Future years,
He is written childless, for of his blood no heir
Shall inherit land or lordship from cruel John Adair.
"His cognizance the bloody hand has a wild meaning now,
It is pointing up for vengeance to Cain-like mark his brow,
It speaks of frantic hands that clasped the side posts of the door;
Pale lips that kissed the threshold they would cross, oh, never more.
The scattered stones of many homes, the desolated farms,
Shall mark with deeper red the hand upon his coat of arms.
The silver birches of Glenveigh when stirred by summer air
Shall whisper of the curse that hangs o'er cruel John Adair."
X.
WHY THE RENT IS RAISED - THE HISTORY OF AN EVICTION FROM ONE OF THE
EVICTED - A DONEGAL CONGREGATION - A CLIMB TO THE TOP OF DOONHILL - DOON
HOLY WELL - MAKING THE BEST OF A STRANGER.
In the silence of the night when sleep would not come, and when my
imagination rehearsed over and over again sights I had seen and tales I
had heard, I made an almost cast-iron resolution to escape to the estate
of Stewart of Ards and have one letter filled up with the good deeds of
a landlord. Alas for me! another storm, a rain storm, and a touch of
neuralgia conspired to keep me "ben the house" in the little room upon
the mountain side. One can weather snow or hail easier than a mountain
rain storm. The rain is laden with half-melted snow, and the wind that
drives it is terribly in earnest.
It is one queer feature of this mountain scenery, the entire absence of
trees. The hills look as if the face of the country had been shaved. Up
the hill sides the little fields are divided off by high, broad stone
fences, the result of gathering the stones out of the fields. The bog
land to be reclaimed requires drains three feet deep every six feet of
land.
To trench up a little field into ridges six feet apart, to gather stones
out of a little field sufficient to surround it with a four feet high
stone fence, to grub out and burn whins, to make all the improvements
with your own labor, and then to have your landlord come along with his
valuator and say, "Your farm is worth double what you pay for it; I can
get thirty shillings an acre for it," and to raise the rent to its full
value, which you must pay or go out. This sort of thing is repeated, and
repeated, in every variation of circumstances and of hardship, and the
people submit and are, as a whole, quiet and law-abiding.
I was called out of my little den to see a woman, one of the evicted
tenants of Mr. Adair. She was on her way to Letterkenny to see her son,
who is in the asylum since the eviction. It was hard enough to wander
through the ruins and hear of the eviction scenes from others, but to
sit by the turf fire and listen to one who had suffered and was
suffering from this dreadful act, to see the recollection of it
expressed in look and tone was different. This woman - husband dead, son
in the asylum - was a decent-looking body in cloak and cap, with a
bleached face and quiet voice.
"We were all under sentence of eviction, but it was told to us that it
was for squaring the farms. Then we were warned to pay in the half-
year's rent. It was not due till May, and we had never been asked to pay
the rent ahead of us before. But the landlord was a new one, and if he
made a rule, why, we must obey him; so we scraped up and sold this and
that and paid it. If we had known what was coming we might have kept it,
and had a penny to turn to when we were out under the sky. It was to get
the rent before he turned us out that he made that plan. We were put out
in the beginning of April; our rent was paid up to May. Oh, I wish, I
wish that he had driven us into the lake the day he put us out. A few
minutes would have ended our trouble, but now when will it end! I have
been through the country, my lady, and my boy in the asylum ever since."
Went to the Catholic chapel up here in the mountains. It was quite
convenient to my lodging. It is a very nice building with a new look. I
was surprised to see such a fine building in the mountains, for, owing
to the poverty of the people, there were no chapels at all in some
places a little time ago. Mass was celebrated in _scalans_, a kind
of open sheds, covered over head to protect the officiating priest from
the weather, while the people clustered round in the open air. When I
spoke of the nice appearance of the chapel I was told that the children
of these hills scattered through the United States, Canada, New Zealand
and Australia, had helped in its building. There were between seven and
eight hundred people present. There were no seats on the floor of the
chapel. I could not help admiring the patient, untiring devotion of
these people, and the endurance that enabled them to kneel so long. The
prevailing type of face is eminently Scottish, so is the tone of voice,
and the names, Murrays, Andersons, and the like.
Were it not for the altar and the absence of seats I could have imagined
myself in a Glenelg Presbyterian congregation.
