people
who, maddened by the sight of a stranger's flocks and herds pasturing
above and below them, have risen at times and driven his animals into
the sea. All the notice he has taken of the matter is to make the
county pay his loss, and leave the county to get the amount out of the
offending townlands if it can. He is not to be scared, for he lives
far away, and apparently his herds are not much afraid either--at
present, that is. How any compensation money is to be got from the
hundreds of miserable people who inhabit Coshleen and Derryinver I
cannot conceive. They have, it is true, potatoes to eat just now, and
may have enough till February; but their pale cheeks, high
cheek-bones, and hollow eyes tell a sorry tale, not of sudden want but
of a long course of insufficient food, varied by occasional fever.
With the full breath of the Atlantic blowing upon them, they look as
sickly as if they had just come out of a slum in St. Giles's. There is
something strangely appalling in the pallid looks of people who live
mainly in the open air, and the finest air in the world. Doubtless
they tell a good story without, as I have already said, any very
severe adherence to truth; but there can be no falsehood in their
gaunt, famished faces, no fabrication in their own rags and the
nakedness of their children. I doubt me Mr. Ruskin would designate the
condition of Mount Misery, otherwise Lettermore Hill, as "altogether
devilish."

The cabins of Connemara have been so frequently described that there
is no necessity for telling the English public that in the villages I
have named anything approaching the character of a bed is very rare. A
heap of rags flung on some dirty straw, or the four posts of what was
once a bedstead filled in with straw, with a blanket spread over it,
form the sleeping-place. Everybody knows that one compartment serves
in these seaside hovels for the entire family, including the pig (if
any), ducks, chickens, or geese. Few people hereabouts own an ass,
much less a horse or a cow, and boats are few in proportion to the
population. Such a cabin as I have rather indicated than described is
occupied by the wife of one John Connolly, of Derryinver. When I
called the husband was away at some work over the hill, and the two
elder boys with him, the wife and seven younger children remaining at
home. I had hardly put my foot inside the cabin when a "bonniva," or
very little pig, quietly made up to me and began to eat t