he first Pope that sat upon that
throne?'

I hesitated for a moment, and he went on:

'I'm only a poor, ignorant man, but I can tell you that myself if
you don't know it, with all your travels. Saint Peter was the first
Pope, and he was crucified with his head down, and since that time
there have been Popes upon the throne of Rome.'

Then he began telling me about himself.

'I was twice a married man,' he said. 'My first wife died at her
second child, and then I reared it up till it was as tall as
myself--a girl it was--and she went off and got married and left me.
After that I was married a second time to an aged woman, and she
lived with me ten year; and then she died herself. There is nothing
I can make now but tea, and tea is killing me; and I'm living alone,
in a little hut beyond, where four baronies, four parishes, and four
townlands meet.'

By this time we had reached the village inn, where I was lodging for
the night; so I stood him a drink, and he went on to his cottage
along a narrow pathway through the bogs.

The People of the Glens

HERE and there in County Wicklow there are a number of little known
places--places with curiously melodious names, such as Aughavanna,
Glenmalure, Annamoe, or Lough Nahanagan--where the people have
retained a peculiar simplicity, and speak a language in some ways
more Elizabethan than the English of Connaught, where Irish was used
till a much later date. In these glens many women still wear
old-fashioned bonnets, with a frill round the face, and the old men,
when they are going to the fair, or to Mass, are often seen in
curiously-cut frock-coats, tall hats, and breeches buckled at the
knee. When they meet a wanderer on foot, these old people are glad
to stop and talk to him for hours, telling him stories of the
Rebellion, or of the fallen angels that ride across the hills, or
alluding to the three shadowy countries that are never forgotten in
Wicklow--America (their El Dorado), the Union and the Madhouse.

'I had a power of children,' an old man who was born in Glenmalure
said to me once; 'I had a power of children, and they all went to
California, with what I could give them, and bought a bit of a
field. Then, when they put in the plough, it stuck fast on them.
They looked in beneath it, and there was fine gold stretched within
the earth. They're rich now and their daughters are riding on fine
horses with new saddles on them and elegant bits in their mouths,