Before I abandon these “Irish Cousin” years at Drishane, I should like to say something more of the old conditions there. I do not think I claim too much for my father and mother when I say that they represented for the poor people of the parish their Earthly Providence, their Court of Universal Appeal, and, in my mother’s case, their Medical Attendant, who, moreover, provided the remedies, as well as the nourishment, that she prescribed.

The years of the ’eighties were years of leanness, “years that the locust hath eaten.” Congested District Boards and Departments of Agriculture had not then arisen. Successive alterations of the existing land tenure had bewildered rather than encouraged the primitive farmers of this southern seaboard; the benefits promised were slow in materialising, and in the meantime the crops failed. The lowering or remission of rents did not mean any immediate benefit to people who were often many years in arrears. Even in normal years the yield of the land, in the district of which I speak, barely sufficed to feed the dwellers on it; the rent, when paid, was, in most cases, sent from America, by emigrated sons and daughters. There was but little margin at any time. In bad years there was hunger.

Two or three fairly prosperous farms there were, and for the rest, a crowd of entirely “uneconomic” holdings, a rabble of fragmentary patches, scarcely larger than the “allotments” of this present war time, each producing a plentiful crop of children, but leaving much to be desired in such matters as the increase of the soil.

The district is not a large one. It contains about eight miles of fierce and implacable seaboard, with only a couple of coves in which the fishermen can find some shelter for their boats, and its whole extent is but three or four miles in length, by a little more than half as many in depth. A great headland, like a lion couchant, sentinels it on one side; on the other, a long and malign spike of rock, thinly clad with heather, and furze, drives out into the Atlantic, like an alligator with jaws turned seawards. Not few are the ships that have found their fate in those jaws; during these past three years of war, this stretch of sea has seen sudden and fearful happenings, but even these tragedies are scarcely more fearful than those that, in the blackness of mid-winter storms, have befallen many a ship on the desperate rocks of Yokawn and ReendhacusÁn.

It is hard to blame people for being ignorant, equally hard to condemn them for thriftlessness and dirt in such conditions as obtained thirty years ago in what are now called “Congested Districts.” Thriftlessness and dirt were indeed the ruling powers in that desolate country. In fortunate years, desolate and “congested” though it was, its little fields, inset among the rocks and bogs, could produce crops in reasonable quantity, and—as I do not wish to overstate the case—not less luxuriant in growth than their attendant weeds. The yellow ragwort, the purple loosestrife, the gorgeous red and orange heads of the docks, only in Kerry can these fleurs de mal be equalled, even in Kerry they cannot be surpassed. The huge shoulder of the headland is beautiful with heather and ling of all sorts and shades; the pink sea-thrift—would that other forms of thrift throve with equal success!—meets the heather at the verge of the cliffs, and looks like a decoration of posies of monthly roses. Osmunda Regalis fern fringes the streams, and the fuchsia bushes have fed on the Food of the Gods and are become trees. On a central plateau, high over the sea, stands one of the signal towers that were built at the time of the French landing in Bantry. In its little courtyard you stand “ringed by the azure world.” From west to east the ocean is wide before you. On many days I have seen it, in summer and winter alike lovely; a vast outlook that snatches away your breath, and takes you to its bosom, making you feel yourself the very apex and central point of the wondrous crescent line of fretted shore, that swings from the far blue Fastnet Rock, looking like an anchored battleship, on the west, to the long and slender arm of the Galley Head, with its white lighthouse, floating like a seagull on the rim of the horizon. Between those points, among those heavenly blues and greens and purples, that change and glow and melt into each other in ecstasies of passionate colour, history has been made, and unforgettable things have happened. But standing up there in the wind and the sun, on that small green circle of grass, hearing the sea-birds’ wild and restless cries, watching the waves lift and break into snow on the flanks of the Stag Rocks far below, it is impossible to remember human insanity, impossible to think of anything save of the overwhelming beauty that encircles you.

In that climate and that soil anything could flourish, given only a little shelter, and a little care, and the elimination from the cultivators of traditional imbecilities; eliminating also, if possible, fatalism, and the custom of attributing to “the Will o’ God” each and every disaster, from a houseful of hungry children to an outbreak of typhus consequent on hopelessly insanitary conditions.

“How was it the spuds failed with ye?” asked someone, looking at the blackened “lazy-beds” of potatoes.

“I couldn’t hardly say,” replied the cultivator, who had omitted the attention of spraying them; “Whatever it was, God spurned them in a boggy place.”

Things are better now. The Congested Districts Board has done much, the general spread of education and civilisation has done more. Inspectors, instructors, remission of rents, land purchase, State loans, English money in various forms, have improved the conditions in a way that would hardly have been credible thirty years ago, when, in these congested districts, semi-famine was chronic, and few, besides the “little scholars” of the National Schools, could read or write, and the breeding of animals and cultivation of crops was the affair of an absentee Providence, and no more to be influenced by human agency than the vagaries of the weather.

The first of the “Famines” in which I can remember my mother’s collecting and distributing relief was in 1880. The potatoes had failed, and I find it recorded that “troops of poor women came to Drishane from the west for help.” My mother lectured them on the necessity of not eating the potatoes that had been given them for seed, and assured them, not as superfluously as might be supposed, that if they ate them they could not sow them. To this they replied in chorus.

“May the Lord spare your Honour long!” and went home and boiled the seed-potatoes for supper.

Poor creatures, what else could they do, with their children asking them for food?

In that same spring came a woman, crying, and saying she was “the most disthressful poor person, that hadn’t the good luck to be in the Misthress’s division.” Asked where she lived, she replied,

“I do be like a wild goose over on the side of Drominidy Wood.”

Spring after spring, during those dark years for Ireland of the ’eighties, the misery and the hunger-time recurred. Seed-potatoes, supplied by charity, were eaten; funds were raised, and help, public and private, was given, but Famine, like its brother, Typhus, was only conciliated, never annihilated. In 1891 Mr. Balfour’s Relief Fund and Relief Works brought almost the first touch of permanence into the alleviating conditions. My mother was among the chief of the distributors for this parish. Desperate though the state of many of the people was, Ireland has not yet, thank Heaven, ceased to be Ireland, and the distribution of relief had some irrepressibly entertaining aspects that need not wholly be ignored.

My mother had herself collected a considerable sum of money, for buying food and clothes (the Government fund being, as well as I recollect, mainly devoted to the purchase of seed-potatoes). Many were her clients, and grievous though their need was, it was impossible not to enjoy the high absurdities of her convocations of distribution. These took place in the kitchen at Drishane. The women came twice a week to get the food tickets, and the preliminary gathering in the stable-yard looked and sounded like a parliament of rooks. Incredibly ragged and wretched, but unquenchable in spirit and conversation, they sat, huddled in dark cloaks or shawls, on the ground in rows, waiting to be admitted to the kitchen when “The Misthress” was ready for them. Most of them had known nothing of the existence of the fund until told of it by my mother’s envoys. It was my mission, and that of my brethren, to ride through the distressed town-lands, and summon those who seemed in worst need, and in my letters and diaries of these years I have found many entries on the subject.

“Jan. 27, 1891.—Rode round the Lickowen country. Sickened and stunned by the misery. Hordes of women and children in the filthiest rags. Gave as many bread and tea tickets as we could, but felt helpless and despairing in the face of such hopeless poverty.”

“January 30.—Jack and I again rode to the West to collect Widows for the Relief Fund. Bagged nine and had some lepping” (an ameliorating circumstance of these expeditions was the necessity of making cross-country short cuts). “Numbers of women came over, some being rank frauds ably detected by the kitchenmaid; one or two knee-deep in lies.” “The boys walked to Bawneshal with tea, etc., for two of the worst widows.” (The adjective refers to their social, not their moral standing.)

On another occasion I have recorded that my sister was sent to inquire into the circumstances of a poor woman with a large family. The latter, in absorbed interest in the proceedings, surrounded the mother, who held in her arms the most recent of the number, an infant three weeks old.

“I have seven children,” said the pale mother, “and this little one-een that,” she turned a humorous grey eye on her listening family, “I’m afther taking out of the fox’s mouth!” (The fox playing the part attributed in Germany to the stork.)

My sister, absorbed in estimating the needs of the seven little brothers and sisters, replied absently,

“Poor little thing! It must have been very frightened!”

Mrs. Conolly stared, and, in all her misery, began to laugh; “May the Lord love ye, Miss!” she said compassionately yet admiringly, “May ye never grow grey!”

The difficulties of distribution were many, not the least being that of steeling my mother’s heart, and keeping her doles in some reasonable relation to her resources. I should like to try to give some idea of one of these gatherings. Lists of those in most immediate need of help had been prepared, I do not now remember by whom, and, in the majority of cases, the names given were those of the males of the respective households. Therefore would my mother, standing tall and majestic in the middle of the big, dark, old kitchen at Drishane, her list in her hand, certain underlings (usually her daughters and the kitchenmaid) in attendance, summon to her presence—let us say—“John Collins, Jeremiah Leary, Patrick Driscoll.” (These are names typical of this end of West Carbery, and the subsequent proceedings, like the names, may be accepted in a representative sense.)

The underling, as Gold Stick-in-Waiting, would then advance to the back door, and from the closely attendant throng without would draw, as one draws hounds in kennel, but with far more difficulty, the female equivalents of the gentlemen in question.

“Now, John Collins,” says my mother (who declared it confused her if she didn’t stick to what was written in the list), addressing a little woman, the rags of whose shrouding black shawl made her look like the Jackdaw of Rheims subsequent to the curse, “Now, John Collins, here’s your ticket. Is your daughter better?”

“Why then she is not, your Honour, Ma’am,” replies John Collins in a voluble whine, “only worse she is. She didn’t ate a bit since.” John Collins pauses, removes a hairpin from her back hair, and with nicety indicates on it a quarter of an inch. “God knows she didn’t ate that much since your Honour seen her; but sure she might fancy some little rarity that yourself’d send her.”

There follow medical details on which I do not propose to dwell. My mother, ever a mighty doctor before the Lord, prescribes, promises “a rarity,” in the shape of a rice pudding, and John Collins, well satisfied, swings her shawl, yashmak-wise, across her mouth, and pads away on her bare feet.

“Patrick Driscoll!”

Patrick Driscoll, bony and haggard, the hood of her dark cloak over her red head, demands an extra quantity, on the plea of extra poverty.

She is asked why her husband does not get work.

“Husband is it!” echoes Patrick Driscoll, witheringly, “What have I but a soort of an old man of a husband, that’s no use only to stay in his bed!”

Other women press in through the doorway, despite the efforts of the underlings, each eloquent of her superior sufferings. Another husband is inquired for.

“He’s dead, Ma’am, the Lord ha’ mercy upon him, he’s in his coffin this minute; and Fegs, he was in the want of it!”

Yet another has a blind husband.

“Dark as a stone, asthore,” she says to Gold Stick, “only for he being healthy and qu’ite, I’d be dead altogether! Well, welcome the Will o’ God! I might be worse, as bad as I am!”

Philosophy, resignation, piety, humour, one finds them all in these bewildering, infuriating, enchanting people. And then, perhaps, a cry from the heart of the crowd,

“Sure ye’ll not forget yer own darlin’ Mary Leary!”

A heartrending appeal that elicits from the Mistress a peremptory command not to attempt to come out of her turn.

Nothing could be more admirable than my mother’s manner with the people. Entirely simple, dictatorial, sympathetic, sensible. She believed herself to be an infallible judge of character, but “for all and for all,” as we say in Carbery, her soft heart was often her undoing, and her sterner progeny found her benevolence difficult to control. She was, in fact, as a man said of a spendthrift and drunken brother, “too lion-hearted for her manes” (means).

“No wonder,” said one of her supplicants, “Faith, no wonder at all for the Colonel to be proud of her! She’d delight a Black!”

Whether this imputed to the Black a specially severe standard of taste, or if it meant that even the most insensate savage would be roused to enthusiasm by my mother’s beauty, I am unable to determine.

I have a letter from my companion Gold Stick, from which I think a few quotations, in exemplification, may be permitted.

Hildegarde Somerville to E. Œ. S. (Feb., 1891.)

“The women have swarmed since you left. I really think I know every one of them now, by voice, sight, and smell, notably Widow Catherine Cullinane, who has besieged us daily. Her voice is not dulcet, especially when raised in abusive entreaty, but she has not got anything out of me yet. It is as well that C. (a brother) and I are here to manage the show, as Mother is, to say the least, lavish. I was out one day when a woman called, a Mrs. Michael Kelleher; she has the most magnificent figure, walk, and throat that I have ever seen. She is tall, and her throat is exactly like the Rossetti women’s throats, long and round, and like cream. She would make a splendid model for you. I had seen her before, and proved her not deserving,” (O wise young judge of quite nineteen!) “her husband being a caretaker with a house and 4s. a week, and the use of two cows, besides a daughter out as a nursemaid. She really did not exactly beg, but came to see if she had ‘a shance of the sharity.’ Her eldest boy, aged eleven, had fallen off the cowhouse roof on to a cow’s back (neither hurt!), and we gave her Elliman, which cured him. But the day I was out, Mother saw her, and although I had given full particulars in the book as to her means”—(her princely affluence in fact, as compared with her fellows)—“she gave her bread, tea, sugar, and meal, simply because she had a baby the other day and had a child with a bad cold.”

Regarding the matter dispassionately, and from a distance, I should say that either affliction amply justified my mother’s action, but H. did not then think so.

“I don’t think this will happen again,” she resumes, severely, “as Mother now regrets having done it. All the same, I had the greatest difficulty in stopping her from clothing an entire family with the Dorcas things, (which are lovely) as I told her, there are not 100 things, and there are over 200 people, and it seems wicked to clothe one family from top to toe, so I prevailed. E. says the Balfour Fund will help very few of our women.” (E. was my cousin Egerton Coghill, who, like Robert Martin, had given his services to the Government as a distributor of the Fund, and, in the south and west of the County Cork, had some of the worst districts in Ireland under his jurisdiction.)

“No one with less than a quarter of an acre of land is entitled to get help,” my sister’s letter continues, “as they can get Out-door Relief from the Rates, and no one with one ‘healthy male’ able to work on the Balfour road can have it, in fact, only those with sick husbands, or widows with farms, are eligible. As the fund is over £44,000, and I have estimated that £150 would keep our Western women going for 6 months, it seems to me very unfair to send the quarter-acre people on to the Rates.”