Source: England from a Back-Window; with Views of Scotland and Ireland
Published: 1878
Author: James Montgomery Bailey

Biographical Note
James Montgomery Bailey (1841-1894) was born at Albany, New York, and after receiving a common school education, learned the trade of a carpenter. He moved to Danbury, Connecticut in 1860, and worked at his trade for the two following years but found time to write occasionally for the newspapers. During the Civil War he served in the Seventeenth Connecticut Volunteers. In 1870 he established the Danbury News, for which he wrote humorous sketches, sometimes original, often simply descriptive of commonplace happenings, which won for him a national reputation and made his paper known throughout the country. England from a Back Window was published in 1878.

Owning a whole Graveyard

On my way from Tuam to Limerick, I stopped over at Athenry for several hours. To look at the place, you would think it had not a population of five hundred; but in 1871 it contained twelve hundred people. I understand it has not fallen away much since then.

I carried a letter of introduction to a gentleman in Athenry, the manager of a mill.

It seems as though you could walk all over Athenry, and touch every house, in a half-hour. It is composed mostly of one-story stone houses roofed with straw and earth. The village lies in low ground, and on this rainy afternoon it seemed to be fairly wallowing in mud. There was but one street, with branching lanes and courts, but little attempt at sidewalks, and still less at road pavements. Standing on the walls of its ruined castle, and looking about over the soggy, stony, and treeless surrounding country, one might be pardoned for inquiring how the Athenry people manage to exist. He would have certainly wondered how any man in good circumstances could come to reside there. Every feature of the place was depressing.

But home is home wherever you may locate it. Beneath those sod roofs were love and patience, and envy and hope, and jawing and scolding, just the same as in the homes of affluence.
Way off, thousands and thousands of miles from here, are hearts that turn night and day to thee, thou muddy and forlorn Athenry, and yearn for thee with all the intensity the human bosom is capable of. Athenry was once a walled city, and the home of a king. This was when Connaught was a country by itself, and the last king occupied the castle which is in ruins here now.

He was the last king. Five hundred years ago he fought with the English, and was defeated and killed. That put an end to the glory of Athenry, and knocked the legs from the kingdom of Connaught. Part of the walls of the place still remain, and one of its gateways. Pieces of the wall appear here and there in field and garden, and even as a fraction of some house, the builder economizing it in the structure.

Then there are the four walls of the castle, with a portion of the wall which was about that; and even the indentation of the moat still remains.

The castle was about forty feet square, and about fifty feet high. The first floor still remains, it being formed by the massive arches which make the cellar. My friend took me down into the cellar, the floor of which was scarcely four feet below the earth’s surface. In addition to milling, he did a little in agricultural implements; and he had several reapers stowed away here, the building being on ground he rented. I was glad to see these reapers here, it looked so natural. I never yet saw a deserted old building in a country village which did not have some sort of agricultural machinery stowed away within it. There had been hens here, too, in this castle of a king; and they had roosted on those reapers, as was quite evident. Hens are very fond of new machinery and fancy sleighs for roosting-purposes.

My companion showed me how he could put a roof on the walls at a small expense, and without interfering with them at all, which would give him the first floor for a store-room; but the people of Athenry would not allow him. It was his own property, of course, as he had a lease of it; but he didn’t care to run counter to the wishes of the community in which he was a resident. They didn’t want to see the place desecrated; and although the greater part of them did not have a whole suit of clothing to their backs, and rarely extended their bill of fare beyond potatoes and milk, still they took an interest in ruins, and knew the proprieties of things.

Another interesting ruin in Athenry is that of a church. A large, fine church it was, several hundred years ago; but only the walls remain, windowless and doorless. The churchyard is one mass of indistinguishable graves. The stones from the walls have fallen inside and outside of the structure; and, between them and the briers, it was difficult to move around.

Inside the walls were several very fine monuments, and many consisting simply of prostrate slabs, covered with a green slime, with inscriptions nearly worn away. The king himself, who died in defence of Athenry and Connaught, is supposed to lie here. Then there were the graves of several noblemen. Their tombs were, as I have said, elaborate. One of them was of beautiful Italian marble, exquisitely cut in that fair country. How oddly out of place it appeared within these crumbling walls, and among the fallen masonry, ordinary tombs, and flourishing brambles!

The Du Burgoes and Bermingham families, older than the eternal hills almost, lie buried in this neglected and dreary place, and appear to be proud of it. It is consecrated ground, you know; and, however disordered and unkempt and rubbishy it may be, it is still a very desirable place to be buried in. But there is one thing I cannot understand. It had a walk about it, and a locked gate, which was opened to us by an old woman who possessed the key. To use a metaphor, she had drained the dregs of poverty, and was now picking her teeth. But she owned this place.

“Who owns this place?” I asked my companion; for I always like to vest romance with a little of the practical. But he didn’t know. He had a ruin of his own, and you would have thought he would take an interest in those matters. And then Athenry is but a hamlet, and he an old resident, and yet not know who owned the only church ruin in his own place! I began to feel uneasy.
“Who has this place now, granny?” he inquired of the old woman as we were passing through the gate.
“I do,” she said.
“Ay, you have the keeping of it; but who owns it?”
” I do, I tell ye.”

I stepped around and took a look at her. She was bareheaded and wore a patched gown and coarse shoes. My eyes protruded so far, that they really ached. And she, so poor that she did not have a whole gown to her back, was the sole possessor of a graveyard, a church, and the graves of the nobility! She went on and explained how she got it. It was the property of a great family, and the family became broken up and scattered, and some neighbours took possession, and in time became likewise scattered; and then someone else tacked himself to it, but, finding precious little return from it, gave it up to one of her ancestors, and so it came to her.

Just think of the property this aged, crooning woman owned! I became so bewildered by this information, that I was obliged to rub my head briskly to assure myself that. I was really awake. But my companion didn’t appear worked up at all; and as for the proprietor of this singular wealth, she was not proud nor overbearing, but walked back of us as quietly as if she were not the owner of a single dead body, to say nothing of a church and a fine assortment of tombstones. She even accepted a shilling.
I should like to see her inventory.

When I became sufficiently composed to speak with a steady voice, I asked this Athenry gentleman how such things could possibly exist.
“Why, would who want the place?” he asked in surprise.
“I am sure I would not take it as a gift.”
“I know; but just bear in mind that it is a graveyard, and ought to come under sanitary conditions. Besides, within repose the members of wealthy families; and how is it they allow the possession of their burial-place to remain in the hands of a poverty-stricken old woman?”
“Well,” said he with provoking coolness, “I don’t see anything remarkable about it. She owns it; but people can bury there. And as for the wealthy families, they are not here; and I don’t know as it makes much difference to them who holds the key to the gate.”
And that was really all there was of it; but to this day I cannot fully comprehend it. Can you?

When we were inside the roofless sanctuary, the old lady opened a door recently erected, which enclosed a little cell. In there were a heap of human bones. Some of them were white, others were brown, and many were green. Some were whole; but the most of them were decaying. I don’t know how many people, or how many grades and conditions, of life, were comprised in that pile.

In a commercial point of view, there were, it is safe to say, about two dollars’ worth of bones. They included shin-bones, thigh-bones, ribs, and skulls. They had been exhumed in making fresh graves, and were put in this cell. The door was built to give a sort of security to the place. In several parts of the building I saw little piles of these ghastly mementos, unprotected by any door from the hand of man, or the devastation of the weather. One-half of a skull, looking like the part of a cocoanut-shell, was half full of rain-water, with an inch of settlings at the bottom, and a stray leaf from a tree floating on the surface. I wonder if it ever occurred to the owner of that skull, when he was going about Athenry, proudly displaying its contents, that, in the course of revolving years, it would catch rain-water and earth and flying leaves in a roofless church.

And who can tell what other changes are in store for this shell to a once active, hopeful, human brain? The time may come when some prudent housewife will take it to her home and have a nice handle put to it, and use it for baling up soft-soap.

I left the village with genuine pleasure, I had seen so much of interest in it. Being a trifle behind time, I hurried back to the station, to make sure of my train. But there was an abundance of time. That was the occasion when the driver of the trap had to go back for the inspector, as related in a former chapter.

The two hours I put in at the little station, expecting every moment to leave, and not doing it, were hardly agreeable; although I managed, with the aid of a pipe and turning up my coat-collar (for it was a damp, drizzling, chilly day), to work off the time.

How slowly such time drags along! and how anxiously we watch its progress, and feel a desire to get behind it, and give it a good push!

We have such an abundance of time, it is to be so many, many years before we shall be called hence, that we can afford to get out of patience with Time for not speeding faster. I have no doubt, that, if accurately reckoned up, we wish away fully one-half of our lives.

But I am not going to sermonize, although abundantly competent to do so: I am merely going to tell you an incident at the Athenry station.

Starting for America

It was a junction of these roads and, while we waited for our train, several others came and departed. One of them, which went to Galway, carried away two buxom girls of between twenty and twenty-five years of age. They had been standing on the platform with some friends, and were noticeable to strangers by their heavy frieze cloaks and scarlet skirts. They were the picturesque women of Galway, and had come over to Athenry to see off a few friends who were going to America. As the train was about to start, they took a convulsive farewell of the emigrants, and the emigrants took an equally convulsive farewell of them. The two Galwegians got into the train, and threw up the window, and put out their heads, and clasped the voyagers about their necks, and cried and sobbed as if their hearts were broken, until the guard and porters forced them apart, to permit the train to go on its way. Then, as it moved away, the women of Galway waved back their handkerchiefs, and sent up a wail that made the blood stand stiff about my heart. Those left behind, with one exception, gave an agonizing response. It was not a sharp cry of pain, nor was it a sobbing, but it seemed to be a melting of one into the other, and altogether too pathetic to fool about with a description. The exception was a young girl of some sixteen years, a neighbour undoubtedly, who, not liking to cry before so many strangers, laughed instead, and tried to hide the offence beneath the light shawl she had wrapped about her head.

The party left on the platform by the departure of this train were an old man, his two sons (one about thirty, and the other eighteen years of age), the wife of the older, two daughters, and the neighbouring girl with the light shawl. The older son and his wife, and two young sisters, were going to America, —four out of a family of six. The son was a stout young man, homely dressed: his wife had no bonnet, but made the cape of her cloak-answer the purpose.

But the young sisters were clothed in bright red-and-yellow shawls, which made up in colour what they lacked in warmth, and blue bonnets trimmed copiously with yellow flowers. Poor girls! they were going to a great country from Athenry, and that pride which is peculiar to and pardonable in their sex could not bear that Athenry should be meanly thought of in foreign lands. And so the bright colours and the colossal yellow flowers were going to America by way of a steerage passage; and I thought of that, and the consequent trailing of the plumes in the dark hold of a tossing vessel; and I did wish that somebody could have told them all about it before they made their purchases.

They were to take the train with myself going to Limerick. As the time came for their getting aboard, the grief of both parties became intense. They clasped each other to their breasts, and cried most pitifully. Going away to America, going thousands of miles apart, — a family that had grown up together for years with never a thought of separation. It was hard all around; but it was the hardest upon the one the least able to bear it, — the poor old man, so poor and thin, that it seemed as if the sharp air would cut through him. But he did not lift his voice: he simply kept walking about, and pressing his hands tightly together. His was not pain: it was simply a dull, dead despair. I wondered if he thought of the dances and frolics where he won the girl who bore him these children, who grew wan and thin with him, and finally sank to her rest; and if he thought of them, and then looked on this scene, which was the bitter climax of his life’s aspirations and ambitions, what must be the sensations under which his brain throbbed? But what is this parting, with its excitement, to the feelings which will come to them when the dear old land lies thousands of miles away? And what is this parting, with its hurry and bustle, to those left behind, to the desolation which will meet them at the threshold of the broken home? Perhaps the old man is thinking of this, and can vividly see the disordered room, the fragments of the last and almost untouched meal, the vacant chair, and that indescribable vacuum which awaits his return from the station.

He may have been thinking of this when he drew back from the others, and stood at the corner of the station building, as the train moved away, and wrung his hands in such an agony of distress, that it drowned the wail of the others, and left only that white, distorted face reflected upon the mind.
“Father, father!” shouted the first-born in a broken voice, “all that I ask of ye is that ye live till I come back. That’s just what I ask of ye,” he continued, with a feeble attempt to be exultant.

Come back? Of course. It is not the going away that the departing care to dwell upon, except in their very secret thoughts: it is of the coming back that they talk; it is the coming back to which they strive hopefully but hopelessly to bring the attention of the unfortunately left behind. But the old man did not hear it. He made no response: no cry escaped him. “As a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.”

God help him, and all fathers and mothers in this land —the land of parting — who are called upon to give up their hearts’ treasures, to have their souls riven with pain on the very verge of the grave! Theirs is a grief for which Nature can furnish no antidote, — the dry grief of despair.