She clambered into the cart, gathered the reins in her hands, and quizzed me with her keen, shrewd eyes.

“Belike ye hail from over the watter—­Ameruky, I’m meanun’?”

“Yes, I’m a Yankee,” I answered.

“Ye wull no be findun’ mony Island McGill folk stoppun’ un Ameruky?”

“No; I don’t remember ever meeting one, in the States.”

She nodded her head.

“They are home-luvun’ bodies, though I wull no be sayin’ they are no fair-travelled.  Yet they come home ot the last, them oz are no lost ot sea or kult by fevers an’ such-like un foreign parts.”

“Then your sons will have gone to sea and come home again?” I queried.

“Oh, aye, all savun’ Samuel oz was drownded.”

At the mention of Samuel I could have sworn to a strange light in her eyes, and it seemed to me, as by some telepathic flash, that I divined in her a tremendous wistfulness, an immense yearning.  It seemed to me that here was the key to her inscrutableness, the clue that if followed properly would make all her strangeness plain.  It came to me that here was a contact and that for the moment I was glimpsing into the soul of her.  The question was tickling on my tongue, but she forestalled me.

She tchk’d to the horse, and with a “Guid day tull you, sir,” drove off.

A simple, homely people are the folk of Island McGill, and I doubt if a more sober, thrifty, and industrious folk is to be found in all the world.  Meeting them abroad—­and to meet them abroad one must meet them on the sea, for a hybrid sea-faring and farmer breed are they—­one would never take them to be Irish.  Irish they claim to be, speaking of the North of Ireland with pride and sneering at their Scottish brothers; yet Scotch they undoubtedly are, transplanted Scotch of long ago, it is true, but none the less Scotch, with a thousand traits, to say nothing of their tricks of speech and woolly utterance, which nothing less than their Scotch clannishness could have preserved to this late day.

A narrow loch, scarcely half a mile wide, separates Island McGill from the mainland of Ireland; and, once across this loch, one finds himself in an entirely different country.  The Scotch impression is strong, and the people, to commence with, are Presbyterians.  When it is considered that there is no public-house in all the island and that seven thousand souls dwell therein, some idea may be gained of the temperateness of the community.  Wedded to old ways, public opinion and the ministers are powerful influences, while fathers and mothers are revered and obeyed as in few other places in this modern world.  Courting lasts never later than ten at night, and no girl walks out with her young man without her parents’ knowledge and consent.