you will be," said Columba. "When are you going to meet him?"
And then the talking began all over again, because everyone wanted to
see Uncle Jerry when he heard the good news; everyone wanted to go to
the Giant's Causeway; in fact, everyone wanted to start out and see the
whole of Ireland that very morning.
"We'd go through Dublin," suggested Columba, "and I could see Trinity
College, where I'm going to study some day."
"I would like to see the College Library," said Feena. "It is one of
the five great libraries of the kingdom, and has a copy of every book
that's published in Great Britain and Ireland."
"Dublin is a beautiful city," said Aunt Hannah. "There's plenty of fine
sights I'd like to show you all. There's the River Liffey, and the
canals, and Dublin Bay. Then there is St. Patrick's Cathedral that is
named in honor of the good saint, and the Bank of Ireland, and Phœnix
Park."
"There is O'Connell Street, too," added Captain Conn. "It's one of the
widest streets in all Europe. I'd like to do some shopping there."
[Illustration:
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York
O'CONNELL STREET (FORMERLY CALLED SACKVILLE STREET), DUBLIN
Notice the O'Connell Monument and the Nelson Pillar. _Page 102_]
"We could see the O'Connell Monument and the Nelson Pillar in O'Connell
Street," suggested Deena, "and we'd get a splendid view of the city
from the top of the Pillar."
"Danny and I could stop at Belfast to see the linen mills," Tara said
to his father. "You said only yesterday it was time we were going up
there to learn the business."
"It is always easy to think of reasons for doing just what we want to
be doing," replied his father, "but it is time now to be thinking of
going to work. We will talk about the journey later when we have more
time for it."
He must have found time to think of it during the day, and to talk it
over with Aunt Hannah, too, for, wonder of wonders, before they went to
bed that night it had been decided that Uncle Tom should take the whole
family up to the North of Ireland the next week, to meet Uncle Jerry
Barry, and to have a look at the Giant's Causeway.
CHAPTER XVI
THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY
"Stand still now, while I count you once more," directed Aunt Hannah,
as they stood at the street corner in Portrush waiting for the electric
tram-car to take them down to the Giant's Causeway.
"No matter how many times I count you, there's always one missing.
Deena, look out for Columba. Kathleen, stand there by your brother;"
and Mrs. Malone took Victoria firmly by the hand and gathered the
children closer together lest one should stray away before they could
all be safely settled in the car.
"Everyone looks at us as if they thought we were crazy," said Hannah.
"Do you remember the man in Dublin who said, 'There's a big man with a
big family'?"
"He was wishing himself in my place, I'm thinking," said her father
with fond pride, as he looked over his rollicking brood; "and it takes
a big family to see a big city, for everyone sees something different."
"We saw a good deal of Dublin for one day, even if Kathleen and Feena
did get lost," said Connie, taking Feena's hand to keep her from
getting lost again.
"It was easy to get lost in O'Connell Street," replied Feena. "There
were so many lovely things in the shop windows that I just thought I'd
go inside to see more."
"Here comes the car," shouted Columba, and in a moment all the younger
Malones were scrambling in, to get seats by the window, while the older
ones followed more slowly.
"I wonder where Father is," Kathleen said, as the car ran along through
the center of the little town. "I've looked for him everywhere this
morning."
"Perhaps he will meet us at the Giant's Causeway," suggested Danny.
"Uncle Tom wrote to him that we would be there to-day."
"Then we will be going over to see Mary Ellen to-morrow," said Kathleen
with a little sigh of happiness, and she folded her hands in her lap
and sat for a long time looking quietly out of the window.
"The sea! the sea!" cried Columba, as the car rounded a curve in the
road, and there lay before them the blue waters of the Atlantic.
Immediately there was the greatest excitement among the children.
"Think of our never having seen the ocean before!" exclaimed Feena,
"and our little green island is all surrounded by it."
"Don't be calling your own country little," Deena reproved her. "Faith,
we could whip the whole world before breakfast if we'd put our minds to
it."
"There's the sea again," called Columba. "See how white the chalk
cliffs look, where the sun is shining on them."
"There were chalk cliffs in Tonroe," Kathleen told him, "but they were
not so high as those, and they didn't have such wonderful shapes."
"Look, Kathleen, do you see those men down there among the rocks
gathering seaweed?" Danny asked. "That is the way I used to gather it
for Farmer Flynn. See the big pile of it they have; and there is one
man loading it into a cart."
"And look, Kathleen, there's a castle up there on the rocks," said
Feena, turning to point out to her cousin the gray towers of an ancient
castle perched high on a rugged cliff.
"That's Dunluce Castle," Uncle Tom told them. "It has stood there a
long time, and could tell many a tale of old Irish wars."
"I'll tell you a tale about it now; it's easy to make up stories about
castles like that," Feena whispered to Kathleen.
"There was once an Irish princess, as beautiful as the dawn," she began
in a low voice, "and her father, the king, locked her up in one of
those old towers and set a dragon to guard her. A prince came riding
by on a horse as black as night. He saw the princess standing at the
tower window, looking out over the sea, and he fell in love with her
sad, sweet face. So he rode down to the cave where the Witch of the Sea
lived all alone,—"
"Here we are, at the end of our car ride," her father interrupted. "Now
for a walk along the shore and a climb over the rocks of the Causeway."
The Giant's Causeway is a low rocky pier which stretches out into the
ocean about six hundred feet, gradually sinking below the waves. It is
composed of about forty thousand upright stone columns which are fitted
closely together, the cracks between them being very narrow but showing
plainly the sides of each column.
Most of the columns have five, six, or seven sides; some have four or
eight; a very few have nine; and there is one among the forty thousand
which has only three sides.
"It looks like the beginning of the world," said Mrs. Malone, looking
up at the enormous cliffs and out over the tremendous, swelling
sea,—the big waves roaring and crashing among the black rocks. "Those
tall crags stand there as if they had been guarding the ocean for
centuries."
"So they have," replied her husband, "and they guarded this part of
our island from the golden-haired tribes of the De Danaans, when they
came sailing across the sea from the north some four thousand years
ago. These great cliffs offered no shelter and they had to sail west or
south to find a landing-place."
"Four thousand years ago," repeated Kathleen. "Were there men living in
Ireland as long ago as that?"
"Yes," replied her uncle, "and Ireland was as pleasant a place to live
in then as it is now. It was a land of forests, echoing in spring and
summer to the songs of the birds. Wild cattle, deer and wolves roamed
through the dense woods. Everywhere in the deep forests were blue
lakes and silver rivers teeming with trout and salmon; and the seas
beat restlessly against the coast, while flocks of white gulls sailed
peacefully between the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea."
"It is easy to believe that this Causeway was built by a giant," said
Columba, who had been climbing over the rocks, and came back now to sit
down beside his father.
"Was it really?" asked Kathleen.
"Of course it was," replied her cousin. "Tell her about it, Father. She
likes stories of giants."
"I'll tell her the truth first," said his father, "and that is that the
Causeway and all these black cliffs were made by a volcano which poured
out hot lava over this part of the coast thousands of years ago. The
lava cooled and cracked into these wonderful shapes,—the Giant's
Causeway, the Giant's Spectacles, the Giant's Organ—and now it is one
of the great sights of Ireland, which hundreds of tourists come every
year to see.
"But the people of old Ireland liked to tell strange tales of the rocks
and mountains and so they made up the story of Finn MacCool.
"Finn MacCool was a giant who lived up here in the north of Ireland,
and as strong and powerful a giant as you'd wish to see. He'd take a
thunder-bolt and flatten it out like a pancake, or pull up a pine tree
and lop off the roots and branches to make himself a walking-stick; and
he was so strong that he had whipped every other giant in the country
who was willing to fight with him.
"Over there where you see the blue hills of Scotland lived a Scotch
giant, and one day he shouted out to Finn that he'd come over and whip
him with one hand if he could only cross the ocean without wetting his
feet.
"That very night Finn MacCool set to work to build this causeway of
rock straight across the sea to the coast of Scotland; and when it was
finished the Scotch giant came over the sea dry-shod, while Finn played
a tune on his organ for him to cross to the sound of music.
"Then there was the greatest wrestling match the world ever saw: but
Finn had the best of it from the start, and sent the Scotchman home to
a different tune.
"Some say that Finn pushed part of the Causeway under the waves so that
the giant had to swim home; and you can see for yourself that it seems
to sink under the water out there.
"There is a bit of it left on the coast of Scotland, too," he added
with a laugh.
"It is a good story, even if it isn't true," said Columba.
"It sounds true," said Kathleen. "Do you know any more stories about
Finn MacCool, Uncle Tom?"
"One or two," replied her uncle, "but I can't tell them to you now. Run
and find your Aunt Hannah and the children, and we'll all go and take a
look at the Giant's Organ."
Kathleen started off at once to find her Aunt Hannah, and as she
climbed over the rocks she saw so many bright-eyed pinks that she
stopped to gather a handful.
"What's that you are doing, Kathleen?" asked a familiar voice, and she
looked up quickly to find her father standing beside her.
"Oh, Father!" she cried, throwing her arms around him, "I was hoping
that I would find you down here. I have such good news to tell you!"
[Illustration:
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York
THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY
"See that little girl out there on the rocks with the big dog beside
her."
_Page 111_]
"It's good news that you're here, Kathleen mavourneen," replied her
father, giving her a hearty kiss.
"But it is much better than that," said Kathleen. "Mary Ellen can see.
Cousin Bee wrote to me about it."
"So she can," said her father, "and a great blessing it is to the dear
child."
"You knew it all the time!" exclaimed Kathleen, "and I thought it was a
secret. Who told you? Did Cousin Bee write to you, too?"
"Perhaps she did," her father answered; and then, looking out across
the Causeway, he added, "See that little girl out there on the rocks
with the big dog beside her. Do you think it is safe for her to be
there all alone? Go and tell her that she'd better come up here with
you."
"Uncle Tom sent me to find Aunt Hannah and the children," said
Kathleen. "I think they are over there on the sand looking for
sea-shells."
"I'll go down and speak to them," her father said, "and we will all
come back and meet you."
So Kathleen clambered out over the rocky pier, stopping every few
minutes to see if the little girl were still safe.
"She looks like Mary Ellen, only bigger," she said to herself, as she
came nearer and saw the child's yellow curls.
Just then the little girl began singing in a sweet soft voice, "How
many miles to Dublin Town?" and Kathleen knew at once that it was Mary
Ellen herself, singing for happiness the little song they used to sing
together in Donegal.
"Mary Ellen!" she called; "Mary Ellen!"
And the little sister turned and held out her arms, crying, "I hear
you, Kathleen; I'd know your voice anywhere. But, best of all, I can
see you now."
Such a hugging and laughing and chattering as there was then. Kathleen
had to tell Mary Ellen all about Kilkenny and the Malones, and Mary
Ellen had to tell Kathleen about the doctor and the hospital and Cousin
Bee.
"And she brought me up here to meet you and Father," she said.
"Who did?" asked Kathleen.
"Cousin Bee, of course," replied her sister; "and she and Father are
planning that we will all live in Tonroe next year, and you and I are
both going to school there. Father is to have the little farm next to
Cousin Patrick's, and we are going to have two little donkeys for our
very own."
"Kathleen," shouted Columba, "we are going over to the wishing chair.
Father says he wants to wish that we'll all get home without getting
lost again."
"Yes," answered Kathleen, and she took her sister's hand to lead her
back over the rocks.
"You won't have to lead me any more," said Mary Ellen.
"That's so, darling; but I'll be forgetting it all the time at first,"
replied Kathleen.
"Tallyho-o-o for the wishing chair!" called Columba again.
"Yes," answered Kathleen, "we're coming." Then she looked lovingly at
her little sister and added, "But I've nothing to wish for now that
Mary Ellen can see."
VOCABULARY
=ȧ lȧn′n[a+]=, my dear.
=Ăn′trĭm=, a county in northeastern Ireland.
=ȧ vĭc′=, my son.
=Bĕl fȧst′=, a city in northeastern Ireland.
=bē līke′=, probably; perhaps.
=bīde=, dwell; stay.
=blăck′thôrn=, a kind of hawthorn, bearing little black plums called
sloes. Strong sticks are made from the branches.
=blär′neў=, flattery; smooth, wheedling talk.
=bō re͞en′=, a little lane.
=Brī′[a+]n B[o+] ru′= (ro͞o), king of Ireland, 1002-1014.
=chĭl′dēr=, children.
=cŏl le͞en′=, lass; girl.
=C[o+] lŭm′bȧ=, a saint's name.
=Cŏn n[e+] mä′rȧ=, a name.
=cre͞el=, a wicker basket.
=Croagh= (crōg), a hill.
=Crŏm′wĕll, Oliver.= Lord Protector of the English Commonwealth,
1653-1658.
=Dȧg′dȧ=, an Irish god.
=Di cho= (dē′ kō), an Irish chief.
=Dŏn [e+] ga̤l′=, a county in northwestern Ireland.
=Dŭb′lĭn=, the capital of Ireland.
=dŭn=, a king's dwelling in ancient Ireland.
=E′rĭn=, Ireland.
=fēar′sȯme=, causing fear; timid; easily frightened.
=Fĭ′ō nȧ=, an Irish princess.
=fôr nĭnst′=, opposite.
=frieze= (frēz), coarse woolen cloth.
=Gāel′ĭc=, the language of the Gael, used in Scotland and Ireland.
=Ga̤l′wāy=, a county in west Ireland.
=Glĕn dȧ′lough= (lŏch), a group of famous ruins of churches and
monasteries.
=gŏs so͞on′=, boy; lad.
=hā'′ pĕn nў=, a half-penny.
=hāy-hăg′gard= (gērd), a stackyard for hay.
=hĭl le͞en′=, little hill.
=hĭg′gle=, to bargain; to haggle.
=Hôrn Hĕad=, a rocky promontory on the northwestern coast of Ireland.
=jäunt′īng-cär=, a two-wheeled vehicle used in Ireland.
=Jẽr′po͜int Ăb′beў=, a ruined church and monastery in County
Kilkenny.
=Kĭl kĕn′nў=, the name of a city and county in the south of
Ireland.
=Kĭl lȧ′raght= (r[a+]t), a village near Boyle.
=Lein′stẽr= (lĕn), the southeastern province of Ireland.
=lĕp′r[e+] caun= (ka̤n), a fairy shoemaker.
=Lĕt′tẽr kĕn′nў=, a town in County Donegal.
=Lĩf′feў=, the river on which Dublin is situated.
=Lough Gä′ rä= (lŏch), a lake in County Sligo.
=Măc Co͞ol′, Fĭnn=, an Irish giant.
=Māive=, queen of West Ireland about 2000 years ago.
=mȧ vo̤ur′ne͞en=, darling.
=Nĕl′sȯn, Horatio=, an English admiral, 1758-1805.
=Ō Cŏn′nĕll, Daniel=, Ireland's silver-tongued orator and "liberator."
=Og′ham= (ŏg′ [a+]m), a kind of writing used in ancient Ireland.
=pēat=, a vegetable substance of roots, fibres, moss, etc., dried and
used for fuel.
=Pōrt rŭsh′=, a town in County Antrim.
=po͜und=, British money equal in value to about $4.86.
=Que͞ens′to͜wn=, a seaport in southern Ireland.
=răth=, a mound or hill.
=rĕd=, make tidy; put in order.
=Rŏs cŏm′m[o+]n=, a county in west Ireland.
=St. Brid'get= (brĭj'ĕt), a patron saint of Ireland, died 523.
=St. Căn′ice= (ĭs), a saint for whom an ancient church in Kilkenny is
named.
=St. C[o+]lŭm′bȧ=, an Irish saint, died 597.
=St. Cŏl′ŭmb kĭlle=, same as St. Columba.
=St. Kĭ′ẽr[a+]n=, a saint for whom the college in Kilkenny is named.
=St. Păt′rĭck=, the patron saint of Ireland, died March 17, about 465
A.D.
=shăm′rŏck=, a three-leaved plant; the national emblem of Ireland.
=shĭl lā′l[a+]h=, a cudgel.
=shĭl′lĭng=, a silver coin equal to about 24 cents.
=Slī′gō=, a county in northwestern Ireland.
=spăl′pe͞en=, good-for-nothing fellow.
=stîr′[a+]; bo͜ut=, oatmeal boiled in water.
=Tä′rȧ=, a hill near Dublin, where the high-kings of ancient Ireland
lived.
=thătch=, straw, rushes or the like, used for a roof.
=Tō′b[a+]r N'a̤lt′=, a holy well in County Sligo.
=Tŏn rōe′=, a village near Boyle in County Sligo.
=whist= (hwĭst), hush; be still.
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