Part 5

A roar, as of breaking seas. We are approaching the open Atlantic, but though its salt is bitter on our lips, our view is obscured by sand-dunes. Then, as we round a bend in the road, the Fall of Asherancally breaks suddenly on us, tumbling through a gut in the mountainside--almost on to the road it seems. We stand under it. We watch the brown bulk of water dropping from the gut-head and dancing in foam on the rocks a hundred feet below. The roar is deafening. One might shout at the top of one's voice, and yet not be heard. The air is iridescent with spindrift, which shines in the sun and sprays coolingly on our cheeks. We lean on the bridge parapet, watching and listening.

[Illustration: LOCH NACUNG--MOONRISE.]

ORANGE GALLASES

I came across an old man to-day out in Lochros--a shock-headed old fellow in shirt and trousers, carrying water from a spring well near the Cross, and a troop of dogs snapping at his heels. "You don't seem to be popular with the dogs?" says I, laughing. "Oh, let them snap," says he. "It's not me they're snapping at, but my orange gallases!"

THE HUMAN VOICE

The human voice--what a wonder and mystery it is! "All power," said Whitman, "is folded in a great vocalism." I spoke to a man to-day on the roadside, near Maghery. He was a poor, raggedy fellow, with a gaunt, unshaven chin and wild eyes, and a couple of barefooted children played about the mud at his feet. He answered me in a voice that _thrilled_ me--deep, chestfull, resonant; a voice, that had he been an educated man, might have won fame for him, as a politician, say, or a preacher, or an actor. And voices like his are by no means uncommon along the western seaboard of Ireland. Men address you on the road in that frank, human, comrade-like way of Irishmen, out of deep lungs and ringing larynxes that bring one back to the time when men were giants, and physique was the rule rather than the exception. In such voices one can imagine the Fenians to have talked one with the other, Fionn calling to Sgeolan, and Oisin chanting the divine fragments of song he dreamed in the intervals of war and venery. Will Ireland ever recapture the heroic qualities--build personality, voice, gesture--or, as Whitman puts it: "Litheness, majestic faces, clear eyes"--that were hers down to a comparatively late period, and in places have not quite died out even yet? I believe she will.

LOCH ALUINN

A grey loch, lashed into foam by wind from nor' westward, lapping unquietly among reeds that fringe its margin. Boulders everywhere--erratics from the Ice Age--bleached white with rain. Crotal growing in their interstices, wild-mint, purple orchises and the kingly osmunda fern. A strip of tilled land beyond--green corn, for the most part, and potatoes. Slieve a-Tooey in the distance, a blue shadowy bulk, crossed and recrossed by mist-wreaths chasing one another over it in rapid succession. A rainbow framing all.

THE OPEN ROAD

The open road, the sky over it, and the hills beyond. The hills beyond, those blue, ultimate hills; the clouds that look like hills; the mystery plucked out of them, and lo, the sea, stretching away into the vast--white-crested, grey, inscrutable--with a mirage dancing on its furthest verge!

[ Transcriber's Note:

The following changes have been made to the original text. The first line presents the text as printed in the original, the second the amended text.

"The words of the maker o poems are the general light and dark." One "The words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark." One

survival of a pagan right of our forefathers. survival of a pagan rite of our forefathers.

better. It is ove the hill the wonders are. better. It is over the hill the wonders are.

'Glory be to the Father's, for ye every night for a week. Give us the 'Glory be to the Father's' for ye every night for a week. Give us the

]