they are charged sixpence a week, and all their prog
is supplied at wholesale prices. We buy largely in Dublin, bring it
down, of course, carriage free, and both the men and their wives and
families are supplied to any amount. They effect a saving of at least
twenty per cent., but probably much more, as village stores are
terribly dear. The whole district has found out this advantage, and
they flock to the hut-store from all parts. So Balfour is a boon to
the country at large."

Next day I went down sixteen miles of line to a spot about a mile from
Oughterard. It was pay-day, and I clung to the engine along with the
engineer, Mr. Wood, and a pay-clerk, armed with several yards of
pay-sheet, and a couple of black tin cash-boxes. A wild and stony
country, a range of high mountains on the left, wide, flat plains on
the right, through which the Corrib serpentined, with big rocks rising
from the channel brilliantly white. "They whitewash the rocks, so that
they can be seen by the boats and the Cong steamer. Englishmen would
blow them up and have done with them, but Irishmen prefer to whitewash
them and sail round them. More exciting I suppose, matter of taste."
This from the engineer, a Saxon of the usual type. On through bogs,
past nameless lakes, and a chaos of limestone rocks and huge granite
boulders, lakes, bogs, rocks, in endless succession, with the long
mountain reek beside us, and a still higher range in the purple
distance. Now and then a green patch sternly walled in, a few cows
grazing, a lonely donkey, a few long-tailed black sheep, or a couple
of goats. Here and there acres of white blossom, looking like a
snowfall. This was the bog bean, growing on a stem a foot high, a
silvery tuft of silky bloom hanging downward, two inches long and the
bigness of a finger. Sometimes we dashed past walled enclosures so
full of stone that they looked like abandoned graveyards, and the only
use of the fences, so far as I could see, was to keep thoughtless
cattle out. Very little tillage. Just a few ridges of potatoes, but
the people who had planted them seemed to have vanished for ever. At
long intervals a diminutive white cot, but nothing else to break the
succession of lake, rock, and bog. Moycullen, six miles from Galway,
is to have a station; another will be built at Ross, ten miles, a
third at Oughterard, sixteen and a half miles. Not a stone laid as
yet. At Ross a great excavation. The men had just laid bare a huge
boul