ents happening visibly
before our eyes, is a rarer phenomenon. And it seems to be occurring
whenever a string of Laraghmenians come plodding up their winding
mountain-path under the burden of heavy creels filled with earth, or
oftener with slippery brown sea-wrack and leathery weed. For it is in
this way that whatever scanty foothold their starveling crops may find,
has been fashioned and maintained in the stony little fields. Year by
year, as the blustery days of late autumn darken into winter, the
steep-ledged path is wetted all along with sea-water, and bestrewn with
dark trails and tough tawny pods out of the dripping creels, until it
grows as sharply ocean-odorous as the beach, while the many bare feet
are continually toiling slowly up and quickly pattering down it. Yet
their efforts are rewarded by only meagre and stunted growths; so
intractable is the material upon which they are expended. Micky Joyce
has been heard to declare, as he took a despondent bird's-eye view of
his holding, that "you might as well be thryin' to raise crops in the
crevices of the stone walls."

However, as we were just now shown, these dwellers at Laraghmena have
another resource to fall back upon. In fact, they have nothing less than
the wide sea as a supplement to their bit of land. The queer small boats
hauled up on the strand, and the dark-brown net festooning the rafters,
betoken that, as does also the bit of salt-fish hung against the wall,
pallid and juiceless, a shadowy, wraith-like looking viand. But the
bounty of the sea has limits; it does not yield up its stores for
nothing, but takes as well as gives. And it helps itself sometimes on a
liberal scale. Some years ago, for instance, it took poor Thady Joyce
and several of his companions, who had gone off in a couple of luggers
after the herrings. The event is remembered with awe at Laraghmena,
because in that wild March gloaming Con the Quare One had met Thady
himself face to face stepping up the winding path, and had given him
good evening, and asked him how he had got all dripping wet, just at the
very time when the unlucky lad must have been lying drowned miles and
miles from there, among the surges of Galway Bay. Other such toll has
often been levied since then; for the curraghs and pookawns in which
Laraghmena goes to sea are frail craft to cope with the billows come
rolling, maybe, from the fogbanks of Newfoundland, and blasts that have
cooled their breath among hills of i