Her lithe graceful figure, her fine, small, chiselled features, her shapely little head rather defiantly set on her sloping shoulders, her fair complexion and clear hazel eyes, her brown golden hair gathered up behind into a kind of tress, all these were Saxon rather than Celtic.  Her trim neat ankles were bare, after the mountain fashion, but she was prettily dressed in a well-fitting dark blue gown, wore a smartly trimmed muslin apron, with lace about her throat, and carried over her arm a new woollen shawl, very tasteful and quiet in colour.  She greeted us with a self-possessed smile.

“No,” she had not, been shopping with her mother.  The shawl was a present from one of her cousins.  Did we not think it very pretty?  She was only out for a walk, and had no notion where her mother might be.  A stalwart red-bearded man who lounged and loitered behind her on the road was “only a friend,” she said, “not a relation at all!” Nor did she show, I am sorry to say, any compassion for the evident uneasiness with which, from a distance, he regarded her long and affable parley with two strangers.

We asked her whether she expected and wished to live in Gweedore, or would like to follow elsewhere some calling or trade.  “Oh yes,” she unhesitatingly replied, “I should like to be a dress-maker in Deny; but,” she added pensively, “it’s no use my thinking about it, for I know I shouldn’t be let!”

“Wouldn’t you like Dublin as well?” I asked.

“Perhaps; but I shouldn’t be let go to Dublin either!”

Would she like to go to America?

“No!” she didn’t think much of “the Americans who came back,” and America must be “a very hard country for work, and very cold in the winter.”

Now this was a widow’s daughter, living in such a cabin as I have described, and upon a small holding in a parish reputed to be the most “distressful” in Donegal![15]

Returning to the hotel we found our car ready for Falcarragh.  Our driver was a quiet, sensible fellow, who did not seem to care sixpence about the great Nationality question, though he knew the country very well.

Iron was visible in the rocks as we drove along, and we passed some abandoned mining works, “lead and silver mines;” he said, “they were given up long before his time.”  We got many fine views of the mountains Errigal, Aghla More, and Muckish.  Lough Altan, a wild tarn, lies between Errigal and Aghla More.

The peasants we met stared at us curiously, but, were very civil, even at a place bearing the ominous name of Bedlam, against which Mr. Burke had warned us as the most troublesome on the way.  All the countryside was there attending a fair, and we drove through throngs of red-shawled, barelegged women, ponies, horses, cattle, and sheep.  Of Tory Island, with its famous tower, dating back to the fabled “Fomorians,” we had some grand glimpses.  The white surf, flashing and leaping high in the air on the nearer islets accented and gave life to the landscape.