nging growths, are ever before
their eyes, and the contemplation steeps them in a sense of the
transitoriness of things good and bad. Even the black soil they tread on
may next year flutter up into a vanishing blue column through a
smoke-hole in somebody's thatch. They carry this sense with a light and
heavy heart. In like manner they make the very most of all unusual
events. They find materials for half-an-hour's talk in the passage by
their doors of one of those rarely coming strangers, who do appear from
time to time, as frequently, indeed, as anybody would expect, having
surveyed the thoroughfare that links us with humanity. For if we follow
it southward, where, like the unvanishing wake of some vessel, it
streaks the level plain, that is lonely as a wide water, but stiller, we
pass by Dan O'Beirne's forge, now neighbourless, and through humble
Duffclane, and on to Ballybrosna, our Town; but we must go many a mile
further to reach anything upon which you would bestow that title. Or, if
we turn northward, we only find it seaming another ample fold of
bogland, outspread far and far beyond Lisconnel before a grey hill-range
begins to rise in slow undulations, crested with furze and broom. Here
we smell turf-smoke again, and see a cabin-row that is Sallinbeg, and
hence the road strikes north-westward in among the mountains, where a
few mottled-faced sheep peer down over it from their smooth green walks,
but do not care to trust their black velvet legs upon it. And then, by
the time that the air has become sea-scented, the road climbs to the
top of a hill, and stops there abruptly, as if it had been travelling
all the while merely to look at the view. The truth is that the funds
for its construction would go no further, and, in consequence, wayfarers
coming along by the shore still have to tread out a path for themselves
across a gap of moorland, if they are bound for Lisconnel.

You may perceive, therefore, that Lisconnel lies out of the way, on the
route to no places of importance, and as its own ten or a dozen little
houses are, I fear, collectively altogether insignificant, it has small
reason to expect many visitors. The Widow M'Gurk said one day that you
might as well be living at the bottom of the boghole for any company you
got the chance of seeing; but this was an exaggeration. She was vexed
when she made the remark, because Mrs. Dooley, old Dan O'Beirne's
married daughter, then staying at the forge, had promised