For I do not know how long we sat glaring at each other, and gasping painfully.  Then by degrees I began to upbraid him in a whisper for coming over a person’s wall to steal his apples, when he was such a fine, well-dressed, grownup young man.  I could see that he was in mortal dread that I might have him up in the police courts, which I had no intention of doing, and when I finally asked him his name and address he invented a long story of how he lived six miles away, and had come over to this neighbourhood for Mass and to see a friend, and then how he had got a drought upon him, and thought an apple would put him in spirits for his walk home.  Then he swore he would never come over the wall again if I would let him off, and that he would pray God to have mercy on me when my last hour was come.  I felt sure his whole story was a tissue of lies, and I did not want him to have the crow of having taken me in.  ’There is a woman belonging to the place,’ I said, ’inside in the house helping the girl to cook the dinner.  Walk in now with me, and we’ll see if you’re such a stranger as you’d have me think.’  He looked infinitely troubled, but I took him by the neck and wrist and we set off for the gate.  When we had gone a pace or two he stopped.  ’I beg your pardon,’ he said, ’my cap’s after falling down on the over side of the wall.  May I cross over and get it?’ That was too much for me.  ‘Well, go on,’ I said, ’and if ever I catch you again woe betide you.’  I let him go then, and he rushed madly over the wall and disappeared.  A few days later I discovered, not at all to my surprise, that he lived half a mile away, and was intimately related to a small boy who came to the house every morning to run messages and clean the boots.  Yet it must not be thought that this young man was dishonest; I would have been quite ready the next day to trust him with a ten-pound note.

Glencree

This morning the air is clear, and there is a trace of summer again.  I am sitting in a nook beside the stream from the Upper Lake, close down among the heather and bracken and rushes.  I have seen the people going up to Mass in the Reformatory, and the valley seems empty of life.

I have gone on, mile after mile, of the road to Sally Gap, between brown dykes and chasms in the turf with broken foot-bridges across them, or between sheets of sickly moss and bog-cotton that is unable to thrive.  The road is caked with moss that breaks like pie-crust under my feet, and in corners where there is shelter there are sheep loitering, or a few straggling grouse....  The fog has come down in places; I am meeting multitudes of hares that run round me at a little distance—­looking enormous in the mists—­or sit up on their ends against the sky line to watch me going by.  When I sit down for a moment the sense of loneliness has no equal.  I can hear nothing but the slow running of water and the grouse crowing and chuckling underneath the band of cloud.  Then the fog lifts and shows the white empty roads winding everywhere, with the added sense of desolation one gets passing an empty house on the side of a road.