No More Learning

A man once lived
there who found on the quay of Sligo a package containing three hundred
pounds in notes. It was dropped by a foreign sea captain. This my man
knew, but said nothing. It was money for freight, and the sea captain,
not daring to face his owners, committed suicide in mid-ocean. Shortly
afterwards my man died. His soul could not rest. At any rate, strange
sounds were heard round his house, though that had grown and prospered
since the freight money. The wife was often seen by those still alive
out in the garden praying at the bush I have spoken of, for the shade
of the dead man appeared there at times. The bush remains to this day:
once portion of a hedge, it now stands by itself, for no one dare put
spade or pruning-knife about it. As to the strange sounds and voices,
they did not cease till a few years ago, when, during some repairs, a
snipe flew out of the solid plaster and away; the troubled ghost, say
the neighbours, of the note-finder was at last dislodged.

My forebears and relations have lived near Rosses and Drumcliff these
many years. A few miles northward I am wholly a stranger, and can find
nothing. When I ask for stories of the faeries, my answer is some such
as was given me by a woman who lives near a white stone fort--one of
the few stone ones in Ireland--under the seaward angle of Ben Bulben:
'They always mind their own affairs and I always mind mine': for it
is dangerous to talk of the creatures. Only friendship for yourself
or knowledge of your forebears will loosen these cautious tongues. My
friend, 'the sweet Harp-String' (I give no more than his Irish name
for fear of gaugers), has the science of unpacking the stubbornest
heart, but then he supplies the _potheen_-makers with grain from his
own fields.
Besides, he is descended from a noted Gaelic magician who
raised the 'dhoul' in Great Eliza's century, and he has a kind of
prescriptive right to hear tell of all kind of other-world creatures.
They are almost relations of his, if all people say concerning the
parentage of magicians be true.




THE THICK SKULL OF THE FORTUNATE


I

ONCE a number of Icelandic peasantry found a very thick skull in the
cemetery where the poet Egil was buried. Its great thickness made
them feel certain it was the skull of a great man, doubtless of Egil
himself. To be doubly sure they put it on a wall and hit it hard blows
with a hammer. It got white where the blows fell but did not break,
and they were convinced that it was in truth the skull of the poet,
and worthy of every honour. In Ireland we have much kinship with the
Icelanders, or 'Danes' as we call them and all other dwellers in the
Scandinavian countries. In some of our mountainous and barren places,
and in our seaboard villages, we still test each other in much the same
way the Icelanders tested the head of Egil. We may have acquired the
custom from those ancient Danish pirates, whose descendants the people
of Rosses tell me still remember every field and hillock in Ireland
which once belonged to their forebears, and are able to describe Rosses
itself as well as any native. There is one seaboard district known as
Roughley, where the men are never known to shave or trim their wild red
beards, and where there is a fight ever on foot. I have seen them at a
boat-race fall foul of each other, and after much loud Gaelic, strike
each other with oars. The first boat had gone aground, and by dint
of hitting out with the long oars kept the second boat from passing,
only to give the victory to the third. One day the Sligo people say a
man from Roughley was tried in Sligo for breaking a skull in a row,
and made the defence not unknown in Ireland, that some heads are so
thin you cannot be responsible for them. Having turned with a look of
passionate contempt towards the solicitor who was prosecuting, and
cried, 'That little fellow's skull if ye were to hit it would go like
an egg-shell,' he beamed upon the judge, and said in a wheedling voice,
'but a man might wallop away at your lordship's for a fortnight. '


II

I wrote all this years ago, out of what were even then old memories. I
was in Roughley the other day, and found it much like other desolate
places.