the road turned down into the
kitchen for a few minutes, and the talking was incessant. Once when
I went into the window I heard Michael retailing my astronomical
lectures from the apex of the gable, but usually their topics have
to do with the affairs of the island.

It is likely that much of the intelligence and charm of these people
is due to the absence of any division of labour, and to the
correspondingly wide development of each individual, whose varied
knowledge and skill necessitates a considerable activity of mind.
Each man can speak two languages. He is a skilled fisherman, and can
manage a curagh with extraordinary nerve and dexterity He can farm
simply, burn kelp, cut out pampooties, mend nets, build and thatch a
house, and make a cradle or a coffin. His work changes with the
seasons in a way that keeps him free from the dullness that comes to
people who have always the same occupation. The danger of his life
on the sea gives him the alertness of the primitive hunter, and the
long nights he spends fishing in his curagh bring him some of the
emotions that are thought peculiar to men who have lived with the
arts.

As Michael is busy in the daytime, I have got a boy to come up and
read Irish to me every afternoon. He is about fifteen, and is
singularly intelligent, with a real sympathy for the language and
the stories we read.

One evening when he had been reading to me for two hours, I asked
him if he was tired.

'Tired?' he said, 'sure you wouldn't ever be tired reading!'

A few years ago this predisposition for intellectual things would
have made him sit with old people and learn their stories, but now
boys like him turn to books and to papers in Irish that are sent
them from Dublin.

In most of the stories we read, where the English and Irish are
printed side by side, I see him looking across to the English in
passages that are a little obscure, though he is indignant if I say
that he knows English better than Irish. Probably he knows the local
Irish better than English, and printed English better than printed
Irish, as the latter has frequent dialectic forms he does not know.

A few days ago when he was reading a folk-tale from Douglas Hyde's
Beside the Fire, something caught his eye in the translation.

'There's a mistake in the English,' he said, after a moment's
hesitation, 'he's put "gold chair" instead of "golden chair."'

I pointed out that we speak of gold watches and gold pins.

'And