Fortunately the weather is fine, and I can spend my days in the sunshine.  When I look round from the top of these walls I can see the sea on nearly every side, stretching away to distant ranges of mountains on the north and south.  Underneath me to the east there is the one inhabited district of the island, where I can see red figures moving about the cottages, sending up an occasional fragment of conversation or of old island melodies.

The baby is teething, and has been crying for several days.  Since his mother went to the fair they have been feeding him with cow’s milk, often slightly sour, and giving him, I think, more than he requires.

This morning, however, he seemed so unwell they sent out to look for a foster-mother in the village, and before long a young woman, who lives a little way to the east, came in and restored him to his natural food.

A few hours later, when I came into the kitchen to talk to old Pat, another woman performed the same kindly office, this time a person with a curiously whimsical expression.

Pat told me a story of an unfaithful wife, which I will give further down, and then broke into a moral dispute with the visitor, which caused immense delight to some young men who had come down to listen to the story.  Unfortunately it was carried on so rapidly in Gaelic that I lost most of the points.

This old man talks usually in a mournful tone about his ill-health, and his death, which he feels to be approaching, yet he has occasional touches of humor that remind me of old Mourteen on the north island.  To-day a grotesque twopenny doll was lying on the floor near the old woman.  He picked it up and examined it as if comparing it with her.  Then he held it up:  ’Is it you is after bringing that thing into the world,’ he said, ‘woman of the house?’

Here is the story:—­

One day I was travelling on foot from Galway to Dublin, and the darkness came on me and I ten miles from the town I was wanting to pass the night in.  Then a hard rain began to fall and I was tired walking, so when I saw a sort of a house with no roof on it up against the road, I got in the way the walls would give me shelter.

As I was looking round I saw a light in some trees two perches off, and thinking any sort of a house would be better than where I was, I got over a wall and went up to the house to look in at the window.

I saw a dead man laid on a table, and candles lighted, and a woman watching him.  I was frightened when I saw him, but it was raining hard, and I said to myself, if he was dead he couldn’t hurt me.  Then I knocked on the door and the woman came and opened it.

‘Good evening, ma’am,’ says I.

‘Good evening kindly, stranger,’ says she, ’Come in out of the rain.’  Then she took me in and told me her husband was after dying on her, and she was watching him that night.

‘But it’s thirsty you’ll be, stranger,’ says she, ’Come into the parlour.’  Then she took me into the parlour—­and it was a fine clean house—­and she put a cup, with a saucer under it, on the table before me with fine sugar and bread.