Castlebar mall is a square of grass with some
trees drawn up on one side.
It is fenced in with chains looped up on
posts - a fence that nobody minds except to step over and they track the
grass with paths running in every direction. Westport's mall is a long
space with trees standing sentry by a river, walled in as if it were a
canal.
I had a wish to meet with a Mr. Smithwick, a land agent, from whom I
might receive a good deal of information. I had information from himself
that he should be at Newport upon the day after I arrived at Westport. I
fought successfully against myself, and got up at an uncomfortably early
hour and went to Newport by mail car. Newport, Mayo, is six Irish - seven
and a half English - miles from Westport and is at the head of Clew Bay.
The road lies through a nice rolling country, entirely desolate and
empty.
The only passenger by the car besides myself, was a gentleman, English I
presume, who, after he became tired of silence, began a conversation
with me, taking for his subject the over-population of the West. I
looked to the side of the car where we sat - it was a country of fine
grassy hills with not one wreath of smoke curling up from a solitary
chimney as far as the eye could reach. I leaned over the well of the car
and looked to the other side - to the limit of the horizon, behold, the
land was empty of house or home or human being. I looked over the
horses' ears - there was the same scene of utter desolation. I turned
round with difficulty and looked behind us - saw the same grassy hills
swelling up in green silence without man or beast. I said softly, "Lift
up thine eyes, sir stranger, and look northward and southward, eastward
and westward. Is not the land desolate without inhabitant, where then is
the over-population?" The strange gentleman looked, not at the empty
hills and the silent green valleys, but at his fellow-traveller with
emotions of fear. To doubt that this fair and desolate Mayo is over-
populated is to show signs of lunacy or worse. Fenianism, Communism, or
even Nihilism, is possible if there is no lunacy to account for such
strange ideas.
Mildly, but with resolution like Samantha's, I urged on the gentleman to
look at the prospect, and he was like one awakening from a dream, for
the country from Newport to Westport, seven and a half miles, is without
inhabitants. I believe Lord Lucan was chief exterminator over this
stretch of country. Brought up at the little inn at Newport, and the
stranger and I had breakfast together. We conversed about over-
population. He had travelled much, and when he recollected what his eyes
saw instead of what his ears heard of a false cry, he admitted that a
loneliness had fallen upon this part of the west.
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