Here and there in County Wicklow there are a number of little known places—­places with curiously melodious names, such as Aughavanna, Glenmalure, Annamoe, or Lough Nahanagan—­where the people have retained a peculiar simplicity, and speak a language in some ways more Elizabethan than the English of Connaught, where Irish was used till a much later date.  In these glens many women still wear old-fashioned bonnets, with a frill round the face, and the old men, when they are going to the fair, or to Mass, are often seen in curiously-cut frock-coats, tall hats, and breeches buckled at the knee.  When they meet a wanderer on foot, these old people are glad to stop and talk to him for hours, telling him stories of the Rebellion, or of the fallen angels that ride across the hills, or alluding to the three shadowy countries that are never forgotten in Wicklow—­America (their El Dorado), the Union and the Madhouse.

‘I had a power of children,’ an old man who was born in Glenmalure said to me once; ’I had a power of children, and they all went to California, with what I could give them, and bought a bit of a field.  Then, when they put in the plough, it stuck fast on them.  They looked in beneath it, and there was fine gold stretched within the earth.  They’re rich now and their daughters are riding on fine horses with new saddles on them and elegant bits in their mouths, yet not a ha’porth did they ever send me, and may the devil ride with them to hell!’

Not long afterwards I met an old man wandering about a hill-side, where there was a fine view of Lough Dan, in extraordinary excitement and good spirits.

‘I landed in Liverpool two days ago,’ he said, when I had wished him the time of day; ’then I came to the city of Dublin this morning, and took the train to Bray, where you have the blue salt water on your left, and the beautiful valleys, with trees in them, on your right.  From that I drove to this place on a jaunting-car to see some brothers and cousins I have living below.  They’re poor people, Mister honey, with bits of cabins, and mud floors under them, but they’re as happy as if they were in heaven, and what more would a man want than that?  In America and Australia, and on the Atlantic Ocean, you have all sorts, good people and bad people, and murderers and thieves, and pickpockets; but in this place there isn’t a being isn’t as good and decent as yourself or me.’

I saw he was one of the old people one sometimes meets with who emigrated when the people were simpler than they are at present, and who often come back, after a lifetime in the States, as Irish as any old man who has never been twenty miles from the town of Wicklow.  I asked him about his life abroad, when we had talked a little longer.