two curious beehive-like structures in
these villages, used here, it is said, as pigsties or storehouses.
On my way down from Sybil Head I was joined by a tall young man, who
told me he had been in the navy, but had bought himself out before
his time was over. 'Twelve of us joined from this place,' he said,
'and I was the last of them that stayed in it, for it is a life that
no one could put up with. It's not the work that would trouble you,
but it's that they can't leave you alone, and that you must be ever
and always fooling over something.'

He had been in South Africa during the war, and in Japan, and all
over the world; but he was now dressed in homespuns, and had
settled down here, he told me, for the rest of his life. Before we
reached the village we met Maurice, the fisherman I have spoken of
and we sat down under a hedge to shelter from a shower. We began to
talk of fevers and sicknesses and doctors--these little villages
are often infested with typhus--and Maurice spoke about the
traditional cures.

'There is a plant,' he said, 'which is the richest that is growing
out of the ground, and in the old times the women used to be giving
it to their children till they'd be growing up seven feet maybe in
height. Then the priests and doctors began taking everything to
themselves and destroyed the old knowledge, and that is a poor
thing; for you know well it was the Holy Mother of God who cured her
own Son with plants the like of that, and said after that no mother
should be without a plant for ever to cure her child. Then she threw
out the seeds of it over the whole world, so that it's growing every
place from that day to this.'

I came out to-day, a holiday, to the Great Blasket Island with a
schoolmaster and two young men from the village, who were coming for
the afternoon only. The day was admirably clear, with a blue sea and
sky, and the voyage in the long canoe--I had not been in one for
two or three years--gave me indescribable enjoyment. We passed
Dunmore Head, and then stood Out nearly due west towards the Great
Blasket itself, the height of the mountains round the bay and the
sharpness of the rocks making the place singularly different from
the sounds about Aran, where I had last travelled in a curagh. As
usual, three men were rowing--the man I have come to stay with, his
son, and a tall neighbour, all dressed in blue jerseys, homespun
trousers and shirts, and talking in Irish only, though my host could