Happy America, Whose People Are Not Compelled By The
Inexorable Logic Of Circumstances To Be Lords, But Can Be Plain
Farmers.
It is really a hard thing to be a lord sometimes, when a place is sunk
with mortgages, and
Burdened with legacies and annuities, and no means
of redemption but the rents and these stopped.
We drove back the way we came. Ascending the hill we met a little beast,
so small, so black and shaggy, that I thought at first it was one of our
Canadian black bears. I asked what it was, and - laughing at my
ignorance - the man told me that it was a Highland Kyloe, one of the
famous black cattle that I have heard so much about, but had never seen
a specimen of the breed before. It would have been big for a bear, but
certainly was small for a cow, while a goat has the appearance of giving
as much milk.
XLIII.
CONG
The land as we neared Cong, between Cong and Lough Mask, as seen from
the rather roundabout road we travelled, has a very peculiar appearance.
It is stony with a very different stoniness from any part of Ireland
which I had seen before. In some places the earth, as far as the eye
could reach, was literally crusted with stone. The stone was worn into
rounded tops and channelled hollows, as if it was once molten, like red
hot potash, and every bubbling swell had become suddenly petrified, or
as if it had once been an uptilted hillside over which a rapid river had
fallen, wearing little hollows, and sparing rounded heights as it dashed
over in boiling fury for ages, accomplishing which result it deserted
this channel; and through some internal movement the bed of the torrent
was levelled into a plain. Some agency or other has worn this solid rock
into a truffle pattern that is very wonderful to see. Over all this part
the stony formation recurs again and again. A person remarked to me that
it looked like the bottom of a former ocean. Judging by the marks worn
into the stone I should say it was not a pacific ocean.
We came to a blacksmith's shop with the arch of the door formed into a
perfect horse-shoe; this, I was told, was the boundary line between Mayo
and Galway. In a few minutes we stopped before the "Carlisle Arms," in
the little village of Cong. Cong village is not very large, and has not
a wealthy appearance. There is a look generally spread over the people
who come in to trade as if their fortune was as stoney as their fields.
I had not been long in the "Carlisle Arms" before my attention was
called to certain framed mementos that hung round the room. By some of
these mementos hung the tale as to how Cong hotel came to be named the
"Carlisle Arms." On a certain occasion, when the then Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland, the Earl of Carlisle, was making some sort of progress through
Ireland, he proposed stopping at the hotel at Maam, a hotel under the
thumb of the late Lord Leitrim, who had some pique at the Lord
Lieutenant, which determined him to order under pain of the usual
penalty that there be no admittance to the Viceroy of Ireland at this
hotel.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 141 of 208
Words from 72011 to 72574
of 107283