sit down on, then kneels down and puffs
at the smouldering peat fire, which she had
nearly let out while Dennis had been whispering
soft nonsense in her little pink ear. I
observe on the mud floor, which is scooped out
in hollows, and is anything but level or clean,
the shavings of an alpeen (shillelagh) which Dennis
has been long seasoning in the dunghill, and which
he has just now been shaping into a terrific mace,
intended to thin the ranks of the base anti-
Flanagan faction; a rope of onions, in their
smiling, bronzed, red-yellow skins, dangle overhead,
and a salmon rod, with its spear at the butt-
end, rests in a corner of the room. Kathleen,
her mermaid dressing over, is now sitting down
at the back door, on a chair without any particular
seat, with one eye on Dennis, who is
putting-to the car, and flapping the blue cushions,
and with the other on a she-goat, that feeds,
tethered, near the stable, and is waiting for Mrs.
Joyce to milk her. At Kathleen's feet, rolls, not
over-dressed, young Teddy Joyce, playing with
his mother's beads (the rosy darlint!), the very
beads she counted as she went last week on
her pilgrimage up that holy mountain near
Westport, Croagh Patrick, which is as conical
and nearly as steep as an extinguisher.

Dennis gives a howl of delight—one of those
howls that you may still hear even in a
Dublin concert-room—as the last buckle of the
harness is slipped into place. He reappears in
a large blue great-coat that reaches down to his
heels, and with a rusty hat with a flapping lid
that goes up and down, twined round with
white shiny lines of gut, and studded, not with
brooches, but with gaudy " maccaws" and
"golden pheasants," as the best salmon-flies
are called. Amongst these, like a gun from
an embrasure, obtrudes the old Irish Adam, in
the shape of a black dhudeen pipe, oily and
odorous.

A truly Irish hubbub announces our departure.
Mike Joyce emerges from some
cellar, or secret distillery, red and rejoicing;
men come out and shake hands with Dennis;
Mrs. Joyce, with her white frilled cap and
pleasant staring face insists on mixing me a
"stirrup cup," in the shape of a glass of
whisky-toddy: the sight of the sugar distilling
down in a silvery shower in which, gives
me quite a new impression of the charms of
chemistry.

I shake hands with everybody, as if I was one
of the Allied Powers in a popular print. I
balance myself sideways on the shelf of the
jaunting-car, feeling as an Englishman at first
always does in that wild, erratic vehicle, as if I
was on a side-saddle, or rather on a chair which
was being drawn from under me.

I felt slightly qualmish, and clutched at the
back rail as we started with a spurt and jerk
that nearly unseated me.

"Hurrah!" called out the Joyce family.
"More power to ye!" said Mrs. J. " Good
luck to the worst of ye!" said Kathleen, looking
up with a smile at Dennis from her stocking.

Off we were—that is to say, off I nearly was—
but I managed to keep my seat, which is more
than some M.P.s can say, and away we went in
that headlong, reckless, generous, pelting way
that Irish carmen, reckless of wear and tear,
always do go in the south of Ireland. Ballyrobin
faded behind us. Now, you who have
laughed at the incomparable traveller who told
you of coals being brought up on a china plate,
guess what luggage we had in our car. Rats
in a bottle? An elephant in a jam-pot? But
you would never guess. A turkey in a band-
box—yes, positively, a turkey sent in an old
bonnet-box to Ballynabrog market by Mrs.
Joyce the prudent. I have seen a few droll
things, but never anything odder than that. A
swan in a basket at Basingstoke, with his neck
out and a parchment direction round it, is droll;
but the turkey in Mrs. Joyce's bonnet-box was
irresistible.

Dennis is a Connaught man, pale and
whiskerless, but with straight black hair and
good features, with a serious, earnest manner,
changing rapidly to rollicking fun and drollery,
and with a fine swelling low-toned voice,
capable of much rise and fall, much in and out,
and endless subtle gradations of feeling.

It is rather startling to a sober, cynical,
sceptical Englishman, who believes what he
sees and can handle, and little else, to hear, for
the first time, an Irishman telling a fairy story
with a quiet, almost sad, air of intense conviction
and feeling; it is startling to one accustomed
to see sham ghosts brought up at
police-courts and sentenced to the treadmill, and
accustomed to hear aërial voices and winking
statues accounted for by spectacled men on
scientific principle, to find a man soberly and
calmly relating, with a voice thrilling with emotion,
some narrative of a dumbly prophesying
banshee, or a child stolen by the fairies. At
once a great mist rolls away, and you see the
centuries that roll between the Protestant and
Catholic, the Saxon and the Celt. You feel
that you are in a twilight country, where
faith is still unreasoning and supreme; where
miracles, and relics, and ghosts, are still believed
in; where ghost stories are matters of life
and death to men; and where the beautiful monsters
of our nurseries still walk, even in the
daylight. Dennis has heard the banshee in the
blue cloak, with the grey dishevelled hair, wailing
under the peat heap; he has seen the phooka, or
demon horse, tear past at night, with fiery
mane and phosphorescent eyes; he has seen the
fairies in green, garlanding the mushroom; he
has beheld O'Douohue on his white horse rise
from the tranquil morning lake; he has stolen up
and heard the cluricaun, or little dwarf in the
cocked-hat and scarlet Hogarth coat, tapping at
a shoe on the sunny side ot a haystack; and here
am I, who love everything Irish, quite an outer
barbarian who has never been granted any of these
privileges! The banshee I saw near Cork,
turned out to be old Mary Burke, drunk under a
hedge, crooning a croppy song to herself; my
phooka near Ballycastle was a tinker's Kerry-pony;
my leprechaun an itinerant cobbler, mend-