out from beneath it, and began looking at me with a heavy stare.  I asked the woman what ailed it, and she told me it had sickened a night or two before with headache and pains all through it; but she had not had the doctor, and did not know what was the matter.  I finished the milk without much enjoyment, and went on my way up Bolus Head and then back to this cottage, wondering all the time if l had the germs of typhus in my blood.

Last night, when I got back to the cottage, I found that another ‘travelling man’ had arrived to stay for a day or two; but he was hard of hearing and a little simple in his head, so that we had not much talk.  I went to bed soon after dark and slept till about two o’clock in the morning, when I was awakened by fearful screams in the kitchen.  For a moment I did not know where I was; then I remembered the old man, and I jumped up and went to the door of my room.  As I opened it I heard the door of the family room across the kitchen opening also, and the frightened whispers of the people.  In a moment we could hear the old man, who was sleeping on the settle, pulling himself out of a nightmare, so we went back to our beds.

In the morning the woman told me his story: 

‘He was living above on a little hillside,’ she said, ’in a bit of a cabin, with his sister along with him.  Then, after a while, she got ailing in her heart, and he got a bottle for her from the doctor, and he’d rise up every morning before the dawn to give her a sup of it.  She got better then, till one night he got up and measured out the spoonful, or whatever it was, and went to give it to her, and he found her stretched out dead before him.  Since that night he wakes up one time and another, and begins crying out for Maurya—­that was his sister—­and he half in his dreams.  It was that you heard in the night, and indeed it would frighten any person to hear him screaming as if he was getting his death.’

When the little man came back after a while, they began asking him questions till he told his whole story, weeping pitiably.  Then they got him to tell me about the other great event of his life also, in the rather childish Gaelic he uses.

He had once a little cur-dog, he said, and he knew nothing of the dog licence; then one day the peelers—­the boys with the little caps—­asked him into the barracks for a cup of tea.  He went in cheerfully, and then they put him and his little dog into the lock-up till some one paid a shilling for him and got him out.

He has a stick he is proud of, bound with pieces of leather every few inches—­like one I have seen with a beggar in Belmullet.  Since the first night he has not had nightmare again, and he lies most of the evening sleeping on the settle, and in the morning he goes round among the houses, getting his share of meal and potatoes.