Near this clearing is a model village, the houses scrupulously neat, with trees and flowers, and here we met the Duchess with her devoted dog walking briskly along to visit one of her people, a wonderful old man, bearing the ancient name of the O’Kanes, and five years older than the Kaiser William.  Until six months ago this veteran was an active carpenter, coming and going, about his work at ninety-six like a man in middle age.  Then he went to bed with a bad cold, and will probably never rise again.  In all his life he never has touched meat or soup, and when they are now offered him rejects them angrily.  He has lived, and preferred to live, entirely on oatmeal in the form of cakes and porridge, and on potatoes; so I make a present of him as a glorious example to the vegetarians.  As in so many other cases, his memory of recent events is dim and clouded—­of events long past, clear and photographic:  the negatives taken in youth quite perfect, the lenses which now take, dimmed and fractured.

He perfectly recollects, for example, the assembling here of the recruits going out to the Continent before the battle of Waterloo, and can give the names and describe the peculiarities of stalwart lads long since crumbled into dust around Mont St. Jean.  With the curious unconcern about death which marks his people, this expectant emigrant into the unknown world chats about his departure as if it were for Dublin, and his kinsfolk chat with him.

“Ye’ll be going soon!”

“Oh yes, I shan’t trouble ye more than an hour or two more.”

In quite another part of the domain we came upon a Covenanter—­a true, authentic Covenanter, who might have walked out of Old Mortality; the name of him, Keyes.  He greeted Lord Ernest cheerily enough, nodded to me in a not unfriendly way, and at once broke into exhortation:  “It’s a very short life we live; man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble.  Well for them that are the children of light—­if seeing the light they sin not against it”; and so on with amazing volubility.

There are eighty-five of these Covenanters here.  They touch not nor have touched the accursed thing.  To them all parties and all governments are alike evil.  The Whigs persecuted the Solemn League and Covenant—­so did the Tories.  Nationalists and Unionists are to them alike abominable, sold under sin.  Withal they are shrewd, canny, successful farmers—­and, as I inferred from sundry incidents, before Lord Ernest confided the fact to me, not averse from a “right gude williewaught” now and then.

Mr. Keyes, I thought, was not a blue-ribbon man, nor a ribbon-man of any kind.

The Duchess told me afterwards she had vainly endeavoured more than once to get these people to vote at elections.

We had a sprinkling of such people, and very good people in quiet times they were, in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War, to whom Federals and Confederates were alike anathema.