s. In Ireland turf is more
used to make fires than coal, because it is very plentiful there, and
many of the poor people in Ireland build their houses of it, and
when they keep them well mended and covered, they are very warm and
comfortable, and they burn good turf fires in their turf houses; but
some of them are lazy, and do not keep their turf houses mended, so
the rain comes in, and they are very miserable, and so will all idle
lazy people be. I hope no little child here will be lazy, Now I will
tell you where they get all this turf, they dig it out of the bogs.
There are bogs in England; they call them mosses or fens, and in
Scotland there are bogs, but the bogs in Ireland are much more
plentiful. Some of them are so very large that you cannot see across
them, and a great many birds live amongst them, such as wild ducks,
and geese, and cranes, and herons, and snipe, all of which I will tell
you about some other time. Those great bogs are very wild, lonesome,
dreary places; no person can live on them, because they are so wet and
soft, and they are full of great deep holes with water in them, which
are called bog holes, and if any person fell in they would be drowned.
Sometimes in the middle of this great bog you will see a pretty green
island, where the land is firm and strong, and the grass is nice and
sweet, so that the poor people make a dry path across the wet bog to
these islands, that they may drive their cows, and goats, and horses
to feed there; and some of these islands are very pretty places, and
look so green in the centre of the black bog. Those bogs which are now
such wet, black, nasty places, were once forests of great trees, as
large as any you children ever saw, and pretty bright rivers ran
through those forests, and nice birds sang in the branches, and great
stags eat the grass underneath; we will read about the stag at some
other time. This was many hundred years ago, and there were very few
people living then in Ireland, and by degrees, when the trees got very
old, they began to fall down into the rivers and stopped them up, so
that the water could not flow on, and the rivers overflowed all the
nice forests, and the trees all fell, so that when some hundred years
passed they were all down, and the branches rotted, and the grass and
clay became wet, like sponge, and the whole of the nice shady forests
of great trees became what we call bogs, and the remains of those
pretty branches and leaves, where