bent and trembled with the motion of the men, I had a far more
intimate feeling of the glory and power of the waves than I have
ever known in a steamer.

Old Mourteen is keeping me company again, and I am now able to
understand the greater part of his Irish.

He took me out to-day to show me the remains of some cloghauns, or
beehive dwellings, that are left near the central ridge of the
island. After I had looked at them we lay down in the corner of a
little field, filled with the autumn sunshine and the odour of
withering flowers, while he told me a long folk-tale which took more
than an hour to narrate.

He is so blind that I can gaze at him without discourtesy, and after
a while the expression of his face made me forget to listen, and I
lay dreamily in the sunshine letting the antique formulas of the
story blend with the suggestions from the prehistoric masonry I lay
on. The glow of childish transport that came over him when he
reached the nonsense ending--so common in these tales--recalled me
to myself, and I listened attentively while he gabbled with
delighted haste: 'They found the path and I found the puddle. They
were drowned and I was found. If it's all one to me tonight, it
wasn't all one to them the next night. Yet, if it wasn't itself, not
a thing did they lose but an old back tooth '--or some such
gibberish.

As I led him home through the paths he described to me--it is thus
we get along--lifting him at times over the low walls he is too
shaky to climb, he brought the conversation to the topic they are
never weary of--my views on marriage.

He stopped as we reached the summit of the island, with the stretch
of the Atlantic just visible behind him.

'Whisper, noble person,' he began, 'do you never be thinking on the
young girls? The time I was a young man, the devil a one of them
could I look on without wishing to marry her.'

'Ah, Mourteen,' I answered, 'it's a great wonder you'd be asking me.
What at all do you think of me yourself?'

'Bedad, noble person, I'm thinking it's soon you'll be getting
married. Listen to what I'm telling you: a man who is not married is
no better than an old jackass. He goes into his sister's house, and
into his brother's house; he eats a bit in this place and a bit in
another place, but he has no home for himself like an old jackass
straying on the rocks.'

I have left Aran. The steamer had a more than usually heavy cargo,
and it was after four o'clock when we sail