SUNDAY UNDER SLIEVE LEAGUE

It is Sunday. The dawn has broken clear after a night’s rain. The sunlight glitters in the soft morning air. The fragrance of peat, marjoram, and wild-mint hangs like a benediction over the countryside. A lark is singing; the swallows are out in hundreds. The road turns and twists—past a cabin, over a bridge—between fringes of wet grass. It dips suddenly, then rises sheer against a wisp of cloud into the dark bulk of Slieve League behind. I see the mountainy people wending in from all parts to Mass. I am standing on high ground, and can see the hiving roads—the men with their black coats and wide-awakes, and the women with their bright-coloured kerchiefs and shawls. Some of them have trudged in for miles on bare feet. They carry their brogues, neatly greased and cleaned, over their shoulders. As they come near the chapel they stop by the roadside or go into a field and put them on. The young girls—grey-eyed, limber slips from the hills—are fixing themselves before they go in of the chapel door. They stand in their ribboned heads and shawls pluming themselves, and telling each other how they look. The boys are watching them. I hear the fresh, nonchalant laugh and the kindly greeting in Irish—“Maidin bhreagh, a Phaid,” and the “Goidé mar tá tú, a Chait?” The men—early-comers—sit in groups on the chapel wall, discussing affairs—the weather, the crops, the new potato spray, the prospects of a war with Germany, the marrying and the giving in marriage, the letters from friends in America, the death and month’s mind of friends. The bell has ceased ringing. The men drop from their perch on the wall, and the last of them has gone in. The road is quiet again, and only the sonorous chant of the priest comes through the open windows—“Introibo ad altare Dei,” and the shriller response of the clerk, “Ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam.”