Then we have a September scene far away. We are now among the wild, unkempt kerns and peasants of County Donegal, in their villages and rude moorland huts of turf and boulders, dotted among the lonely valleys far away amid the bare, desolate, wind-swept uplands and bleak, gaunt, long-backed ridges, shrouded for half the year in rolling grey mists from off the ocean, that range along the coasts of North-Western Ireland. Everywhere the men are hard at work, seated in groups round their peat fires, all actively engaged in pointing pikes and grinding axes, lashing scythe-blades to short poles, and putting a fresh edge to ugly crooked knives; crooning to themselves the while over their toil:—
Oh, the Frinch are on the say, Says the Shan Van Voght— Oh, the Frinch are on the say, Says the Shan Van Voght— The Frinch are in the Bay, They’ll be here without delay, And the Orange will decay, Says the Shan Van Voght.
Again we are on the coast; by Donegal Bay. It is the morning of Friday, the 12th of October, ’98, between seven and eight o’clock. Eager-faced, excited watchers line the crags of Bloody Foreland. From the wide, flat expanse of sea below comes up on the wind the dull, heavy, throbbing sound of a distant cannonade. It has been getting nearer since daybreak. It now comes nearer and nearer still; and by degrees, from the direction of Tory Island, on the horizon over yonder, where a grey rolling cloud of powder-smoke lies heavy over the sea, two squadrons of men-of-war, two straggling lines of ships, most of them firing fiercely, come dimly into view. One is assuredly the long-looked-for French—Commodore Bompart’s squadron from Brest, bringing three thousand French soldiers and Wolfe and Matthew Tone. They were to have landed at Lough Swilly yesterday and raised the country-side. The other is the English fleet—a British squadron that has followed round from Cawsand Bay under press of sail to look after M. Bompart. They picked up news of him off the Fastnet and Achill Island, and pushed on here. On the previous day at noon—as we learn later on—off Malin Head in a stiff north-westerly gale, the British look-outs sighted the French squadron; and they have been working to bring Monsieur Bompart to battle ever since.