me a look at yours, if so be you had one, but as for asking you
for it and you in pain, it's what I wouldn't do."

There are travellers, cantankerous people, who complain that Irish
railway officials are not civil. Perhaps English porters and guards may
excel them in the plausible lip service which anticipates a tip. But
in the Irishman there is a natural delicacy of feeling which expresses
itself in lofty kinds of courtesy. An Englishman, compelled by a sense
of duty to see the ticket of a passenger, would have asked for it with
callous bluntness. The Irishman, knowing that his victim was in pain,
approached the subject of tickets obliquely, hinting by means of an
anecdote of great interest, that people have from time to time been
known to defraud railway companies.

CHAPTER III

Rosnacree House, the home of Sir Lucius Lentaigne and his ancestors
since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes brought the family to
Ireland in search of religious freedom, stands high on a wooded slope
above the southern shore of a great bay. From the dining-room windows,
so carefully have vistas been cut through the trees, there is a broad
prospect of sea and shore. For eight miles the bay stretches north to
the range of hills which bound it. For five or six miles westward its
waters are dotted over with islands. There are, the people say, three
hundred and sixty-five of them, so that a fisher-man with a taste for
exploration, could such a one be found, might land on a different
island every day for a whole year. Long promontories, some of them to be
reckoned with the three hundred and sixty-five islands when the tide
is high, run far out from the mainland. Narrow channels, winding
bewilderingly, eat their way for miles among the sea-saturate fields
of the eastward lying plain. The people, dwelling with pardonable pride
upon the peculiarities of their coast line, say that any one who walked
from the north to the south side of the bay, keeping resolutely along
the high-tide mark, would travel altogether 200 miles. He would reach
after his way-faring a spot which, measured on the map, would be just
eight miles distant from the point of his departure. Sir Lucius, who
loved his home, while he sometimes affects to despise it, says that
he believes this estimate of the extent of the sea's meanderings to be
approximately correct, but adds that he has never yet met any one with
courage enough to attempt the walk. You do, in fact, come sud