From the rich plains of Meath to the barren lands of Galway, it is a far cry and an unforgettable journey. The country grows more and more desolate, and grand in desolation, as one approaches the Atlantic. There was an orange sunset that evening, over an illimitable stretch of bog, a vision of savage, haunting beauty that went with us into the darkness of the fast closing day like a strain of wild music.

Ireland has always been as a living creature to her children. She has taken, in their fanciful minds, a distinct personality. To get such a glimpse of her as that, is to understand the passionate ardour of fealty which she has had the power to inspire; to understand how she has come to be “Kathleen na Hoolihan,” and “My dark Rosaleen,” to those poet hearts. We were speeding now to that very corner of land from which her younger lovers have chiefly sprung.

It was pitch dark when we alighted at a town which had once been large and prosperous and was now forlornly sunk in decay; mute witness, like so many others, to that act of tyranny—blunder and crime—the effects of which England can never wipe away.

Our kind friends had ordered “a carriage from the hotel” to meet us. We had a long cross-country drive before us. Looking doubtfully by the light of the station lamp at the two emaciated animals that were to draw us, we wondered, in our tired brains, if two bad horses are not worse than one. It had begun to drizzle rain, a fine soft rain that is like a caress in the air.

If anything could beat the Dublin cab, it was that Galway carriage. We set off lurching and rattling; and soon, the wind catching us from over the fields, the rain began to strike in across the open windows. To have a window up seemed the simple remedy; but things simple elsewhere are not so in the West of Ireland. One window was as impossible to lift out of its socket as the oyster out of its closed shells, for it was strapless. We fell upon the other strap and instantly the window shot outwards at right angles, with the evident intention of casting itself on the road, had we not held it despairingly by its shabby appendage. If you have ever tried to hold a window in that position by its strap you will know how agonizing is the process. The driver was hailed.

“Look here! Your window’s loose!—You’d better stop and put it back.”

The slogging trot of the horses slackened, and over his shoulder the man of Galway demanded:

“Is it the windy on the left, or the wan to the right of ye?”

“The left, the left! Oh, do be quick!”

“The left, is it? Sure, isn’t that the wan with the sthrap?” He jerked his reins and clucked at his horses. What more could we want? Wasn’t that the one with the “sthrap?”

With great difficulty, with imminent risk to the life of the window and our own safety, we got the recalcitrant pane back into its socket, and discovered that by dint of judicious manipulation, and a tight hold of the “sthrap,” it was possible to shelter the most neuralgic of the party.

A ten Irish miles’ drive along the stoniest of roads, through complete darkness—for there was only a partial glimmer from one carriage-lamp half the way, which then became extinct altogether—it is something of an enterprise! But it was worth it to find such a welcome at the end!

A “Gothic” mansion, dating from the early part of last century, Kilcoultra is outwardly a very grand pile and stands nobly in the midst of a rolling park, reclaimed from the wild stony land of Galway. And inside, the first impression is like stepping in to the glories of a missal page. The whole house is homogeneous and entirely successful in its mediÆval colouring. On the walls are gorgeous enamel blues, peacock greens or yet carmine crimsons appropriately set with fleurs-de-lis, maltese cross or some other conventional device in gold; ceiling and cornices are richly illuminated to correspond. To find this glow of colour in the midst of the melancholy greys and greens of the western landscape, under the low drifting cloud-ridden skies, has a great charm; it has a poetic Maeterlinckian atmosphere.

There is something too of the delicate sadness of an old romance in the lives of these kindly ladies who rule so wisely over the lands left to them by their brother—the last of his name. He was a man round whom justly centred unusual hopes and ambitions. Now he, who had so great a heart and so splendid a mind, lies in the ruined chapel in the park, alone. The chapel is roofless. It is a nobly solitary and fit resting-place for one who was nobly apart from the petty aims of his contemporaries; who lived and died true to his ideals; whose work still prospers in the freed lands of his people. He gave up much for Ireland, and Ireland gave him nothing at all in return ... except that wonderful sleeping-place with the changing sky overhead.

They say there is no such word in the Irish language as gratitude, and yet—

My Kilcoultra hostess drove me round the property on the day after my arrival, and drew the pony to the standstill on a height that finely dominated the park and house. When I had duly admired the view she pointed with her whip to a little white cottage that stood a few yards away and began a kindly tale of the old woman who had long lived there and had but recently passed away.

“When I’d come round to see her, I used to find her, times out of number, leaning over the wall, gazing down at Kilcoultra. Always she’d be leaning over the wall, staring down at the house. And one day I said to her, ‘Mary, what in the world makes you stand there like that?’ And she answered me, ‘I’m looking down on the roof that shelters me lovely master!’”

“My lovely master!” A fragrant thing to have become to the poor that live on your soil! When we reach a sphere where things are judged by different standards and higher measures than we can now conceive, how far will not such a title outweigh any paltry worldly honour!

Yet if the memory of its lost master dominates and haunts all Kilcoultra house and lands, there is nothing to sadden one in the thoughts it inspires; and our stay there is altogether full of charm and pleasure.

Not only are the ladies a fund of anecdote, racy of the soil; not only do they live delightfully in touch with their peasantry, with eye and ear ever ready to catch the humour and the pathos about them; but they are cultured, far-travelled beings. Not much in the outer world escapes their knowledge and shrewd apprehension.

Home topics, however, are what appeals to their visitors most.

“Carrie,” the younger sister will say to the elder, “I heard Whalen the guard, and Tim Rooney the porter, at Athenmore Station, talking together. And Tim is thinking of making up to a young lady, you know, and I suppose he’s always talking about it, for Whalen was saying to him just as I came up: ‘’Pon me word, I wish you were married, and had your family rared on me!’ They had a great jollification at our station the other night,” she goes on, turning to us. “And they brewed the punch in the station bell! Whalen’s a very humorous man,” she proceeds. “They used to stop the express from Galway at Athenmore when required; but there were complaints of the delay and orders came from Dublin it wasn’t to be done on any account. But it’s a recent regulation and everybody doesn’t know about it. And the other day there was terrible work, for there was Father Blake and the Doctor both counting on it for an urgent sick call—dying, they said the poor man was.

“‘You’ll have to stop the train for this once, Whalen,’ says Father Blake.

“‘I’ll maybe save him yet,’ says the doctor.

“‘I couldn’t, yer riverence,’ says Whalen; ‘it’s as much as me place is worth. Don’t you be askin’ me, doctor. It ’ud be me ruin. The company’s very strict.’

“‘Think of his poor soul,’ says the priest.

“‘I’ll hold ye responsible for his life,’ says the doctor.

“‘Wirra, I can’t,’ says poor Whalen, and calls up Tim. ‘Tell his riverence, Tim,’ says he, ‘tell his riverence and the doctor that I can’t be disobeying orders.... And begorra, she’s due this minute! Up into the signal-box with you. And down with that signal, so the express can get by,’ says he. And as Tim starts off at a great pace, Whalen shouts after him, ‘And I’m sure I hope ye’ll get it to work, Tim, for it’s terrible stiff it is, that same signal, and it at danger!’

“Well, whether he had winked at Tim, or what, but Tim worked and worked.

“‘I can’t get it to move,’ he says. ‘Will you come up yourself, Mr. Whalen, sir, and have a try?’

“And, oh,” says Miss Margaret, in fits of laughter, “the way the two of them went on in that signal-box, and the way Whalen pumped and pulled, and at last he cries, ‘There’s no help for it, it’s stuck! And sure the company can’t blame me, if the machinery’s out of order,’ says he. ‘Well, there’s wan good thing, your riverence, the thrain ’ull have to stop now, anyhow.’”

We laugh a good deal during those pleasant meals at Kilcoultra. Not one dull moment does the house hold for us, and we don’t want any better company than that of the two dear ladies.

“We’ve got,” Miss Caroline, the elder, explains to me carefully, “a very careful coachman, a very steady man, so you needn’t be the least nervous driving out with us. He was selected, indeed, because he could be trusted. It wouldn’t do for us unprotected women, you know,” she says in all seriousness, “to be risking our necks with a tipsy coachman.”

Two days we are driven by this paragon. The third day there sits a stranger on the box.

“I hope,” says Miss Carrie apologetically, “that you don’t mind his being out of livery.”

“The fact is, Regan had an accident last night,” explains Miss Margaret. “He fell into the old gravel pit going back home and cut his head open, and——”

“It was my fault entirely,” interrupts Miss Caroline in distressed accents. “I had to send him in to Galway town, and to tell him to wait and bring back Captain Blake. And that meant loitering an hour.”

“Dear, dear!” Miss Margaret clacks her tongue. “That was very unfortunate! He—such a steady man! But an hour in Galway town...!”

“It’s only what might have been expected,” Miss Caroline concludes. “I blame myself entirely.—I generally,” she adds, turning to me, “avoid leaving him any time in the town, you know.”

And the best of it is that Regan remains in their minds “the steady man.” How impossible it is for the stranger to understand Ireland and Ireland’s ways! How much humour must you have—and what unlimited patience! There is nothing, of course, that so conduces to patience as a pleasant sense of humour.

The ladies are the Providence of the district. There is a room at the back of the great gallery filled nearly to the ceiling with rolls of homespun made by the peasant women in the villages. Whenever a cottage mother is in want of money she runs up to Miss Margaret or Miss Caroline, bringing or promising the product of her loom. A good deal of money is advanced; a good deal paid in this manner, chiefly out of the ladies’ generous pockets.

“Of course, poor things, you must know the way to take them,” says Miss Caroline in her Irish way. “One of them will come up and declare they’ll all be ‘lost entirely, ruined out and out’ for the want of five pounds. ‘Are you sure you couldn’t do with thirty shillings, now?’ I say to them. ‘Oh, Miss Caroline’—it will be then—‘as thrue as I’m a living woman, I couldn’t do with less than two pound ten!’ ... I get at the truth that way,” she adds.

It is Miss Margaret who undertakes the sale of goods which have already cost Kilcoultra so dear, and no one can say that she shows a commercial spirit.

“Let me see now,” she will say, fingering the stuff—and splendid stuff it is—with tentative finger and thumb. “I think we paid three-and-tenpence a yard for this, or maybe it was four shillings, but”—with a delighted smile—“I’ll let you have it for one-and-six, if you’re sure—really sure—you want it.”