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Updated: June 6, 2025
The outrage to a tomb in China probably gives no greater shock to the Chinese than the outrage to a hearth in Inishmaan gives to the people. When the few trifles had been carried out, and the door blocked with stones, the old woman sat down by the threshold and covered her head with her shawl. Five or six other women who lived close by sat down in a circle round her, with mute sympathy.
The morning was so stormy, that in ordinary circumstances I would not have attempted the passage, but as I had arranged to travel with a curagh that was coming over for the Parish Priest who is to hold stations on Inishmaan I did not like to draw back. I went out in the morning and walked up the cliffs as usual.
The charm which the people over there share with the birds and flowers has been replaced here by the anxiety of men who are eager for gain. The eyes and expression are different, though the faces are the same, and even the children here seem to have an indefinable modern quality that is absent from the men of Inishmaan. My voyage from the middle island was wild.
A little later when I went down to the kitchen I found two men from Inishmaan who had been benighted on the island. In spite of the charm of my teacher, the old blind man I met the day of my arrival, I have decided to move on to Inishmaan, where Gaelic is more generally used, and the life is perhaps the most primitive that is left in Europe.
Probably his character has given him a bad reputation on the island, and he lives here with the restlessness of a man who has no sympathy with his companions. I have come over again to Inishmaan, and this time I had fine weather for my passage.
They were drowned on their way home, and the art of making these little barrels died with them, at least on Inishmaan, though it still lingers in the north and south islands. Another catastrophe that took place last winter gave a curious zest to the observance of holy days.
After my weeks in Inishmaan, Kilronan seemed an imposing centre of activity. The half-civilized fishermen of the larger island are inclined to despise the simplicity of the life here, and some of them who were standing about when I landed asked me how at all I passed my time with no decent fishing to be looking at.
In Inishmaan one is forced to believe in a sympathy between man and nature, and at this moment when the thunder sounded a death-peal of extraordinary grandeur above the voices of the women, I could see the faces near me stiff and drawn with emotion. When the coffin was in the grave, and the thunder had rolled away across the hills of Clare, the keen broke out again more passionately than before.
It seems absurd to apply the same laws to these people and to the criminal classes of a city. The most intelligent man on Inishmaan has often spoken to me of his contempt of the law, and of the increase of crime the police have brought to Aranmor.
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