THROUGH CONNEMARA
IN A
GOVERNESS CART.

BY
THE AUTHORS OF “AN IRISH COUSIN.”
Illustrated by W. W. Russell, from Sketches by
th Œ. Somerville.
LONDON:
W. H. ALLEN & CO., LIMITED,
13, WATERLOO PLACE, S.W.
—
1893.

The following pages, with their accompanying illustrations, originally appeared in the columns of “The Ladies’ Pictorial,” and are here reprinted by permission of the Proprietors.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

THROUGH CONNEMARA IN A GOVERNESS-CART.

CHAPTER I.

MY second cousin and I came to London for ten days in the middle of last June, and we stayed there for three weeks, waiting for a fine day.

We were Irish, and all the English with whom we had hitherto come in contact had impressed upon us that we should never know what fine weather was till we came to England. Perhaps we came at a bad moment, when the weather, like the shops, was having its cheap sales. Certainly such half-hours of sunshine as we came in for were of the nature of “soiled remnants,” and at the end of the three weeks aforesaid we began to feel a good deal discouraged. Things came to a climax one day when we had sat for three-quarters of an hour in a Hungarian bread shop in Regent Street, waiting for the rain to clear off enough to let us get down to the New Gallery. As the fifth party of moist ladies came in and propped their dripping umbrellas against the wall behind us, and remarked that they had never seen such rain, our resolution first began to take shape.

“Hansom!” said my second cousin.

“Home!” said I.

By home, of course we meant the lodgings—the remote, the Bayswaterian, but still, the cheap, the confidential; for be they never so homely, there’s no place—for sluttish comfort and unmolested unpunctuality—like lodgings.

“England is no fit place for a lady to be in,” said my second cousin, as we drove away in our hansom with the glass down.

“I’d be ashamed to show such weather to a Connemara pig,” I replied.

Now Connemara is a sore subject with my second cousin, who lives within sight of its mountains, and, as is usually the case, has never explored the glories of her native country, which was why I mentioned Connemara. She generally changes the conversation on these occasions; but this time she looked me steadily in the face and said,

“Well, let’s go to Connemara!”

I was so surprised that I inadvertently pressed the indiarubber ball of the whistle on which my hand was resting, and its despairing wail filled the silence like a note of horror.

“Let’s get an ass and an ass-car!” said my cousin, relapsing in her excitement into her native idiom, and taking no notice of the fact that the hansom had stopped, and that I was inventing a lie for the driver; “or some sort of a yoke, whatever, and we’ll drive through Connemara.”

In the seclusion of the back bedroom we reviewed the position, while around us on the lodging-house pegs hung the draggled ghosts of what had been our Sunday dresses.

“That’s the thing I wore last night!” said my second cousin, in a hard, flat voice, lifting with loathing finger a soaked flounce. As she did so, the river sand fell from it into the boots that stood beneath.

“Soil of tea-garden, Kingston-on-Thames. Result of boating-picnic that has to fly for refuge to an inn-parlour ten minutes after it has started.”

“It will wash,” I answered gloomily. “But look at that!” Here I pointed to an evening gown erstwhile, to quote an Irish divine, “the brightest feather in my crown.” “That’s what comes of trailing through Bow Street after the opera, looking for a hansom during the police riots. Give me Irish weather and the R.I.C.! We will go to Connemara!”

. . . . . .

The Milford and Cork boat starts at eight, and at half-past eight a doomed crowd was sitting round its still stationary tea-table. My second cousin was feverishly eating dry toast and drinking a precautionary brandy and soda, but the others were revelling

“IN THE SECLUSION OF THE BACK BEDROOM.”

on beefsteak and fried fish. The company was mixed. Opposite to us sat an American and his bride, both young, and both uncertain of the rules that govern the consumption of fish; the bride feeling that a couple of small forks, held as though they were pens, would meet the situation, while her big, red-headed husband evidently believed that by holding the fork in the right hand and the knife in the left the impropriety of using the latter would be condoned. Beside us were two elderly ladies, returning, like us, to their native land.

“Yes, me dear,” we heard one saying to the other; “I had nothing only my two big boxes and seven little small parcels, and poor little Charlie’s rabbit, and that porther wanted to get thruppence out o’ me!”

“D’ye tell me so?” remarked the friend.

“Yes, dear, he did indeed! He wanted thruppence and I gave him tuppence; he was tough, very tough, but I was shtubborn!”

“Ah, them English is great rogues,” said the friend, consolingly.

“More fish, Miss?” said the unobservant steward to my second cousin, thrusting a generous helping under her nose. It wanted but that, and she retired to the doubtful security of the ladies’ cabin.

We have travelled with many stewardesses on the various routes between England and Cork, and we have found that, as a species, they have at least two great points in common. They are all Irish, and they are all relentlessly conversational. They have no respect for the sanctity of the silence in which the indifferent sailor wishes to shroud herself; it is impossible for them to comprehend those solemn moments, when the thoughts are turned wholly inwards in a tumult of questioning, while the body lies in mummy stillness waiting for what the night shall bring forth. Their leading object seems to be to acquire information, but they are not chary of personal detail, and, speaking from experience, I should say that a stewardess will confide anything to the passenger by whose berth she has elected to take down her hair. For stewardesses generally do their hair two or three times in the course of a twelve hours’ crossing. When you go on board you find them at it. Your evening ablutions are embittered by the discovery of their hair-pins in the soap-dish, and at earliest dawn the traveller is aware of the stewardess combing her shining tresses over the washing-stand. I have sometimes wondered if from this custom arose the fable that the mermaid, when not decoying sailors to their fate, is incessantly “racking her poll,” as they say in the county Cork.

We will not linger on the details of the night, the sufferings of little Charlie, who, on the plea of extreme youth, had been imported by his mother into the ladies’ cabin; the rustlings and chumping of the rabbit, whose basket occupied the greater part of the cabin table, or the murmured confidences exchanged through the night hours by the stewardess and the friend of Charlie’s mother. These things are being forgotten by us as fast as may be; but my second cousin says she never can forget the waft of pigs that came to her through the porthole as the steamer drew alongside of the Cork quay.

The exigencies of return tickets had compelled us to go to Connemara viâ Cork and Milford, and it certainly is not the route we would recommend; however, it has its advantages, and we were vouchsafed a time of precious rest before the starting of our train for Limerick at 2.10, and we reposed in peace on the sofas of the ladies’ drawing-room in the Imperial Hotel. Much might be said, were there time, of the demeanour of ladies in hotel drawing-rooms; so hushed, so self-conscious, so eminent in all those qualities with which they are endued by the artist who “does” the hotel interiors for the guide-books. It is almost possible to believe that they are engaged for the season to impart tone, and to show how agreeable a lounge life can be when spent in the elegant leisure that is the atmosphere of hotel drawing-rooms.

We crossed Cork on an outside-car; and here, no doubt, we should enter on a description of its perils which would convulse and alarm English readers in the old, old way; but we may as well own at once that we know all about outside-cars; we believe we went to be christened on an outside-car, and we did not hold on even then—we certainly have not done so since.

Let us rather embark on a topic in which all, saving a besotted few, will sympathise. The nursery en voyage—the nurse, the nursemaid, the child, the feeding-bottle. These beset every traveller’s path, and we had considerably more than our fair share of them between Cork and Limerick. At Cork they descended upon the train, as it lay replete and helpless, a moment before starting, and before we had well understood the extent of the calamity, a nurse was glaring defiance at us over the white bonnet of a bellowing baby, and a nursemaid was already opening her basket of food for the benefit of two children of the dread ages of three and five respectively. Some rash glance on the part of my second cousin must have betrayed our sentiments to the nurse, and it is hard to say which was worse, her exaggerated anxiety to snatch the children from all contact with us, or the imbecile belief of the nursemaid that we wanted to play with them, and, of the two, enjoyed their wiping their hands on our rug in the intervals between the oranges. They never ceased eating oranges, those children. Oranges, seed cake, milk; these succeeded one another in a sort of vicious circle. An enterprising advertiser asks, “What is more terrible than war?” We answer unhesitatingly, oranges in the hands of young children.

However, everything, even the waits at the stations between Limerick and Athenry, comes to an end if you can live it out, and at about nine o’clock at night we were in Galway. Scarcely by our own volition, we found ourselves in an hotel ’bus, and we were too tired to do more than notice the familiar Galway smell of turf smoke as we bucketted through Eyre Square to our hostelry. It may be as well at this point to seriously assure English readers that the word “peat” is not used in Ireland in reference to fuel by anyone except possibly the Saxon tourist. Let it therefore be accepted that when we say “turf” we mean peat, and when, if ever, we say Pete, we mean the diminutive of Peter, no matter what the spelling.

We breakfasted leisurely and late next morning, serenaded by the screams of pigs, for it was fair day, and the market square was blocked with carts tightly packed with pigs, or bearing tall obelisks of sods of turf, built with Egyptian precision. We cast our eye abroad upon a drove of Connemara ponies, driven in for sale like so many sheep, and my second cousin immediately formed the romantic project of hiring one of these and a small trap for our Connemara expedition.

“They are such hardy little things,” she said, enthusiastically, “we had two of them once, and they always lived on grass. Of course they never did any work really, and I remember they used to bite anyone who tried to catch them—but still I think one of them would be just the thing.”

“I beg your pardon, Miss,” said the waiter, who was taking away our breakfast things, “but thim ponies is very arch for the likes of you to drive. One o’ thim’d be apt to lie down in the road with yerself and the thrap, and maybe it’d be dark night before he’d rise up for ye. Faith, there was one o’ them was near atin’ the face off a cousin o’ me own that was enticin’ him to stand up out o’ the way o’ the mail-car.”

My second cousin looked furtively at me, and rose from her seat in some confusion.

“Oh, I think we should be able to manage a pony,” she said, with a sudden resumption of the dignity that I had noticed she had laid aside since her arrival in Galway. “Is there—er—any two-wheeled—er—trap to be had?”

“Sure there is, Miss, and a nate little yoke it’d be for the two of ye, though the last time it was out one of the shafts——”

“Is it in the yard?” interrupted my second cousin, severely.

“It is, Miss, but the step took the ground——”

My cousin here left the room, and I followed her. A few moments later the trap was wheeled into the yard for our inspection. It was apparently a segment of an antediluvian brougham, with a slight flavour about it of a hansom turned the wrong way, though its great-grandfather had probably been a highly-connected sedan-chair. The door was at the back, as in an omnibus, the floor was about six inches above the ground, and the two people whom it with difficulty contained had to sit with their backs to the horse, rocking and swinging between the two immense wheels, of which they had a dizzy prospect through the little side windows.

“There it is for ye, now!” said the waiter, triumphantly. He had followed us downstairs and was negligently polishing a tablespoon with his napkin. “And Jimmy,” indicating the ostler, “’ll know of the very horse that’ll be fit to put under it.”

“No,” we said faintly, “that would never do; we want to drive ourselves.”

The ostler fell into an attitude of dramatic meditation.

“Would you be agin dhrivin’ a side-car?”

We said “No.”

Equally dramatic ecstasy on the part of both ostler and waiter. The former, strange to say, had a friend who was the one person in Galway who had the very thing we wanted. “Letyees be gettin’ ready now,” said Jimmy, “for I’ll go fetch it this minute.”

About half an hour later we were standing at the hotel doorsteps, prepared for our trial trip. On the pavement were clustered about us the beggarwomen of Galway—an awesome crew, from whose mouths proceeded an uninterrupted flow of blessings and cursings, the former levelled at us, the latter at each other and the children who hung about their skirts. We pushed our way through them, and getting up on the car announced that we were ready to start, but some delay in obtaining a piece of cord to tie up the breeching gave the beggars a precious opportunity. My second cousin was recognised, and greeted by name with every endearment.

“Aha! didn’t I tell ye ’twas her?” “Arrah, shut yer mouth, Nellie Morris. I knew the fine full eyes of her since she was a baby.” “Don’t mind them, darlin’,” said a deep voice on a level with the step of the car; “sure ye’ll give to yer own little Judy from Menlo?”

This was my cousin’s own little Judy from Menlo, and at her invocation we both snatched from our purses the necessary blackmail and dispensed it with furious haste. Most people would pay largely to escape from the appalling presence of this seventy-year-old nightmare of two foot nothing, and she is well aware of its compelling power.

The car started with a jerk, the driver boy running by the horse’s side till he had goaded it into a trot, and then jumping on the driving-seat he lashed it into a gallop, and we swung out of Eyre Square followed by the admiring screams of the beggars. The pace was kept up, and we were well out of Galway before a slightly perceptible hill suddenly changed it to a funeral crawl—the animal’s head disappearing between its forelegs.

“Give me the reins,” said my second cousin. “These country boys never know how to drive,” she added in an undertone as she took them from the boy. The horse, a pale yellow creature, with a rusty black mane and tail, turned his head, and fixing a penetrating eye upon her, slightly slackened his pace. My cousin administered a professional flick of the whip, whereon he shrank to the other side of the road, jamming the step of the car against a telegraph post and compelling me to hurriedly whirl my legs up on to the seat. We slurred over the incident, however, and proceeded at the same pace to the top of the hill. A judicious kick from the boy urged the horse into an amble, and things were going on beautifully when we drew near a pool of water by the roadside.

“You see he goes very well when he is properly driven,” my second cousin began, leaning nonchalantly

“IF YE BATE HIM ANY MORE HE’LL LIE DOWN.”

across the car towards me. As she spoke, the car gave a lurch and came to a standstill at the edge of the pool. Apparently the yellow horse was thirsty. He was with difficulty dragged into the middle of the road again, but beyond the pool he refused to go. The boy got down with the air of one used to these things.

“If ye bate him any more he’ll lie down,” he said to my cousin. “I’ll go to the house beyond and gether a couple o’ the neighbours.”

The neighbours—that is to say, the whole of the inhabitants of the house—turned out with enthusiasm, and, having put stones behind the wheels, addressed themselves to the yellow horse with strange oaths and with many varieties of sticks.

“’Tis little he cares for yer bating,” screamed the mother after several minutes of struggle. “Let him dhrink his fill o’ the pool and he’ll go to America for ye.”

We thought that on the whole we should prefer to return to Galway, and though assured by the boy of ultimate victory, we turned and made for the town on foot.

“I scarcely think that horse will do,” said my second cousin, after we had walked about half a mile, turning on me a face still purple from her exertions with the whip. “We want a freer animal than that.”

She had scarcely finished when there was a thundering on the road behind us, a sound of furious galloping and shouting, and the car appeared in sight, packed with men, and swinging from side to side as the yellow horse came along with a racing stride.

“Ye can sit up on the car now!” called out the boy as they neared us, “he’ll go aisy from this out.”

The car pulled up, and the volunteers got off it with loud and even devotional assurances of the yellow horse’s perfections.

But we walked back to Galway.

CHAPTER II.

SHALL we admit that, after all, the first stage of our journey was accomplished by means of the mail-car? We had been assured, on reliable authority, that Oughterard, fourteen Irish miles from Galway, was the place where we should find what we wanted, and with a dubious faith we climbed the steep side of the mail car, and wedged ourselves between a stout priest and an English tourist. Above us towered the mail baskets, and a miscellaneous pile of luggage, roped together with that ingenuity that necessity has developed in the Irish carman, and crowning all, the patriarchal countenance of a goat looked down upon us in severe amazement from over the rim of an immense hamper.

We have said in our haste that we never hold on on jaunting-cars, but as the dromedary to the park hack, so is the mail-car to the ordinary “outside” of its species. It is large enough to hold six people on each side, and is dragged by three horses at a speed that takes no account of ruts and patches of stones and sharp corners, or of the fact that the unstable passenger has nothing to grasp at in time of need, except his equally unstable fellow-traveller. We held on to the priest and the tourist with all the power of our elbows, and derived at least some moral support from the certainty that when we fell off the car we should, like Samson, carry widespread disaster with us. But somehow people do not fall off these cars; and even the most unschooled of Saxons sits and swings and bows on the narrow seat with a security that must surprise himself.

An Irish mile is, roughly speaking, a mile and a quarter English, so we leave to the accomplished reader the computation of the distance from Galway to Oughterard according to the rightful standard. It is not in the ordinary sense a very interesting drive; the guide-books pass it over in a breath in their haste to blossom out into the hotels and fisheries of Connemara; but to the eye that comes fresh to it from the offensively sleek and primly-partitioned pastures of England this first impression of Galway and its untrammelled bogs and rocks will be as lasting as any that come after. We ourselves might have framed many moving sentences about the desolate houses standing amongst the neglected timber within their broken demesne walls, but “all our mind was clouded with a doubt,” and from the peculiar protrusion of my cousin’s nether lip, I could gather that her moodiness was the outward token of an agitated mental parade of all the Oughterard horseflesh with which she was acquainted.

We spent that night at Oughterard in Miss Murphy’s comfortable little hotel, and the next morning found us embarked once more in search of a means of travel. The trap had been unearthed—the trap of our brightest dreams—a governess-cart that would just hold two people and a reasonable amount of luggage; but the horse was the trouble. Various suggestions had been made: some had been feasible, and the one thing on which we were firmly decided, viz., the governess-cart, seemed an impossibility.

“Well, Miss, ye see, she’s only just in off grass; sure she’ll rejoice greatly in the coorse of the next few days, and she’d fit the shafts well enough so.”

Thus spoke the proprietor of many flocks and herds to whom we had addressed ourselves. “It’s a pity there’s nothing would suit ye only the little thrap, but surely ye might thry her whatever.”

“She” was a farm mare of mountainous proportions, who after violent exertions had been squeezed between the shafts of the governess-cart, and she now stood gazing plaintively at us, and switching her flowing tail, while the shafts made grooves for themselves in her fat sides.

“Sit in now, Miss, and dhrive her out o’ the yard.” My second cousin got in with ease, the step of the trap being almost on the ground, owing to the unnatural elevation of its shafts, and the mare strode heavily forward. My cousin clutched the front rail convulsively.

“I am slipping out!” she said with a sudden tension in her voice. Had she thought of it she might have held on by the tail, which hung down like a massive bell-rope above her, but as it was, after a moment or two of painful indecision, she made a hurried but safe exit over the door of the trap. The fate of the expedition trembled in the balance, and the group of spectators who had formed round us began to look concerned. The mare was extracted with some difficulty from the pinioning shafts, and all things were as they were, the governess-cart with its shafts on the ground, and my cousin and I with our hearts in our boots, when a voice came to us from the crowd—

“Johnny Flaherty have a nice jinnet.”

“A betther never shtud in Galway!” said another voice. “She’s able to kill anny horse on the road.”

An excited discussion followed, in the course of which it was brought forward as the jennet’s strongest

“SHE’S A LITTLE GIDDY ABOUT THE HEAD, MISS.”

recommendation that she was the daughter of the lady whose majestic build had lost to us the enjoyment of her admirable moral qualities. Finally a portion of the crowd detached itself and ran up the street, returning in a few minutes with Johnny Flaherty and a long-legged, long-eared brown animal, which, as it approached, cast an eye of sour suspicion upon us and its mother. There was no doubt but that this creature would fit the trap, but with haunting memories of the iniquities of mules and their like we asked if it was gentle.

“She’s a little giddy about the head, Miss,” said the owner diffidently; “but if ye’ll not touch the ears she’s the quietest little thing at all. Back in, Sibbie!”

Sibbie backed in with an almost unwholesome docility, and was harnessed in the twinkling of an eye, the lookers-on assisting enthusiastically. She was led out of the yard. We got in with Mr. Flaherty, and before the crowd had time to cross themselves we were out of sight.

“Perfection!” I gasped, with the wind whistling in my teeth as Sibbie sped like a rat between the shafts that had given her good mother her first insight into tight lacing. “She goes splendidly—the very thing! but now isn’t it time to go back and get in our things?”

My cousin did not answer; she was driving, and something told me that the same idea had occurred to her. She was leaning rigidly back, and one of her gloves had burst at the knuckles. Johnny Flaherty extended a large hand and laid it on the reins.

“She’s over-anxious for the road,” he said apologetically, as he brought the jennet to a standstill; “but I’ll put a curb-chain on her for ye.”

We turned and wheeled back into Oughterard, a positive adoration for Sibbie, with her discreet brown quarters and slender, rapier-like legs, welling up in us. Now, thinking over these things, it seems possible that her week’s hire approached her net value, but at the time of bargaining we felt that her price was far above rubies.

As this is the record of a genuine expedition, it is perhaps advisable to say that our luggage consisted of a portmanteau, a dressing bag, a well-supplied luncheon basket, and a large and reliable gingham umbrella, purchased for the sum of three shillings in Oughterard. We viewed the elaborate stowing of

“WE VIEWED THE STOWING OF THE GOVERNESS-CART.”

these in the governess cart, and then went to Mr. Flaherty for his final sailing orders.

“Ye’ll mind her passing Flanigan’s; she have a fashion of running in there; and as for passing our own place, I have a boy standin’ there now in the archway with a stick, the way he’d turn her back out of it if she’d make a dart for the stable, and I’ll put a rope in the thrap for fear anything might break on ye.”

Mr. Flaherty looked a little anxious as he gave us these directions, and when he had gone for the rope, an old woman, who had been regarding us with a sympathetic solicitude, came up to my cousin and took her by the arm.

“That the Lord may save yees! that’s all I’ll say,” she groaned; “if ’twas a horse itself, I’d say nothin’, but thim mules is nayther here nor there. Sure asthore, ye couldn’t tell the minnit he’d turn into a boghole, when he doesn’t know ye, and thim Cunnemarra roads has nothin’ before him to shtop him only the grace of God! and the wather up aich side of the road by yees as deep as a well!”

It was painful to find that Oughterard credited the jennet with the sole conduct of the expedition, and regarded us as helpless dependents on her will and pleasure. But the old woman’s agitation was quite unaffected, and the last thing we heard, as we flourished down the main street, was her voice uplifted in prayerful lamentation.

Owing possibly to the fact that Mr. Flaherty’s boy was demonstrating with the pitch-fork in the archway leading to the stable, Sibbie made no attempt to “dart” into it as her owner had anticipated, and nothing marred the dignity of our departure. We turned cautiously over the crooked bridge, and drove along beside the river, running black under tall trees, with patches of foam sailing fast on it. Villas with trimly clipped ivy and flower-beds all ablaze were on our other hand, suburban in self-respecting neatness, romantic by force of surroundings and of something old-fashioned and solid in their build.

“This is the best village for its size this side of Galway,” said my cousin, with a languid indifference that, as I well knew, masked the seething self-satisfaction of the resident in the neighbourhood. “And the place has improved so wonderfully. For instance, there’s the Widow’s Almshouse. It isn’t so very long ago since an old woman said to my grandmother, ‘That’s the Widdies’ Almhouse, and sorra widdy in it but one little owld man,’ and now it’s simply bursting with widows—at least, I mean——”

“MR. FLAHERTY’S BOY WAS DEMONSTRATING WITH A PITCH-FORK.”

This remarkable illustration of the prosperity of Oughterard was suddenly interrupted. We had forgotten that the residence of the too fascinating Mr. Flanigan was at hand, but not so Sibbie. With the subtlety of her race, she cloaked her design in a fulsome submissiveness, as the deadly spirit is sheathed in the syrup of the liqueur, and turning in full career, without so much as an indication from her long expressive ears, she made for the gate of which we had been warned. By a special interposition of Providence it was closed, but we were both jerked forward in a very humiliating way, and there was much unseemly hectoring and lashing before we could drag her from the haven where she would be. The seeds of distrust were from that moment sown in our hearts, and we proceeded with a want of confidence that we had never afterwards reason to regret.

A few moments of steep ascent brought us out on to the moor that is the entrance to Connemara; a wide brown place of heather and bog, with the sinuous shining of the Oughterard river saving it from the suspicion of monotony. The level road ran out in front of us till it dwindled into a white thread, the distant hills were no more than confidential blue hints of what we were to see, the sun shone, the strong west wind made us rejoice that we had stitched elastic into our hats, and the exhilaration of our feelings found vent in one passion-fraught word—luncheon.

A great many people have asked us why we did not make our journey through Connemara on tricycles: the roads are so good, the mail-cars offer such facilities for the transport of baggage, the speed and simplicity are so great. To this we have our reply—what then of the luncheon hamper? These objectors have not taken into account the comfortable wayside halt by the picturesque and convenient lake; the unpacking of the spirit lamp, and its glittering bride the tin kettle, the dinner knives at sixpence apiece, the spoons at two-pence-halfpenny; the potted meats, the Bath Olivers, the Bovril and the Burgundy. In the abstract we are not fond of picnics, and agree with the Bard of “Ballads from Punch” in thinking that—

They who in contempt, the Dryad’s haunts
Profane with empty bottles and loose papers,
Find tongues in tarts, ants running on their boots,
Wasps in the wine, and salt in everything!

But a long road and an early breakfast create an earnestness and sincerity in the matter of luncheon that were lacking in the artificial junketings of the Bard. Certainly, our stopping-places were not such as a Dryad could haunt with any degree of comfort. On this first day we pulled up under the lee of a low bank, one of the few roadside fences we had come to in that waste of heather and grey-blue lakes, and spread out our eatables on the seats of the cart with a kind of bashfulness of the possible passer-by; a bashfulness soon to be hardened by custom into a brazen contempt for even the passing mail-car and the fraternal backward grin of its driver. Most people who have wolfed the furtive sandwich in a crowded railway carriage have felt all of a sudden how gross and animal was the action, but how, if persevered in, a callous indifference may be attained; this was the case with us.

After that first lunch the complexion of things changed. The wind sharpened into a wet whip, the clouds swooped down on the hilltops, the lakes turned a ruffled black, like a Spanish hen with its plumage blown the wrong way, and the first mishap to the

“WE PURSUED OUR WAY TO RECESS.”

expedition occurred. I turned my head to look with mild surprise at the end of an iron bedstead with which an ingenious farmer had closed an opening in his stone wall, and as I did so my hat soared upwards from my head, and flew like a live thing towards the lake by which we were driving. I followed with as much speed as I possess, while my cousin lay in idiot laughter in the cart, and had the pleasure of seeing my hat plunge with the élan of a Marcus Curtius into a bed of waterlilies by the bank. From this I drew it, pale, half-drowned, but sane and submissive; and placing it in solitary confinement at the bottom of the trap, I donned a chilly knitted Tam o’Shanter, and we pursued our way to Recess.

CHAPTER III.

DECOROUS black posts, with white tops, on either side of a little avenue, a five-pound trout laid out on the hall door-steps, with some smaller specimens of its kind, a group of anglers admiring these, and a fine, unostentatious rain that nobody paid any attention to—these were our first impressions of the Royal Hotel, Recess. With many injunctions as to her “giddiness” about the head, Sibbie was commended to the care of a stable-boy, and we marched over the corpses of the trout into a little hall in which the smell of wet waterproofs and fishing tackle reigned supreme.

Our only information as to the hotels of Connemara had been gathered from a gentleman whose experience dated some thirty years back. He told us that on arriving at the hotel to which fate had consigned him, his modest request for something more substantial than bread and whisky had been received with ill-concealed consternation. A forlorn hope of children was sent forth to find and hunt in a chicken for his dinner; he had watched the search, the chase, the out-manœuvring of the wily victim; he had heard, tempered by a single plank door, its death screech in the kitchen, and he had even gone the length of eating it, when it was at last served up on a kitchen-plate, brown and shrivelled as “She” in her last moments, and boiled with a little hot water as its only sauce. As to the bedrooms, our friend had been almost more discouraging. He said that while he was dining he heard a trampling of feet and the moving of some heavy body in the passage. The door opened, and a feather bed bulged through the narrow doorway into the room, and was spread on the floor by the table. It was then explained that, as he had asked for dinner and a bed, sure there they were for him, and they were elegant clean feathers, and he should have them for eightpence a pound. With some difficulty the traveller made them understand that, though he meant to carry the dinner away with him, he had no such intentions with regard to the bed; and after a more lucid setting forth of his requirements, his host and hostess grasped the position. He was taken into a room which was quite filled by two immense four-post beds, and having been given to understand that one was reserved for domestic requirements, he was offered the other. He was on the point of accepting this couch when a snore arose from its depths.

A FISHERMAN AT RECESS.

“Ah, sure, that’s only the priest,” said the lady of the house; “and he’s the qui’test man ever ye seen. God bless him! He’ll not disturb ye at all.” This was our friend’s experience, and though possibly it had gained flavour and body with age, it had, at all events, made us look forward with a fearful interest to what might be our lot in Connemara.

But the first vision of the long Recess dinner-table dissipated all our hopes of the comic squalor that is endured gladly for the sake of its literary value, and I may admit that the regret with which my cousin and I affected to eat our soup and pursue our dinner through its orderly five or six courses was not altogether sincere. From one point of view it might have been called a fish dinner, as from clear soup, to raspberries one topic alone filled the mouths of the diners—the outwitting of the wiles of trout and salmon. There was a reading-party of Oxford men, their blazers glowing rainbow-hued among the murky shooting coats of the other diners; there were young curates, and middle-aged majors, and elderly gentlemen—to be an elderly gentleman amounts to a profession in itself—and all, without exception or intermission, talked of fish and fishing. Not to talk to the comrade of your travels at a table d’hôte is an admission of failure and incapacity, so much so that rather than sit silent, I would if need were, repeat portions of the Church Catechism to my friend in a low conversational voice. My cousin and I have seldom been forced to this extreme, and on this occasion we kept up the semblance of a cultured agreeability to one another in a manner that surprised ourselves. But the volume of discussion raging round us overwhelmed us in the end. We felt the Academy and the jennet to be alike an impertinence; we faltered and became silent.

Opposite to us sat one of the most whole-souled of the elderly gentlemen, with a face of the colour and glossy texture of Aspinall’s Royal Mail red enamel, in vigorous conversation with a callow youth in a pink blazer, one of whose eyes was closed by midge-bites; and, though the general chorus might rise and wane in the long intervals between the courses, their strident bass and piping tenor sustained an unflagging duet.

“I assure you, my dear sir,” protested the elderly gentleman, earnestly, with an almost pathetic oblivion of the difference in age between him and his neighbour, “it is not a matter of a fly with these Glendalough trout. I have seen a man fail repeatedly with a certain butcher, and immediately afterwards the same butcher, put pleasantly to a fish, you understand, rose him at once.”

“H’m,” returned the Pink Blazer, gloomily, receiving this, to us, surprising statement, with perfect calm, “my experience—and I’ve fished these lakes for years—is that a full-bodied Jock Scott”—but we will not betray our ignorance by trying to expound second-hand the profundities of the Pink Blazer. When they had been given to the world, he hid his little midge-bitten face in a tumbler of shandygaff, while his aged companion gravely continued the argument.

There were only two or three other ladies at the table, and they evidently had, by long residence in the hotel, been reduced to assuming an interest in the prevailing topic, which we found hard to believe was genuine. They may, of course, have been enthusiasts, but their looks belied them.

Next morning we were awakened by the babble of fishermen in the hall, then the rattle of cars on the gravel told that they had started on their daily business, and when at a subsequent period we came down to breakfast, we found ourselves alone, and the hotel generally in a state of peaceful lethargy. It was, so we had heard excited voices in the hall proclaiming, a splendid day for fishing. This meant that when we looked out of the window we saw two blurred shadows that we believed to be mountains, and heard the rushings of over-fed streams, which, thanks to the mist, were quite invisible. But the hotel weather-glass stood high, and at ten o’clock we were hopeful; at eleven we were despairing; at twelve we were reckless, and we went to our room to get ready for a walk. We have hitherto omitted all reference to one important item of our equipment, and even now, remembering that we were travelling in a proclaimed district, I mention with bated breath the fact that my second cousin insisted on taking an ancient and rusty revolver with her. She had secretly purchased a box of cartridges, weighing several pounds, and at the last moment she had requested me to stow this armoury in the travelling-bag—“In case of mad dogs and things on the road,” she said. The pistol, in its leather case, I consented to, but the tin box of ammunition was intolerable, and we compromised by putting six cartridges into an “Easy Hair Curler” box, which really might have been made for them. So far there had been no occasion to use it, but now, as my cousin struggled into her mackintosh, she remarked tentatively, “Don’t you think this would be a good day for the revolver?”

I said I was not much of a judge, but she might bring it if she liked; and having secreted it and a few “easy hair curlers” in her mackintosh pocket, she was ready for the road.

We paused in the hall for a last vengeful look at the barometer, which still stood cheerfully at Set Fair (we believe its constructor to have been a confirmed fisherman), and at the door we encountered the two hotel dogs—a large silky black creature of the breed that is generally selected to adorn penwipers, and a smirking fox-terrier, with polite, and even brilliant manners of a certain flashy hotel sort.

“Would they come for a walk with the ladies?” said I, my voice assuming the peculiar drivelling tone supposed to be attractive to dogs.

THE TWO HOTEL DOGS.

The penwiper regarded me with cold amber eyes, and composed itself for slumber.

“Come along, then!” I said, still more persuasively adding, as I stepped out into the thick fine mist, “Cats!”

The amber eyes closed, and their owner curled into an inky heap with a slumbrous growl; while the fox-terrier, having struck a dashing attitude to keep up his character as a sportsman, affected to believe that the cats I referred to were in the kitchen, and hurried off in that direction. We were snubbed; and we went forth reflecting on the demoralising effect of hotel life. Its ever-changing society and friendships of an hour had turned the penwiper into an ill-mannered cynic, and the fox-terrier into an effete and blasé loafer. Thus moralising, we splashed along the road, past the little post and telegraph office, where you write your telegrams in an arbour of roses, and post your letters between the sprays of clematis, and struck gallantly forward, with the telegraph posts, along the Clifden road. Glendalough lake lay on our left hand, and the bare mountains towered up on our right—at least, we were given to understand by the guide-books and the waiter that they towered, the mist allowing us no opportunity of judging for ourselves. Across the lake we saw the Glendalough hotel among the woods that came down to the water’s edge, and on it—we allude to the lake—were the boats of some of the maniacs who had left their comfortable asylum in the grey of the morning. We did not see them catching any fish; in fact, we have been forced to the conclusion that we had some malign influence on the anglers of Connemara, for, though we have watched them long and often, we have never seen so much as a rise.

We left the main road at the end of the lake, and turned into one running in another direction. It was, like every Connemara road, good and level, and in perfect order. Like all the others, too, it disdained fence or protection of any kind, unless an occasional deep ditch or lake on each side can be called a reassurance to the driver. Here and there on the road the little black demon cattle were standing disgustedly about, declining to eat the wet grass among the wetter heather, and concentrating all their attention on us in a manner that, taken in connection with the most villainous expression of countenance, and horns like Malay Krisses, made it advisable to throw stones at them while there was yet time. They at once withdrew, recognising the fact that is early implanted in the mind of every known Irish animal, that sermons in stones are unanswerable. We had got on to a long stretch of bog road, bounded only by the vaguely suggestive mist, and we were beginning to feel the ardour for a long walk awakening in us, when we heard a strange yelping on the road behind us, and looking back, saw a large brindled bulldog advancing out of the mist at a lumbering trot. No one was with him; a short piece of rope hung round his collar, and his aspect altogether was so terrific that my cousin and I again provided ourselves with the national weapon, and stood discreetly aside to let him pass. He instantly stopped and stared at us in what seemed a very threatening manner.

“Perhaps he’s mad!” I suggested. “Where’s the gun?”

“In my pocket,” returned my cousin in a low voice “and I can’t get it out. It’s stuck.”

“NOW!”

“Well, you’d better hurry,” I said, “for he’s coming.”

The bulldog was moving slowly towards us, uttering strange grunts, and looking excitedly round at the cattle, who were beginning to close in on us and him. My cousin with one strenuous effort ripped the pocket off her mackintosh.

“I’ve got it at last!” she panted, putting in a cartridge with trembling fingers and cocking the pistol. “It’s awfully stiff, and I know it throws high, but anyhow, it will frighten him—I don’t really want to hit him.”

“For goodness’ sake wait till I get behind you,” I replied. “Now!”

There was a report like a cannon, and I saw my cousin’s arm jerk heavenwards, as if hailing a cab. The next moment the cattle were flying to the four winds of heaven, and the bulldog, far from being alarmed or hurt, was streaking through the heather in hot pursuit of the largest cow of the herd.

This was a more appalling result than we could possibly have anticipated. Not only had we failed to intimidate, but we had positively instigated him to crime.

“He’s used to guns,” I said. “He thinks we are cow-shooting.”

“He’s gone to retrieve the game,” replied my cousin in a hollow voice.

In another instant the bulldog had overtaken his prey, and the next, our knees tottering under us with horror, we saw him swinging from her nose by his teeth, while her bellowings rent the skies. Back she came down the hill, flinging her head from side to side, while the bulldog adhered with limpet tenacity to her nose, and, jumping the bog-ditch like a hunter, she set off down the road, followed by a trumpeting host of friends and sympathisers who had re-gathered from the mountain-side on hearing her cries. The whole adventure had been forced upon us so suddenly and unexpectedly that we had no time to argue away the illogical feeling that we were responsible for the bulldog’s iniquities. I see now that the sensible thing would have been to have gone and hid about among the rocks till it was all over. But that course did not occur to us till afterwards. As a matter of fact, my cousin crammed the pistol into her uninjured pocket, I filled my hands with stones, and we pursued at our best speed, seeing from time to time above the heaving backs and brandished tails of the galloping cattle the dark body of the bulldog as he was swung into the air over his victim’s head. Suddenly the whole cortége wheeled, and flourished up a bohireen that led to a cottage, and in the quick turn the cow fell on her knees, and lay there exhausted, with the bulldog prone beside her, exhausted too, but still holding on. The presumable owner of the cow arrived on the scene at the same instant that we did.

“Call off yer dog!” he roared, in a fearful voice.

“He’s not ours!” we panted; “but come on, and we’ll beat him off!” the bulldog’s evident state of collapse encouraging us to this gallantry.

The man’s only reply was to pick up a large stone, and heave it at the dog. It struck his brindled ribs a resounding blow, but he was too much blown to bear malice satisfactorily; to our deep relief he crawled to his feet, slunk away past us on to the main road, and, setting off at a limping trot in the direction from which he had come, presently vanished into the mist.

The man stooped down and examined the poor cow’s torn and bleeding nose, and she lay, wild-eyed, with heaving sides, at our feet.

“That the divil may blisther the man that owns him!” he said; “and if he isn’t your dog, what call have you taking him out to be running my cows?”

“We met him on the road,” we protested. “We couldn’t help his following us.”

“Aha! thin it’s one of them dirty little fellows of officers that has the fishing lodge below that he belongs to!” said the man. “I heard a shot awhile ago, and ye may b’lieve me I’ll have the law o’ them.”

We exchanged guilty glances.

“Yes; I heard a shot, too,” I said nervously. “Well, I—a—I think we must be getting on now. It’s getting late, and—a—I hope the cow isn’t very bad. Anyhow”—my voice sinking into the indistinct mumble that usually accompanies the benefaction—“here’s something to get soft food for her till her nose gets well.”

The ambition for the long walk was dead. With more hurried good wishes and regrets we wished the man good evening, and so home, much shattered.

P.S.—We should like to meet the owner of that bulldog.

CHAPTER IV.

SIBBIE looked as suspicious and unamiable as ever when she came to the door next morning; her long day in the stable had evidently not propitiated her in the least, but to her subtle mind had only augured a journey of unprecedented length on the following day. We started, however, with great brilliancy, and with a vulgar semi-circular sweep, like a shop-boy making a capital letter, that Sibbie considered very telling when in society. It took altogether by surprise the penwiper dog, who, with a little more than his usual elaborate ill-breeding, was standing with his back to us, looking chillingly unconcerned, and compelled him to show the most humiliating adroitness in order to escape from Sibbie’s venomous fore-feet. The incident rounded off pleasingly our last impressions of Recess, and we whirled out on to the main road in a manner that nearly took our breath away, and probably left the gate-post in a state of hysterical gratitude at its escape.

It was not raining, but the day had got itself up to look as like rain as possible, and was having a great success in the part. A rough wind was blowing the clouds down about us, and, as on the day before, the hills hid their heads and shoulders in the odious mist, leaving only their steep sides visible, with the wrathful white watercourses scarring them, like perpendicular scratches on a slate. It was on one of these hills that a tourist missed his footing last year in trying to get to the bottom faster than someone else; the heather clump broke from the edge of the ravine, and the young fellow went with it. They searched for him all the summer night, and next morning a shepherd found him, dead and mutilated, at the foot of the cliff. We drove on steadily by bare bog and rocky spur for three or four miles, with the wind hard in our faces, till we came to a cross road, where a double line of telegraph wires branched from the single one, and following, according to directions the double one, we left the mail-car road behind. The wind now screamed into our right ears, and Sibbie’s long tasselled tail, which before had streamed back out of sight under the cart, turned like a weather cock and swept out in front of the left wheel. It was not a pleasant day for seeing one of the show places of Connemara, but it was the best and only one we could afford; besides, from what we had heard of Ballinahinch, it seemed as if it would be able to bear an unbecoming atmosphere better than most places.

It need scarcely be said that the new road ran by a lake, or lakes; every road we have seen in Connemara makes for water like an otter, and finds it with seeming ease, sometimes even succeeding in getting into it. In a forlorn hollow by one of these lakes, we came on a little Roman Catholic chapel, with its broken windows boarded up, and its graveyard huddled under a few wind-worn trees on the hill behind. Crooked wooden crosses, or even a single upright stake, were the landmarks of the dead; perhaps in a country where trees take more trouble to preserve than game, and are far more rare, a piece of timber is felt to be more honourable than the stone that lies profusely ready to the hand. The graveyard trees quivered rheumatically in the wind, long bending before it in one direction having stiffened them past waving; the pale water chafed and sighed in a rushy creek below; even Sibbie chafed and sighed as we stood still to look back, and she took at least ten yards of the hill at full gallop when we started her again.

As we drove along the high ground beyond, Ballinahinch came slowly into sight; a long lake in a valley, a long line of wood skirting it, and finally, on a wooded height, the Castle, as it is called, a large modern house with a battlemented top, very gentlemanlike, and even handsome, but in no other way remarkable.

It was not the sort of thing we had expected. We had heard a great deal about Mary Martin, who was called the Princess of Connemara forty years ago; we had read up a certain amount of Lever’s “Martins of Cro’ Martin,” of which she was the heroine, and knew from other sources something of her gigantic estate, of the ruin of it during the famine, of the way in which she and her father completed that ruin by borrowing money to help their starving tenants, and of her tragic death, when she had lost everything, and had left Ireland for ever. We were prepared for anything, from an acre of gables and thatch to a twelfth century tower with a dozen rooms one on top of the other, and a kerne or a gallowglass looking out of every window, but this admirable mansion with plate-glass windows, and doubtless hot water to the very garrets, shook down our sentimentalities like apples in autumn. We drove on in silence. I knew that my cousin felt apologetic.

“I believe I had forgotten,” she said, “that it was Mary Martin’s father who built this, sixty or seventy years ago. Of course you couldn’t expect it to look old.”

“BALLINAHINCH CAME SLOWLY INTO SIGHT.”

“No, of course not,” I replied, “and even if I did I don’t think it would be much use. That house is too conscientious to look a day older than its age.”

We arrived at the gate while I spoke, a modest entrance to what seemed a back road to the house, and Sibbie turned in at it with her usual alacrity in the matter of visiting. She would visit at a public-house, at a pigstye, at a roofless ruin, anywhere rather than go along the road. The picnic was beginning; certainly the view was. We looked along the lake and saw how it coiled and spread among its wooded islands; the shrouded hill behind it gave for the moment some indication of its greatness; there was no doubt that even at its worst, as it undoubtedly was, Ballinahinch was worth seeing.

The wind fought with us along the first stretch of the drive, dragging at our hat pins, lifting the rug off our knees; blowing our hair in our eyes; but at the first turning a great and sudden calm fell about us. For the first time in our travels we were in a large plantation. Some local genius once said that “Connemara got a very wooded look since them telegraph posts was put up in it,” and after many a drive in which the line of black posts dwindling to the horizon was the only break in the barrenness we began to understand this. Here at all events the civilising hand had done its work, and we slackened pace in the greenness and shelter, and, fortified by the knowledge that the present owner of the place was far away, we began to think of luncheon. My cousin pacified the fly-tormented Sibbie with a few handfuls of fresh grass, and got out our pewter spoons and other elegances of the luncheon table, while I, grovelling on the floor of the cart, nurtured there the spirit-lamp through one of its most implacable moods. There was a charming stillness, broken only at first by the occasional heavy splash of a leaping salmon in the lake below, and by Sibbie’s leisurely mastications, then the first sulky sigh came from the tin kettle, and a long beckoning finger of blue flame darted from beneath it. That was a weird habit of the spirit-lamp, to beckon to us when the kettle began to boil, and on this occasion it did not play us false. We made our homely cup of Bovril, we devoured our cheese, we crunched our Bath olivers, and it was just then, when the seats of the trap were covered with cups and crumbs, and we were altogether at our grimiest, that we heard wheels close at hand.

My cousin at once showed a tendency to get over the wall and hide, leaving undivided degradation to me, but the descent to the lake on the other side was too steep. As she turned back discomforted I was quite glad to see how dishevelled she looked, and how crooked her hat was, and before any remedial steps could be taken the Philistines were upon us. They consisted of four young men, crowded on a car with their fishing-rods and baskets, and, to do them justice, they, after a first stare of astonishment, considerately averted their eyes from the picnic. The narrowness of the road made it necessary that they should pass at a walk, and it was at that moment, while we were affecting unconsciousness of all things in heaven and earth, that the nightmare of yesterday rose up before us—the bulldog. He was close behind the axle of the car, fastened to it, thank heaven, with a glittering chain, but between the spokes of the wheel we saw his eyes rolling at us with a bloodshot amiability or even recognition, while his crooked tail wagged stiffly, and his terrible nose twitched amorously towards the Bath oliver I held in my hand. The car quickened up again, and he dragged at his chain as he was forced into a shuffling trot along with it. “Come in, Stripes,” shouted one of the youths, and the party passed out of sight.

“Did you see him?” I said excitedly. “I believe he knew us!”

“Of course he did,” returned my cousin, with an offensive coolness that was intended to carry off any recollections of her dastardly moment of panic, “but he won’t tell. He knows if he gives us away about the revolver we will inform about the cow. For my part I’m rather sorry he isn’t here now,” she went on, as she wiped a knife in the grass, and then stabbed it

“WE HEARD WHEELS CLOSE AT HAND.”

into the earth to give it a polish; “no picnic should be without a dog. When I was a child we used always to wipe the knives on the dogs’ backs between the courses at a picnic, and then the dogs used to try and lick that spot on their backs——”

I am not squeamish, but I checked my cousin’s recital at this point, and we pursued our way to the house. Tall sliding doors, in perfect order, admitted us to a large quiet yard, so orderly that, as we looked round it, we felt, like Hans Andersen’s black beetle, quite faint at the sight of so much cleanliness, and would have been revived by the only familiar whiff of the cow-shed and pigstye. We gave Sibbie and her luncheon bag to a man who was hanging about, and were proceeding to ask whether we might walk about the grounds, when a door into the house opened, and there issued from it a young woman of such colossal height and figure that we stared at her awe-struck. She smiled at us with all the benevolence of the giantess, and advancing, offered to be our guide. We thanked her like Sunday School children and followed her meekly towards the hall door, feeling as we looked at her that it would have been simpler to have climbed on to her tremendous shoulders and got at once a bird’s-eye view of the demesne. It was apparently part of the programme that we should see the inside of the house, and she led us through the rooms in the lower story, billiard-room, dining-room, drawing-room, library; all comfortable, and in their way imposing, but unfortunately devoid of special objects to comment on, while the giantess stood and held the door of each open, with, as it seemed to us, an ogress-like avidity for approbation. But she proved to be a kindly giantess, and when we looked, in spite of ourselves, a little unenthusiastic at the prospect of viewing the upper part of the house she relented and said we might go out into the grounds.

The hill sloped steeply from the dining-room windows, to the lake in front, and to a wood at the side, and going down some steps we found ourselves in a shady walk by the water.

“This is Miss Martin’s seat,” said the giantess, stopping in front of a curiously-shaped and comfortless-looking stone block, “ye can sit in it if ye like.”

We did so, gently.

“How very nice,” said my cousin, getting up again, and removing an earwig and some dead leaves of last year from her skirt, “but I should have thought she would have liked more of a view. Those laurels two yards off are very pretty of course, but one can’t see anything else.”

I saw an antagonistic gleam in the giantess’s eye and hastened to suggest that the laurels might have grown up since the days of Mary Martin.

“Whether or no, it’s in it she used to sit,” she said, as if that settled the question of the view. “Maybe ye’d like now to walk a piece in the woods to see them?”

“I suppose it would take us a long time to walk through such large woods as these?” I said lusciously, seeing that I was regarded with more favour than my cousin.

“Is it walk thim woods? Ye’d sleep, before ye’d have them walked. But there’s a nice road round to the boathouse ye can go.”

“Perhaps you could tell me how many acres there are in this estate?” said my cousin, trying to make hay in my private streak of sunshine.

“I declare I’m not rightly sure.”

“I suppose they’re past counting?” continued my cousin, with the fascinating smile of one who is sustaining a conversation brilliantly.

“About that,” responded the giantess lucidly, determined at all hazards to keep pace with outside opinion. “Here now is the little road I was tellin’ ye of. Would ye know the way in it?”

We assured her we could find the boathouse without her help, and “so in all love, we parted.”

As we walked on in the solitude the lake narrowed beside us to a river, a connecting channel between it and the larger lake beyond, and the water ran strong and quiet under the meeting branches that leaned above it from both sides. The dark mirror reflected every twig; brown stems, green canopy, and opening of grey sky arched away beneath our feet as well as above our heads; we became at last giddy with the double world, and felt our eyes cling instinctively to the silver smear on the glassy surface or the golden gleam in the shallow that testified to where illusion began. Once or twice there was a splash that sounded, in that silence, as if a large stone had been thrown in; we were, of course, looking the wrong way each time, and instead of seeing the flash of a ten or twenty pound fish we saw only the rift in the crystal, and the big ripples following each other to the shore. Once only in Galway did we see live fish without stint or hindrance, when, afterwards, we leaned over the bridge in Galway town itself, and could have counted by the hundred the dark backs of the salmon that lie all day still and shadowy in the clear water below the weir.

We were soon out again by the upper lake, and, much beset by flies and midges, walked along the edge of the wood till we came to the boathouse. On its broad steps we sat thankfully down to rest, and commented at our leisure on the atrocities of the grey weather, and of the cloud that was cloaking the peak of the mountain opposite. We happened to know that there ought to be a mountain there, one of the Twelve Pins, in fact, but for all we could see, it might have flown into the Atlantic Ocean, in search of something less watery than Connemara. As we sat there, and saw the invariable fisherman catching the inevitable nothing, and looked at the dark sheet of water in its beautiful setting of trees, my cousin told me drowsily several things about Mary Martin. I cannot now recall the recital very clearly, but I remember hearing how Miss Martin had taken a guest up the mountain that should have been soaring into the heavens before us, and, making him look round the tremendous horizon, had told him how everything he could see belonged to her. If the weather had been like ours, it would not have been a very overpowering statement, limited, in fact, to the cloud of mist and Miss Martin’s umbrella; but as it was, with the inland mountains and moors clear to the bluest distance, and the far Atlantic rounding her fifty miles of sea-coast, it was a boast worth making. Perhaps it was the vision that was clearest to her failing sense when she lay dying on the other side of that Atlantic without an acre and without an income, a refugee from the country where her forefathers had prospered during seven hundred years.

The retrospect became melancholy, and we began to be extremely chilly; sitting out of doors was too severe a test for this July day, and we made towards the house again. When we were nearing Mary Martin’s seat we saw through the trees a brilliant spot of colour, which gradually developed into a scarlet petticoat, worn shawl-wise about the head of an old woman who had sat down in a tattered heap to rest on the stone bench. She put away something like a black pipe as we came up, and began the usual beggar’s groaning, and when, after some fumbling, my cousin produced a modest coin, the ready blessings were followed by the ready tears, that welled from hideously inflamed eyes, and trickled over the wrinkles in her yellow cheeks. It occurred to us to ask whether she remembered Mary Martin, and in a moment the tears stopped.

“Is it remember her?” she said, wiping her eyes with some skill on a frayed corner of the red petticoat. “I remember her as well as yerself that I’m looking at!”

“What was she like in the face?” said my cousin in her richest brogue.

“Oh musha? Ye couldn’t rightly say what was she like, she was that grand! She was beautiful and white and charitable, only she had one snaggledy tooth in the front of her mouth. But what signifies that? Faith, whin she was in it the ladies of Connemara might go undher the sod. ’Twas as good for thim. And afther all they say she died as silly as ye plase down in the County Mee-yo (Mayo), but there’s more tells me she died back in Ameriky. Oh, glory be to God, thim was the times!”

The tears began again, and she relapsed into the red petticoat. We left her there, huddled on the seat moaning and talking to herself. We could do no more for her than hope, as we looked back at her for the last time, that the pipe in her pocket had gone out. The day was slipping by; a twelve mile drive to Letterfrack was before us. Taking all things into consideration, especially Sibbie’s powers as a roadster, we hardened our hearts to starting at once, without taking the half-mile walk to see the wonderful stables that cost Colonel Martin £15,000 to build, and are paved with blocks of the green and white Connemara marble. Let us trust that our intended admiration was conveyed in some form to that costly marble flooring, in spite of an unpleasant saying about good intentions and a certain pavement that is their destination.

CHAPTER V.

IT was nearly four o’clock before we got out of the Ballinahinch avenue on to the Clifden road. A young horse had got loose in the yard just as Sibbie was having her toilet made for the start, and the clattering of hoofs and cracking of whips that ensued had so upset her old-maidish sensibilities, that she refused to leave the stable, till finally, by a noble inspiration on our part, she was backed out of it. She had started from the yard in a state of mingled resentment and terror; even still her ears were fluttering like the wings of a butterfly, and she showed a desire to canter that seemed to us unhealthy. The shrunken oat bag lay at our feet; decidedly she had had more luncheon than was good for her while we were walking ourselves off our legs in the woods of Ballinahinch. The broad lake lay on our left, showing coldly and mysteriously through the changing swathes of mist, and above us, on our left, the long slopes of bog and heather stretched upwards till they steepened into the dignity of actual mountains.

“If I thought the weather could not hear me,” observed my second cousin, “I should say it was going to clear up. It looks almost as if there were sunlight on those children’s petticoats ahead of us.” An enchanting group was advancing to meet us; half-a-dozen or so of children, boys and girls petticoated alike in mellow varieties of the dull red or creamy white Galway flannel, a few cattle wandered in front of them, and in their midst a long-suffering donkey was being ridden by three of them and beaten by the remainder. We were so absorbed in sitting with our heads on one side to better appreciate the artistic unity of the picture that we took no heed of the dangerous forward slant of Sibbie’s ears. No one could have supposed that in her short intimacy with “the quality” she could have already developed a fine-ladyish affectation of horror at the sight of an estimable poor relation; yet so it was. Casting one wild look at the appalling spectacle, she sprang sideways across the road, whirled the trap round, only avoiding the black bog-ditch by a hair’s breadth, and fled at full speed in the direction from which she had just come.

My cousin and I were for the moment paralysed by surprise, and by the sudden horrid proximity of the bog-ditch, which was hospitably prepared to take us all in and do for us, and think nothing of it. Sibbie’s strong little brown back was hooped with venomous speed, and her head was out of sight between her forelegs. The telegraph posts were blended into a black streak, the lakes swam past us like thoughts in a dream, it seemed useless to get out to go to her head; obviously, Sibbie was running away. The governess cart quite entered into the spirit of the thing, and leaped and bounded along in a way that—considering its age and profession—we thought very unbecoming. It is perhaps a façon de parler to say that I was driving. To put it more accurately, I

“HANGING ON EACH TO OUR REIN.”

had been driving, and now I was trying very hard to do the opposite. However, after laying the seeds of two blisters in vain, I was ignominiously compelled to hand one rein to my cousin. Hanging on each to our rein, we lay back in the trap, getting a good leverage for our pull over the ridge of the luncheon basket. I shudder to think of the result had those reins broken. Two human Catherine wheels would have been seen revolving rapidly over the stern of the governess-cart, and as for Sibbie—— But the reins were staunch, and though at first a want of unanimity caused us to swing from side to side of the road in a series of vandykes, the combined weight of the expedition slowly told, and Sibbie’s ears were hauled into sight. Back and up they came till they were laid along her back, and her long nose pointed skywards in a fury of helpless protest, while her gallop grudgingly slackened.

Of course my hat had blown off early in the proceedings, but nothing else had happened. I handed my rein to my cousin without a word, and got out of the trap.

“No doubt this had been extremely amusing,” I said, “but I am going to buckle the reins as low down on this bit as they will go.”

And I did so. I hate people who do nothing but laugh on an emergency, simply because they think it looks brave.

As I turned Sibbie round I saw, nearly a quarter of a mile away, a child standing by a telegraph post, holding in its hand a white disc that I knew must be my hat, and I also saw with much pleasure that the other children, with the cows and the donkey, had left the road, and were climbing up the hillside. So, with hearts overflowing with a great thanksgiving that “Earl Percy,” i.e., the mail-car and its English tourists, had not “seen our fall,” we drove back again at a cautious jog, Sibbie obviously as much on the look-out as we were for anything that she could reasonably shy at. The girl with the hat was regarded by her with an anguish of suspicion, only allayed by my getting out of the cart while the hat was smuggled in, and leading her—a process which always suggests taking a child by the hand to give it confidence.

It was a long way, about six Irish miles, back to the turn that we had been instructed would take us to Letterfrack, and the invalid sunshine had already swaddled itself again in cotton wool and retired for the night. If my second cousin has a failing, it is that she believes herself to possess “an eye for country,” a gift fraught with peril to its possessor. Unfortunately, she had, before starting, studied on a map the relative positions of Ballinahinch, Recess, and Letterfrack, and now that she was face to face with the situation her eye for country flashed fire at the idea of having to traverse two sides of a triangle instead of one, which was pretty much what we were called upon to do.

“It is absurd,” she said, hotly, “to go back almost to Recess to go by that ‘new line’ to Letterfrack, when I am almost sure I remember seeing on the Ordnance Map a dear little roadeen that would take us through the mountains somehow on to the Kylemore road.”

From the use of the affectionate diminutive “roadeen,” I knew that my cousin was trying to engage my sympathies, and though I tried to steel my heart against the suggestion, there certainly was something attractive in the thought of a short cut.

“It ought to be a little further on,” she continued, “by a little lake; and you know it’s getting pretty late now.”

I now recognise that this was the moment at which to have stamped upon the scheme, and to have made the time-honoured remark that we had no time for short cuts. But I let it slide by me, and when we reached a narrow, but to all appearance sufficient mountain road, bending plausibly away to the left, we mutually succumbed to its fascinations. For a mile or so it was really very fair. It certainly did occur to me that it might be awkward if we met anything larger than a wheelbarrow, as the governess-cart easily monopolised the space between the usual bog-ditches, but as, so far, the district seemed quite uninhabited, we did not trouble ourselves on that account. The road became steeper and stonier as we advanced, but Sibbie toiled on gallantly, the pride of having run away clearly still working in her and encouraging her in a way no mere whip could have done. The cotton-wool into which the sun had retreated had now covered all the sky, and was wrapping up the mountain tops as if they were jewellery, which, as they were armoured from head to foot in sheets of grey rock, seemed to us unnecessary care. We were getting deeper and deeper into the hills, and the higher we got the heavier the rain became. It felt as though some important heavenly pipe had burst, and we were getting near the scene of the explosion. The three shilling umbrella did its best; it humped its back against the torrent like an old cab-horse, and really kept my second cousin fairly dry. But things were going very badly with the luncheon basket, and, though we did not mention it to each other, the belief in the short cut was dying in us.

The road ahead was narrowing in a way not to be accounted for by the laws of perspective; it was becoming suspiciously grassy, and rocks of a size usually met with only in the highest Druidical circles lay about so near to the track that steering was becoming a difficulty. A wild-looking woman, wearing a coarse white flannel petticoat over her red hair instead of a cloak, came paddling along with barefooted indifference to the wet, and stopped to stare at us with a frank and open-mouthed amazement which was not reassuring.

“Shall we ask her the way?” I suggested.

“It’s no good,” replied my cousin, sombrely; “we must go on now. It’s too narrow to turn round. Let’s get on to those cottages and ask someone there.”

(The belief in the short cut here heaved its final groan and expired.)

We had climbed to a kind of small plateau in the heart of the hills, and on the farther side of the little indigo lake round which the track wound were a couple of cottages. We beat Sibbie into a trot, and made for the nearer of the two, and the barking of the usual cur having brought a young man out of the house, my cousin proceeded to discourse him.

“Are we going right for Kylemore?”

“Yo’re not.”

“Where does this road lead to?”

“To the Widda Joyce’s beyant.”

“And is that the end of it? Can’t we get on any farther?”

The young man looked at us much as an early Roman might have regarded the Great Twin Brethren.

“Bedad I dunno what yerselves is able to do; but there’s no answerable road for a cart whatever.”

Our eyes met in dumb despair, but my second cousin still rose above the waves. (This metaphor is most appropriate, as we could not have been much wetter if we had been drowned.)

“Where is the nearest hotel?” she asked, with all the severity of an examining Q.C.

“Back in Recess. Ye’d be hard set to get there to-night.”

“Think now, like a good boy, is there no sort of a place hereabouts where they’d put us up for the one night?”

The despairing relapse into the vernacular had its effect.

“Well, faith, I wouldn’t say but the Widda Joyce ’d be apt to be able to do it. There was an English gintleman, a Major, that she had there for the fishin’——”

In what capacity the English Major was used in the fishing we did not stop to inquire; he might have been employed as a float for all we cared; it was about all we felt ourselves fit for.

We did not ask the Widow Joyce if she could take us in. We simply walked into her house and stayed there. We had heard a good deal of the Spanish type of beauty that is said to abound in Connemara, but the Widow Joyce was the first specimen of it that we had seen. A small, pale, refined woman, with large brown eyes, and dark hair tucked shiningly away under a snowy white frilled cap, she heard our story with flattering interest and compassion, and we had hardly finished it before most of her eleven children were started in different directions to prepare things for us and “the pony.” By-the-bye, we noticed that during our travels Sibbie was always given brevet rank, the delicate inference being that we were far too refined and aristocratic to be associated with anything so vulgar as a jennet.

A lovely clear fire of turf was burning on the hearth, and Mrs. Joyce hospitably insisted on our each sitting on little stools inside the big fireplace, and roasting there, till the steam of our sacrifice showed how necessary a proceeding it was. In the meantime that sacred place known as “Back-in-the-room” was being prepared for our reception; as far though we should have preferred the kitchen with its clean earth floor and blazing fire, Mrs. Joyce would not hear of our having our dinner there.

“Sure the Meejer always ate his vittles back in the room,” she said; and to this supreme precedent we found it necessary to conform.

We certainly owed a great deal to the Meejer. It was the Meejer, we discovered, who had broken an air-hole in the hermetically-sealed window. “An’ faith, though he give us the money to put in the glass agin, we never got it done afther. It’s a very backwards place here.” The Meejer’s sense of decorum had prescribed the muslin curtains that shielded the interior from the rude gazer’s eye. The Meejer had compelled the purchase of a jug and basin, and “a beautiful clane pair o’ sheets, that not a one ever slep in but himself.” In fact, what of civilisation there was, was due to his beneficent influence, and we rose up and said that the Meejer was blessed. Our dinner was an admirable meal; a blend of the resources of the luncheon-basket and of Mrs. Joyce; its only drawback being that, forgetful, as she herself admitted, of the precepts of the Meejer, she had put the teapot down “on the coals to dhraw,” and the result was a liquid that would have instantly made me sick, and would have kept my second cousin awake in agony till she died next morning. So we avoided the tea.

“SITTING ON LITTLE STOOLS INSIDE THE BIG FIREPLACE.”

“Back in the room” was a small whitewashed place with an earthern floor as clean, though not quite as dry, as the one in the kitchen. A big four-poster bed filled one end of it, and a red painted press, a square table, a huge American chest with the washing apparatus on it, and two or three chairs, were the rest of the furnishing. But though the upholstery was of a simple character, it was evident that the decorative sense was not lacking. The walls were lavishly hung with fervidly coloured religious prints; two or three sheets of an illustrated fishing fly-list had a place of honour near the widow’s patron saint over the fireplace, the gorgeous salmon flies being probably regarded by the younger Joyces as portraits of some new kind of angel; and drapery’s adventitious aid was lent by the suspended wardrobe of the family, both male and female, which relieved the severities of the bedposts, and gave a little air of interesting mystery to the corners of the room. Rather more than half the room had a rough ceiling of boards, and near the door we noticed a ladder leading up to the loft thus made. We had felt anxious about the bestowal of the widow and her family, not knowing what duties the four-poster might not be called upon to perform, and as the witching hour of ten o’clock drew nigh, and the low murmur of Joyce discourse still continued, we had made up our minds to ask what the arrangements might be, when there came a tap at the door.

“I beg yer honour’s pardon, Miss,” said our hostess’ soft, polite voice, “but would there be any harm in meself and the children goin’ above up to the loft?”

We said no, quite the contrary, and after some whispering and giggling outside the door, a procession of Joyces slowly filed up the ladder, headed by the younger sons of the house, and followed by the widow and the daughters. The last pair of stout red legs was hoisted off the ladder, the rustling and pounding overhead gradually subsided, and my second cousin and I found ourselves face to face with the most serious situation—not excepting either the bulldog or the runaway—of the expedition. The fear of interruption had hitherto prevented us from making as thorough investigation as we might have wished, and now we “stared at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien.” Then she said—

“I’ll look.”

She turned down the bedclothes with a stiff, nervous hand. “They seem pretty clean,” she said at last; “they mayn’t perhaps have been washed very lately, but I think they must have dusted them. I can only see one crumb and a used wax match.”

The account was not encouraging, but it might have been worse. Of the sufferings of that night, however, as much cannot be said. After our occupancy of that bed, not one used match, but twenty, might have been collected. In explanation of this circumstance, I will merely quote one line from the charming duet for bass and tenor in The Lily of Killarney—

To light the way, to flea my love.

CHAPTER VI.

FROM the indications given in the last chapter, the intelligent reader will probably have gathered the fact that we did not sleep well.

“It isn’t the little bit they ates I begridges them,” quoted my cousin, as in one of the long watches of the night she wearily lit her candle for the nineteenth time, “but ’tis the continial thramplin’ they keeps up.”

Even when the greater part of these foes was either gorged or slain, the sleep that hummed its mellow harmonies in the loft over our heads held far from us, tossing and stifling among feathers and flock pillows. It must have been about two a.m., and I had just, by various strategies, induced myself to go to sleep, when I was once more awakened, this time by a convulsive clutch of my arm.

“Don’t stir!” whispered my second cousin, in a voice so low that it felt like one of my own dreams, “but listen!”

A stealthy sound, as of a slow, barefooted advance, crept to us, buried though we were in the perfumed depths of the flock pillows.

“Whatever it is, it came out from under the bed,” breathed my cousin, “and it has gone twice round the room—looking for our money, I expect!”

The steps ceased for a moment, then there came a sound as of a little rush towards the bed, and in an instant something with loud flappings and rustlings had descended upon us, and rested heavily, with hollow cacklings of contentment, upon our buried forms (for I suppose I need hardly state that we had both bolted under the bedclothes).

“I believe it’s only the goose after all!” I said, as soon as I was sufficiently recovered to speak.

“Only the goose!” returned my second cousin, with concentrated fury; “I don’t see much to be grateful for in that. And how do you know it isn’t the gander? I’m simply stifling here, but I know the brute would peck me if I went out from under the clothes. I wish to goodness it had been a burglar. Anyhow, they don’t peck.”

This was indisputable; as was also the fact that the bird had to be dislodged. She had worked herself into a position that was probably more satisfactory to her than it was to me, and judging, as I was well able to do, by her weight, she must have been a remarkably strong and vigorous bird.

“Get the matches ready,” I said, gathering myself for an effort. Then, curving myself till the goose must have thought she was sitting on a camel, I gave a heaving plunge. There was a croak, a flop, and a minute afterwards the light of a match revealed a monstrous grey goose standing in pained astonishment on the floor near the bed.

Fortunately the profundities of Joyce repose knew no disturbance, and, still more providentially, the three shilling umbrella was within reach of the bed. Opening this as a safeguard against an attack, which in our then thin costume we should be ill-fitted to

“REVEALED A MONSTROUS GREY GOOSE.”