the least afraid of cattle, or of
other things in daylight and the open air; of course at night in dark
passages infested with bears and little hunchbacks ... Well, it was
obviously different. And yet that woman who was afraid of "cows" could
walk without a tremor, or a little shiver down the spine, past the very
"Gates of Hell," where they roared and blazed in the dark passage.

Our English home had brightly-lit passages, and was consequently
practically free from bears and robbers. Still, we all preferred the
Ulster home in spite of its obvious perils. Here were a chain of lakes,
wide, silvery expanses of gleaming water reflecting the woods and
hills. Here were great tracts of woodlands where countless little burns
chattered and tinkled in their rocky beds as they hurried down to the
lakes, laughing as they tumbled in miniature cascades over rocky ledges
into swirling pools, in their mad haste to reach the placid waters
below. Here were purple heather-clad hills, with their bigger brethren
rising mistily blue in the distance, and great wine-coloured tracts of
bog (we called them "flows") interspersed with glistening bands of
water, where the turf had been cut which hung over the village in a
thin haze of fragrant blue smoke.

The woods in the English place were beautifully kept, but they were
uninteresting, for there were no rocks or great stones in them. An
English brook was a dull, prosaic, lifeless stream, rolling its
clay-stained waters stolidly along, with never a dimple of laughter on
its surface, or a joyous little gurgle of surprise at finding that it
was suddenly called upon to take a headlong leap of ten feet. The
English brooks were so silent, too, compared to our noisy Ulster burns,
whose short lives were one clamorous turmoil of protest against the
many obstacles with which nature had barred their progress to the sea;
here swirling over a miniature crag, there babbling noisily among a
labyrinth of stones. They ultimately became merged in a foaming,
roaring salmon river, expanding into amber-coloured pools, or breaking
into white rapids; a river which retained to the last its lordly
independence and reached the sea still free, refusing to be harnessed
or confined by man. Our English brook, after its uneventful childhood,
made its stolid matter-of-fact way into an equally dull little river
which crawled inertly along to its destiny somewhere down by the docks.
I know so many people whose whole lives are li