Gweedore," but she was not
visible, though we met her mother (by no means a _pulchra mater_) as we
crossed the Clady at Bryan's Bridge.

We soon passed from the bogland into a wilderness of granite. Our
jarvey, however, maintained that there was "better land among the stones
than any bogland could be." He was a shrewd fellow, and summed up the
economical situation, I thought, better than some of his betters, when
he said of the whole region that "it will fatten four, feed five, and
starve six."

It may well fatten six, though, I should say, if the natural wealth of
this vast granite range can be properly turned to account. On every side
of us lay vast blocks of granite of all hues and grades, all absolutely
unworked, but surely not unworkable. We stopped and picked up many
specimens, some of them almost as rich in colour as porphyry. Of lakes
and lakelets supplying water-power the name too, is legion.

Beyond Annagary we caught a glimpse of the Isle of Arran, the scene, a
few years ago, of so much suffering, and that of a kind I should think
as much beyond the control of legislation as the misery and destruction
which have overtaken successive attempts to establish settlements on
Anticosti in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

This town of Dungloe sprawls along the shore of the sea. It is reputed
the most ill-favoured town in Donegal, and it certainly is not a dream
of beauty. But it blooms all over with evidences of the prosperity of
that interesting type of Irish civilisation, the "Gombeen man," of whom
I had heard so much at Gweedore. Over the doorways of most of the shops
appear the names of various members of the family of Sweeney, all of
them, I am told, brought here and established within a few years past by
the head of the sept, who is not only the great "Gombeen man" of the
region, but a leading local member of the National League, and Her
Majesty's Postmaster. The Sweeneys, in fact, commercially speaking,
dominate Dungloe, their, only visible rivals being a returned Irish
American, who has built himself a neat two-story house and shop just at
the entrance of the village, and our own host, Mr. Maurice Boyle, whose
extremely neat little inn just faces a large shop, the stronghold of the
Chief of the Sweeneys. I am sorry to find that this important citizen of
Dungloe is not now here. We went into his chief establishment to make
some purchases, and found it full of customers, chiefly women, neatly
dressed after the Do