The Aran Islands | Page 9

own dress, and one old man I spoke to for a minute on
the pier, when I came ashore, asked me if I was not cold with 'my little
clothes.'
As I sat in the kitchen to dry the spray from my coat, several men who
had seen me walking up came in to me to talk to me, usually
murmuring on the threshold, 'The blessing of God on this place,' or
some similar words.
The courtesy of the old woman of the house is singularly attractive, and
though I could not understand much of what she said--she has no
English--I could see with how much grace she motioned each visitor to
a chair, or stool, according to his age, and said a few words to him till
he drifted into our English conversation.
For the moment my own arrival is the chief subject of interest, and the
men who come in are eager to talk to me.
Some of them express themselves more correctly than the ordinary
peasant, others use the Gaelic idioms continually and substitute 'he' or
'she' for 'it,' as the neuter pronoun is not found in modern Irish.
A few of the men have a curiously full vocabulary, others know only
the commonest words in English, and are driven to ingenious devices to
express their meaning. Of all the subjects we can talk of war seems
their favourite, and the conflict between America and Spain is causing
a great deal of excitement. Nearly all the families have relations who
have had to cross the Atlantic, and all eat of the flour and bacon that is
brought from the United States, so they have a vague fear that 'if
anything happened to America,' their own island would cease to be
habitable.
Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are
bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in
many different idioms. Most of the strangers they see on the islands are
philological students, and the people have been led to conclude that

linguistic studies, particularly Gaelic studies, are the chief occupation
of the outside world.
'I have seen Frenchmen, and Danes, and Germans,' said one man, 'and
there does be a power a Irish books along with them, and they reading
them better than ourselves. Believe me there are few rich men now in
the world who are not studying the Gaelic.'
They sometimes ask me the French for simple phrases, and when they
have listened to the intonation for a moment, most of them are able to
reproduce it with admirable precision.
When I was going out this morning to walk round the island with
Michael, the boy who is teaching me Irish, I met an old man making his
way down to the cottage. He was dressed in miserable black clothes
which seemed to have come from the mainland, and was so bent with
rheumatism that, at a little distance, he looked more like a spider than a
human being.
Michael told me it was Pat Dirane, the story-teller old Mourteen had
spoken of on the other island. I wished to turn back, as he appeared to
be on his way to visit me, but Michael would not hear of it.
'He will be sitting by the fire when we come in,' he said; 'let you not be
afraid, there will be time enough to be talking to him by and by.'
He was right. As I came down into the kitchen some hours later old Pat
was still in the chimney-corner, blinking with the turf smoke.
He spoke English with remarkable aptness and fluency, due, I believe,
to the months he spent in the English provinces working at the harvest
when he was a young man.
After a few formal compliments he told me how he had been crippled
by an attack of the 'old hin' (i.e. the influenza), and had been
complaining ever since in addition to his rheumatism.
While the old woman was cooking my dinner he asked me if I liked
stories, and offered to tell one in English, though he added, it would be
much better if I could follow the Gaelic. Then he began:--
There were two farmers in County Clare. One had a son, and the other,
a fine rich man, had a daughter.
The young man was wishing to marry the girl, and his father told him
to try and get her if he thought well, though a power of gold would be
wanting to get the like of her.
'I will try,' said the young man.

He put all his gold into a bag. Then he went over to the other farm, and
threw in the gold in front of him.
'Is that all gold?' said the father of