Chapter XVIII. Limavady love-letters.
'As beautiful Kitty one morning was tripping

With a pitcher of milk from the fair of Coleraine,
When she saw me she stumbled, the pitcher it tumbled,

And all the sweet buttermilk watered the plain.'
Anonymous.

We wanted to cross to Rathlin Island, which is 'like an Irish
stockinge, the toe of which pointeth to the main lande.' That would

bring Francesca six miles nearer to Scotland and her Scottish lover;
and we wished to see the castle of Robert the Bruce, where,

according to the legend, he learned his lesson from the 'six times
baffled spider.' We delayed too long, however, and the Sea of Moyle

looked as bleak and stormy as it did to the children of Lir. We had
no mind to be swallowed up in Brecain's Caldron, where the grandson

of Niall and the Nine Hostages sank with his fifty curraghs, so we
took a day of golf at the Ballycastle links. Salemina, who is a

neophyte, found a forlorn lady driving and putting about by herself,
and they made a match just to increase the interest of the game.

There was but one boy in evidence, and the versatile Benella offered
to caddie for them, leaving the more experienced gossoon to

Francesca and me. The Irish caddie does not, on the whole, perhaps
manifest so keen an interest in the fine points of the game as his

Scottish brother. He is somewhat languid in his search for a ball,
and will occasionally" target="_blank" title="ad.偶然地；非经常地">occasionally, when serving amiable ladies, sit under a tree

in the sun and speculate as to its whereabouts. As for staying by
you while you 'hole out' on your last green, he has no possible

interest in that proceeding, and is off and away, giving his
perfunctory and half-hearted polish to your clubs while you are

passing through this thrilling crisis. Salemina, wishing to know
what was considered a good score by local players on these links,

asked our young friend 'what they got round in, here,' and was
answered, 'They tries to go round in as few as possible, ma'am, but

they mostly takes more!' We all came together again at luncheon,
and Salemina returned flushed with victory. She had made the nine

hole course in one hundred and sixty, and had beaten her adversary
five up and four to play.

The next morning, bright and early, we left for Coleraine, a great
Presbyterian stronghold in what is called by the Roman Catholics the

'black north.' If we liked it, and saw anything of Kitty's
descendants, or any nice pitchers to break, or any reason for

breaking them, we intended to stop; if not, then to push on to the
walled town of Derry,-

'Where Foyle his swelling waters
Rolls northward to the main.'

We thought it Francesca's duty, as she was to be the wife of a
Scottish minister of the Established Church, to look up

Presbyterianism in Ireland whenever and wherever possible, with a
view to discoursing learnedly about it in her letters,--though, as

she confesses ingenuously, Ronald, in his, never so much as mentions
Presbyterianism. As for ourselves, we determined to observe all

theological differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics, but
leave Presbyterianism to gang its ain gait. We had devoted hours--

yes, days--in Edinburgh to the understanding of the subtle and
technical barriers which separated the Free Kirkers and the United

Presbyterians; and the first thing they did, after we had completely
mastered the subject, was to unite. It is all very well for

Salemina, who condenses her information and stows it away neatly;
but we who have small storage room and inferior methods of packing

must be as economical as possible in amassing facts.
If we had been touring properly, of course we should have been going

to the Giant's Causeway and the swinging Bridge at Carrick-a-rede;
but propriety is the last thing we aim at in our itineraries. We

were within worshipping distance of two rather important shrines in
our literarypilgrimage; for we had met a very knowledgeable

traveller at the Sorley Boy, and after a little chat with him had
planned a day of surprises for the academic Miss Peabody. We

proposed to halt at Port Stewart, lunch at Coleraine, sleep at
Limavady; and meantime Salemina was to read all the books at her

command, and guess, we hoped vainly, the why and wherefore of these
stops.

On the appointed day, the lady in question drove in state on a car
with Benella, but Francesca and I hired a couple of very wheezy

bicycles for the journey. We had a thrilling start; for it chanced
to be a fair day in Ballycastle, and we wheeled through a sea of

squealing, bolting pigs, stupid sheep, and unruly cows, all pursued
on every side by their drivers. To alight from a bicycle in such a

whirl of beasts always seems certain death; to remain seated
diminishes, I believe, the number of one's days of life to an

appreciable extent. Francesca chose the first course, and, standing
still in the middle of the street, called upon everybody within

hearing to save her, and that right speedily. A crowd of 'jibbing'
heifers encircled her on all sides, while a fat porker, 'who (his

driver said) might be a prize pig by his impidence,' and a donkey
that was feelin' blue-mouldy for want of a batin', tried to poke

their noses into the group. Salemina's only weapon was her scarlet
parasol, and, standing on the step of her side-car, she brandished

this with such terrible effect that the only bull in the cavalcade
put up his head and roared. "Have conduct, woman dear!" cried his

owner to Salemina. "Sure if you kape on moidherin' him wid that
ombrelly, you'll have him ugly on me immajently, and the divil a bit

o' me can stop him." "Don't be cryin' that way, asthore," he went
on, going to Francesca's side, and piloting her tenderly to the

hedge. "Sure I'll nourish him wid the whip whin I get him to a more
remoted place."

We had no more adventures, but Francesca was so unhinged by her
unfortunate exit from Ballycastle that, after a few miles, she

announced her intention of putting her machine and herself on the
car; whereupon Benella proclaimed herself a competent cyclist, and

climbed down blithely to mount the discarded wheel. Her ideas of
propriety were by this time so developed that she rode ten or twelve

feet behind me, where she looked quaint enough, in her black dress
and little black bonnet with its white lawn strings.

"Sure it's a quare footman ye have, me lady," said a genial and
friendly person who was sitting by the roadside smoking his old

dudeen. An Irishman, somehow, is always going to his work 'jist,'
or coming from it, or thinking how it shall presently be done, or

meditating on the next step in the process, or resting a bit before
taking it up again, or reflecting whether the weather is on the

whole favourable to its proper performance; but however poor and
needy he may be, it is somewhat difficult to catch him at the

precise working moment. Mr. Alfred Austin says of the Irish
peasants that idleness and poverty seem natural to them. "Life to

the Scotsman or Englishman is a business to conduct, to extend, to
render profitable. To the Irishman it is a dream, a little bit of

passing consciousness on a rather hard pillow; the hard part of it
being the occasional necessity for work, which spoils the tenderness

and continuity of the dream."
Presently we passed the Castle, rode along a neat quay with a row of

houses advertising lodgings to let; and here is Lever Cottage, where
Harry Lorrequer was written; for Lever was dispensary doctor in Port

Stewart when his first book was appearing in the Dublin University
Magazine.

We did not fancy Coleraine; it looked like anything but Cuil-
rathain, a ferny corner. Kitty's sweet buttermilk may have watered,

but it had not fertilised the plain, though the town itself seemed
painfully prosperous. Neither the Clothworkers' Inn nor the

Corporation Arms looked a pleasant stopping-place, and the humble
inn we finally selected for a brief rest proved to be about as gay

as a family vault, with a landlady who had all the characteristics
of a poker except its occasionalwarmth, as the Liberator said of

another stiff and formal person. Whether she was Scot or Saxon I