[Image of two ladies and the letter W]HEN the iron-studded hall-door of Renvyle House Hotel had closed behind us, we found ourselves in a low-panelled hall, with oaken props for guns and fishing rods, and long black oaken chests along its walls. Everything was old-fashioned, even mediÆval, dark, and comfortable. Nothing was in the least suggestive of a hotel, unless it might have been a row of letters and telegrams on the chimney-piece, and I was beginning seriously to fear that we had made a mistake, when I noticed my second cousin’s eye- Our various belongings—somewhat disreputable and travel-stained by this time—having been conveyed from the trap, we were told that tea was ready in the drawing-room, and followed the servant through two deep doorways into another room, also mediÆval and panelled. “What is so rare as a day in June?” asks Mr. Lowell. Nothing, we can confidently reply, except a fire in July, and there on the brick hearth we saw with gloating, incredulous eyes a heap of burning turf sending a warm, dry glow into the room, and making red reflections in the antique silver tea-service that was placed on a table near it. For ever quelled were our vague anticipations of the hotel drawing-room and its fetishes, the ornate mirrors, the glass-shaded clocks, and the alabaster chimney ornaments; and as we extended our muddy boots to the blaze, and sipped hot tea through a heavy coating of cream, we felt reconciled to the loss of an ideal. After the clank of our tea-cups had continued for a few minutes, there was a stir under the frilled petticoat of the sofa, and a small black-and-tan head was put forth with an expression of modest but anxious inquiry, the raised flounces making a poke bonnet round the face, and giving it an old-ladyish absurdity, of which its owner was happily unaware. We laughed—an unkindness which was followed by an expression of deep but amiable embarrassment, and a I was beginning to feel a little acrid at this recollection when the door-handle turned in its place high up in the panels, and Mrs. Blake came in to see her visitors. That my cousin belonged to her county seemed to her a full and sufficient reason that she should welcome us as friends, and perhaps it gave us throughout our stay an advantage over the ordinary tourist in the more intimate kindnesses and opportunities for conversation that fell to our lot. We looked as hard at Mrs. Blake as politeness would permit, while the broad columns of the Times seemed to rise before our mind’s eye, with the story sprinkled down it through examination and cross-examination of what she had gone through in the first years of the agitation. It required an effort to It was some time before we went up to see the two rooms of which we had been offered a choice. Both were low and panelled, both had low, long windows; in fact it will save trouble if we say at once that everything at Renvyle was long and low and panelled. The first room looked to the front of the house, and out over the Atlantic towards the muffled ghosts of Innis Boffin and Achill Islands; a fine view on a fine day, and impressive even at its worst; but to us, the room’s chiefest attraction was the four-poster bed, a magnificent kind of upper chamber, like a There was unconfessed peace in the certainty that it was not an afternoon for sight-seeing; rather for fervent shin-roasting at the drawing-room fire, blended with leisurely, unsystematic assimilation of the Times for the last four days. Fishermen, apparently, take a holiday from newspapers, along with their other duties when they go a-fishing, and expose themselves to nothing more severe in the way of literature than the Field or Land and Water; at all events, these and a pre-historic Illustrated London News had been our only opportunities for keeping ourselves in touch with the outer world since we had left it. Boaconstrictor-like, we slowly gorged ourselves with solid facts, and then subsided into a ruminative torpor, misanthropically delighted at the fact that we had chanced upon an intermediate period as to tourists, and that the owners of the letters and telegrams that we had seen in the hall had not arrived to claim them and their lawful share of the fire and the newspapers. “SHE WAS AN AMERICAN LADY.” Our most salient recollections of the rest of the evening are connected with the velvet delicacy of the lobster soup at dinner, and the tortured bashfulness of the English youth, who crept, mouse-like, into the room after the rest of the small party were seated, and raised neither his eyes nor his voice till the meal was ended. Directly he had finished, he hurried from the room and was seen no more. A lady who sat next us volunteered the information that he always acted just so, and that he spent his days, so far as anyone could guess, in slinking around the mountains. “He’s so shy,” she concluded, “that he’ll scrape a hole in his plate trying to get the last mite of butter off it rather than ask me to pass Given a sloping, sunshiny bank of shingle, a mass of yellow lichen-covered rocks between it and a purple-and-emerald streaked sea, a large empty morning, and a cock-shot, there is no reason why one should ever stop throwing stones. That is how my second cousin and I occupied ourselves the morning after our arrival at Renvyle. We had started early, with sketching materials and luncheon, full of a high resolve to explore several miles of coastline, beginning with the famous Grace O’Malley’s Castle, and ending with afternoon tea and well-earned repose. No one can accuse these papers of a superfluity of local information. We have exercised a noble reticence in this respect, owing partly to a sympathetic dislike of being instructive, and partly also to the cir I think we had begun to discuss this energetic Grace and her probable action in modern politics as we strolled across the fields between Renvyle and the sea. At all events, something beguiled us to sit down upon that slope of small round stones, when we were as yet but a quarter of a mile from the hotel, and then a flaunting tuft of white bladder campion on a point of yellow rock offered itself irresistibly as an object for stone-throwing. As we write this we are sensible of its disappointing vulgarity. The word “sketch,” if not, indeed, “sonnet,” should have closed the sentence; But after luncheon Grace O’Malley’s tower seemed farther off than ever, and relinquishing the vigorous projects of our morning start, we began to drift along the shore towards the pale stretches of the sands. We dawdled luxuriously across a low headland, where the mouths of the rabbit-burrows made yellow sandy patches in the coarse grass, and we slid down the crumbling slope on to the hard, perfect surface of the sand. Its creamy smoothness had something of the Another fifty yards would have brought us to the water’s verge, when suddenly crossing our path at right angles, we came upon a long line of footmarks, masculine in size, pointed in shape, fraught with “What did I tell you?” remarked my cousin; “he was rushing off to hide before we should see him!” We reached the rocks, and, with eyes that must have imparted to her pince-nez the destructive quality “He must be at the other side,” she began, when our eyes simultaneously fell upon a small white object. It was a sandwich. It lay between two big rocks that leaned to each other, leaving just room for a slim person to squeeze through; and looking through the aperture, we saw a long narrow vista of the sands, and on them a solitary flying speck—the Englishman. |