The Aran Islands | Page 7

fairy host.'
The boys came on with us some distance to the north to visit one of the
ancient beehive dwellings that is still in perfect preservation. When we
crawled in on our hands and knees, and stood up in the gloom of the
interior, old Mourteen took a freak of earthly humour and began telling
what he would have done if he could have come in there when he was a
young man and a young girl along with him.
Then he sat down in the middle of the floor and began to recite old
Irish poetry, with an exquisite purity of intonation that brought tears to
my eyes though I understood but little of the meaning.
On our way home he gave me the Catholic theory of the fairies.
When Lucifer saw himself in the glass he thought himself equal with
God. Then the Lord threw him out of Heaven, and all the angels that
belonged to him. While He was 'chucking them out,' an archangel
asked Him to spare some of them, and those that were falling are in the

air still, and have power to wreck ships, and to work evil in the world.
From this he wandered off into tedious matters of theology, and
repeated many long prayers and sermons in Irish that he had heard from
the priests.
A little further on we came to a slated house, and I asked him who was
living in it.
'A kind of a schoolmistress,' he said; then his old face puckered with a
gleam of pagan malice.
'Ah, master,' he said, 'wouldn't it be fine to be in there, and to be kissing
her?'
A couple of miles from this village we turned aside to look at an old
ruined church of the Ceathair Aluinn (The Four Beautiful Persons), and
a holy well near it that is famous for cures of blindness and epilepsy.
As we sat near the well a very old man came up from a cottage near the
road, and told me how it had become famous.
'A woman of Sligo had a son who was born blind, and one night she
dreamed that she saw an island with a blessed well in it that could cure
her son. She told her dream in the morning, and an old man said it was
of Aran she was after dreaming.
'She brought her son down by the coast of Galway, and came out in a
curagh, and landed below where you see a bit of a cove.
'She walked up then to the house of my father--God rest his soul--and
she told them what she was looking for.
'My father said that there was a well like what she had dreamed of, and
that he would send a boy along with her to show her the way.
"There's no need, at all," said she; "haven't I seen it all in my dream?"
'Then she went out with the child and walked up to this well, and she
kneeled down and began saying her prayers. Then she put her hand out
for the water, and put it on his eyes, and the moment it touched him he
called out: "O mother, look at the pretty flowers!"'
After that Mourteen described the feats of poteen drinking and fighting
that he did in his youth, and went on to talk of Diarmid, who was the
strongest man after Samson, and of one of the beds of Diarmid and
Grainne, which is on the east of the island. He says that Diarmid was
killed by the druids, who put a burning shirt on him,--a fragment of
mythology that may connect Diarmid with the legend of Hercules, if it
is not due to the 'learning' in some hedge-school master's ballad.

Then we talked about Inishmaan.
'You'll have an old man to talk with you over there,' he said, 'and tell
you stories of the fairies, but he's walking about with two sticks under
him this ten year. Did ever you hear what it is goes on four legs when it
is young, and on two legs after that, and on three legs when it does be
old?'
I gave him the answer.
'Ah, master,' he said, 'you're a cute one, and the blessing of God be on
you. Well, I'm on three legs this minute, but the old man beyond is
back on four; I don't know if I'm better than the way he is; he's got his
sight and I'm only an old dark man.'
I am settled at last on Inishmaan in a small cottage with a continual
drone of Gaelic coming from the kitchen that opens into my room.
Early this morning the man of the house came over for me with a
four-oared curagh--that is, a curagh