get for it from Captain Hill?  They get a holding with land enough to grow potatoes on, and with as much free fuel as ever they like, and with free pasture for their beasts, and all this they get on the average, mind you, for no more than ten shillings a year!  Why, there was a time, I can assure you, when the women here earned the value of all the Hill rents by knitting stockings and making woollen stuffs.  You see the stuffs lying here in this window that they make even now, and good stuffs too.  But before the League boycotted the agency here, the agency ten years ago used to pay out L900 in a year, where it pays less than L100 to the women for their work.”

“Why did the League do this?”

“Why?  Why, because it wanted to control the work itself, and to know just what it brings into the place.  You must remember Father M’Fadden is the President of the League, and the people will do anything for him.  I have heard of one old woman who sat up of nights last year knitting socks to send up to London, to pay the Christmas dues to the Father,—­six shillings’ worth.”

“And are these stuffs here in the hotel made for the agency you speak of?”

“Oh no; these are just made by women that know the hotel, and Mr. Robinson here, he kindly takes in the stuffs.  You see the name of every woman on every one of them that made it, and the price.  If a stranger buys some, he pays the money to Mr. Robinson, and so it goes to the women, and no commission charged.”

The “stuffs” are certainly excellent, very evenly woven; and the patterns, all devised, I am told, by the women themselves, very simple and tasteful.  The only dyes used are got by the women also from the sea-weeds and the kelp, which must be counted among the resources of the place.  The browns and ochres thus produced are both soft and vivid; while nothing can be better than a peculiar warm grey, produced by a skilful mingling of the undyed wools.

“What, then, causes the distress for which the name of Gweedore is a synonym?” I asked.

“It doesn’t exist,” responded my Galwegian; “that is, there is no such distress in Gweedore as you find in Connemara, for instance;[14] but what distress there is in Gweedore is due much more to the habits the people have been getting into of late years, and to the idleness of them, than to any pressure of the rents you hear about, or even to the poverty of the soil.  Go down to the store at Bunbeg, and see what they buy and go in debt for!  You won’t find in any such place as Bunbeg in England such things.  And even this don’t measure it; for, you see, two-thirds of them are not free to deal at Bunbeg.”

“Why not?  Is Bunbeg ’boycotted’?”