nce to Lisconnel, and our visits thither are fewer still. The
neighbours say that the people up there do be very poor entirely, and
are wont to use a commiserating tone when speaking of them. But their
knowledge of the locality and its inhabitants is by no means intimate,
and would be even less so, were it not that Theresa Joyce and her
brother Mick, the remnant of Mrs. Kilfoyle's family, are now living
there, which makes a connecting link.

Laraghmena is scattered rather wildly over the slopes of a grey mountain
that shoulders the sea at the point where its foam comes nearest to
Lisconnel. Some of the cabins stand so low along the shore that the
shingle knocks clatteringly at their doors when the tide is full and
rough; and other some are perched so high up on the hillside that they
constantly disappear from view behind a curtain of the pale mists which
haunt its summit, creeping to and fro. When one of these little white
dwellings, with its field-fleck beside it, emerges from the clouds, you
feel as if the slightly improbable had happened, since at such a height
you would have expected nothing but the appropriate rocks and swampy
patches. There was once a French princess who would no doubt have
wondered why on earth any people should choose to live and farm in such
unchancy places. Rather than that she would have ploughed herself up a
little bit of the rich green land which spreads in broad tracts round
about, with sometimes sheep nibbling over it, and here and there a few
deer. But the views of this young lady are represented as having been so
far in advance of her age that she seems hardly possible as an
historical personage, and withdraws into the myth-mists. To that region
certainly belongs the ancient chronicle in which we read how the Irish
Nemedians, revolting against the intolerable deal of cream and butter
and wheaten meal exacted from them by their oppressors, the Fomorians,
those ferocious African pirates, emigrated to Hellas, in hope of better
things, but were at last driven back home to escape the heavier yoke of
the Athenians, who compelled them to: "Dig clay in the valleys, and
carry it in leathern bags to the top of the highest mountains, and the
most craggy rocks, in order to form a soil upon those barren places, and
make them fruitful, and able to bear corn." That history should repeat
itself is, of course, to be recognised as merely a commonplace fact; but
a myth reproducing itself in the shape of ev