of the mountain, and the lark saluting the new-born
radiance with a song attuned to the freshness of the morning. Where his
road ascended he viewed the sparkling inlet spread far to the
southward; and where the track dipped, the smooth slopes on either side
ran up to grey crags that, high above, took strange shapes, now of
monstrous heads, now of fantastic towers. As his sure-footed nag forded
the brown bog-stream, long-shanked birds rose silently from the pools,
and he marked with emotion the spots his boyhood had known: the shallow
where the dog-wolf--so big that it had become a fable--died biting, and
the cliff whence the sea-eagle's nest had long bidden him defiance.

Bale rode behind him, taciturn, comparing, perhaps, the folds of his
native Suffolk hills with these greener vales. They reached the hedge
tavern, where the mare had been seized, and they stayed to bait their
horses, but got no news. About eight they rode on; and five long Irish
miles nearer Tralee, though still in a wild and lonely country, they
viewed from the crest of a hill a piece of road stretched ribbon-like
before them, and on it a man walking from them at a great pace. He had
for companion a boy, who trotted beside him.

Neither man nor boy looked back, and it did not seem to be from fear of
the two riders that they moved so quickly. The man wore a loose drugget
coat and an old jockey-cap, and walked with a stout six-foot staff.
Thus armed and dressed he should have stood in small fear of robbers.
Yet when Colonel John's horse, the tread of its hoofs deadened by the
sod road, showed its head at his shoulder, and he sprang aside, he
turned a face of more vivid alarm than seemed necessary. And he crossed
himself.

Colonel John touched his hat. "I give you good morning, good man," he
said.

The walker raised his hand to his cap as if to return the salute, but
lowered it without doing so. He muttered something.

"You will be in haste?" Colonel John continued. He saw that the sweat
stood in beads on the man's brow, and the lad's face was tear-stained.

"I've far to go," the man muttered. He spoke with a slight foreign
accent, but in the west of Ireland this was common. "The top of the
morning to you."

Plainly he wished the two riders to pass on, but he did not slacken his
speed for a moment. So for a space they went abreast, the man, with
every twenty paces, glancing up suspiciously. And now and again, the
boy, as he ran or walked, vented