eme
horror by the peasants. The madhouse, which they know better, is
less dreaded.

One night I had to go down late in the evening from a mountain
village to the town of Wicklow, and come back again into the hills.
As soon as I came near Rathnew I passed many bands of girls and men
making rather ruffianly flirtation on the pathway, and women who
surged up to stare at me, as I passed in the middle of the road. The
thick line of trees that are near Rathnew makes the way intensely
dark even on clear nights, and when one is riding quickly, the
contrast, when one reaches the lights of Wicklow, is singularly
abrupt. The town itself after nightfall is gloomy and squalid.
Half-drunken men and women stand about, wrangling and disputing in
the dull light from the windows, which is only strong enough to show
the wretchedness of the figures which pass continually across them.
I did my business quickly and turned back to the hills, passing for
the first few miles the same noisy groups and couples on the
roadway. After a while I stopped at a lonely public-house to get a
drink and rest for a moment before I came to the hills. Six or seven
men were talking drearily at one end of the room, and a woman I
knew, who had been marketing in Wicklow, was resting nearer the
door. When I had been given a glass of beer, I sat down on a barrel
near her, and we began to talk.

'Ah, your honour,' she said, 'I hear you're going off in a short
time to Dublin, or to France, and maybe we won't be in the place at
all when you come back. There's no fences to the bit of farm I have,
the way I'm destroyed running. The calves do be straying, and the
geese do be straying, and the hens do be straying, and I'm destroyed
running after them. We've no man in the place since himself died in
the winter, and he ailing these five years, and there's no one to
give us a hand drawing the hay or cutting the bit of oats we have
above on the hill. My brother Michael has come back to his own place
after being seven years in the Richmond Asylum; but what can you ask
of him, and he with a long family of his own? And, indeed, it's a
wonder he ever came back when it was a fine time he had in the
asylum.'

She saw my movement of surprise, and went on:

'There was a son of my own, as fine a lad as you'd see in the
county--though I'm his mother that says it, and you'd never think it
t look at me. Well, he was a keeper in a kind of private asylum, I
think they call it, and wh