was never seen by any man younger than Father Marty or the old peasant who brought turf to her door in creels on a donkey’s back?  But she wore it always without any cap, tied in a simple knot behind her head.  Whether chignons had been invented then the author does not remember,—­but they certainly had not become common on the coast of County Clare, and the peasants about Liscannor thought Mrs. O’Hara’s head of hair the finest they had ever seen.  Had the ladies Quin of the Castle possessed such hair as that, they would not have been the ladies Quin to this day.  Her eyes were lustrous, dark, and very large,—­beautiful eyes certainly; but they were eyes that you might fear.  They had been softer perhaps in youth, before the spirit of the tiger had been roused in the woman’s bosom by neglect and ill-usage.  Her face was now bronzed by years and weather.  Of her complexion she took no more care than did the neighbouring fishermen of theirs, and the winds and the salt water, and perhaps the working of her own mind, had told upon it, to make it rough and dark.  But yet there was a colour in her cheeks, as we often see in those of wandering gipsies, which would make a man stop to regard her who had eyes appreciative of beauty.  Her nose was well formed,—­a heaven-made nose, and not a lump of flesh stuck on to the middle of her face as women’s noses sometimes are;—­but it was somewhat short and broad at the nostrils, a nose that could imply much anger, and perhaps tenderness also.  Her face below her nose was very short.  Her mouth was large, but laden with expression.  Her lips were full and her teeth perfect as pearls.  Her chin was short and perhaps now verging to that size which we call a double chin, and marked by as broad a dimple as ever Venus made with her finger on the face of a woman.

She had ever been strong and active, and years in that retreat had told upon her not at all.  She would still walk to Liscannor, and thence round, when the tide was low, beneath the cliffs, and up by a path which the boys had made from the foot through the rocks to the summit, though the distance was over ten miles, and the ascent was very steep.  She would remain for hours on the rocks, looking down upon the sea, when the weather was almost at its roughest.  When the winds were still, and the sun was setting across the ocean, and the tame waves were only just audible as they rippled on the stones below, she would sit there with her child, holding the girl’s hand or just touching her arm, and would be content so to stay almost without a word; but when the winds blew, and the heavy spray came up in blinding volumes, and the white-headed sea-monsters were roaring in their fury against the rocks, she would be there alone with her hat in her hand, and her hair drenched.  She would watch the gulls wheeling and floating beneath her, and would listen to their screams and try to read their voices.  She would envy the birds as they seemed to be worked into madness by the winds