In the evenings I sometimes meet with a girl who is not yet half through her teens, yet seems in some ways more consciously developed than any one else that I have met here.  She has passed part of her life on the mainland, and the disillusion she found in Galway has coloured her imagination.

As we sit on stools on either side of the fire I hear her voice going backwards and forwards in the same sentence from the gaiety of a child to the plaintive intonation of an old race that is worn with sorrow.  At one moment she is a simple peasant, at another she seems to be looking out at the world with a sense of prehistoric disillusion and to sum up in the expression of her grey-blue eyes the whole external despondency of the clouds and sea.

Our conversation is usually disjointed.  One evening we talked of a town on the mainland.

‘Ah, it’s a queer place,’ she said:  ’I wouldn’t choose to live in it.  It’s a queer place, and indeed I don’t know the place that isn’t.’

Another evening we talked of the people who live on the island or come to visit it.

‘Father is gone,’ she said; ’he was a kind man but a queer man.  Priests is queer people, and I don’t know who isn’t.’

Then after a long pause she told me with seriousness, as if speaking of a thing that surprised herself, and should surprise me, that she was very fond of the boys.

In our talk, which is sometimes full of the innocent realism of childhood, she is always pathetically eager to say the right thing and be engaging.

One evening I found her trying to light a fire in the little side room of her cottage, where there is an ordinary fireplace.  I went in to help her and showed her how to hold up a paper before the mouth of the chimney to make a draught, a method she had never seen.  Then I told her of men who live alone in Paris and make their own fires that they may have no one to bother them.  She was sitting in a heap on the floor staring into the turf, and as I finished she looked up with surprise.

‘They’re like me so,’ she said; ‘would anyone have thought that!’

Below the sympathy we feel there is still a chasm between us.

‘Musha,’ she muttered as I was leaving her this evening, ’I think it’s to hell you’ll be going by and by.’

Occasionally I meet her also in the kitchen where young men go to play cards after dark and a few girls slip in to share the amusement.  At such times her eyes shine in the light of the candles, and her cheeks flush with the first tumult of youth, till she hardly seems the same girl who sits every evening droning to herself over the turf.

A branch of the Gaelic League has been started here since my last visit, and every Sunday afternoon three little girls walk through the village ringing a shrill hand-bell, as a signal that the women’s meeting is to be held,—­here it would be useless to fix an hour, as the hours are not recognized.