STRANGER THAN FICTION. THE BRONTËS AL FRESCO. THE BRONTËS AND THE GHOSTS. THE DEVIL AND THE POTATO BLIGHT. THE GREAT BRONTË FIGHT.

By Doctor William Wright.

I. THE BRONTËS AL FRESCO.

I proceed with this chapter in the first person, though the story came to me at second-hand. My tutor, the Reverend W. McAllister, narrated it to me, in the words in which he had heard it from a youthful cousin, and I am able to give it almost in the same words and in the form in which I wrote it out as an exercise in composition.

The scene described does not, however, rest on the authority of Mr. McAllister or his friend, but on the testimony of all who knew the Brontës in their home life. The same scene has been described to me by old men whose memory extended back to matters in the last century, and quite recently, when visiting the place, an aged neighbor pointed out the exact spot where he himself had witnessed the Brontës engaged in their amusements. The story is so characteristic that I give it in extenso, and with all details, as I got it:

“In 1824 I made my first great journey out into the big world, accompanied by my elder brother. I was then very young. The nature of our business obliged us to go on foot, and the distance traversed was two or three miles.

“Our errand brought us into the midst of the Brontës, and as we had to remain there six or seven hours, I had an opportunity of seeing, under various aspects, that extraordinary and unique family, whose genius came to be revealed a few years later by three little girls, on English soil.

“I first saw a group of the Brontë brothers together. I think there were six of them, and they were marching, in step, across a field towards a level road. Their style of marching, and whole appearance, arrested my attention. They were dressed alike, in home-spun and home-knitted garments, that fitted them closely, and showed off to perfection their large, lithe, and muscular forms. They were all over six feet high, but, with their close-fitting apparel and erect bearing, they appeared to me to be men of gigantic stature. They bounded lightly over all the fences that stood in their way, all springing from the ground and alighting together, and they continued to march in step without an apparent effort, until they reached the public road, and then they began, in a business-like way, to settle conditions, in preparation for a serious contest.

“A few men and boys watched the little group of Brontës timorously, from a distance, but curiosity drew my brother and myself close up to where they were assembled. They did not seem to notice us, or know that we were present, but proceeded with a match of rolling a large metal ball along the road. The ball seemed to be about six pounds weight, and the one who could make it roll furthest along the road would be declared the winner.

“The contest was to them an earnest business. Every ounce of elastic force in the great, muscular frames was called into action, and there was a profusion of strange, strong language that literally made my flesh to creep, and my hair to stand on end. The forms of expression which they used were as far from commonplace as anything ever written by the gifted nieces; and as the uncles’ lives were on a lower plane of civilization, and their scant education had not reduced their tongues to the conventional forms of speech, they gave utterance to their thoughts with a pent-up and concentrated energy never equalled in rugged force by the novelists.

“I had never seen men like the Brontës, and I had never heard language like theirs. The quaint conceptions and glowing thoughts and ferocious epithets that struggled for utterance, at the unlettered lips of the Irish Brontës, revealed the original quarry from which the vicar’s daughters chiselled the stones for their artistic castle-building, and disclosed the original fountain from which they drew their pathos and passion. Similar fierce originality and power are felt to be present in everything produced by the English Brontës, but in their case the intensity of energy is held in check by the Branwell temperament, and kept under restraint by education and culture.

“The match over, and the sweep-stakes secured, the brothers returned to their harvest labor as they went, clearing, like greyhounds, every fence that stood in their way. At that time no fame attached to the Brontë name, but the men that I had come upon were so different from the local gentry, farmers, flax-dressers, and such like people, who lived around them, that I became, all at once, deeply interested in them.

“From a distance I watched their shining sickles flashing among the golden grain, and caught snatches of song, which I afterwards found to be from Robert Burns. My interest, however, in the Brontës was shared by no one. They were then neither prophets nor heroes in their own country, and they were regarded with a kind of superstitious dread by their neighbors, rather than with interest or curiosity.

“Young as I then was, I persevered with my inquiries, and my curiosity was rewarded. I learned that the Brontës had a brother a clergyman in England, ‘a fine gentleman,’ then on a visit with them, and that the Brontë family were in the habit of holding an open-air concert every favorable afternoon in a secluded glen below their house. I remember wondering if the clergyman ever broke out in the vigorous vernacular of his kith and kin, but I was especially interested in the open-air concert.

“My brother and I, by the nature of our errand, could not return home till late in the evening, and as we were at leisure we made up our minds to assist at the concert. On pretence of gathering blackberries we explored the glen and discovered the place. No one would accompany us, and we were told, with looks of terror, that it would be at our peril if we went to the concert, as the brothers had ‘the black art,’ and were, above all men, to be avoided. We resolved notwithstanding to go as spectators, and waited with impatience till the day’s work should be over.

“About six o’clock a horn was blown, and the reapers suddenly dropped their sickles and strolled down leisurely to the concert glen. We had already preceded them, and taken our places on a high ridge bordering the glen, in a thicket of low brushwood.

“Three sisters were the first to arrive on the scene. They brought a spinning-wheel, a supply of oat-bread and buttermilk, and a green satchel which contained a violin. The men sat astride the trunk of a prostrate tree, and disposed of their afternoon collation in an incredibly short space of time, one wooden bowl, or noggin, supplying milk to each.

“Scarcely had the frugal meal been ended when one of the brothers began to thrum the fiddle, and quick as lightning two of the sisters and the other brothers were whirling and spinning airily over the grass. The other sister was busily plying her spinning-wheel and watching the moving scene. In turns each of the sisters took her place at the wheel, and the one relieved instantly plunged into the mazes of the dance.

“The girls were tall, like their brothers, and picturesque in their red tippets. Like their brothers, they were handsome and graceful. They were mature maidens, but they had not lost their elegant figures, or their fresh white and red complexions. Their homemade dresses, though of plain woollen material and simply made, fitted them well, and were in perfect harmony with their rustic surroundings. Their hair hung in ringlets round their shoulders, and they moved with unconscious gracefulness, whirling over the greensward as if they scarcely touched it, or mazing through a ‘country dance’ or an ‘eight-part reel,’ or waltzing round and round in a manner to make the onlooker giddy.

“There was nothing in the whole performance suggestive of the rough peasant, or the country clown. All was exquisite grace and courtesy. The musician was also relieved from time to time, each of the brothers taking his turn at the violin.

“The scene was of the most weird and romantic character. The place selected for the family dance was in a secluded widening of the glen, down which flows a little stream that makes a murmuring noise as it tumbles over stones, and among the roots of alder and willow. It was wide enough to give full scope for extended galops, and sufficient for all the exigencies of Sir Roger de Coverley. The ground was thickly carpeted with grass, and surrounded by large trees with overhanging branches. The trees were festooned with ivy and honeysuckle. Sweetbrier and wild roses overflowed the hedges in great profusion, and ‘Flowering Sally,’ in pink bunches, fringed the brook.

“The sun was sinking in the west, throwing dark shadows down the sides of the Newry mountains, and shedding a pale glory on Slieve Donard and the other lofty peaks of the Mourne range. Close by stood the Knock Hill, generally sombre and unpicturesque, but on that occasion it glowed in the parting rays. The little valley, as it dipped downward, opened out to the west, and through the opening the setting sun poured a rich flood of light on the animated groups, mating each dancer with a long, dark shadow, and doubling the number of figures that tripped lightly over the grass.

“As the sun dropped behind the ridge of Armagh the concert came to an end, after a long bout of Scotch jigs, in which two and two in a row danced opposite to each other, chased by their tall, unearthly shadows. The closing scene was a great effort of endurance, but none seemed to weary, and with a few skips into the air, the arms raised in curves above the head, and the fingers being made to crack, all was still.

“There were four spectators of this wonderful family gathering—my brother and myself, a goat that was quietly barking a tree beside us, and pausing occasionally to look at the frantic display, and, on the other side of the valley from where we were, the clergyman brother, who walked to and fro, in solemn black, apparently in meditation, and taking no notice of the gleeful recreation of his brothers and sisters.

“There was no dawdling when the dance was over. Each of the brothers bowed with an air of gallantry to each of the sisters, and then one of the brothers caught up the spinning-wheel, and, poising it on his shoulder, strode up the homeward side of the glen. All followed smartly and disappeared, in company with the sober figure in black.

“We slipped out of the bower where we had sat entranced, and hurried homeward, with feelings of uncertainty as to the reality of things, in the gathering darkness.”

This is the most complete account I have ever heard of the summer-evening concerts held by the Brontës. Others had often seen these large-limbed, sinewy children of Anak dancing on the green with their flying shadows; but they had failed to appreciate the sylphlike motions of the maidens, or the stately curvetting of the gigantic brothers, and looked on the whole exhibition as something uncanny, and as tending to confirm the popular belief that the Brontës had dealings with the powers of the nether world.

The unique forms and forceful language of the Brontës were lost on their commonplace neighbors, who looked on them as strange and dangerous people. In fact, they were not regarded with much favor by the people of the district, from whom they carefully held aloof; and the belief that they were in league with the devil received a certain amount of confirmation, as we shall see by and by.

When I first began to take an interest in the Brontës I was admonished, in a mysterious manner, to have nothing to do with such people. I was advised to keep out of their way, lest I should hear their odious language, and it was even hinted that they might in some Satanic way do me bodily harm.

I am bound to say that matters in this respect have not altered much since for the better. My attempts, recently, to get accurate information on special points, regarding the Brontës and their ways, have been looked upon as a kind of craze, out of which, I have been assured, I was never likely to reap much credit. And even educated people, when replying to my inquiries on matters of fact, have sometimes felt called on to remind me that I was taking much pains with regard to a dangerous and outlandish family.

In fact, the Brontës paid the penalty for being a little cleverer than the people with whom they came in contact, and with whom they never associated. The Brontës looked down on the people of their own rank in life, and permitted no familiarities of any kind; and the only person who ever joined in their dances, as far as is known, was Farmer Burns. As they held aloof from everybody, they were only known by their strange language and odd ways. Imagination filled up the unknown, and gossips, as usual, made the most of every little circumstance. The fact that Mrs. Brontë had once been a Catholic prejudiced in no small degree the minds of Protestants against the children.

The clergyman’s presence in no way restrained the mirthful exuberance of the dancers. Before he left home he was always one of the party, and on his visits from college and from his living he often joined in their mirth, as formerly. But on the occasion referred to by Mr. McAllister he seemed uninterested in the familiar scene.

He was probably thinking of his precocious little women, Maria and Elizabeth, whom he had left at Cowan Bridge school a month before; or his heart may have been in the Haworth vicarage with the motherless little girls, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, who were under the care of their prim maiden aunt. Even then the children were wise beyond their years, though, in their narrow world, they had scarcely begun to accumulate the experience which enabled them to give local form and color to their father’s stories.

II. THE DEVIL AND THE POTATO BLIGHT.

The concert glen and romantic brook witnessed very different ceremonies from that just described. At one period an awful drama took the place of lissome glee, when Hugh Brontë, “the giant,” in wild passion, sought to come into actual bodily conflict with the devil.

The potato blight fell as a crushing blow on the hopes of the Brontës, and proved the turning-point of their fortunes. They were growing in prosperity, and had enlarged their farm by the savings of many years. Through industry and frugality they had added field to field until their material success seemed to be assured; but while they were rejoicing in the position to which they had attained, the potato crop blackened, and melted away before their eyes.

Ireland at that period had two kinds of tenant farmers. One resembled the drowsy oriental, who basks in the sun, and seems content, not to live, but to exist.

In Ireland a large number of people on the land simply existed in those days. They knew that if they drained or improved their farms the landlords would raise their rents, so as to sweep away the entire profits arising from their improvements. They were well aware that any enlargement or brightening of their homesteads would cause the agent to scent superfluous money, and put on the screw; for a tenant would be more likely to make an effort to hold on to a comfortable house than to an uncomfortable one. Every staple of thatch put upon the leaky roof, or bucket of whitewash brushed on to the sooty walls of the cabin, gave the landlord a new hold on the tenant, and supplied the agent with a new pretext for increasing the rent for his master, or securing a present for himself. And there were agents so kindly disposed towards the miserable tenants that they preferred one pound as a present to themselves to two pounds added to the landlord’s rent-roll.

Under these circumstances tenants of the indolent type did not drain their lands or improve the appearance of their houses; and if they had thriving cattle they kept them concealed in remote fields when the agent was about; and when they were obliged to meet either agent or landlord, they decked themselves out like Jebusites, in ragged and squalid garments. It thus happened that landlords and land agents never saw their tenantry except in rags, and thus the tenants contrived to order themselves lowly and reverently to their betters.

The land of the thriftless brought forth potatoes in plenty. A little lime and dike scourings, mixed together, sufficed for manure. The potato seed was planted on the lea-sod, and covered up in ridges four or five feet wide. The elaborate preparation for planting potatoes in drills was then unheard of. Cabbage plants were dibbled into the edges of the ridges, and the potatoes and cabbages grew together. Abundant supplies of West-reds and Yellow-legs and Copper-duns, with large Savoy and Drumhead cabbages, only needed to be dug and gathered, to maintain existence.

Oats, following the potato crop, provided rough, wholesome bread, and little yellow rats of Kerry cows supplied milk. Great stalwart men and women lived on potatoes three times a day, with bread and buttermilk and an occasional egg. Sometimes, in the autumn, a lean and venerable cow would be fed for a few weeks on the after grass (flesh put on in a hurry being considered more tender) and then killed, salted, and hung up to the black back in the kitchen for family use. This pièce de résistance was the only flesh-meat ever known in the homes of such people.

Two pigs, fattened yearly on potatoes, and a few lambs, taken from the early clover, met the demands of the landlord. The wool of the sheep, spun, knitted, or woven at home, supplied scant, but sufficient, wardrobes. For fuel they had whins, or furze, cut from the fences, and turf from the bogs. The fire was preserved by raking a half-burned turf every night in the ashes, but a coal to light the fire was occasionally borrowed from more provident neighbors, and carried by a pair of tongs from house to house. Matches were unknown in those days.

The men broke stones by the roadsides, on warm days, for pocket-money or tobacco, and the women obtained their little extras by the produce of their surplus eggs, which they carried to market in little osier hand-baskets.

Existence in such homes flowed smoothly, one year being exactly like another. The people had no prospects, no hopes, no ambitions. They lived from hand to mouth, and, while all went well, the fulness of each day was sufficient for their simple wants. In their diurnal rounds they gathered their creels of potatoes, and drove their Kerry cows to the fields, golden with tufted ragweeds and purple with prickly thistles.

Such people seldom had their rents raised or their improvements confiscated, for the simple reason that they never made improvements, and never sought, through sustained effort, to better their conditions. They had no margin beyond the bare necessaries of life, no resources to fall back upon, in case of calamity. With barely enough to supply their daily wants, they lived on the verge of starvation, and when the famine came they starved.

The Brontës were people of a different fibre. They would not succumb without a struggle. They had advanced from the Emdale cabin to the Lisnacreedy cottage, and thence to the house and farm in Ballynaskeagh. The primitive corn-kiln, with its insignificant and precarious profits, had been abandoned for the lucrative occupation of macadamizing roads, and cultivating the land.

The Brontës worked hard, and were frugal as well as industrious. They had hoarded the savings of many years, and invested all in a new farm, and they felt that they had a right to look forward to a condition of prosperity and independence.

The class to which the Brontës belonged differed widely from the inert and feckless farmers that encumbered many a bankrupt estate. They did not live from hand to mouth, spending each day’s efforts on each day’s wants, and passing the summer in an easy doze. No people on earth slaved and saved as they did. They worked late and early. Their wives and daughters and little children rose with the sun, and labored the live-long day. Every good thing raised on the farm went to market, to meet the landlord’s exactions, and to add to the little store. Butter, bacon, fowl, eggs, and such like, raised by the laborious housewife, were sacred to the landlord, and to the hoard accumulated against the rainy day.

For such slaves there was little recreation except a half holiday on Christmas Day, with a party display on the Twelfth of July or the Seventeenth of March. No toil, however, could crush out of them the desire to better their lot, but their moiling and saving seldom resulted in anything more brilliant than a five-pound note to pay a son’s passage to America, or a twenty-pound portion for the daughter.

The industry of the Brontës was not in vain. They lived under the best landlords that Ireland has ever produced. “The Sharman estate,” now known as “the Sharman-Crawford property,” has been blessed by a succession of Christian landlords, who recognized that landed property had duties as well as privileges, and who have made it their life work to propagate their doctrines by peaceful persuasion.

On the Sharman estate the Brontës had a fair field for their industries. They worked in absolute harmony, as far as appeared to the outside world. They were a loving family in their way, but without the shows of love. Their home was all the world to them, and they clung to it, in early life, with something of the affectionate attachment that Emily Brontë and her sisters afterwards manifested towards the sombre parsonage at Haworth. They were healthful, hopeful and happy in their farm, with the growing signs of plenty around them.

At this juncture the potato blight, which cracked the framework of Ireland’s economic arrangements, blasted the Brontë paradise. The affection of the farmer towards his growing crops is in proportion to the solicitude with which he has watched over them; but the Brontës only learned fully what a treasure the potato crop had been to them when it was taken away. Never had their farm seemed so beautiful, or the potatoes appeared so bountiful, but, in a night, the fields were smitten black, and the stench of rotting leaves filled the air. The tubers became rotten and repulsive, instead of being white and floury.

Many theories were advanced to account for the calamity. Pamphlets were published and sermons preached, to show that national disaster had followed on the heels of national wrongdoing. Seasons for humiliation and fasting and prayer were set apart, to supplicate Almighty God to take away the awful judgment.

The Brontë mind never ran smoothly with the common current. To them the evil appeared to be simply the work of the devil. The Brontës held the simple old Zoroastrian creed that everything beneficent was the work of God, and everything maleficent the work of the Evil One.

Such opinions were not confined to the Brontës. As children we were given to understand that frosted blackberries were clubbed by the devil, who had blown his breath upon them as he passed by; and of course we all knew that the old Enemy, with the club foot, lurked in the blackberry bushes.

Servants and common laborers held to the belief, no doubt prompted and fortified by the action of the Brontës, that the devil went bodily from potato field to potato field, in his work of destruction; and many reports got into circulation, that he had been actually seen among the potatoes, in the form of a black dog or black bull, but that he always vanished in a flash of lurid light when challenged.

Hugh Brontë no more doubted that the devil, in bodily form, had destroyed the potato crop than he doubted his own existence. He saw the prop struck from under the family by a malignant enemy, and he would not tamely submit to the personal injury. It was both cruel and unjust that the devil, who never did any work, should pollute the fruits of their toil. He would shame the fiend out of his foul work; and for this purpose he would go deliberately to the field, and gather a basketful of rotten potatoes. These he would carry solemnly to the brink of the glen, and, standing on the edge of a precipice, call on the fiend to behold his foul and filthy work; and then, with great violence, dash them down as a feast for the fetid destroyer. This ceremony of feasting the fiend on the proceeds of his own foul work was often repeated, with fierce and desperate energy; and the Devil’s Dining-room is still pointed out by the neighbors.

I knew a man who witnessed one of these scenes. He spoke of Hugh Brontë’s address to the devil as being sublime in its ferocity. With bare, outstretched arms, the veins in his neck and forehead standing out like hempen cords, and his voice choking with concentrated passion, he would apostrophize Beelzebub, as the bloated fly, and call upon him to partake of the filthy repast he had provided. The address ended with wild, scornful laughter as Brontë hurled the rotten potatoes down the bank.

The dramatic power of the ceremony was so real, and the spell of Brontë’s earnestness was so contagious, that my informant, who was not a superstitious man, declared that for a few seconds after the challenge was given he watched in terror, expecting the fiend to appear.

III. THE GREAT BRONTË FIGHT.

The fight between Welsh Brontë and Sam Clarke of Ballynaskeagh was an era-making event. The contest took place long before my time, but I had a precise and full account of the battle from two eye-witnesses. No encounter of the kind in County Down ever made such a noise, or left such a lasting impression. Like the flight of Mahomet or the founding of Rome, it became a fixed point around which other events ranged themselves.

Women would speak of their children as born, or their daughters married, so many years before or after the fight; and old men, in referring to their ages, would tell how they had been present when Welsh Brontë licked Sam Clarke, and that they must have been of such an age at the time. It was one of those famous encounters which only required the pen of Pindar to give it immortality in epic form.

The history of the affair which I here submit embodies the conclusions at which I have arrived, after comparing twenty or thirty versions; but I am specially indebted to the late Mr. John Todd of Croan, who was present at the battle with his brother James, and who narrated the incidents of the contest, with many picturesque details. I should add, however, that the Todds were friends of the Brontës, and told the story with the warmth of partisans.

Welsh Brontë had a sweetheart called Peggy Campbell, and she had a little, delicate, deformed brother who used to go to Ballynafern school on crutches. Some of the big healthy boys thoughtlessly amused themselves by tormenting the little cripple. He often arrived home with his clothes torn and daubed with mud, and sometimes showing in his person the signs of ill-treatment. After the manner of school-boys, he would never tell on his tormentors. Welsh’s sweetheart, however, had discovered the cowardly and cruel treatment to which her little brother had been subjected, and appealed to Welsh to protect him.

Welsh had, no doubt, often heard the story of his father’s wrongs, when a child, and, at a hint from Peggy, constituted himself the champion of the injured boy. He went to Sam Clarke, who was a near relative of the chief offenders, and begged him to interfere.

Clarke, who was said to be something of a bully, advised Brontë to mind his own business, and Brontë replied that that was the exact thing he was doing; and then he added, as a threat, that unless Clarke restrained his brutal relatives he would chastise them himself. Hot words ensued, and Brontë and Clarke parted with expressions of mutual defiance.

Welsh Brontë’s blood was up. His sense of justice was roused on behalf of an ill-used child, and his feelings of chivalry impelled him to become the champion of his sweetheart’s brother.

Meanwhile the boys were meditating vengeance on their victim, who, in addition to the crime of meek endurance, had, they believed, proved a sneak, by telling of their misdeeds.

Welsh Brontë resolved to watch the children on their way home from school on the following day. He took up his position in a clump of trees somewhere near the glen. He waited long, but the school-children did not appear, and, thinking that perhaps they had returned home by another path, he left his ambush to resume his work. Suddenly he heard hilarious cheering and piteous cries, and hurrying towards the spot from which the noise came, he found the school engaged in the ceremony of “ducking the clash beg,” or tale-bearer.

They had taken the poor little cripple’s crutches from him, and had placed him in the middle of a pond of water, up to his neck, and then, having taken hands, they danced round the pond, chanting, “Clash beg!” “Clash beg!” “Clash beg!”

Welsh Brontë took in the situation at a glance, and captured the two biggest Clarkes before they knew he was near. He then compelled them to wade into the pond, and support gently to the edge their victim. When they had placed him on the dry ground, he was so exhausted that he could neither stand nor support himself on his crutches, and Brontë obliged the Clarkes to carry him home on their backs, time about, the water dripping down their clothes. They did as Brontë directed them, but only after considerable chastisement.

The other children had fled home in alarm, and had given a highly colored description of the inhuman manner in which Brontë was treating the Clarkes. Some of them reported that he had actually drowned them in the pond. On that night a challenge from Sam Clarke reached Welsh Brontë, and was instantly accepted.

The time for angry words had gone, and all preliminary formalities were carried out according to rule, and with perfect courtesy. “Seconds” were appointed, the day was fixed, and a professional pugilist, who resided at Newry, was engaged to act as referee. Both men went into close training, and the event was awaited with the most intense excitement for ten miles round.

The day, a charming summer day, at last arrived. A crowd numbering ten thousand—some estimated the number at from thirty to fifty thousand—assembled. They came together from Newry, Banbridge, Rathfriland, Dromore, Hilltown, Warrenpoint, Loughbrickland, and other towns and districts. Such an assemblage of the scoundrelism of that region had never been drawn together before. But they were not all scoundrels, for public opinion had not, at that time, affixed the stamp of infamy indelibly to the brutal exhibitions of the ring; and it was said that a number of sporting clergymen and country gentlemen were present, undisguised and unashamed.

Many circumstances rendered the field famous. The mothers of the combatants had fed their sons for the fray like gamecocks; oat-bread and new milk were the staple food which was supposed to give muscle, strength, and endurance.

Shortly before the fight Clarke’s mother, when giving him his last meal before the encounter, said to him, “Sam, my son, may you never get bit or sup from me more, if you do not lick the mongrel.”

This Spartan speech spread through the field like wildfire, and such was the code of honor, on that occasion, that the exhortation was much blamed, and led to a strong current of popularity in favor of Brontë. The word “mongrel,” referring to the fact that her son’s antagonist had had a Catholic mother, was considered unfitting to be used in connection with the noble encounter that was about to take place.

The ring was roped off in the hollow of a green field; the multitude stood on the rising ground around, and all could see the entire ring. Three or four hundred men were enrolled as “special order preservers,” and stood in a circle round the ring, two or three deep. The seconds and referee and umpire were in their places at the opposite sides of the ring.

The hour fixed to begin was twelve o’clock, and prompt to the minute the two combatants strode down leisurely through the crowd, each with his sweetheart leaning on his arm; their mothers already occupied seats of honor outside the ring.

Clarke was an older and maturer man than Brontë, and much bigger. Beside him, Brontë, in his tight-fitting homespun, looked slender and youthful and overmatched.

In consequence of the ungenerous and unguarded words spoken by Clarke’s mother, sympathy, as we have seen, was already on Brontë’s side, and this was greatly increased by the natural feeling that prompts the generous to take the weak side.

As far as I have been able to ascertain, the original cause of the quarrel was wholly lost sight of before the fight began. No one seemed to give a thought to the circumstance that Brontë had got into the affair by espousing the cause of a helpless boy. After listening to an account of the fight, from some old man who had witnessed it, I have often asked what it was about, and I have generally got for answer, “Oh, it was just a fight,” my question being evidently deemed irrelevant, and somewhat silly.

The champions stepped into the ring, and their sweethearts with them. As each stripped he handed his clothes to his future wife, and these two women stood, each with her lover’s garments on her arm, till the matter was decided.

Time was not accurately kept, but the battle was said to have lasted three or four hours. At first Clarke had the advantage in strength and weight, but Brontë, who had long arms, was lithe and active and wiry, and did not seem to weary as the day wore on. On the contrary, Clarke began to show signs of fatigue, but the spectators thought he was simply husbanding his strength. Throughout the whole contest not a word was heard. Suddenly, Miss Campbell’s voice rang out clear in the silence: “Welsh, my boy, go in and avenge my brother, and the mongrel.”

Peggy Campbell, by her woman’s instinct, discerned that the hour for the final effort and victory had come. Welsh responded like a lightning flash. A few awful moments followed. The spectators held their breaths and some fainted, others covered their eyes with their hands, or averted their faces. Terrific crushing and crashing blows were heard all over the field, and when the blows ceased to resound, Sam Clarke was lying a motionless heap in the ring.

The crowd, after the long suspense and hushed silence, lost all control of themselves, and wanted to rush in and chair the victor, but the “special order preservers” held the ring, and the sea of human beings surged against them in vain.

Welsh Brontë declined to receive congratulations until he had deposited his antagonist safely at home in bed. The fight was followed by no evil consequences, and Sam Clarke and Welsh Brontë became fast friends from that day forth.

All were agreed as to the closing scene. During the last few seconds the fight became so fierce and furious that the blood of the spectators ran cold. Nothing like it for wild fury and Titanic ferocity had ever been witnessed, and no such battle has ever, since or before, been fought in County Down.

IV. THE BRONTËS AND THE GHOSTS.

The glen, on the edge of which the Brontës lived, lay secluded among the hills, remote from the more frequented thoroughfares of the country. It was a beautiful and romantic spot by day, but lonesome and desolate at night. For miles round it had the reputation of being haunted, and few passed that way after dark. Those who were obliged to do so heard unnatural splashes in the stream, and rustlings among the bracken, and strange moanings and sobbings among the trees, when there was not a breath of air stirring.

Strange and fitful cries were said to be heard in the glen, and doleful wailings, as of some one in agony.

Long ago, according to tradition, a woman had been murdered in the glen by her false lover and betrayer. Hugh Brontë had told the story, with minute details and local color, till everybody who frequented the gatherings at the kiln knew it by heart.

The villain had enticed his victim to Rathfriland fair, on pretence of getting the wedding ring. He had there attempted to strangle her, but she had escaped from his grasp, and was making her way home to her mother, through fields and byways, when, according to one of Patrick Brontë’s unpublished songs:

He waylaid her in the lonely glen, and murdered her under circumstances of great atrocity. On that night the ghost of the murdered woman rushed upon the assassin, and, with a wild scream, dragged him from his bed and through the window of his cabin, and down, down, down, with unearthly yells, to the bottomless pit. The whole story was told in verse, I believe, by Patrick Brontë, and sung to a sad air at local gatherings. It ran partly thus:

The punishment was, according to local sentiment, well deserved; but both were doomed to walk the earth for a thousand years. They had made their abode in the glen, hence the doleful and dismal voices.

Another circumstance added to the horror with which the glen was regarded at night. It was said that, at a remote period, a man who had been robbed committed suicide, at a crossing of the brook. He was still living when found with his throat cut, and up to his last breath he continued to moan, with a gurgling sound, “There were ten tenpennies in my pocket at the river.”

I believe the story was founded on fact. A man had committed suicide under the circumstances narrated, but in quite a different part of the country. The deed, however, had come to be located in the Brontë glen, and increased the superstitious awe with which the place was then regarded. A snipe frequented the spot at night, and as people attempted to cross, it would start with a sudden screech from almost beneath their feet. The bird with the unearthly yell was supposed to be the spirit of the unfortunate man.

On one occasion Hugh Brontë was riding home with a neighbor. When they had reached the glen a headless man appeared on the road in front of them. The neighbor’s horse stood shivering, as if rooted to the ground, but Brontë’s horse, without any appearance of fear, walked up to the dreadful object, and Brontë, unmoved, and without pause or word, simply cracked his whip at it, and it disappeared in a flash of light.

Ghost baiting became a passion with the Brontës, and though they were too proud to associate much with their neighbors, they were not averse to being stared at and talked of by them.

The mill at the lower end of the glen, where now stand Mr. Ratcliffe’s dwelling-house and offices, was haunted. Lights flitted through it at night, and no one would go near it after sunset. When the terror was at its height Hugh Brontë armed himself with a sword and a Bible, and went alone to encounter the ghost or devil, or whatever it might be.

The neighbors, who saw Brontë marching to his doom, stood afar off in the darkness, and awaited the result. Unearthly noises were heard, and it was clear that a serious contest was proceeding. After a long delay Brontë returned, bruised and battered and greatly exhausted, but he would give no account of what had transpired.

His secrecy regarding his adventure increased the terror of the superstitious, for it was given out and believed that Brontë, having been worsted in the encounter, saved his life by making some compact with the fiend or ghost. And some even believed that he was ever after in league with the powers of darkness.

This fearsome theory seemed to be confirmed by Hugh Brontë’s subsequent action. One dark and dismal night, the ghost in the glen began to wail like a child in distress. The people barred their doors, covered their heads in bed with their blankets, and stopped their ears, to keep out the unearthly sounds; but Hugh Brontë went down quietly to the glen, and soothed the ghost until by little and little its moaning died away.

On several occasions it was believed that Hugh was actually seen in the glen, standing with his hand on the mane of a magnificent black horse, but when any neighbor drew near, the black horse dwindled into a great black cat, which kept purring around Brontë, and rubbing itself against his legs. As soon as the neighbor withdrew, the cat would again develop into the large black horse, and Brontë was often seen riding up and down upon it, near precipices and ravines where there was no path!

There was also supposed to be a white-sheeted figure that used to frequent the glen, carrying a little child in her arms. It was said that she was in the habit of asking for a night’s lodging, but never seemed disposed to accept it. She generally kept her face covered, or averted, but when it was exposed it proved to be a toothless, grinning skull, with a light shining from each eyeless socket.

One of the Brontë sisters and her daughter lived in a house near by, in which a man called Fraser had hanged himself. The house was declared to be haunted. Apparitions appeared in it, both by day and night, but especially at night. Noises were heard in the rooms during the hours of darkness. When the inmates slept at night, something like a huge frog with claws used to rush up the clothes from the foot of the bed, settle on their chests, and almost suffocate them.

Hugh went to his sister’s house one night, taking his gun with him. He upbraided Fraser for his ungallant and mean conduct in frightening lone women, and then called on him to come out like a man and face him. But nothing appeared, the ghost evidently declining to face a loaded musket.

Brontë was importunate in his challenge, taunting Fraser’s ghost with all kinds of sarcastic gibes and accusations, that he might irritate it into appearing, but the ghost would not be drawn. Then he fired off his gun, and challenged the ghost to meet him face to face, using every scornful and reproachful epithet to drive it into a passion, but all in vain.

On the following night Hugh returned to the haunted house with a fiddle, and tried to coax the ghost to appear in response to the music. The ghost, however, remained obdurate, regardless alike of threats, reproaches, and blandishments. Brontë returned home that night in a state of wild excitement. All the way he incessantly called on Fraser to come and shake hands with him, and make up their quarrel.

He retired to bed in a delirium of frenzy, and during the night the ghost appeared to him, and gave him a terrific squeeze, from which he never recovered. He died shortly after in great suffering, upbraiding Fraser for his heartless cruelty and cowardice, and he declared, dying, that when he reached the land of shadows he would take measures to prevent Fraser from haunting his sister and niece. After Hugh’s death the rumblings and apparitions ceased to trouble his sister’s house.

The great horror, however, of the haunted glen was the Headless Horseman. The phantom generally made its appearance among thickets of tangled bushes, which no horse could penetrate, and glided silently over uneven and broken ground, where no horse could have gone.

It always appeared to be ridden and guided by a man in flowing robes, whose feet were firmly in the stirrups and whose hands held the bridle, but whose head had been chopped off, leaving only a red and jagged stump.

The ghastly spectacle was so minutely described by the Brontës that others carried the picture of it in their imaginations, and it is not to be wondered at if many thought they saw the spectre among the shimmering shadows of the trees.

A neighbor of the Brontës, Kaly Nesbit, a very old and, I believe, a very good man, once gave to a number of us a vivid account of the apparition. He told the story with great earnestness, and with apparent conviction as to its truth. I give his account as nearly as I can in his own quaint language:

“I heerd the horse nichering in the glen. It was not the voice of a horse but of a fiend, for it came out of the bowels of the earth, and shook the hills, and made the trees quake. Besides, there was no room for a horse on the steep bank, and among the bushes and brablack.

”I had just had a drap of whiskey, about a noggin, and I wasn’t a bit afeard of witch or warlock, ghost or devil, and so I stepped into the glen to see for myself whatever was to be seen.

“At first I could not see any inkling of a horse, but I heerd the branches swishing along his sides, at the lower end of the glen. Then I saw a large dark object as big as a haystack coming nixt me, and walking straight through trees and bushes as if they were mere shadows.

“I juked down behind a hedge of broom, and as I hunkered in the shadow he came on in the slightly dusk light. The horse was as big as four horses, and at a distance I thought the rider was a huge blackavised man; but when he came fornenst me the moon fell full upon him through a break in the trees, and then I saw that he was crulged up on the saddle, and that only a red and ghastly stump stuck up between his shoulders, where his head should have been.

”I escaped unseen, but just as the terrible thing passed me it nichered again horribly, and I saw sparks of fire darting out of its mouth.

“It then turned and cut triangle across the valley, passing over the cockpit, and walking upon the air, as it emerged into the moonlight. It walked up straight against the steep edge of the quarry-pit, and vanished into the bank. I saw it vanishing by degrees, like a shadow, at first black, but growing lighter and lighter, till it entirely disappeared, and there was nothing on the high bank where it stopped but the bright moonlight.”

Kaly Nesbit had the reputation of being a very good man. I knew him pretty well, especially as a near relative of his had been my kind old nurse, who imparted to me much Brontë lore. I am sure he believed the fascinating story he told; but a noggin of whiskey is a rather indefinite quantity, and Kaly Nesbit, on that night, may have had his faculties for hearing and seeing in a rather sensitive condition.

However that may have been, his sober and earnest account of the monstrous spectre, confirming, as it did, the wildest stories of the Brontës, created a profound impression.