own through the narrow glens with the
congested whirl and roar of a torrent, breaking at times for sudden
moments of silence that keep up the tension of the mind. At such
times the people crouch all night over a few sods of turf and the
dogs howl, in the lanes.

When the sun rises there is a morning of almost supernatural
radiance, and even the oldest men and women come out into the air
with the joy of children who have recovered from a fever. In the
evening it is raining again. This peculiar climate, acting on a
population that is already lonely and dwindling, has caused or
increased a tendency to nervous depression among the people, and
every degree of sadness, from that of the man who is merely mournful
to that of the man who has spent half his life in the madhouse, is
common among these hills.

Not long ago in a desolate glen in the south of the county I met two
policemen driving an ass-cart with a coffin on it, and a little
further on I stopped an old man and asked him what had happened.

'This night three weeks,' he said, 'there was a poor fellow below
reaping in the glen, and in the evening he had two glasses of whisky
with some other lads. Then some excitement took him, and he threw
off his clothes and ran away into the hills. There was great rain
that night, and I suppose the poor creature lost his way, and was
the whole night perishing in the rain and darkness. In the morning
they found his naked footmarks on some mud half a mile above the
road, and again where you go up by a big stone. Then there was
nothing known of him till last night, when they found his body on
the mountain, and it near eaten by the crows.'

Then he went on to tell me how different the country had been when
he was a young man.

'We had nothing to eat at that time,' he said, 'but milk and
stirabout and potatoes, and there was a fine constitution you
wouldn't meet this day at all. I remember when you'd see forty boys
and girls below there on a Sunday evening, playing ball and
diverting themselves; but now all this country is gone lonesome and
bewildered, and there's no man knows what ails it.'

There are so few girls left in these neighbourhoods that one does
not often meet with women that have grown up unmarried. I know one,
however, who has lived by herself for fifteen years in a tiny hovel
near a cross roads much frequented by tinkers and ordinary tramps.
As she has no one belonging to her, she spends a good deal of her
time wan