It was written
in English, as he is the only one of the family who can read or
write in Irish, and I heard it being slowly spelled out and
translated as I sat in my room. A little later the old woman brought
it in for me to read.
He told her first about his work, and the wages he is getting. Then
he said that one night he had been walking in the town, and had
looked up among the streets, and thought to himself what a grand
night it would be on the Sandy Head of this island - not, he added,
that he was feeling lonely or sad. At the end he gave an account,
with the dramatic emphasis of the folk-tale, of how he had met me on
the Sunday morning, and, 'believe me,' he said, 'it was the fine
talk we had for two hours or three.' He told them also of a knife I
had given him that was so fine, no one on the island 'had ever seen
the like of her.'
Another day a letter came from the son who is in America, to say
that he had had a slight accident to one of his arms, but was well
again, and that he was leaving New York and going a few hundred
miles up the country.
All the evening afterwards the old woman sat on her stool at the
corner of the fire with her shawl over her head, keening piteously
to herself. America appeared far away, yet she seems to have felt
that, after all, it was only the other edge of the Atlantic, and now
when she hears them talking of railroads and inland cities where
there is no sea, things she cannot understand, it comes home to her
that her son is gone for ever. She often tells me how she used to
sit on the wall behind the house last year and watch the hooker he
worked in coming out of Kilronan and beating up the sound, and what
company it used to be to her the time they'd all be out.
The maternal feeling is so powerful on these islands that it gives a
life of torment to the women. Their sons grow up to be banished as
soon as they are of age, or to live here in continual danger on the
sea; their daughters go away also, or are worn out in their youth
with bearing children that grow up to harass them in their own turn
a little later.
There has been a storm for the last twenty-four hours, and I have
been wandering on the cliffs till my hair is stiff with salt.
Immense masses of spray were flying up from the base of the cliff,
and were caught at times by the wind and whirled away to fall at
some distance from the shore.
