‘I’ve been through perils enough to slay nations,’ he said, ’and the people here think I should be rotten with gold, but they’re better off the way they are.  For five years I was a ship’s smith, and never saw dry land, and I in all the danger and peril of the Atlantic Ocean.  Then I was a veterinary surgeon, curing side-slip, splay-foot, spavin, splints, glanders, and the various ailments of the horse and ass.  The lads in this place think you’ve nothing to do but to go across the sea and fill a bag with gold; but I tell you it is hard work, and in those countries the workhouses is full, and the prisons is full, and the crazyhouses is full, the same as in the city of Dublin.  Over beyond you have fine dwellings, and you have only to put out your hand from the window among roses and vines, and the red wine grape; but there is all sorts in it, and the people is better in this country, among the trees and valleys, and they resting on their floors of mud.’

In Wicklow, as in the rest of Ireland, the union, though it is a home of refuge for the tramps and tinkers, is looked on with supreme horror by the peasants.  The madhouse, which they know better, is less dreaded.

One night I had to go down late in the evening from a mountain village to the town of Wicklow, and come back again into the hills.  As soon as I came near Rathnew I passed many bands of girls and men making rather ruffianly flirtation on the pathway, and women who surged up to stare at me, as I passed in the middle of the road.  The thick line of trees that are near Rathnew makes the way intensely dark even on clear nights, and when one is riding quickly, the contrast, when one reaches the lights of Wicklow, is singularly abrupt.  The town itself after nightfall is gloomy and squalid.  Half-drunken men and women stand about, wrangling and disputing in the dull light from the windows, which is only strong enough to show the wretchedness of the figures which pass continually across them.  I did my business quickly and turned back to the hills, passing for the first few miles the same noisy groups and couples on the roadway.  After a while I stopped at a lonely public-house to get a drink and rest for a moment before I came to the hills.  Six or seven men were talking drearily at one end of the room, and a woman I knew, who had been marketing in Wicklow, was resting nearer the door.  When I had been given a glass of beer, I sat down on a barrel near her, and we began to talk.

‘Ah, your honour,’ she said, ’I hear you’re going off in a short time to Dublin, or to France, and maybe we won’t be in the place at all when you come back.  There’s no fences to the bit of farm I have, the way I’m destroyed running.  The calves do be straying, and the geese do be straying, and the hens do be straying, and I’m destroyed running after them.  We’ve no man in the place since himself died in the winter, and he ailing these five years, and there’s no one to give us a hand drawing the hay or cutting the bit of oats we have above on the hill.  My brother Michael has come back to his own place after being seven years in the Richmond Asylum; but what can you ask of him, and he with a long family of his own?  And, indeed, it’s a wonder he ever came back when it was a fine time he had in the asylum.’