Part 13 (1/2)

”Some one high up,” Margaret said.

That evening came the news of the death of Queen Victoria.

Of course this is ”merely” second sight, but if you don't believe in such things you don't feel like scoffing when people see visions that come true.

I was unfortunate enough not to meet a Galway woman, an ignorant peasant, who saw a vision that shaped itself around a ruined castle.

She said to my informant (one of the leaders in the Gaelic revival) that while she was looking at the castle one day a band of young gentlemen on horseback and strangely dressed came riding up to the castle, and in the windows of it were many handsome women, gayly dressed and with their hair brushed up from their foreheads, and they were laughing and talking.

And when the young hors.e.m.e.n came to the ditch that was around the castle a platform that was laid against the wall was let down by chains, and over the bridge thus made the gay young men rode and joined the chattering ladies.

This was a woman who would not have heard of moats and drawbridges, and but little of the castle remained save the four walls. She had seen a vision, so my informant, a woman of forceful intellect, told me--and I believed it then, and half believe it now. If one has visions why not see them? I wish I might myself.

But it is very hard for the traveler to get at these revelations. The natives are shy of strangers, who like as not do not believe in fairies--never having seen Tinker Bell--and they will not talk.

But for my part I hope the time will come when it will be proved beyond a doubt that there are fairies, and if the revelation ever does manifest itself at all, doubting Thomases and the rest, I am sure that their habitat will prove to be Ireland.

And when they are proved to exist, remember that I said I believed in them.

CHAPTER XIII

_In Galway with a Camera_

Galway comes as near as any Irish city that I ever saw to rivaling New York's East Side for dirtiness, and yet a fair-minded observer would be compelled to tell Galway, when the time for awarding the leather medal came, that she was only a close second.

This does not so much mean that New York is dirtier than I realized she was when I was there as it means that Ireland is not as dirty as English and Irish and American writers have pictured it.

Perhaps in some parts of Ireland the pig still sleeps in the room with the family, but as a faithful chronicler of actual sights I cannot say that I saw such a sight in any of the numerous slums and villages I visited in twenty counties. I hate to destroy so poetic an illusion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PICTURESQUE GALWAY]

There was something idyllic in the thought of a pink little pig and a pink little boy, the two of them the pink of neatness, lying side by side in a happy-hearted Irishman's cabin, while pig and boy and Irishman starved to death, but the truth was something better than that. There were pigs and little boys, but they were not neatly pink and they were not starving, and the old man did not swing a s.h.i.+llelagh or sing songs as I was pa.s.sing by.

s.h.i.+llelaghs were never so plentiful as they are now, but they are made to supply the foreign demand for them, and the Irishman is amused and perhaps a bit contemptuous as he sees Americans, with never a drop of Irish blood in them, buying s.h.i.+llelaghs to take home for the sake of sentiment.

I wish I might write that I saw evidences of dest.i.tution on every side--it would please the sentimentalists--but I did not. There were beggars, but not so many as I had feared I would see, and they did not chase me any harder than youngsters have chased me in City Hall Park in New York demanding a cent to buy sterilized milk.

In Sligo I was followed by a poor woman carrying a baby, and as she raised her hand for alms her shawl dropped off and disclosed her nakedness to the waist, but I was a.s.sured by a Sligo gentleman that she was a professional beggar from out of town, and that possibly the baby was not hers, and I know for a fact that she went to a public house with the money I gave her.

And all the time I was fumbling in my pocket for coppers she was wis.h.i.+ng me happy days. She stands out in my recollection as the most abject beggar I saw.

But in Galway there is dirt and squalor and it is picturesque. There in the Claddagh one meets with old hags who are hideous enough and Spanish looking enough to have just left Velasquez's studio, where one can imagine them posing as models for some masterpiece of the great realist.

Barefooted they are, and the homely ones have a great desire to be photographed. Many and many were the pretty women I saw in Ireland, but my camera recorded but few of their lineaments, while I was asked more than once by plain women to take their pictures.

One nailed me as I was pa.s.sing her vegetable shop in the Claddagh. She was cross-eyed, poor thing, and in a land where pretty features are as plentiful as blackberries, she was plain, but she besought me to take her picture.

Now, when a woman asks you to photograph her you don't feel like refusing her, and I was too much of a novice to make a feint at snapping the shutter and pa.s.sing on, so I stopped and tried to see a picture in the carrots and cabbages that were displayed at the door.