hole-pins, with the oar loose between
them, and they jeered at the simplicity of the Connaught system.
Then we got on the relative value of canoes and boats.

'They are not better than boats,' said Maurice, 'but they are more
useful. Before you get a heavy boat swimming you will be wet up to
your waist, and then you will be sitting the whole night like that;
but a canoe will swim in a handful of water, so that you can get in
dry and warm the whole night. Then there will be seven men in a big
boat and seven shares of the fish; but in a canoe there will be
three men only and three shares of the fish, though the nets are the
same in the two.'

After a while a man sang a song, and then we began talking of tunes
and playing the fiddle, and I told them how hard it was to get any
sound out of one in a cottage with a floor of earth and a thatched
roof over you.

'I can believe that,' said one of the men. 'There was a man a while
since went into Tralee to buy a fiddle; and when he went into the
shop an old fiddler followed him into it, thinking maybe he'd get
the price of a pint. Well, the man was within choicing the fiddles,
maybe forty of them, and the old fiddler whispered to him to take
them out into the air, "for there's many a fiddle would sound well
in here wouldn't be worth a curse outside," says he; so he was
bringing them out and bringing them out till he found a good one
among them.'

This evening, after a day of teeming rain, it cleared for an hour,
and I went out while the sun was setting to a little cove where a
high sea was running. As I was coming back the darkness began to
close in except in the west, where there was a red light under the
clouds. Against this light I could see patches of open wall and
little fields of stooks, and a bit of laneway with an old man
driving white cows before him. These seemed transfigured beyond any
description.

Then I passed two men riding bare-backed towards the west, who spoke
to me in Irish, and a little further on I came to the only village
on my way. The ground rose towards it, and as I came near there was
a grey bar of smoke from every cottage going up to the low clouds
overhead, and standing out strangely against the blackness of the
mountain behind the village.

Beyond the patch of wet cottages I had another stretch of lonely
roadway, and a heron kept flapping in front of me, rising and
lighting again with many lonely cries that made me glad to reach the
little p