When I turn back again the air has got stuffy and heavy and calm, with a cloud still down upon the glen; there is a dead heat in the air that is not natural so high up, and the silence is so great three or four wrens that are singing near the lake seem to fill the valley with sound.  In most places I can see the straight ending of the cloud, but above the lake grey fingers are coming up and down, like a hand that is clasping and opening again.  One longs for rain or wind or thunder.  The very ewes and lambs have stopped bleating, and are slinking round among the stacks of turf.

I have come out again on the mountain road the third day of the fog.  At first it was misty only, and then a cloud crept up the water gullies from the valley of the Liffey, and in a moment I am cut off in a white silent cloud.  The little turfy ridges on each side of the road have the look of glens to me, and every block of stone has the size of a house.  The cobwebs on the furze are like a silvery net, and the silence is so great and queer, even weazels run squealing past me on the side of the road....  An east wind is rising.  Once in every minute I see the little mounds in their natural shapes that have been mountains for a week.  I see wet cottages on the other side of the glen that I had forgotten.  Then, as I walk on, I see out over a cloud to the tops of real mountains standing up into the sky.

There is a dense white fog around the cottage, and we seem to be shut away from any habitation.  All round behind the hills there is a moan and rumble of thunder coming nearer, at times with a fierce and sudden crash.  The bracken has a nearly painful green in the strangeness of the light.  Enormous sheep are passing in and out of the sky line.

There is a strange depression about the cottage to-night.  The woman of the house is taken ill and has got into bed beside her mother-in-law, who is over ninety, and is wandering in her mind.  The man of the house has gone away ten miles for medicine, and I am left with the two children, who are playing silently about the door.

The larches in the haggard are dripping heavily with damp, and the hens and geese, bewildered with the noise and gloom, are cackling with uneasy dread.  All one’s senses are disturbed.  As I walk backwards and forwards, a few yards above and below the door, the little stream I do not see seems to roar out of the cloud.

Every leaf and twig is heavy with drops, and a dog that has passed with a sad-eyed herd looked wet and draggled and afraid.

I remember lying in the heather one clear Sunday morning in the early autumn when the bracken had just turned.  All the people of the district were at Mass in a chapel a few miles away, so the valleys were empty, and there was nothing to be heard but the buzzing of a few late bees and the autumn song of thrushes.  The sky was covered with white radiant clouds, with soft outlines, broken in a few places by lines of blue sky of wonderful