We crossed over to the railway hotel, finally, and had lunch, and when we came out, the woman who managed the place waylaid us at the front door for a chat. She told us of a woman from the village who was on the _t.i.tanic_, but was saved, and discussed various scandals in high life, which she had gleaned from the half-penny press; and then we spoke of the girl we had met in the village, and she deplored the high-and-mighty airs which some of the girls who come home from America give themselves.

"But I once heard one of them put well in her place," she added, "when she came back with her hat full of flowers and her petticoat full of flounces, and walked about the town as though we were all dirt beneath her feet. Well, one day an old man stopped her for a word, a friend of the family who wished her well, but she put up her nose at him--and perhaps he was not very clean--and was for going past. But he put out his hand and caught her by the arm. 'You're after bein' a fine lady now,' says he, 'but I mind the time, and that but a few years since, when I've seen ye sittin' on your bare-backed a.s.s, with your naked legs hangin' down--yes, and I can be tellin' ye more than that, if so be ye wish to hear it!' She didn't stay long in the village after that," added the speaker, with a chuckle of relish.

Our train came along, presently, and we were soon running over as dreary, bleak and miserable a land as any we had seen in Ireland. Vast boggy plains, bare rocky hillsides, with scarcely a house to be seen anywhere--only a ruin, now and then, marking the site of some ancient stronghold; and so, in the first dusk of the evening, we came to Athlone.

One would have thought that, with so important a town, the station would have been placed somewhere near it; but habit was too strong for the builders of the line, and so they put the station about a mile away, at the end of a dreary stretch of road, beyond a great barrack, along the river, past the castle, and over the bridge.

Athlone has been famous for its widows ever since the days of Molly Malone, ohone! who

Melted the hearts Of the swains in them parts;

and we found that the best hotel in the place, which was not as good as it might have been, was managed by a widow, who might well have posed for the lovely Molly. She had not been a widow long, and I judged would not be if the swains of the town had any voice in the matter, for the bar was very popular when she was behind it.

We went out, after dinner, to see the town, and found it one of the most ugly and depressing we had yet encountered--a sort of cross between a town and a village, but with the attractions of neither. The water-front is its most interesting part, for a fragment of the old castle which was built to guard the second of the all-important fords of the Shannon still stands there. Kincora, you will remember, guarded the other. But Kincora was three days' march to the southward; and for two days' march to the northward there was no other place where the Shannon could be crossed; and so here at the ford just below Lough Ree, in the old days, a franklin named Luan set up a rude little inn, and the place came to be known as Ath Luan, Luan's Ford--Athlone. Here in the year 1001, hostages were sent from all Ireland to meet Brian Boru and proclaim him High King; and here, a century later, the O'Conors built a rath and a tower to guard the ford and levy tribute upon all who used it. In another hundred years, the Normans had seized it, and put up the strong, round-towered castle, parts of which still remain; and for seven centuries after that, the English power "sat astride the pa.s.sage of Connaught," save for the brief time, after the battle of the Boyne, it was held by the Irish. But Ginkle captured it, as he was soon to capture Limerick, and a few years later, most of what was left of the town was destroyed when the magazine of the castle blew up during a thunderstorm.

But though there is little in Athlone to delay the visitor, there are two places in the neighbourhood worth seeing. Nine miles to the north is Lissoy, made immortal by Goldsmith as

Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain;

and ten miles to the south, on the bank of the Shannon, are the ruins of Clonmacnoise, whither, twelve centuries ago, men in search of knowledge turned their faces from all the corners of Europe.

It was for Lissoy we started next morning, on a car for which I had bargained the night before. Our jarvey was a loquacious old fellow, who talked unceasingly, but in so broken a brogue that it was only with the greatest difficulty we could follow him. He had known some people who had gone down on the _t.i.tanic_, and he told us all about them; but most of his talk was a lament for the hard times, the sorrowful state of the country, the paucity of tourists, and the vagaries of the landlady, of whom he spoke in the most mournful and pessimistic way. She was not, I gathered, a native of Athlone, but a Dublin woman whose ideas were new-fangled and highfalutin, and who, I inferred, did not look kindly upon the careless habits of her "help."

The road lay through a pleasant, rolling country, with glimpses of Lough Ree to the left, and on a hill to the right a tall shaft which our jarvey told us marked the exact centre of Ireland. When one looks at the map, one sees that it is at least somewhere near the centre. But it has been explained to other pa.s.sers-by in many ways: as the remains of a round tower, as a tower which a rich man built in order to mount to the top of it every day to count his sheep, as a pole for his tent put up by Finn MacCool, as a wind-mill in the old days, and as a dozen other things--anything, in fact, that happened to occur to the man who was asked the question. One answer, you may be sure, he never made, and that was that he didn't know!

There _are_ some remains of old windmills in the neighbourhood--we saw one or two on near-by hillsides, close enough to recognise them; and if I had known at the time what a divergence of opinion there was about that lonely tower in the distance, I would have driven over to it and investigated it on my own hook. But our jarvey's answer was so positive that it left no room for doubt, so we drove on through a village of tiny thatched houses, with the smoke of the turf giving a pleasant tang to the air; then up a long hill, to the left at a cross-roads, and at last our jarvey drew up before a five-barred gate. We looked at him questioningly, for there was no village in sight.

"'Tis here it was, sir," he said, "sweet Auburn, the loveliest village of the plain. 'Twas up that path yonder the village preacher's modest mansion rose, though there is little enough left of it now; and over yonder, behind that wall with the yellow furze atop it, unprofitably gay, was where the village master taught his little school, and there is nothing at all left of that; and a little furder on is the 'Three Jolly Pigeons,' where news much older than the ale went round."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GOLDSMITH RECTORY AT LISSOY]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "THREE JOLLY PIGEONS"]

I looked at him wonderingly.

"Where did you pick up all that patter?" I asked.

He snickered.

"Ah, you would not be the first gintleman I have driven out here, sir,"

he explained; "and many of them would be speakin' parts of the poem."

"I suppose ale is still to be obtained at the 'Three Jolly Pigeons'?"

"It is, sir, if so be your honour would be wantin' some. And they have one of the big stones of the old mill for a doorstep," he added, as an extra inducement not to pa.s.s it by.

We got down from our seats, went through the gate, and up the path which Goldsmith and his father trod so many times; for, whether or not Lissoy was really Auburn, there can be no doubt that the elder Goldsmith was really vicar here, and that he lived in the house, the rectory of Kilkenny West, of which only a fragment of the front wall remains, and that Oliver was a boy here. The ash trees which shadowed the path have disappeared, but there are still plenty of gabbling geese around, and a file of them went past as I took a picture of the remnant of the rectory. A shed with a hideous roof of corrugated iron has been built behind it, and near by is a two-storied house where the present tenant lives. We found an old woman, for all the world like Goldsmith's "widowed, solitary thing," carding wool in an outhouse, and she showed us the old well, deep in the ground, walled around and approached by a steep flight of steps.

There was nothing more to see, so we went back to the gate, escorted by three friendly pigs, and clambered up to our seats again, and looked out over the valley. There is nothing in that valley but gently-rolling pastures, and nothing lives there now but sheep and cattle. And it sends a chill up the spine to realise that once a village stood there, and that it has melted away into the earth. Not a stone is left of its houses, not a sod of its walls, not a flower of its gardens.

But that village was Lissoy, not Auburn. No such village as Auburn ever existed in Ireland, where the young folks sported on the village green, and the swain responsive to the milkmaid sung, and the village master taught his school during the day, and argued with the preacher in the evening, and a jolly crowd gathered every night at the inn to drink the nut-brown ale. There is not a single Irish detail in that picture; it is all English, just as Goldsmith intended it should be, for it was of "England's griefs" he was writing, not of Ireland's. In that day, few people here in Westmeath spoke anything but Irish; the village children knew nothing of schools, except hedge-row ones, taught by some fugitive priest; the "honest rustics" had no "decent churches," but only hidden caves in dark valleys, where Ma.s.s was said secretly and at the risk of life; and, rest a.s.sured, when any inhabitant of this valley had money to spend for drink, he wasted it on no such futile beverage as nut-brown ale!

I am sure that little of it is sold to-day at the "Three Jolly Pigeons,"

where we presently arrived, a low wayside tavern with thatched roof and plastered wall, kept by John Nally, who welcomed us most kindly, and grew enthusiastic when I proposed to take a picture. There was a rickety donkey-cart standing by the door, and its owner came out to be in the picture, too--raggeder even than his donkey, disreputable, dirty, gin-soaked, and with only a jagged tooth or two in his expansive mouth, but carefree and full of mirth.

Betty, who had been admiring the supreme raggedness of the donkey, asked its name.

"Top o' the Mornin', miss," answered the man, with a shout of laughter, and I am sure the name was the inspiration of the moment.

And then, while our jarvey drank his whiskey, I had a talk with Mr.

Nally, who, of course, for reasons of trade perhaps, is firmly of the belief that Auburn is Lissoy and no other. And he told me of another poet who was born down on the banks of the Inny, a mile or two away, and who, in the old days, spent many an evening at the Pigeons--Johnny Casey he called him, and it turned out to be that same John Keegan Casey, who wrote "The Rising of the Moon," and "Maire my Girl," and "Gracie og Machree," and "Donal Kenny,"--Irish subjects all, and most of them local ones, as well. Donal Kenny, for instance, was a bold blade, a clever hand with the snare and the net, who turned the heads of all the girls in the neighbourhood, and broke those of most of the boys, until it was glad they were when he went off with himself to America. I have looked up the poem since, and I fear that Casey enveloped the parting scene with exaggerated sentiment; yet the verses have a swing to them:

Come, piper, play the "Shaskan Reel,"

Or else the "La.s.ses on the Heather,"

And, Mary, lay aside your wheel Until we dance once more together.

At fair and pattern oft before Of reels and jigs we've tripped full many; But ne'er again this loved old floor Will feel the foot of Donal Kenny.

We tore ourselves away, at last, taking a road which ran along the border of the lake--a beautiful sheet of bluest water, dotted with greenest islands, with the rolling plains of Roscommon rising beyond.

And then, from the top of a long hill, we saw below us the spires of Athlone, and soon we were rattling down into the town.

That morning, while looking through our guide-book, we had encountered a sentence which piqued our curiosity. It was this:

"Some of the walls of St. Peter's Abbey remain, in which can be seen one of those curious figures called 'Sheela-na-gig."

I remembered dimly that, back at Cashel, John Minogue had called our attention to a grotesque figure with twisted legs and distorted visage carved on a stone, and had called it something that sounded like Sheela-na-gig; but I wasn't sure, and so we started out blithely to find this one.

Right at the start, we met with unexpected difficulties, for n.o.body at the hotel, not even the ancient jarvey, had ever heard of the Sheela-na-gig. The barmaid, however, said that St. Peter's Abbey was on the other side of the river, past the castle, so we went over there, and found that part of the town much more dilapidated and picturesque than the more modern portion on the Westmeath side. We wandered around for quite a while, asking the way of this person and that, and finally we wound up at St. Peter's church, a new structure and one singularly uninteresting. It was evident that there was no Sheela-na-gig there; and at this point Betty surrendered, and went back to the hotel to write some letters.

But I had started out on the quest of the Sheela-na-gig, and I was determined to find it. I thought possibly it might be somewhere among the ruins of the Franciscan Abbey, which stand close to the other side of the river, so I crossed the river again, and after walking about a mile along a high wall through a dirty lane, reached a gate, only to find it locked. There was a man inside, raking a gravelled walk, but he said n.o.body was admitted to the ruins, and anyway he was quite positive that there was no such thing as a Sheela-na-gig among them. He added that a portion of the ruins had been torn down to make room for an extension of the Athlone Woolen Mills, and perhaps they had the Sheela-na-gig there.

I had no faith in this suggestion, but for want of something better to do, I turned in at the office of the mills, and was warmly welcomed by the manager, who invited me to inspect the place. It is an exceedingly rambling and haphazard structure, but it gives employment to hundreds of people, mostly girls and women, whose pale faces and drooping figures bore testimony to the wearing nature of the work. The mill gets the wool in the raw state, straight from the grower, and the processes by which it is cleaned and carded and spun into thread, and dyed, and woven into cloth, and inspected, and weighed, and finally rolled up ready for the market, are many and intricate. The manager told me that the mill turned out thirty thousand yards of tweed a week, and he hoped to turn out even more, as soon as a reduction of the tariff permitted him to get into the American market. Even with a duty of forty-five per cent., he could compete with American tweeds, and with a lower duty he could undersell them.

It needed only a glance at the shabby, toil-worn men and women working in his factory to understand why this was true. I didn't ask him what wages his women earned, but I _did_ ask as to their hours of labour.

They go to work at 6:30 in the morning and work till six in the evening, with a three-quarter hour interval for breakfast and the same for lunch.

I saw groups of them, afterwards, strolling about the streets in the twilight, and sad and poor and spiritless they looked. Yet they are eager for the work, for at least it keeps them alive, and one can scarcely blame the manager for sticking to the market price, and so doing his best to meet a remorseless compet.i.tion. I confess that such economic problems as this are too stiff for me.

As I was about to leave, I casually mentioned my search for the Sheela-na-gig--and he knew where it was! It was over on the other bank, it seemed, not far from the river-front, and he directed me with great detail how to get to it; but, alas, in such a town of crooked streets, definite direction was impossible. However, with hope springing eternal, I crossed the bridge a third time, turned up-stream close beside the river, wandered into a board-yard, extricated myself, got into a blind alley that ended in a high wall and had to retrace my steps; asked man after man, who only stared vacantly and shook their heads; and finally found a boy who knew, and who eagerly left his work to conduct me to the spot.

Imagine with what a feeling of triumph I stood at last before the Sheela-na-gig!

It is carved over the wide arch of the entrance to what was once an abbey, but what I think is now a laundry--an impish, leering figure, clasping its knees up under its chin, and peering down to see who pa.s.ses. Underneath the imp are the words "St. Peter's Port," and underneath the words is a grotesque head. On either side of the arch is a sculptured plaque, that to the left bearing the words "May Satan never enter," and that to the right, "Wilo Wisp & Jack the Printer,"--the two, of course, forming a couplet.

While I was staring at these remarkable inscriptions and trying to puzzle out some meaning for them, an old woman, who had been watching me with interest from the door of her house, came out and tried to tell me the history of the gate. But she spoke so incoherently that I could make nothing of it beyond the fact that the inscriptions originated in two men's rivalry for possession of the property; so somebody else will have to untangle that legend.

A little way up the street there was a shop which, among other things, had post-cards displayed for sale, and I stopped in, thinking I might get a picture of the gate and perhaps learn something more of its story.