There are so few girls left in these neighbourhoods that one does not often meet with women that have grown up unmarried.  I know one, however, who has lived by herself for fifteen years in a tiny hovel near a cross roads much frequented by tinkers and ordinary tramps.  As she has no one belonging to her, she spends a good deal of her time wandering through the country, and I have met her in every direction, often many miles from her own glen.  ’I do be so afeard of the tramps,’ she said to me one evening.  ’I live all alone, and what would I do at all if one of them lads was to come near me?  When my poor mother was dying, “Now, Nanny,” says she, “don’t be living on here when I am dead,” says she; “it’d be too lonesome.”  And now I wouldn’t wish to go again’ my mother, and she dead—­dead or alive I wouldn’t go again’ my mother—­but I’m after doing all I can, and I can’t get away by any means.’  As I was moving on she heard, or thought she heard, a sound of distant thunder.

‘Ah, your honour,’ she said, ’do you think it’s thunder we’ll be having?  There’s nothing I fear like the thunder.  My heart isn’t strong—­I do feel it—­and I have a lightness in my head, and often when I do be excited with the thunder I do be afeard I might die there alone in the cottage and no one know it.  But I do hope that the Lord—­bless His holy name!—­has something in store for me.  I’ve done all I can, and I don’t like going again’ my mother and she dead.  And now good evening, your honour, and safe home.’

Intense nervousness is common also with much younger women.  I remember one night hearing some one crying out and screaming in the house where I was staying.  I went downstairs and found it was a girl who had been taken in from a village a few miles away to help the servants.  That afternoon her two younger sisters had come to see her, and now she had been taken with a panic that they had been drowned going home through the bogs, and she was crying and wailing, and saying she must go to look for them.  It was not thought fit for her to leave the house alone so late in the evening, so I went with her.  As we passed down a steep hill of heather, where the nightjars were clapping their wings in the moonlight, she told me a long story of the way she had been frightened.  Then we reached a solitary cottage on the edge of the bog, and as a light was still shining in the window, I knocked at the door and asked if they had seen or heard anything.  When they understood our errand three half-dressed generations came out to jeer at us on the doorstep.

‘Ah, Maggie,’ said the old woman, ’you’re a cute one.  You’re the girl likes a walk in the moonlight.  Whist your talk of them big lumps of childer, and look at Martin Edward there, who’s not six, and he can go through the bog five times in an hour and not wet his feet.’