The Aran Islands | Page 5

shuffling on the stairs, and the old
dark man I had spoken to in the morning groped his way into the room.
I brought him over to the fire, and we talked for many hours. He told
me that he had known Petrie and Sir William Wilde, and many living
antiquarians, and had taught Irish to Dr. Finck and Dr. Pedersen, and
given stories to Mr. Curtin of America. A little after middle age he had
fallen over a cliff, and since then he had had little eyesight, and a
trembling of his hands and head.
As we talked he sat huddled together over the fire, shaking and blind,
yet his face was indescribably pliant, lighting up with an ecstasy of

humour when he told me anything that had a point of wit or malice, and
growing sombre and desolate again when he spoke of religion or the
fairies.
He had great confidence in his own powers and talent, and in the
superiority of his stories over all other stories in the world. When we
were speaking of Mr. Curtin, he told me that this gentleman had
brought out a volume of his Aran stories in America, and made five
hundred pounds by the sale of them.
'And what do you think he did then?' he continued; 'he wrote a book of
his own stories after making that lot of money with mine. And he
brought them out, and the divil a half-penny did he get for them. Would
you believe that?'
Afterwards he told me how one of his children had been taken by the
fairies.
One day a neighbor was passing, and she said, when she saw it on the
road, 'That's a fine child.'
Its mother tried to say 'God bless it,' but something choked the words in
her throat.
A while later they found a wound on its neck, and for three nights the
house was filled with noises.
'I never wear a shirt at night,' he said, 'but I got up out of my bed, all
naked as I was, when I heard the noises in the house, and lighted a light,
but there was nothing in it.'
Then a dummy came and made signs of hammering nails in a coffin.
The next day the seed potatoes were full of blood, and the child told his
mother that he was going to America.
That night it died, and 'Believe me,' said the old man, 'the fairies were
in it.'
When he went away, a little bare-footed girl was sent up with turf and
the bellows to make a fire that would last for the evening.
She was shy, yet eager to talk, and told me that she had good spoken
Irish, and was learning to read it in the school, and that she had been
twice to Galway, though there are many grown women in the place
who have never set a foot upon the mainland.
The rain has cleared off, and I have had my first real introduction to the
island and its people.
I went out through Killeany--the poorest village in Aranmor--to a long

neck of sandhill that runs out into the sea towards the south-west. As I
lay there on the grass the clouds lifted from the Connemara mountains
and, for a moment, the green undulating foreground, backed in the
distance by a mass of hills, reminded me of the country near Rome.
Then the dun top-sail of a hooker swept above the edge of the sandhill
and revealed the presence of the sea.
As I moved on a boy and a man came down from the next village to
talk to me, and I found that here, at least, English was imperfectly
understood. When I asked them if there were any trees in the island
they held a hurried consultation in Gaelic, and then the man asked if
'tree' meant the same thing as 'bush,' for if so there were a few in
sheltered hollows to the east.
They walked on with me to the sound which separates this island from
Inishmaan--the middle island of the group--and showed me the roll
from the Atlantic running up between two walls of cliff.
They told me that several men had stayed on Inishmaan to learn Irish,
and the boy pointed out a line of hovels where they had lodged running
like a belt of straw round the middle of the island. The place looked
hardly fit for habitation. There was no green to be seen, and no sign of
the people except these beehive-like roofs, and the outline of a Dun that
stood out above them against the edge of the sky.
After a while my companions went away and two other boys came and
walked at my heels, till I turned and made them