FROM TORY TO ARAN. BY STEPHEN GWYNN. I saw her lights about an hour before sunrise on the morning of June 3, as she lay atanchor in Downings, which is the name given to the eastern bight of Sheephaven Bay. It was late to be afoot on the hill behind Portnablah, the little harbour on the west of that broad water; but I was returning from an evening spent with a friend who has put into practice the principles of the Gaelic League by setting a big outhouse in trim for dancing, and gathering his acquaintance, gentle and simple, about him for Irish dances, songs, music, and suchlike gaieties. A fine, hardy, sturdy race was to be seen there, and prosperouslooking, though we lived in a congested district (where the average valuation is under 30s. per annum). If they were prosperous, many of them, like the young farmer who escorted me over the hill, had in good part to thank "the Board" for it. He is one of many who supplement the ordinary hard work on a small farm by two months' still harder work, after the land's harvest is done, the harvest which the wintry sea offers to those who have skill and endurance to reap it. Thanks to the Board, that second harvest is now richly worth the reaping. Fifteen years ago, herrings caught in Downings Bay were worth from 5s. to 15s. a cran— and often they rotted for want of buyers. The cran or basket is a measure of capacity, and may hold from 600 to 1000 herrings according to their size the hundred being the "long hundred" of 123. At the present time Downings Bay herring in good condition are worth on the quay-head as the smacks land them from 158. to £3 the cran-and upwards. To put it still more simply, before the Board began its work, ten a penny was about the common price for herring landed on shore. Now, there are days when buyers would be glad to count down a penny for every herring. You will see men who have come in with their boats loaded down to the gunwale setting down the heavy baskets and stopping 1 "Three Days in the Granuaile," Oct. 1899. VOL. CLXXVI.-NO. MLXVII. X to pick up fish that have by girls-many of them skilled dropped out. workers brought over from Scotland, whose hands, they say, can hardly be seen while they work, and who earn up to 10s. a-day, while the local girls follow their example a little closer every year. But when we got the anchor up and were steaming out of Dunfanaghy channel, a couple of row-boats signalled to us. Shrewd enough, they had heard the steamer was bound west, and rowed across to intercept her on chance of a tow. The member of the Board and his colleague thought they well deserved it. Earlier in the When the Granuaile picked me up at Portnablah, where some work on the little harbour had to be inspected, my friends, I found, had stayed to see the herring fleet come in, and to watch the sale of fish. The sight had been encouraging, for there was £2000 paid down that morning on the on the quay, and about £500 of it went to the Board's boats. The balance went to the big luggers, some manned by fishermen from Arklow and Kinsale, but mainly sailing from Scotland sea going boats, equipped with steamwinches, some even propelled by steam, and all manned by fishermen who are that and nothing else. But it takes no great imagination to realise what £500 for one night's work means to the score or so of boats gathered from Downings Bay itself, and west to Kincashla, Burton's Port, and Douros, but specially from Tory-Tory, the northernmost, barrenest, and strangest of the many strange and barren islands that fringe Ireland's Atlantic seaboard. TORY AND ITS PEOPLE. It was the Tory folk who brought the thing home to me in the flesh-for I had seen none of the actual fishing or fishers. I had not been able to get out with the fleet, as no boat was fishing from the Portnablah side, nor had I been in Downings to see the work at the pier where the cleaning and packing is done morning they had seen these As One boat had come in with twelve cran, the other with fifteen, and had earned £2 a cran: £54 for the night's work among eight men; for the Tory people have all their boats "bought out," and the Board no longer takes a third share to cover the cost of boats and nets supplied. They were a curious motley group enough, these fellows, three or four wearing caps made from the fur of the common seal all of course speaking Irish among themselves, and using the English noticeably as a foreign tongue; but they all had the use of it. Fine oarsmen as they were, seamen passed the flat slab of rock, on the Granuaile noticed in from which rises the Horn them some lack of sea-craft: itself, with its shining face seathey did not know how to ward, 100 feet higher than the make fast for towing, nor how rest, we met the swell heaving to steer when in tow. One of big against us. There was the two steersmen was white hardly an air of wind, the sun in the face, and continually beat scorchingly; all about the shifted the tiller back and for- cliffs breeding gulls swarmed ward, while his eyes strained like bees, and their crying was anxiously ahead; nor did his innumerable in the quiet air. crew look at all comfortable. But betwixt us and Tory, Still, their position, dancing in where it rose like a bastioned the wash of the screw through castle out of the sea, waves a heavy swell, was eagerly surged into huge mounds, and coveted; for as we rounded the along the seaward cliffs of the nearest point of Horn Head Head they raced and leaped and came into view of the and shattered themselves; and whole fleet, which was drifting the boats at our tail danced and out under the lightest of airs, a leaped too. A mistake in steercommotion was evident. One ing might easily have meant a row-boat, in tow of a smack far capsize; for here in the Sound out in the middle of the bay, of Tory the tide runs strong, cast off and began to pull and was meeting the swell that feverishly in our direction; a came up out of the west, still small smack near our course travelling on the way that prepared to drop her lug-sail, some far-off Atlantic gale had and signalled to us passionately sent it. with coats and handkerchiefs. But the only lucky ones were two other row-boats right in our course, who put themselves slap across the vessel's bows, while in each the steersman stood waving and gesticulating. In a minute we had them alongside the ropes were passed aft from one boat to the other; and we started off with two on each string and the peller's wash between them. "Mind your steering now!" the captain shouted. pro And, indeed, he had reason. To the eastward of Horn Head, running through Skate Bay, with the horse-shoe cliff, 500 feet sheer, on our left, the sea was not big. But once we It was easy to tell, if only by the whole cut of him in his oilskins, that one steersman of the four, who sat wholly at his ease, with his tiller steady and no uncertainties as to how each wave should be met and parried, was not only a boatman, but a sailor to whom this business was no novelty. One might marvel that any man who had ever got out of that desolate island should return there, but they say the Tory men have no fault to find with it; that one man is back there with а fortune earned in Klondyke, another out of Australia, and so on. And I can tell for my own part that one of the bestknown leaders of the Gaelic 66 propaganda, and by general consent the best step-dancer in the north of Ireland, has given up his salaried work as organiser" of the Gaelic League and gone back to live on his native earth-or rock. It is an eloquent fact about Tory that rats cannot, and will not, and do not, subsist there; and about where I write, a man building a house thinks himself lucky if he can get a handful of Tory clay to build into the foundations, for then no rats will trouble him. But I am not advertising the clay as an article of commerce; an odd handful is the most that Tory can spare. There is water on the island, and there are stones, with a little earth in among them; but the bulk of the soil is said to be fish-heads, and for the turf they burn they must cross to the mainland. Tory is a republic nowadays, or perhaps administered like other places; it has anyhow a priest in residence and lighthouse keepers, so it is in touch with the Church and Government. But in the old days a king ruled it-a king of the Homeric type, with no precise functions. Such kings there were in all these outlying islands, and in many the title is still preserved. But time was when it was more than a title. Living memory recalls how the King of Inishkee came before the county court judge at Ballina, and stood there in all the splendour of his great stature and spread of shoulders and bushy beard. There was a question put to him, but he turned straight to the judge, and, "I am the King of Inishkee," he said; "and I am here to speak to the Queen of England. Who are you, and have you anything to show me that you speak for her?" The judge told him that he had read his commission in that court, and that whatever was said to him, was as if it were said to the Queen herself. Well," said the King of Inishkee, "that will do. Tell the Queen of England that they are asking my people to pay county cess. What is this county cess then? Is it not laid out for roads and bridges? What roads and bridges are there in Inishkee? Is it not laid out for police and magistrates? What police and magistrates are there in Inishkee? It is not just that my people should pay for these things. Tell the Queen of England that the King of Inishkee says his people will not pay the cess. And they did not pay it. Neither did they in Tory, for that matter, even after the king ceased to be. But the kingly office must, I think, have fallen into derision, for the last king was a dwarf: and the office did not survive him, for he at all events brought it into disrepute. His history, as I heard it told yesterday between two women, both of whom remembered him, deserves to be set down. "The first time I saw him was in my uncle's shop," said one, "an' a quare fright he gave me. All I seen of him was the head above the counter, and the two hands, like it would be a child reaching up; but the head had an old man's face, and I wondered whether some bad thing was in it." She described then how he was brought into "the room of the house, and how in order to get seated-for his feet only reached the cross-bar when he was sitting-the dwarf would tilt the chair forward and then jerk himself back. Only his legs were dwarfish; the head and body were man's size. And, queer object as he was, he found the way to beguile a woman. а Some stranger seeing him in Tory provided him with an education, and sent him back to be a schoolmaster to the islanders. But, unluckily, those were the days of active proselytising, and the king had been made into a Protestant, and "whatever kind of teaching he gave" soon excited displeasure, and he had to leave the island. For a long time he lived in a man's house in the village of the mainland whence boats sail for Tory, teaching whoever would come to him. Now this man had a daughter, "and a fine able-looking girl she was; and if ever a woman took anything she be to get something" (ie., some love-potion). At all events, she and the king ran off together to the neighbouring town and got married in secret. They had to cross the strand, and the wee legs of him wasn't fit to travel, and she be to lift and carry him like a wean. If I had a man, now, that I would need to carry, dear but I would hit him a slap and leave him lying. Wasn't it the strange thing that he would get one to follow him. Poor and all as I 66 was, the dear Lord knows I wouldn't follow him from this to the door." That was how the elder woman of the two, who had seen a hard life, described her feelings towards him; and her chief grievance against him was his change of creed. My other friend blamed him more for his bad treatment of the fine young woman after he got her; but the feeling of Tory was on the religious issue. He was king while he lived; but he died a Protestant, the only Protestant of the island, and the islanders would not give him burial among themselves. There was great talk what should be done with him; but at the last they took him to the mainland, and what is remembered is how they left the coffin some place on the side of a ditch, and went into a public-house and were all drinking together. If he got Christian burial at the rear hand (as they say here), it is the most respect he got from them. un We did not land on what once had been his kingdom, but cast loose the boats off the west end of the island, where it runs out low and flat to the tall lighthouse. It was believable to see so wild a surf running on that calm day, and one would have thought they might be hard set enough to reach the little landing-slip near to the village and the stump of an ancient round tower. But they were in good time, anyhow, for the night's fishing, and the tow, covering in a couple of hours what they would have needed half a day |