It is
in its rare beauty a spot than which, for a poet's childhood, no
fitter could be found.
[Illustration: MRS. HALL CAINE. From a photograph by Alfred Ellis,
London.]
CHILDHOOD IN A MANX COTTAGE.
The Ballavolley cottage was a typical Manx cottage. On one side of the
porch was the parlor, which also served as a dairy, redolent of milk
and bright with rare old Derby china. On the other side was the
living-room, with its undulating floor of stamped earth and grateless
hearthstone in the ingle, to the right and left of which were seats.
Here in the ingle-nook the little boy would sit watching his aunts
cooking the oaten cake on the griddle, over a fire of turf from the
curragh and gorse from the hills, or the bubbling cooking-pot slung on
the slowrie. One of his earliest recollections is of his old
grandmother, seated on her three-legged stool, bending over the fire,
tongs in hand, renewing the fuel of gorse under the griddle. The walls
of this room were covered with blue crockery ware, and through the
open rafters of the unplastered ceiling could be seen the flooring of
the bedrooms above. These were very low dormer rooms, with the bed in
the angle where the roof was lowest. One had to crawl into bed and lie
just under the whitewashed "scraa" or turf roofing, which smelt
deliciously with an odor that at times still haunts the cottage lad in
statelier homes.
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