In Wicklow and West KerrySynge, J. M. (John Millington)
Philosophy
In Wicklow and West Kerry
Synge, J. M. (John Millington)
Ireland -- Social life and customs
The day was magnificently bright, and the ten miles of Dingle Bay
were wonderfully brilliant behind the masses of people, and the
canvas booths, and the scores of upturned shafts. Towards evening I
got tired taking or refusing the porter my friends pressed on me
continually, so I wandered off from the racecourse along the path
where Diarmuid had tricked the Fenians.
Later in the evening news had been coming in of the doings in the
sandhills, after the porter had begun to take effect and the
darkness had come on.
'There was great sport after you left,' a man said to me in the
cottage this evening. 'They were all beating and cutting each other
on the shore of the sea. Four men fought together in one place till
the tide came up on them, and was like to drown them; but the priest
waded out up to his middle and drove them asunder. Another man was
left for dead on the road outside the lodges, and some gentleman
found him and had him carried into his house, and got the doctor to
put plasters on his head. Then there was a red-headed fellow had his
finger bitten through, and the postman was destroyed for ever.'
'He should be,' said the man of the house, 'for Michael Patch broke
the seat of his car into three halves on his head.'
'It was this was the cause of it all,' said Danny-boy: 'they
brought in porter east and west from the two towns you know of, and
the two porters didn't agree together, and it's for that the people
went raging at the fall of night.'
I have been out to Bolus Head, one of the finest places I have met
with. A little beyond Ballinskelligs the road turns up the side of a
steep mountainy hill where one sees a brilliant stretch of sea, with
many rocks and islands--Deenish, Scariff the Hog's Head, and Dursey
far away. As I was sitting on the edge of the road an old man came
along and we began to talk. He had little English, but when I tried
him in Irish we got on well, though he did not follow any Connaught
forms I let slip by accident. We went on together, after a while, to
an extraordinary straggling village along the edge of the hill. At
one of the cottages he stopped and asked me to come in and take a
drink and rest myself. I did not like to refuse him, we had got so
friendly, so I followed him in, and sat down on a stool while his
wife--a much younger woman--went into the bedroom and brought me a
large mug of milk. As I was drinking it and talking to the couple, a
sack that was beside the fire began to move slowly, and the head of
a yellow, feverish-looking child came out from beneath it, and began
looking at me with a heavy stare. I asked the woman what ailed it,
and she told me it had sickened a night or two before with headache
and pains all through it; but she had not had the doctor, and did
not know what was the matter. I finished the milk without much
enjoyment, and went on my way up Bolus Head and then back to this
cottage, wondering all the time if I had the germs of typhus in my
blood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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