I have made my way round the foot of Dingle Bay and up the south coast to a cottage where I often lodge.  As I was resting in a ditch some time in the afternoon, on a lonely mountain road, a little girl came along with a shawl over her head.  She stopped in front of me and asked me where I was going, and then after a little talk:  ‘Well, man, let you come,’ she said; ’I’m going your road as well as you.’  I got up and we started.  When I got tired of the hill I mounted, and she ran along beside me for several miles, till we fell in with some people cutting turf and she stopped to talk to them.

Then for a while my road ran round an immense valley of magnificent rich turf bog, with mountains all round, and bowls where hidden lakes were lying bitten out of the cliffs.

As I was resting again on a bridge over the Behy where Diarmuid caught salmon with Grania, a man stopped to light his pipe and talk to me.  ‘There are three lakes above,’ he said, ’Coomacarra, Coomaglaslaw and Coomasdhara; the whole of this place was in a great state in the bad times.  Twenty years ago they sent down a ’mergency man to lodge above by the lake and serve processes on the people, but the people were off before him and lay abroad in the heather.  Then, in the course of a piece, a night came, with great rain out of the heavens, and my man said:  “I’ll get them this night in their own beds, surely.”  Then he let call the peelers—­they had peelers waiting to mind him—­and down they come to the big steppingstones they have above for crossing the first river coming out of the lakes; my man going in front to cross over, and the water was high up covering the Stones.  Then he gave two leps or three, and the peelers heard him give a great shriek down in the flood.  They went home after—­what could they do?—­and the ’mergency man was found in the sea stuck in a net.’

I was singularly pleased when I turned up the boreen at last to this cottage where I lodge, an looked down through a narrow gully to Dingle Bay.  The people bade me welcome when came in, the old woman kissing my hand.

There is no village near this cottage, yet many farms are scattered on the hills near it; and as the people are in some ways a leading family, many men and women look in to talk or tell stories, or to buy a few pennyworth of sugar or starch.  Although the main road passes a few hundred yards to the west, this cottage is well known also to the race of local tramps who move from one family to another in some special neighbourhood or barony.  This evening, when I came in, a little old man in a tall hat and long brown coat was sitting up on the settle beside the fire, and intending to spend, one could see, a night or more in the place.

I had a great deal to tell the people at first of my travels in different parts of the county, to the Blasket Islands—­which they can see from here—­Corkaguiney and Tralee; and they had news to tell me also of people who have married or died since I was here before, or gone away, or come back from America.  Then I was told that the old man, Dermot (or Darby, as he is called in English), was the finest story-teller in Iveragh; and after a while he told us a long story in Irish, but spoke so rapidly and indistinctly—­he had no teeth—­that I could understand but few passages.  When he had finished I asked him where he had heard the story.