stem to steer with an oar while I rowed with the others.

We had had a good dinner and drink and were wrought up by this
sudden revival of summer to a dreamy voluptuous gaiety, that made us
shout with exultation to hear our voices passing out across the blue
twinkling of the sea.

Even after the people of the south island, these men of Inishmaan
seemed to be moved by strange archaic sympathies with the world.
Their mood accorded itself with wonderful fineness to the
suggestions of the day, and their ancient Gaelic seemed so full of
divine simplicity that I would have liked to turn the prow to the
west and row with them for ever.

I told them I was going back to Paris in a few days to sell my books
and my bed, and that then I was coming back to grow as strong and
simple as they were among the islands of the west.

When our excitement sobered down, Michael told me that one of the
priests had left his gun at our cottage and given me leave to use it
till he returned to the island. There was another gun and a ferret
in the house also, and he said that as soon as we got home he was
going to take me out fowling on rabbits.

A little later in the day we set off, and I nearly laughed to see
Michael's eagerness that I should turn out a good shot.

We put the ferret down in a crevice between two bare sheets of rock,
and waited. In a few minutes we heard rushing paws underneath us,
then a rabbit shot up straight into the air from the crevice at our
feet and set off for a wall that was a few feet away. I threw up the
gun and fired.

'Buail tu e,' screamed Michael at my elbow as he ran up the rock. I
had killed it.

We shot seven or eight more in the next hour, and Michael was
immensely pleased. If I had done badly I think I should have had to
leave the islands. The people would have despised me. A 'duine
uasal' who cannot shoot seems to these descendants of hunters a
fallen type who is worse than an apostate.

The women of this island are before conventionality, and share some
of the liberal features that are thought peculiar to the women of
Paris and New York.

Many of them are too contented and too sturdy to have more than a
decorative interest, but there are others full of curious
individuality.

This year I have got to know a wonderfully humorous girl, who has
been spinning in the kitchen for the last few days with the old
woman's spinning-wheel. The morning she began I heard her exquisite
intonation almost befo