'I have come back,' he said, 'to live in a bit of a house with my
sister. The island is not the same at all to what it was. It is
little good I can get from the people who are in it now, and
anything I have to give them they don't care to have.'
From what I hear this man seems to have shut himself up in a world
of individual conceits and theories, and to live aloof at his trade
of net-mending, regarded by the other islanders with respect and
half-ironical sympathy.
A little later when I went down to the kitchen I found two men from
Inishmaan who had been benighted on the island. They seemed a
simpler and perhaps a more interesting type than the people here,
and talked with careful English about the history of the Duns, and
the Book of Ballymote, and the Book of Kells, and other ancient
MSS., with the names of which they seemed familiar.
In spite of the charm of my teacher, the old blind man I met the day
of my arrival, I have decided to move on to Inishmaan, where Gaelic
is more generally used, and the life is perhaps the most primitive
that is left in Europe.
I spent all this last day with my blind guide, looking at the
antiquities that abound in the west or north-west of the island.
As we set out I noticed among the groups of girls who smiled at our
fellowship - old Mourteen says we are like the cuckoo with its
pipit - a beautiful oval face with the singularly spiritual
expression that is so marked in one type of the West Ireland women.
Later in the day, as the old man talked continually of the fairies
and the women they have taken, it seemed that there was a possible
link between the wild mythology that is accepted on the islands and
the strange beauty of the women.
At midday we rested near the ruins of a house, and two beautiful
boys came up and sat near us. Old Mourteen asked them why the house
was in ruins, and who had lived in it.
'A rich farmer built it a while since,' they said, 'but after two
years he was driven away by the 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:
