As the pile of mouldering clay got higher beside the grave a heavy smell began to rise from it, and the men hurried with their work, measuring the hole repeatedly with the two rods of bramble.  When it was nearly deep enough the old woman got up and came back to the coffin, and began to beat on it, holding the skull in her left hand.  This last moment of grief was the most terrible of all.  The young women were nearly lying among the stones, worn out with their passion of grief, yet raising themselves every few moments to beat with magnificent gestures on the boards of the coffin.  The young men were worn out also, and their voices cracked continually in the wail of the keen.

When everything was ready the sheet was unpinned from the coffin, and it was lowered into its place.  Then an old man took a wooden vessel with holy water in it, and a wisp of bracken, and the people crowded round him while he splashed the water over them.  They seemed eager to get as much of it as possible, more than one old woman crying out with a humorous voice—­

‘Tabhair dham braon eile, a Mhourteen.’ (’Give me another drop, Martin.’)

When the grave was half filled in, I wandered round towards the north watching two seals that were chasing each other near the surf.  I reached the Sandy Head as the light began to fail, and found some of the men I knew best fishing there with a sort of dragnet.  It is a tedious process, and I sat for a long time on the sand watching the net being put out, and then drawn in again by eight men working together with a slow rhythmical movement.

As they talked to me and gave me a little poteen and a little bread when they thought I was hungry, I could not help feeling that I was talking with men who were under a judgment of death.  I knew that every one of them would be drowned in the sea in a few years and battered naked on the rocks, or would die in his own cottage and be buried with another fearful scene in the graveyard I had come from.

When I got up this morning I found that the people had gone to Mass and latched the kitchen door from the outside, so that I could not open it to give myself light.

I sat for nearly an hour beside the fire with a curious feeling that I should be quite alone in this little cottage.  I am so used to sitting here with the people that I have never felt the room before as a place where any man might live and work by himself.  After a while as I waited, with just light enough from the chimney to let me see the rafters and the greyness of the walls, I became indescribably mournful, for I felt that this little corner on the face of the world, and the people who live in it, have a peace and dignity from which we are shut for ever.

While I was dreaming, the old woman came in in a great hurry and made tea for me and the young priest, who followed her a little later drenched with rain and spray.