for expressing itself, the towns are all exactly alike, and their
resemblance consists in the absence of any beauty which can please
the eye. An English country town, although the English bucolic is
notoriously as stupid as an ox, has certain features of its own. So has
a Swiss cottage or a French village. It is possible to represent these
upon Christmas cards or the lids of chocolate-boxes without labelling
them English, Swiss, or French. Any moderately well educated young lady
will recognise them at once, and exclaim without hesitation, 'How truly
English!' or 'How sweetly Swiss!' But no one can depict an Irish town
with any hope of having it recognised unless he idealizes boldly,
introducing a highly-intelligent pig, or a man in knee-breeches kissing
a fancifully-attired colleen. And then, after all, he might as well have
labelled it Irish at once in good plain print, and saved himself the
trouble of drawing the symbolic figures.

To describe Ballymoy, therefore, mountains, rivers, and such like
natural eccentricities being left out of the count, is to describe fifty
other West of Ireland towns. There is a railway-station, bleak, gray,
and windswept, situated, for the benefit of local car-owners, a mile and
a half from the town, and the road which connects the two is execrable.
There is a workhouse, in Ballymoy as everywhere else in this lost land
the most prominent building. There is a convent, immense and wonderfully
white, with rows and rows of staring windows and a far-seen figure of
the Blessed Virgin, poised in a niche above the main door. There is
a Roman Catholic church, gray-walled, gray-roofed, and unspeakably
hideous, but large and, like the workhouse and the convent, obtruding
itself upon the eye. It seems as if the inhabitants of the town must all
of them be forced, and that at no distant date, either into religion
or pauperism, just as small bodies floating in a pond are sucked into
connection with one or other of the logs which lie among them. The shops
in the one tortuous street block the footpaths in front of their doors
with piles of empty packing-cases. The passenger is saluted, here by a
buffet in the face from a waterproof coat suspended outside a draper's,
there by a hot breath of whisky-laden air. Two shops out of every
three are public-houses. These occupy a very beautiful position in the
economic life of the town. Their profits go to build the church, to
pay the priests, and to fill the coffer