Part 14 (2/2)

I agreed that it was a clever idea, and I hereby call it to the attention of our lawmakers.

”Well,” said the priest, who had been listening attentively to all this, ”I am glad to know the truth about this tax. I had heard of it, and had thought it another English exaction laid upon Ireland. Now I see that I was wrong; for, as you say, it is a just tax.”

And then he told us some stories of the old days, of famine and persecution and eviction, of the hard fight for life on the rocky hillsides, while the fertile valleys were given over to grazing or ringed with high walls and turned into game preserves. There were lighter stories, too, of the humorous side of Irish character, and one of them, though I suspect it is an old one, I will set down here.

The southwest coast of Ireland, of which Bantry Bay forms a part, is one of the most dangerous in the world, because of the rugged capes which stretch far out into the ocean and the small islands and hidden reefs which lie beyond. It is just the sort of coast where fish abound, and so little villages are scattered all along it, whose men-folks fish whenever the weather lets them, and at other times labour in the tiny potato patches up on the rocky hillsides. Naturally they are familiar with all the twists and turnings of the coast, and are always on the lookout to add to their scanty incomes by a job of piloting.

One day the crew of a fis.h.i.+ng-boat perceived a big freighter nosing about in a light fog, rather closer insh.o.r.e than she should have been, and at once lay alongside and put a man aboard.

”Will you be wantin' a pilot, sir?” he asked the captain, who was anxiously pacing the bridge.

The captain stared a moment at the dirty and tattered visitor.

”Who the devil are you?” he demanded, at last.

”Me name's McCarthy, sir. I'm a pilot, sir.”

”A pilot!” and the captain looked at McCarthy again. ”I don't believe it.”

”'Tis the truth I'm tellin' you, sir,” protested McCarthy.

”Well,” said the captain, ”if it's the truth, you can easily prove it.

Let me hear you box the compa.s.s.”

McCarthy was nonplussed. More than once, sitting over a pot of ale in some public house, he had heard old sailors proudly rattle off the points of the compa.s.s, but, though he remembered how the rigmarole sounded, he had no idea how to do it, nor even any very clear idea of what it meant.

”Faith, I can't do it, sir,” he admitted.

”Can't do it?” roared the captain. ”Can't box the compa.s.s! And yet you call yourself a pilot.”

McCarthy did some rapid thinking, for he saw a good job, which he could ill afford to lose, slipping through his fingers.

”It's like this, sir,” he said, finally, ”in our small place, it's the Irish we would be using, niver a word of English, and all the English any of us knows is just the little we might pick up from bein' after the s.h.i.+ps. I can't box the compa.s.s in English, but I can box it in the Irish, sir, if that will do.”

The captain looked into the speaker's guileless eyes and also did some rapid thinking. He knew no Gaelic, but he needed a pilot badly, and he reflected that, in any language, it ought to be possible to tell whether the compa.s.s was being boxed correctly, because the words would have to follow each other with a certain similarity of sound, as north, north-and-by-east, north-north-east, north-east-by-north, and so on.

”All right,” he growled, ”go ahead and let's hear you.”

”My father,” McCarthy began solemnly in his homely Gaelic; ”my grandfather, my grandfather's grandmother, my grandmother's grandfather, my great grandfather, my great grandfather's grandmother, my great grandmother's great. . . .”

”Hold on,” shouted the captain, quite convinced. ”I see you know how.

Take charge of the s.h.i.+p!”

And McCarthy thereupon proved he knew how by getting the vessel safely past Cape Clear!

It was pouring rain, next morning, a steady, driving rain, which looked as though it might last forever, and we were confronted by the problem which so often confronts the traveller in Ireland, whether to go or stay. To go meant the possibility of having the most beautiful drive in Ireland obscured in mist; to stay meant a dreary day at the hotel, with no a.s.surance that the next day would be any better, or the next, or the next. At last we decided to go.

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