My companion was still unconvinced, so we went on.  The rushes were shining in the moonlight, and one flake of mist was lying on the river.  We looked into one bog-hole, and then into another, where a snipe rose and terrified us.  We listened:  a cow was chewing heavily in the shadow of a bush, two dogs were barking on the side of a hill, and there was a cart far away upon the road.  Our teeth began to chatter with the cold of the bog air and the loneliness of the night.  I could see that the actual presence of the bog had shown my companion the absurdity of her fears, and in a little while we went home.

The older people in County Wicklow, as in the rest of Ireland, still show a curious affection for the landed classes wherever they have lived for a generation or two upon their property.  I remember an old woman, who told me, with tears streaming on her face, how much more lonely the country had become since the ‘quality’ had gone away, and gave me a long story of how she had seen her landlord shutting up his house and leaving his property, and of the way he had died afterwards, when the ‘grievance’ of it broke his heart.  The younger people feel differently, and when I was passing this landlord’s house, not long afterwards, I found these lines written in pencil on the door-post: 

In the days of rack-renting
And land-grabbing so vile
A proud, heartless landlord
Lived here a great while. 
When the League it was started,
And the land-grabbing cry,
To the cold North of Ireland
He had for to fly.

A year later the door-post had fallen to pieces, and the inscription with it.

On the Road

One evening after heavy rains I set off to walk to a village at the other side of some hills, part of my way lying along a steep heathery track.  The valleys that I passed through were filled with the strange splendour that comes after wet weather in Ireland, and on the tops of the mountains masses of fog were lying in white, even banks.  Once or twice I went by a lonely cottage with a smell of earthy turf coming from the chimney, weeds or oats sprouting on the thatch, and a broken cart before the door, with many straggling hens going to roost on the shafts.  Near these cottages little bands of half-naked children, filled with the excitement of evening, were running and screaming over the bogs, where the heather was purple already, giving me the strained feeling of regret one has so often in these places when there is rain in the air.

Further on, as I was going up a long hill, an old man with a white, pointed face and heavy beard pulled himself up out of the ditch and joined me.  We spoke first about the broken weather, and then he began talking in a mournful voice of the famines and misfortunes that have been in Ireland.