sited garrisoned from four to ten men.
They lived comfortably in their white houses, strolled in pairs over the
country roads, picked blackberries, and fished for trout. If at some
time there came a crisis, one man was more than enough to surround it.
The remaining nine add dignity to the scene. The crisis chiefly
consisted of occasional drunken men who were unable to understand the
local geography on Saturday nights.

The note continually struck was that each group of constables lived on a
little social island, and there was no boat to take them off. There has
been no such marooning since the days of the pirates. The sequestration
must be complete when a man with a dinky little cap on his ear is not
allowed to talk to the girls.

But they fish for trout. Isaac Walton is the father of the Royal Irish
Constabulary. They could be seen on any fine day whipping the streams
from source to mouth. There was one venerable sergeant who made a rod
less than a yard long. With a line of about the same length attached to
this rod, he hunted the gorse-hung banks of the little streams in the
hills. An eight-inch ribbon of water lined with masses of heather and
gorse will be accounted contemptible by a fisherman with an ordinary
rod. But it was the pleasure of the sergeant to lay on his stomach at
the side of such a stream and carefully, inch by inch, scout his hook
through the pools. He probably caught more trout than any three men in
county Cork. He fished more than any twelve men in the county Cork. Some
people had never seen him in any other posture but that of crowding
forward on his stomach to peer into a pool. They did not believe the
rumour that he sometimes stood or walked like a human.

IV.--A FISHING VILLAGE.

The brook curved down over the rocks, innocent and white, until it faced
a little strand of smooth gravel and flat stones. It turned then to the
left, and thereafter its guilty current was tinged with the pink of
diluted blood. Boulders standing neck-deep in the water were rimmed with
red; they wore bloody collars whose tops marked the supreme instant of
some tragic movement of the stream. In the pale green shallows of the
bay's edge, the outward flow from the criminal little brook was as
eloquently marked as if a long crimson carpet had been laid upon the
waters. The scene of the carnage was the strand of smooth gravel and
flat stones, and the fruit of the carnage was cleaned mackerel.

Far to the south,