At the corner we turned into a public-house, where there were men we
knew, who had done their business also; and we went into the little
alcove to sit down quietly for a moment. 'What will you take, sir,'
said the man I lodge with, 'a glass of wine?'

I took beer and the others took porter; but we were only served
after some little time, as the house was thronged with people.

The men were too much taken up with their bargains and losses to
talk much of other matters; and before long we came out again, and
the son of the house started homewards, leading the new filly by a
little halter of rope.

Not long afterwards I started also. Outside Killorglin rain was
coming up over the hills of Glen Car, so that there was a strained
hush in the air, and a rich, aromatic smell coming from the bog
myrtle, or boggy shrub, that grows thickly in this place. The
strings of horses and jennets scattered over the road did not keep
away a strange feeling of loneliness that seems to hang over this
brown plain of bog that stretches from Carrantuohull to Cuchulain's
House.

Before I reached the cottage dense torrents of rain were closing
down through the glens, and driving in white sheets between the
little hills that are on each side of the way.

One morning in autumn I started in a local train for the first stage
of my journey to Dublin, seeing the last of Macgillicuddy's Reeks,
that were touched with snow in places, Dingle Bay and the islands
beyond it. At a little station where I changed trains, I got into a
carriage where there was a woman with her daughter, a girl of about
twenty, who seemed uneasy and distressed. Soon afterwards, when a
collector was looking at our tickets, I called out that mine was for
Dublin, and as soon as he got out the woman came over to me.

'Are you going to Dublin?' she said.

I told her I was.

'Well,' she went on, 'here is my daughter going there too; and maybe
you'd look after her, for I'm getting down at the next station. She
is going up to a hospital for some little complaint in her ear, and
she has never travelled before, so that she's lonesome in her mind.'

I told her I would do what I could, and at the next station I was
left alone with my charge, and one other passenger, a returned
American girl, who was on her way to Mallow, to get the train for
Queenstown. When her mother was lost sight of the young girl broke
out into tears, and the returned American and myself had trouble to
quie