The day had turned out wet, the rain fell in
long slanting cords, and beginning first by
covering the window-panes of the inn at Ballyrobin
(where I was detained) with silver scratches
like so many feeble attempts at autographs
by some traveller possessed of a diamond ring,
had at last come to a wide, washing stream
that flooded the glass, and kept it dripping,
like a thatched roof on a wet day, the
bright drops matching each other in races to
the bottom, as if they had determined to be
merry, and to get up small Derbys on their
own account. The car waited till the cushions
got wet, and Dennis drove it back again under
cover.

In my room there was not much to amuse a
weather-bound traveller. The only books on the
shelf over the illuminated tea-tray were, a
Catholic Testament in the Irish language, a
dismembered volume of Tom Moore's Irish Melodies,
and a History of the Irish Rebellion, black-greasy
with thumbing. The mantelpiece was
stuck with bagsmen's cards. There was nothing
in the room peculiarly national except the
peat fire and the peat basket, which, in Ireland,
stands where the coal-scuttle does in England.
There were the lumps of dried black turf, looking
like small oblong cakes of chocolate, burning,
or to be burnt. There is no blaze about a peat
fire, but a quick, earnest, white flame, that slowly
burns the sods (where once the snipe and wild
duck fed and nestled; where the moping, bankrupt
heron brooded over his irremediable misfortune;
where the hooded crow watched the lamb,
and the endless magpies strutted and fluttered)
to a blinding pure crimson, so pure and
intense, that it gradually alchemises into a bloom
of colourless radiance, and then, lowering and
sinking, lapses into white stillness preparatory to
fusing into the mortuary ashes of old age and
repentance. There is something primitive
and savage in the tall basketful of dry turf, and
I like to throw it on the fire, fancying myself
Caractacus, or Phelim O'Toole, the first King of
Munster.

The Three Salmons at Ballyrobin is not an
hotel like the Hotel du Louvre at Paris. It
more resembles an English village inn, with a
dash of the English beer-shop. On the mantelpiece
was the gresset (cresset), or rush wick
in a pool of grease, that flared for me last
night while I chilled my blood with stories of
the Irish pikemen, and warmed it with sips of
whisky-toddy. Then there is the rude deal
table, which appears to serve the landlady's
family for a sort of register or family Bible;
for it is carved with hieroglyphic notches of
past scores and initials of great men of
the Joyce (landlady's family name) lineage
now dead. O'Flanagan, when he came in to
tell me that he thought there was a bit of blue
showing over Benabola, and that the weather
would hold up yet, was great in his commentaries
on these initials. He said what I took
for J for Joyce, was no J, bedad, at all, not a
hap'orth of a J, but F for Flanagan, flaming
O'Flanagan, his great-great-grandfather, who held
the inn before the Joyces was born or thought
of. He was of the O'Flanagans—the flaming,
combustible, mad, burning-hot O'Flanagans—the
ould Irish chiefs that the monks used to mention
in their litanies, and pray specially against, chanting,
as the candles twinkled, the incense smoked,
and the bell tinkled, " From the wrath of the
O'Flanagans—the flaming O'Flanagans—good
Lord deliver us!" Well, but about the initials:
there was M. F., that was Murphy O'Flanagan
(rest his sowl!), that bet the big grazier at Ballinasloe,
and was killed at last by a foul blow on
the back of the head of him from a thundering
stone in an old woman's stocking. There was D.
F.—that was Dennis O'Flanagan, who, at Donny-
brook, wopped Slippery Sam, the English drover,
and was transported for so getting the better of
him. P. F.—that was Paddy O'Flanagan (Dennis's
father, rest his sowl!), who ended his life on the
drop at Derry, for cutting the ears off of a " dirty
blackgaird" of a Dublin land agent.

While Dennis, really trusting it will hold up,
goes to get out the car, I turn over all my Irish
stories, whether of banshees or ribbonmen, of
leprechan, crock of gold, changeling, demon
horse, croppy, fairy, or what not. I bethink me
of how a Doolan tamed the demon horse, and of
how the famous O'Rourke went up to the moon,
and was left there by the " big thafe" of an eagle.
Tired at last of my rumination, and finding no one
coming, I rouse myself and go out into the kitchen
to see what delays Dennis and the car. I find
Dennis, totally forgetful of me and the journey,
intent on teazing Mistress Joyce's eldest daughter,
a little wicked, black-eyed colleen, who has her
back to me, and is arranging her long hair, which
looks something like a horse's mane, by means
of a cracked three-cornered bit of looking-glass
stuck on the second row of plates on the dresser,
and singing like a mermaid as she weaves her
tresses:

      "Sweet Molly Carew,
         It wasn't for you
         That I gave in the banns to the parson,
         Yet, for you I'd do murther,
         Yes, trayson, or further,
         Stale, felo de say, or rale arson."

On one side of the crystal triangle sacred
to female vanity, was a truculent, black-browed,
burglarious portrait of Dean Cahill; on the
other, a fubsy caricature of Napoleon, who is
still the idol of the Irish peasantry, though he
never did anything for them; these impulsive,
inconsequential Celts always like best
those who serve them least. Three brown,
smoky lumps of ham contributed by the deceased
"gintleman who pays the rint," depended from
a beam over my head, like swords of Damocles.
In one corner of the earth floor rolled a heap
of " pink eyes," mixed in brotherly union with
the " baskets-full," the genus potato the Joyces
especially affect. On the shelf near Dennis is
a suspicious green bottle half uncorked, and as
he hears my foot, Dennis drops his whip, cries
"In a moment, your honour!" and is off to the
stables, while Kathleen looks round, colours, and
brushes a stool clean with her apron for me to