p I
afforded, I found myself on the sick call.

The road brought us by a lake which gave a chilly air to the landscape
in the winter day, then past a strip of country meagrely wooded. We
turned into a narrow road that struck the hills at once, skirting a
sloping place covered with scrub and quite dark, like a black patch on
the landscape. After that it was a barren pasture, prolific only in
bleached boulders of rocks, of bracken that lay wasted, of broom that
was sere. It was a very still afternoon, not a breath of wind stirring.
Sheep looking bulky in their heavy fleeces lay about in the grass, so
motionless that they might be the work of a vigorous sculptor. The
branches of the trees were so still, so delicate in their outlines
against the pale sky, that they made one uneasy; they seemed to have
lost the art of waving, as if leaves should never again flutter upon
them. A net-work of low stone walls put loosely together, marking off
the absurdly small fields, straggled over the face of the landscape,
looking in the curious evening light like a great grey web fantastically
spun by some humorous spider. The brown figure of a shepherd with a
sheep crook in his hand rose up on a distant hill. He might be a sacred
figure in the red chancel of the western sky. In a moment he was gone,
leaving one doubtful if he had not been an illusion. A long army of
starlings trailed rapidly across the horizon, a wriggling motion marking
their course like the motion in the body of a gigantic snake. Everything
on the hills seemed, as the light reddened and failed, to grow vast,
grotesque. The silence which reigned over it all was oppressive.

Stray cabins skirted the roadside. Some people moved about them, leaving
one the impression of a remoteness that was melancholy. The women in
their bare feet made little curtesies to the Friar. Children in long
dresses ran into the cabins at sight of the strangers, like rabbits
scuttling back to their burrows. Having found refuge they looked out
over the half-doors as the car passed, their eyes sparkling, humorous,
full of an alert inquisitiveness, their faces fresh as the wind.

A group of people swung along the road, speaking volubly in Irish,
giving one the impression that they had made a great journey across the
range of hills. They gave us a salutation that was also a blessing. We
pulled up the car and they gathered about the Friar, looking up at him
from under their broad-brimmed black hats, th