‘Then you have been in France?’ I asked her.

‘For eleven years,’ she replied.

‘Alors vous parlez Francais, Madame?’

‘Mais oui, Monsieur,’ she answered with pure intonation.

We had a little talk in French, and then the old man got his can filled with porter—­the evening drink for a party of reapers who were working on the hill—­bought a pennyworth of sweets, and went back down the road.

‘That’s the greatest old rogue in the village,’ said the publican, as soon as he was out of hearing; ’he’s always making up to all who pass through the place, and trying what he can get out of them.  The other day a party told me to give him a bottle of XXX porter he was after asking for.  I just gave him the dregs of an old barrel we had finished, and there he was, sucking in his lips, and saying it was the finest drink ever he tasted, and that it was rising to his head already, though he’d hardly a drop of it swallowed.  Faith, in the end I had to laugh to hear the talk he was making.’

A little later I wished them good evening and started again on my walk, as I had two mountains to cross.

At a Wicklow Fair

The Place and the People

A year or two ago I wished to visit a fair in County Wicklow, and as the buying and selling in these fairs are got through very early in the morning I started soon after dawn to walk the ten or twelve miles that led to Aughrim, where the fair was to be held.  When I came out into the air the cold was intense, though it was a morning of August, and the dew was so heavy that bushes and meadows of mountain grass seemed to have lost their greenness in silvery grey.  In the glens I went through white mists were twisting and feathering themselves into extraordinary shapes, and showing blue hills behind them that looked singularly desolate and far away.  At every turn I came on multitudes of rabbits feeding on the roadside, or on even shyer creatures—­corncrakes, squirrels and snipe—­close to villages where no one was awake.

Then the sun rose, and I could see lines of smoke beginning to go up from farm-houses under the hills, and sometimes a sleepy, half-dressed girl looked out of the door of a cottage when my feet echoed on the road.  About six miles from Aughrim I began to fall in with droves of bullocks and sheep, in charge of two or three dogs and a herd, or with whole families of mountain people, driving nothing but a single donkey or kid.  These people seemed to feel already the animation of the fair, and were talking eagerly and gaily among themselves.  I did not hurry, and it was about nine o’clock when I made my way into the village, which was now thronged with cattle and sheep.  On every side the usual half-humorous bargaining could be heard above the noise of the pigs and donkeys and lambs.  One man would say: 

’Are you going to not divide a shilling with me?  Are you going to not do it?  You’re the biggest schemer ever walked down into Aughrim.’