e with a splendid
gateway, and sometimes, riding through it, a figure new to our eyes, a
Lady Master of the Hounds, handsome in her habit with red facings. We
pass many an 'evicted farm,' the ruined house with the rushes growing
all about it, and a lonely goat browsing near; and on we walk, until
we can see the roofs of Lisdara's solitary cabin row, huddled under
the shadow of a gloomy hill topped by the ruins of an old fort. All is
silent, and the blue haze of the peat smoke curls up from the thatch.
Lisdara's young people have mostly gone to the Big Country; and how
many tears have dropped on the path we are treading, as Peggy and Mary,
Cormac and Miles, with a wooden box in the donkey cart behind them, or
perhaps with only a bundle hanging from a blackthorn stick, have come
down the hill to seek their fortune! Perhaps Peggy is barefooted;
perhaps Mary has little luggage beyond a pot of shamrock or a mountain
thrush in a wicker cage; but what matter for that? They are used to
poverty and hardship and hunger, and although they are going quite
penniless to a new country, sure it can be no worse than the old. This
is the happy-go-lucky Irish philosophy, and there is mixed with it a
deal of simple trust in God.

How many exiles and wanderers, both those who have no fortune and
those who have failed to win it, dream of these cabin rows, these
sweet-scented boreens with their 'banks of furze unprofitably gay,'
these leaking thatches with the purple loosestrife growing in their
ragged seams, and, looking backward across the distance of time and
space, give the humble spot a tender thought, because after all it was
in their dear native isle!

'Pearly are the skies in the country of my fathers,
Purple are thy mountains, home of my heart;
Mother of my yearning, love of all my longings,
Keep me in remembrance long leagues apart.'

I have been thinking in this strain because of an old dame in the first
cabin in Lisdara row, whose daughter is in America, and who can talk of
nothing else. She shows us the last letter, with its postal order for
sixteen shillings, that Mida sent from New York, with little presents
for blind Timsy, 'dark since he were three years old,' and for lame
Dan, or the 'Bocca,' as he is called in Lisdara. Mida was named for the
virgin saint of Killeedy in Limerick. [*] "And it's she that's good enough
to bear a saint's name, glory be to God!" exclaims the old mother
returning Mid