Search -
In Wicklow; West Kerry; The congested districts; Under ether
In Wicklow West Kerry The congested districts Under ether Author:John Millington Synge Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ON THE ROAD One evening after heavy rains I set off to walk to a village at the other side of some hills, part of my way lying along a steep heathery track. T... more »he valleys that I passed through were filled with the strange splendour that comes after wet weather in Ireland, and on the tops of the mountains masses of fog were lying in white, even banks. Once or twice I went by a lonely cottage with a smell of earthy turf coming from the chimney, weeds or oats sprouting on the thatch, and a broken cart before the door, with many straggling hens going to roost on the shafts. Near these cottages little bands of half-naked children, rilled with the excitement of evening, were running and screaming over the bogs, where the heather was purple already, giving me the strained feeling of regret one has so often in these places when there is rain in the air. Further on, as I was going up a long hill, an old man with a white, pointed face andheavy beard pulled himself up out of the ditch and joined me. We spoke first about the broken weather, and then he began talking in a mournful voice of the famines and misfortunes that have been in Ireland. ' There have been three cruel plagues,' he said, ' out through the country since I was born in the West. First, there was the big wind in 1839,that tore away the grass and green things from the earth. Then there was the blight that came on the gth of June in the year 1846. Up to then the potatoes were clean and good; but that morning a mist arose up out of the sea, and you could hear a voice talking near a mile off across the stillness of the earth. It was the same the next day, and the day after, and so on for three days or more; and then you could begin to see the tops of the stalks lying over as if the life was gone out of them. And that was th...« less