me to myself.  The room had two beds, running from wall to wall with a small space between them, a chair that the little hostess had brought in, an old hair-brush that was propping the window open, and no other article.  When I had been in bed for some time, I heard the host’s voice in the kitchen, and a moment or two later he came in with a candle in his hand, and made a long apology for having been away the whole of my first evening on the island, holding the candle while he talked very close to my face.  I told him I had been well entertained by his family and neighbours, and had hardly missed him.  He went away, and half an hour later opened the door again with the iron spoon which serves to lift the latch, and came in, in a suit of white homespuns, and said he must ask me to let him stretch out in the other bed, as there was no place else for him to lie.  I told him that he was welcome, and he got into the other bed and lit his pipe.  Then we had a long talk about this place and America and the younger generations.

‘There has been no one drowned on this island,’ he said, ’for forty years, and that is a great wonder, for it is a dangerous life.  There was a man—­the brother of the man you were talking to when the girls were dancing—­was married to a widow had a public-house away to the west of Ballydavid, and he was out fishing for mackerel, and he got a great haul of them; then he filled his canoe too full, so that she was down to the edge in the water, and a wave broke into her when they were near the shore, and she went down under them.  Two men got ashore, but the man from this island was drowned, for his oilskins went down about his feet, and he sank where he was.’

Then we talked about the chances of the mackerel season.  ’If the season is good,’ he said, ’we get on well; but it is not certain at all.  We do pay four pounds for a net, and sometimes the dogfish will get into it the first day and tear it into pieces as if you’d cut it with a knife.  Sometimes the mackerel will die in the net, and then ten men would be hard set to pull them up into the canoe, so that if the wind rises on us we must cut loose, and let down the net to the bottom of the sea.  When we get fish here in the night we go to Dunquin and sell them to buyers in the morning; and, believe me, it is a dangerous thing to cross that sound when you have too great a load taken into your canoe.  When it is too bad to cross over we do salt the fish ourselves—­we must salt them cleanly and put them in clean barrels—­and then the first day it is calm buyers will be out after them from the town of Dingle.’

Afterwards he spoke of the people who go away to America, and the younger generations that are growing up now in Ireland.

‘The young people is no use,’ he said. ’l am not as good a man as my father was, and my son is growing up worse than I am.’  Then he put up his pipe on the end of the bed-post.  ‘You’ll be tired now,’ he went on, ’so it’s time we were sleeping; and, I humbly beg your pardon, might I ask your name?’ I told him.