wn fires
that they may have no one to bother them. She was sitting in a heap
on the floor staring into the turf, and as I finished she looked up
with surprise.

'They're like me so,' she said; 'would anyone have thought that!'

Below the sympathy we feel there is still a chasm between us.

'Musha,' she muttered as I was leaving her this evening, 'I think
it's to hell you'll be going by and by.'

Occasionally I meet her also in the kitchen where young men go to
play cards after dark and a few girls slip in to share the
amusement. At such times her eyes shine in the light of the candles,
and her cheeks flush with the first tumult of youth, till she hardly
seems the same girl who sits every evening droning to herself over
the turf.

A branch of the Gaelic League has been started here since my last
visit, and every Sunday afternoon three little girls walk through
the village ringing a shrill hand-bell, as a signal that the women's
meeting is to be held,--here it would be useless to fix an hour, as
the hours are not recognized.

Soon afterwards bands of girls--of all ages from five to
twenty-five--begin to troop down to the schoolhouse in their reddest
Sunday petticoats. It is remarkable that these young women are
willing to spend their one afternoon of freedom in laborious studies
of orthography for no reason but a vague reverence for the Gaelic.
It is true that they owe this reverence, or most of it, to the
influence of some recent visitors, yet the fact that they feel such
an influence so keenly is itself of interest.

In the older generation that did not come under the influence of the
recent language movement, I do not see any particular affection for
Gaelic. Whenever they are able, they speak English to their
children, to render them more capable of making their way in life.
Even the young men sometimes say to me--

'There's very hard English on you, and I wish to God I had the like
of it.'

The women are the great conservative force in this matter of the
language. They learn a little English in school and from their
parents, but they rarely have occasion to speak with any one who is
not a native of the islands, so their knowledge of the foreign
tongue remains rudimentary. In my cottage I have never heard a word
of English from the women except when they were speaking to the pigs
or to the dogs, or when the girl was reading a letter in English.
Women, however, with a more assertive temperament, who have ha