slands has a
wearisome and dangerous task. He comes to this island or Inishere on
Saturday night--whenever the sea is calm enough--and has Mass the
first thing on Sunday morning. Then he goes down fasting and is
rowed across to the other island and has Mass again, so that it is
about midday when he gets a hurried breakfast before he sets off
again for Aranmore, meeting often on both passages a rough and
perilous sea.

A couple of Sundays ago I was lying outside the cottage in the
sunshine smoking my pipe, when the curate, a man of the greatest
kindliness and humour, came up, wet and worn out, to have his first
meal. He looked at me for a moment and then shook his head.

'Tell me,' he said, 'did you read your Bible this morning?'

I answered that I had not done so.

'Well, begod, Mr. Synge,' he went on, 'if you ever go to Heaven,
you'll have a great laugh at us.'

Although these people are kindly towards each other and to their
children, they have no feeling for the sufferings of animals, and
little sympathy for pain when the person who feels it is not in
danger. I have sometimes seen a girl writhing and howling with
toothache while her mother sat at the other side of the fireplace
pointing at her and laughing at her as if amused by the sight.

A few days ago, when we had been talking of the death of President
McKinley, I explained the American way of killing murderers, and a
man asked me how long the man who killed the President would be
dying.

'While you'd be snapping your fingers,' I said.

'Well,' said the man, 'they might as well hang him so, and not be
bothering themselves with all them wires. A man who would kill a
King or a President knows he has to die for it, and it's only giving
him the thing he bargained for if he dies easy. It would be right he
should be three weeks dying, and there'd be fewer of those things
done in the world.'

If two dogs fight at the slip when we are waiting for the steamer,
the men are delighted and do all they can to keep up the fury of the
battle.

They tie down donkeys' heads to their hoofs to keep them from
straying, in a way that must cause horrible pain, and sometimes when
I go into a cottage I find all the women of the place down on their
knees plucking the feathers from live ducks and geese.

When the people are in pain themselves they make no attempt to hide
or control their feelings. An old man who was ill in the winter took
me out the other day to show me how