LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

[1]

RED CLOUD, THE SOLITARY SIOUX.

CHAPTER I.

Our home in Glencar—A glimpse at the outside world—My parents—My schoolmasters—Donogh—Cooma-sa-harn—The eagle’s nest—“The eagle is coming back to the nest”—Alone in the world—I start for the Great Prairie—Good-bye to Glencar.

Far back as I can remember anything I can remember our cottage in Glencar. It was a small thatched house, with plenty of June roses and white jessamine trailing over two sides of it, through wooden trellis-work. The ground rose steeply behind the house, until the trees that covered it gave place to scattered clumps of holly bushes, which finally merged into open mountain, heather-covered, and sprinkled here and there with dwarf furze bushes. In front of the cottage the little lawn sloped downwards to a stream, the bed of which was strewn with great boulders of rock, which[2] were bare and dry in summer, but in winter scarcely showed over the surface. Between the big rocks there were pools and shallows, in which trout rose briskly at the midges in the early summer evenings. Whenever I think of that cottage home now, it seems to me to be always sunshine there. There must have been dark days, and wet ones, too, but I can’t call them to mind. There was a large flat rock in the middle of the lawn half way down to the stream; one end

of this rock was imbedded in the earth, the other leant out from the ground, giving shelter underneath. The only dark thing I can remember about the whole place was that hollow under the big stone. I used to sit in there on the very hot days, looking out across the stream upon the one road that led from the outer world into Glencar. When the weather was not too warm I lay on the top of the rock, looking at the same view. The road came into the glen over a hill that was four miles distant from our cottage; you could see the white streak crossing the crest of ridge, flanked on each side by the dark heather mountain. You caught sight of the road again as it came down the hillside, and here and there at turns, as it wound along the valley to the old five-arched bridge over the Carragh river, and then disappeared around the hill on which our cottage stood. When in the summer days I used to lie on the rock, or beneath its shadows, I was always thinking of the country that lay beyond the boundary ridge, the land to which the[3] white road led when it dipped down behind the hill: that

was the outside world to me, the glen was the inside one. As I grew older I came to know more of the outside world; I was able to climb higher up the steep hill behind the house, to get beyond the holly bushes out into the heather, and at last one day I reached the mountain-top itself. That was a great event in my life. It took me a long while to get up; the last bit was very steep; I had to sit down often amid the rocks and heather for want of breath. At last I gained the summit, and sank down quite exhausted on an old weather-beaten flat rock; I was just ten years old that day. Thirty years have gone by since then. I have climbed many a lofty mountain, lain down for weeks alone in forests and on prairies, but never have I felt so proudly conscious of success as I did that day. It was my first view of the outside world. How vast it seemed to me. The glen, my world, lay below, winding away amid the hills. All the streams, all the lakes, were unfolded to my sight, and out beyond the boundary ridge was the great open country. That was on one side—the glen side; but as I turned round

to look beyond the mountain I had come up, I saw a sight that filled me with utter astonishment. Below me on that side there lay another glen, smaller than ours; then the hill rose again, but not to the height of the ridge on which I stood; and then, beyond the hill, there spread a great, vast waste of blue water—out—out, until I could see no more,[4] where the sky came down upon it—the end of the world. It was the sea!

It was getting dark when I reached home that day. I went straight to my mother. “Mother,” I said, “I have been to the top of Coolrue, and have seen the end of the world.” I was fearfully tired; I had fallen over rocks coming down, and was bruised and torn; but what did it matter?

From that day forth the glen seemed a small place to me, and my mind was ever at work shaping plans for the future. About this time I began to read well. There were many old books in our cottage—books of travel and adventure, books of history, and one large old atlas that had maps of every country in the world in it, and in the corner of each map there was a picture of the people of the land, or of some wonderful mountain, or waterfall in it.

I read all these books in the long winter evenings; and many a time I sat poring over the maps, moving my finger up a long waving line of river, and travelling in fancy from island to island in the ocean.

And now I must say something about the inmates of our home. They were few. There was my mother, one old servant woman, and an old man who kept the garden tilled, drove in the cow at nightfall, and took care of everything. In truth there wasn’t much to be taken care of. We were very poor, and we were all the poorer because we had once[5] been rich—at least my mother had been. My father had died before I could remember him. His picture hung over the fireplace in our little parlour; and I can almost say that I do remember him, because the picture is confused in my mind with the reality, and I have a dim recollection of a man, tall, pale, and dark haired; but I can’t add to it voice or action; it is only a vague kind of shadow. I was four years old when he died.

When I was seven years old my mother began to tell me about him. She used to sit often in the winter evenings looking at his picture; and as I sat at her feet, and she spoke of the old times, and how brave and honourable he was, I remember her voice used to tremble, and sometimes she would stop altogether.

As I grew older I learned more about him. I heard how we had first come to Glencar. It had been a favourite spot with my father in his early days, and whenever he could get leave of absence he used to come to it, for the lakes held plenty of trout, and the mountains had snipe, woodcock, and grouse upon them. After my father’s marriage he had built the cottage. My mother was as fond of the glen as he was, and they used to come here for two or three months every year. When they had been three years married my father’s regiment was ordered to India. My mother went too. I was only two years old at the time. When we reached India the regiment was ordered up country, for war had broken[6] out. At the battle of Moodkee my father was severely wounded. After a while he was able to be moved down to the coast, where my mother had remained when the regiment went on service. From the coast he was invalided to England. The voyage home was a long one. We arrived in England in the end of summer.

The autumn and winter came. The cold told severely upon my father’s weakened state, and when spring arrived it was evident he had but a short time to live. He wished to see Glencar again. With much difficulty he was brought to the cottage, to die.

In the upper end of the glen there was a wild secluded lake called Lough Cluen. A solitary island stood under the shadow of a tall mountain wall which overhangs the lake on one side. The island is little more than a rock, with yew-trees and ivy growing over it. A ruined church, half hidden in the trees, stood on this rock. It was my father’s grave. He had wished to be buried in this lonely island, and his wish was carried out.

The little cottage, a few acres of land, the rugged mountain and the stream—now formed, with my mother’s scanty pension, all our worldly possessions. Here, then, we took up our residence, and here I grew up, as I have already described—the glen my world; the mountain, lake, and stream my daily playground.

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About a mile from our cottage there lived an old pensioner, who, forty years earlier, had followed Wellington from the Tagus to Toulouse. He had served his full term of twenty-one years, and being at the time of his discharge a staff-sergeant, his pension was sufficient to secure him a comfortable home for the rest of his days. He had a few acres of land around his cottage. He was the best angler in the glen. He was my earliest friend and guide with rod and gun on river, lake, and mountain side.

Sergeant MacMahon, formerly of her Majesty’s 40th Regiment, was, when I knew him, a man who had passed his sixtieth year. Yet time, despite a score years of fighting and exposure, had dealt lightly with the old soldier, who still stood as straight as the ramrod he had so often driven home upon the bullet of his firelock. From him I got my first lessons in other things besides fishing and shooting. He taught me the “extension motions,” the “balance step without gaining ground,” the manual and platoon exercises, and the sword exercise. He also showed me the method of attack and defence with the bayonet.

He had the battles of the Peninsula by heart, and day after day did he pour forth his descriptions of how Busaco was won, and how Fuentes d’Onore had been decided, and how Lord Wellington had outmarched “Sowlt,” as he used to call him, at Pampeluna, or had out-manœuvred Marmont at Torres Vedras. His personal adventures were told in another style. He had stories of bivouac—“bivoocing” he[8] used to call it—of nights on outlying picquet, of escapes when patrolling, and of incidents in action, that he loved to recount to me as we sat by the river side waiting for a cloud to cross the sun before we tried a cast of flies over some favourite stream.

Once every quarter he set off in his mule-cart for Killarney to draw his pension. On these occasions I used to notice that his voice on his return sounded a little thick, and his face generally appeared flushed. But the next day all would be the same as usual. At the time I fancied that the exertion of the journey had been too much for him, or that the excitement of meeting some old comrades (there were three other Peninsula heroes in the town) had overcome him. He had been a great ally of my poor father’s in earlier days, and to my mother he was equally attached. With all his stories of wars and fighting his heart was true and gentle. He was fond of all animals, knew the notes of every bird, and could tell the names of the trees in the wood, or the wild flowers by the river side. He was my outdoor schoolmaster. I learned from him many a pleasant lesson, and many a useful one too.

But I had another schoolmaster at this time. A mile down the glen from our cottage stood the priest’s house, next to our own cabin-cottage the most comfortable residence in Glencar. In summer the old man was usually to be found in his garden, in winter in his little parlour,[9] always buried in some old volume from his well-stored shelves.

His had been a curious career. His early student days had been passed in an old French city. In middle age he had been a missionary in the East, and at last he had taken charge of the wild district of Glencar, and settled down to the simple life of parish priest. Here he lived in the memory of his past life. Nearly half a century had gone since last his eyes had rested on the vine-clad slopes of the Loire, but it was ever an easy task to him to fling back his thoughts across that gulf of time, and to recall the great names that had risen in the sunrise of the century, and flashed such a glory over Europe that the lustre of succeeding time has shone faint and dim in contrast. He had seen the great emperor review his guards in the courtyard of the Tuileries, and had looked upon a group of horsemen that had in it Murat, Ney, Soult, Lannes, and Massena. How he used to revel in such memories! and what point such experience lent to the theme! He never tired talking of the great campaigns of the Consulate and Empire. I followed him in these reminiscences with rapt eagerness;

the intensity of my interest gave increased ardour to his narrative, and many a winter’s night sped rapidly while the old man, seated before his turf fire, rambled on from battle-field to battle-field, now describing to me the wonderful strategy of some early campaign in Italy, now carrying my[10] mind into the snows of Russia, and again taking me back into the plains of France, to that last and most brilliant effort of warlike genius, the campaign of 1814.

At such times, the storm among the mountains would sometimes lend its roar in fitting accompaniment to the old man’s story, and then the scene would change to my mind’s eye as I listened. The little parlour would fade away, the firelight became a bivouac, and I saw in the grim outside darkness of the glen figures dimly moving; the squadrons charged; the cannon rumbled by; and the pine-tops swaying in the storm, were the bearskin caps of the old Guard, looming above smoke and fire!

Such were my schoolmasters; such the lessons they taught me.

The years passed quickly away. Notwithstanding my strong love of outdoor life, I devoted a good many hours every day to reading and study, and by the time I was fifteen years of age I had contrived to master a curious amount of general knowledge, particularly of history and geography, such as does not usually fall to the lot of boys of that age. I had a slight knowledge of Latin, was tolerably well acquainted with French, knew the habits, customs, and limits on every nation and tribe under the sun, and could travel the globe in fancy with few errors of time, distance, and position.

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One companion I had in all these years who has not yet been mentioned—poor Donogh Driscoll, a wild and ragged boy, two years my junior.

In every adventure, in every expedition among the hills, Donogh was my attendant. He it was who used to wade into the reeds of Meelagh river to catch gudgeon for the baits for my night-lines in the Carragh; he carried my bag, later on, when my shooting time came; he marked with clear eye the long flight of the grouse pack down the steep slope of Coolrue; he brought me tidings of wild duck feeding on the pools and ponds amid the hills; he knew the coming of the wild geese to the lonely waste that lay beyond Lough Acoose; he would watch the pools in the Carragh river, and knew to a foot where the salmon lay. Faithful companion through all my boyish sports and pastimes, he shared too with me my dreams of enterprise, my hopes of adventure in the big outside world. Often as we sat on some rock high up on the heather-covered side of Seefin, looking out over the vast waste of ocean, he would wonder what it was like over there “beyant the beyant.”

“You wont lave me here alone by myself, when you go away, sir?” he used to say to me. “It’s lonely I’d be thin entirely.”

“You’d have the fishing and shooting, Donogh,” I would reply. “You’d have the hares and the salmon all to yourself when I was gone.”

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“What good would they be to me, ave you wasn’t here with them?” he’d answer. “Sure the duck in November above in Cluen, and the salmon in ’Coose in April, and the grouse here on Seefin in August, would only remimber me of the ould days when we hunted thim together.”

I used at such times to promise him that whenever I did set out on my travels I would take him with me; and indeed, in all my plans for the future his companionship was always reckoned upon.

At the upper end of the glen, a narrow pass, or gap between two mountains, led out upon a wild and lonely lake, around the sides of which the mountains rose in a gloomy precipice of rock for many hundreds of feet.

Cooma-sa-harn, the name of the tarn that lay thus encompassed by cliffs, was a place that in my earliest wanderings filled me with feelings of awe and wonder. Strange echoes haunted it. Stones loosened from the impending cliffs rolled down into the lake with reverberating thunder, and their sullen splash into the dark water was heard repeated for many seconds around the encircling walls. On one side only was the margin of the lake approachable on level ground. Here loose stones and shingle, strewn together, formed a little beach, upon which the sullen waters broke in mimic waves; and here, too, the outflow of the lake escaped to descend the mountain side, and finally add its tribute to the many feeders of the Carragh river.

[13]

I was about twelve years of age when I first extended my wanderings to this lonely spot. Later on, Donogh and I made frequent expeditions to it. Its waters held no fish, and its shores rose too steep and high for game. But for all these deficiencies, Cooma-sa-harn held one wonder that sufficed to atone for every other shortcoming, and to make it a place of unceasing interest to us. It had an eagle’s nest. There, 600 feet over the lake, in a smooth piece of solid rock, was a shelf or crevice, and in that hollow a golden eagle had built his nest year after year. From the little beach already mentioned we could see the birds at their work. From the top of the encircling cliffs we could look down and across at them too; but the distance in either case was great, and do what we would to obtain a closer view, we were always baffled by the precipitous nature of the mountain. We tried the mountain immediately above the nest, but could see nothing whatever of the smooth rock. We worked our way along the edge of the water, by the foot of the precipice, but were again baffled in the attempt.

Projecting rocks hid the whole side of the cliff. We were fairly puzzled.

Many an hour we spent looking up from the shore at the coveted shelf, which it seemed we were never likely to learn more about. The eagles seemed to know our thoughts, for they frequently soared and screamed high above our heads, as though they rejoiced in our discomfiture. It was not alone in the spring and summer that we were reminded of[14] our enemies thus perched on their inaccessible fortress. In the last hour of daylight of winter evenings a solitary speck over the valley would often be seen sailing downwards through space. It was the golden eagle going home to his ledge at Cooma-sa-harn.

It would be idle to deny that we both felt keenly our inability to get to this eagle’s nest. During four years we had looked across the dark waters, had watched the old birds flying in and out, had seen the young ones sitting on the ledge, and had listened to their screams as their mother came down to them with a prey from the surrounding hills. There was in our cottage an old telescope that had belonged to my father in his early days. This I brought out one day, and looking through it, with elbows resting upon knees, and glass directed upon the shelf of rock, I could discern plainly enough the inmates of the rough nest; but all this only made more tantalizing our helplessness to scale the rock, or to descend from above to the projecting ledge. The day on which I brought out the telescope to make a closer survey of the spot, was bright with sunshine. As the hours grew later the sun moving towards the west, cast its light full upon the face of the nest, which had before been in shadow. The inequalities of the surface, and the formation of the cliffs around the large flat rock,