The first town out of Westport is Castlebar, which, as Murray puts it, "has all the buildings usual in a county town, viz. Asylum, Gaol, Court-house and Barracks," and they can be seen looming up above the other buildings as the train passes, some half mile away. Beyond Castlebar, the line crosses the so-called plains of Mayo, a vast expanse of naked limestone rock, very ugly and sinister; and then to the left is a village dominated by a round tower; and finally we came to Claremorris, where we were to change cars.

Claremorris, no doubt, also has an asylum, a jail, a court-house and a barracks; but we didn't go out to see, for nobody seemed to know just when our train might be expected, and we were afraid to run any risks. So we sat down on the platform, and Betty fell into talk with a clean, nice-looking old man, who was carefully gathering up all the dodgers and posters and old newspapers that were lying around, and folding them up and putting them in his pocket, I suppose to read at leisure after he got home. And he told about where he lived, and how many children he had, and described the disposition of each of them; and then he questioned Betty about her condition in life, and age, and size of family, and all the time he was looking intently at her mouth.

"Tell me, miss," he said, at last, "is them your own teeth you've got?"

"Indeed they are," laughed Betty, and clashed them to prove it.

"I would hardly believe it," he went on, and looked closer. "I niver saw any like them."

"They're strong as iron," and Betty clashed them again.

"And white as snow. I wish my daughter was here, for she will not believe me when I tell her."

Good teeth, as I have remarked before, are the exception in Ireland; and most of those that appear good at first glance, turn out, at second glance, to be fabrications of the dentist. Perhaps it has always been so. Irish poets are fond of dwelling on the glories of Irish hair, and it is still glorious; they tell over and over again of the brightness of Irish eyes, and they are still bright; they describe how many times the beauty of Irish complexions, and there is none to match them anywhere else in the world; but I do not remember that any of them refer to Irish teeth. It is a pity, for many a pretty face is ruined by the ugly teeth a smile discloses.

We got away from Claremorris, finally, after narrowly escaping being carried back to Westport, and proceeded northward over a new line which has been built across the plains of County Mayo. There were few passengers, and we had a compartment to ourselves, except for two priests who rode with us for a short distance, and who wanted to know all about President Wilson, of whom they had heard many splendid things. Just where we crossed into County Sligo I don't know; but we were in it at Collooney, a village more prosperous than most, with a number of mills; and then we came to Ballysadare, where there are some famous salmon fisheries.

As we ran on past Ballysadare, a hill like a truncated cone loomed up on the left, and in the centre of the level top was something that looked like a huge bump, and as we drew nearer, we saw that it was a great cairn of loose stones piled on top of each other. The hill was Knocknarea, and the cairn, which is six hundred feet around and thirty-five feet high, is said to have been piled over the body of Meave, Queen of Connaught, by her tribesmen, in the first century after Christ. Meave was killed while bathing in Lough Ree by Conal Carnach, who, angry at her share in the death of the mighty Cuchulain, put a stone into a sling and cast it at her with such sure aim that he inflicted a mortal wound. There is some dispute as to whether she was really borne to the top of Knocknarea for burial; but the cairn is called "Miscan Meave," or "Meave's Heap," and if it does not actually cover her body, it probably commemorates her death. She lived so long ago that her name has passed into folk-lore—in England as Queen Mab.

Knocknarea, with its strange shape, dominates the whole landscape, and is in sight all the way to Sligo, for the train describes a half-circle around it. Sligo itself is a considerable town, with more bustle about its streets than is usual in western Ireland, and the proprietor of its principal hotel is a canny individual who follows the precept, once so popular with American railroads, of charging all the traffic will bear. When I asked the price of a double room, he looked me over, and then he said ten shillings the night.

"Ten shillings a night!" I echoed, in some surprise, for I had not expected to encounter rates so metropolitan on the west coast of Ireland; and then I asked to see the room, thinking it might be something palatial. But it was quite an ordinary room; clean and airy and comfortable enough; but I judged the usual charge for it was about five shillings. There are few things I detest more than being overcharged. "Come along," I said to Betty. "There's another hotel in this town; we'll have a look at it."

The proprietor was waiting nervously in the lobby.

"What's the matter?" he asked, as we came down. "Isn't the room all right?"

"Oh, it's right enough," I said; "but I'm not going to pay two prices for it."

"But this is the best hotel in Sligo," he protested. "There's an American millionaire and his wife staying here right now."

"Well, I'm not a millionaire," I said; "and even if I were, I wouldn't pay ten shillings for that room," and I started to walk out, for I didn't want to argue about it.

But he followed me to the door.

"What would you pay, now?" he asked, ingratiatingly.

I looked at him in surprise, for I hadn't had any idea of fixing his rates for him.

"Five shillings," I said.

"You may have it for six," he countered.

I hesitated. I didn't like the man; but it was a nice room, and the dining-room looked clean. Probably we should fare worse if we went farther.

"All right," I agreed finally; and I am bound to admit that he never showed any malice, but treated us as nicely as possible during all our stay in Sligo. Perhaps he is a retired jarvey, and this is just his way of doing business.

Sligo, with its well-built houses and bustling streets, has every appearance of being prosperous, and I have been told that it is one of the few towns in Ireland which is growing in population. It has had its share of battles and sieges, for Red Hugh O'Donnell captured it from the English, and then the English captured it from Red Hugh, and camped in the monastery and did what they could to destroy it; but enough of it remains to make a most interesting ruin, and we set out at once to see it.

It is a Norman foundation, dating from 1252, but a good deal of the existing structure is later than that. The most interesting feature, to my mind, is the row of eight narrow lancet windows lighting the choir of the church. I like these early lancets, and I am inclined to question whether the wide windows and elaborate tracery of later Gothic are as dignified and severely beautiful. There is a grace and simplicity about these tall, narrow openings, with their pointed arches, which cannot be surpassed.

There are some interesting monuments, too, in the choir, notably a most elaborate one to O'Conor Sligo against the south wall. O'Conor and his wife, life-size, kneel facing each other in two niches, over and below and on either side of which are sculptured cherubs and saints and skulls and swords and drums and spades and hooks and hour-glasses, together with the arms of the family and an appropriate motto or two. From the choir, a low door gives access to the charnel-house, and beyond that is the graveyard; while from the nave there is an entrance to the cloisters, three sides of which are very well preserved, though the level of the ground almost touches the base of the pillars.

It is, I should say, at least four feet higher than it was when the cloisters were built, and this accretion is mostly human dust, for the graveyard has been in active use for a good many centuries. Burials grew so excessive, at last, that before one body could be placed in the ground, another had to be dug out of it; and gruesome stories are told of the ruthless way in which old skeletons were torn from the graves and thrown out upon the ground and allowed to lie there, a scandal to the whole county. All that has changed now, and there wasn't a bone in sight the day we visited the place. Indeed, the old caretaker waxed very indignant about the way he had been wronged.

"'Tis in that book you have in your hand the slander is," he said, and nodded toward my red-bound Murray, and I read the sentence aloud:

"Now, I ask ye to look around, sir," continued the caretaker, excitedly, "and tell me if ye see anywhere aught to warrant such words as them ones. Human remains, indeed! Ye see, sir, it was like this. The day the felly was here who wrote that book, I had just picked up a bone which had got uncovered on me, and slipped it under a tomb temporary like, till I could find time to bury it decent; and then he come by, and saw it, and that was what he writ. The bones do be workin' up to the surface all the time—and how can that be helped, I should like to know? But I put them under again as soon as I see them. As for neglect—look about ye and tell me if ye see neglect."

I assured him that everything seemed to be in good shape, for the grass had just been cut and everything was very tidy. And then he told me that he and his helper had been working on the place for a week past, because, in a few days, the Irish Antiquarian Society was to meet at Sligo, and its members would be poking their noses about everywhere. From which I inferred that, perhaps, at ordinary times, the place may be rather ragged, and that an occasional bone may escape the guardian's watchful eye.

When we got back to the hotel and entered the dining-room for dinner, we were amused to find that the American millionaire and wife, of whom the proprietor had boasted, were no other than the personally-conducted couple who had come with us on the coach from Leenane to Westport. They were eating grumpily, while their guide, who ate with them, was doing his best to impart an air of cheerfulness to the meal by chattering away about the country. The head-waiter hovered near in a tremor of anxiety, and almost jumped out of his skin whenever the guide raised his finger.

I went into the smoking-room, later on, to write some letters; and presently the door opened, and the guide slipped in, and closed the door carefully, and sat down with a sigh, and got out a pipe and filled and lighted it, and rang for a whiskey and soda. And then I caught his eye, and I couldn't help smiling at its expression, and in a minute we were talking. He was a special Cook guide, he told me, and the two people with him were from Chicago.

"I fancied," he went on, "when I took this engagement, that I was going to have an easy time of it with just two people, but I have never worked so hard in my life. The man is all right; but all the woman wants to do is to keep moving on. You know Glengarriff? Well, then you know what a jolly place it is, and what a splendid trip it is over the hills from Macroom. Would you believe me, that woman would not even turn her head to look at that view. I would say to her, 'Now, Mrs. Blank, isn't that superb!' and she would just bat her eyelids; and when we got to Glengarriff, she raised a most awful row because we had to stay there over night, and because there was no light but candles in the bedrooms.

"I don't know why such people travel at all," he went on wearily. "Yes I do, too—she travels just to buy post-cards and send them back home. She buys a hundred at every stop, and as soon as she gets them addressed and posted, she is ready to start on. Ruins? Why she won't look at ruins. She wouldn't even get out of the carriage at Muckross Abbey—but she thinks that new Catholic cathedral at Killarney a marvel of beauty. It is the only thing she has grown enthusiastic about since she has been in Ireland. We had planned to stay at Killarney four days, but she wanted to go on before she had been there four hours. I tell you, sir, it's disheartening."

I asked him how long he had been conducting for Cook, and he said only for a short time, for he was an actor by profession, and hoped to return to the stage some day. But by a run of bad luck, he had been involved in three or four failures, and had been driven to Cook's to make a living. He had been to America, and he told me with what company, but I have forgotten, and then he was going on to tell me what rÔles he had played and which of them had been his greatest successes, and the worn, harassed look left his face—and just then the door opened and the Chicagoan stuck his head in, and frowned when he saw us talking and laughing together; and my companion grew suddenly sober, and went out to see what was wanted, and I didn't see him again. I suppose they were on their way at daybreak.

Sligo is the centre of one of the most interesting districts in Ireland for the antiquarian. There is that great cairn on the top of Knocknarea, and on the plain of Carrowmore near the mountain's foot is such a collection of megalithic remains as exists nowhere else in the British Isles, while on the summit of a hill overshadowing Lough Gill is a remarkable enclosure, resembling Stonehenge, but far more extensive.

It was for Carrowmore we set off on foot, next morning, determined to spend the day, which was beautifully bright and warm, in a leisurely ramble over the plain, which, four thousand years ago, was the scene of a great battle, in which the De Dananns were again the victors, as they were at Moytura, below Lough Mask. This battle is known as Northern Moytura, and here the De Dananns met and conquered Balor of the Evil Eye and his Formorians, and after that they were undisputed masters of Erin for a thousand years, until the Milesians, or Gaels, sailing from south-western Europe, beached their boats upon the shore of Kenmare Bay. It was to mark the graves of the warriors who fell in that dim-distant fray that the circles and cromlechs which dot its site were probably erected; but the Irish have another theory, which we shall hear presently.

I shall not soon forget that walk, at first through the busy streets of the town, past solid, well-built houses of brick, with bright shops on the lower floor and living-rooms above; then into the poorer and quainter quarter, where the houses are all one-storied, built of rubble, roofed with straw, and, as we could see through the open doors, stuffed with trash, as all these little Irish houses seem to be; and finally out along the country road, between fragrant hedges, occasionally passing a pretty villa, set in the midst of handsome grounds—and then we came to a place where the road branched, and we stopped.

Our guide-book gave no definite directions as to how to get to Carrowmore. "On Carrowmore," it says, with magnificent vagueness, "within three miles south-west of Sligo, is a large and most interesting series of megalithic remains"; nor does it tell how far the remains are apart, or how to find them. If it had been Baedeker, now, we would not have stood there hesitant at the cross-roads, because he would not only have told us which way to turn, but would have provided a diagram, and led us step by step from one cromlech to the other. There is no Baedeker for Ireland, which is a pity, for I have never yet found a guide to equal that painstaking German.

There was no one to ask, so we took the road which led toward Knocknarea; but after we had gone some distance, a telegraph-boy came by on his wheel, and told us that we should have taken the other road; so we walked back to the branch and turned up it. The road mounted steadily, and after about a mile of up-hill work, we came to a cluster of thatched houses, and I went up to one of them to ask the way of a woman who was leaning over her half-door.

I think I have already said somewhere that Irish directions are the vaguest in the world—perhaps this is the reason Murray is so vague, since it is written by an Irishman!—and the conversation on this occasion ran something like this:

"Good morning," I began. "It is a fine day, isn't it?"

"It is so, glory be to God."

"Can you tell me how to get to the cromlechs?"

"The cromlechs? What might that be?"

"The big stone monuments that are back here in the fields somewhere."

"Ah—so it is the big stones you would be after?"

"Yes. Can you tell me how to get to them?"

"I might," said the woman cautiously. She had been looking at me all this time with the brightest of eyes, and then she looked at Betty, who had remained behind at the gate. "Is yon one your wife?" she asked, with a nod in Betty's direction.

"Yes."

"You would be from America."

"Yes."

"Have you people hereabouts?"

"Oh, no; we haven't any relatives in Ireland."

"And would you be comin' all this way just to see the big stones?"

"We want to see everything," I explained. "The stones are near here, aren't they?"

"They are so. Just a step up yonder lane, and you are right among them."

She was preparing to ask further questions; but this direction seemed definite enough, so I thanked her and fled, and Betty and I proceeded to take a step up the lane. We took many steps without seeing any stones; and finally we turned up a narrow by-lane, and came to a tiny cottage, hidden in the trees. We were greeted by a noisy barking, and then a man hurried out of the cottage and quieted the dog and told us not to be alarmed. We told him we were looking for the stones.

"There be some just a small step from here," he said; "but you would never find them by yourselves, so I will go with you. You are from America, I'm thinking?"

"Yes," I admitted, wondering, with sinking heart, if it was going to begin all over again.

"I have four brothers in America, and all doing well, glory be to God, though seldom it is that I hear from them."

"How did you happen to stay in Ireland?" I asked.

"One must stay with the mother," he explained simply. "I was the oldest, so that was for me to do."

He was a nice-looking man of middle age, with a kindly, intelligent face, and eyes very bright; and while his clothes were old and worn, they were clean.

"She is dead now, God rest her soul," he added, with a little convulsion of the face I didn't understand till later, "and I am alone here."

"What," I said; "not married?"

"No," he answered, with a smile, "there's just Tricker and me."

"Tricker?"

"Sure that's the dog, and a great help he is to me. Come here, Tricker, and show the lady and gentleman what you can do." The shaggy black dog came and sat down in front of him, looking up at him with shining eyes. "You would hardly believe it, miss, but Tricker gathers all my eggs for me, and he can tell a duck egg from a hen egg. If I do be having a bit of company, I will tell Tricker to go out and bring in some duck eggs, and I have never known him to make a mistake. Or perhaps I will be wanting some water from the spring, and I just give Tricker the bucket and send him for it. Or perhaps I will be wanting some coal, and then I just tell Tricker to fetch it."

There was a little pile of coal lying in one corner of the yard, and I had noticed it with some surprise, for we had seen nothing but turf in the west of Ireland; but our host told us that the coal came from Donegal and that it was better than turf and even cheaper in the long run.

"Tricker," he said, "take in some coal!"

Tricker ran to the coal and picked up a lump in his jaws and trotted through the open door of the house and laid the lump down on the hearth inside; then he came back and took in another lump, and then a third, and finally his master stopped him.

"He would be taking it all in if I left him to himself," he said. "He is not very well, for he was kicked by the mare the other day, and I thought for a time he was going to die on me. But he did not, glory be to God, and I think he will soon be well again. And now, if you will come this way, I will be showing you the stones."

He led the way across a field, which he said was his, and then over a stone wall into another; and in the middle of it was a depressed tomb with slabbed sides, in which, I suppose, at some far-off time, the body of some chieftain had been laid; and then our guide showed us the path which we must follow to get to the cromlechs; and then I put my hand in my pocket.

"Ah, no," he protested, drawing back.

"For Tricker," I said; "to get him some dainty, because he's ill."

His face softened.

"Ah, well, sir," he said, "if you put it like that, I'll take it, and Tricker and I both thank ye kindly; and you, miss. God speed ye," and he stood watching us for quite a while, as we made our way up toward the road which ran along the edge of the ridge above us.

As soon as we gained it, we saw the first of the cromlechs; and then, in a farther field, we saw another—great stones, standing upright in a circle of smaller ones, with a mighty covering slab on top, grey and lichened, and most impressive. They are supposed, as I have said, to mark the graves of warriors who fell in battle four thousand years ago; but the Irish peasantry explain them in a more romantic way, as the beds which Diarmuid prepared nightly for his mistress, GrÁinne, during the year they fled together up and down Ireland to escape the wrath of her husband, the mighty Finn MacCool.

GrÁinne, you will remember, was the daughter of King Cormac, and she it was who won that race up Slievenamon for the honour of Finn's hand. There was a splendid wedding at Tara; but as GrÁinne sat at the feast, she looked at the man she had just married, and saw that the weight of years was on him; and then she looked about the board and noticed a "freckled, sweet-worded man, who had the curling, dusky black hair, and cheeks berry-red," and she asked who he was, and she was told that he was Diarmuid, "the white-toothed, of lightsome countenance, the best lover of women and of maidens that was in the whole world." And GrÁinne looked on him again, and her heart melted in her bosom; and she mixed a drink and sent it about the board, until there came upon all the company "a stupor of sleep and deep slumber."

Then she arose from her seat and went straight to Diarmuid, and laid a bond upon him that he should take her away; and Diarmuid, who was leal to Finn, asked his comrades what he should do, and they all said he must bide by the bond she had laid on him, for he was bound to refuse no woman, though his death should come of it.

"Is that the counsel of you all to me?" asked Diarmuid.

"It is," said Ossian and Oscar and all the rest; and then Diarmuid rose from his place, and his eyes were wet with tears, and he said farewell to his comrades, for he knew that from that day he was no longer a member of the goodly company of the Fianna, but only a hunted man.

And he and GrÁinne fled from Tara to Athlone, and crossed the Shannon by the ford there, with Finn's trackers close behind them; and for a year and a day they travelled through the length and breadth of Ireland; and every night Diarmuid built for his love a chamber of mighty stones, and carpeted it with sweet grass, and crept softly in beside her and held her in his arms till morning, so that no hurt might come to her. And there the chambers remain to this day, 366 of them, to prove the story true.

I wish I could tell the remainder of the legend, but there is no space here; besides you will find it and many others like it very beautifully told in one of the most fascinating Irish books I know—Stephen Gwynne's "Fair Hills of Ireland"; a book which I have pillaged remorselessly, and which I recommend to every one planning to visit the Island of the Saints.

There are really more than 366 of the cromlechs, though nobody knows the exact number; and they are the most venerable monuments reared by man in Ireland. The growth of peat around certain of them proves that they have stood where they now stand for at least four thousand years. How the huge covering stones, sometimes weighing hundreds of tons, were lifted into place, no one knows, just as no one knows how the Egyptians raised their great monoliths from the quarry.

There are two most impressive cromlechs at Carrowmore, quite close together, and my pictures of them are opposite the next page. The first one we came to stands near the road in a pasture, and it was merely a question of clambering over a wall to get to it; but to reach the other, it was necessary to cross a newly-cultivated field; and as there were some men working in it, I asked permission to do so.

"Ah," said one of them, "so it is the big stones you have come to see. You're very welcome. I only wish you could take them with you."

"So do I," I said. "We haven't anything like them in America. Everybody would want to see them."

"That is just the trouble here. There are always people coming to see them, and they tramp about over my field, with no thought of the damage they will be doing, and without asking my leave, as you have done. And then it is at least half an acre of good land that the stones make good for naught, and good land is not that plentiful in Ireland that we can afford to waste any of it. And then there's the trouble of ploughing around them."

The farmer was right, in a way, for a half acre of good land would have been of far more value to him than this beautiful cromlech in the midst of its circle of stones; but how happy I would have been to give it half an acre, if I could have wafted it home to America! The circle is considerably more than a hundred feet in diameter, and the stones which compose it are great boulders, four or five feet high, set on end. The cromlech itself is very imposing, with massive side supports, six or seven feet high, and a mighty covering stone, flat on the under side. It is like a giant bestriding the landscape; and Betty remarked that it reminded her of the legs of Uncle Pumblechook, with several miles of open country showing between them. My picture of it has Knocknarea in the background, and if you look closely, you will see the little bump in the middle of its summit which is the cairn of Queen Meave.

The hill was only a mile or so away, and I proposed going over to it, but Betty vetoed that, for it meant some stiff climbing, and we had already walked a good many miles; so we started back slowly along the road to Sligo, and a beautiful road it was, with the purple hills in the distance, and the green rolling fields on either side, and the whitewashed cottages gathered close beside it. And the doors of all of them were wide open, and the people who lived in them, hearing our footsteps, came out to pass the time of day and make some comment on the weather; and one old woman, who had been hoeing her potatoes, was so eager to talk that we stopped and sat down on the low wall in front of her cottage, and stayed for half an hour.

She began with the usual questions—where we were from, if we were married, how old we were, and so on; and then she started to tell us about herself, omitting no detail, however intimate.

"I have been to America," she said; "for seven years I lived there, and a grand place it is; and you will be wondering why I ever came back to County Sligo. 'Twas because of this bit of land, which would be mine, and this houseen, which is a poor one, but I was born there, and I will die there, glory be to God. I would ask you in, but it is that dirty, I am ashamed of it. There is so much to be done in the field that I have had no time for the house; besides, I am getting old and my legs are very bad. I got a bottle from the doctor, and I do be taking a sip of it now and then, but it does me no good. I am thinking there is nothing will cure me.

"We were not always down in the world like this," she rattled on. "There was a time when we were well off. That was before my man was hurted. He was a county councillor, then, and as handsome a man as you would be seeing in a day's walk; and many's the time he has gone to Dublin with a flower in his button-hole, and me looking after him with pride, for he was always a good head to me. But a horse kicked him, and broke his leg and his arm, and he has not had the right use of either since; and so we started going down; and when one starts doing that, there's no stopping.

"That's himself going there," she added, indicating an unkempt figure limping painfully along the road with the help of a heavy cane. "He's ashamed for you to see him, he's that dirty;" but curiosity proved stronger than pride, in the end, and he finally came hobbling up to us, a wreck of a man with dirty clothes and unkempt hair and unshaven face and battered derby hat—and yet one could see that he had been a handsome fellow once.

We mentioned our stopping at the house of the bachelor who owned Tricker, and both our companions grew serious.

"Ah, poor boy," said the woman, "he does be havin' a hard time. There was no one but his mother—all the others had gone to America; and he looked after her as careful as a daughter could; but she was very feeble, and he come home from the field one day to find her dead on the hearth. She had fallen in the fire and burned, bein' too weak to get up. It was a great shock to him, her dyin' in a way so painful and without a priest; and we all felt for him, though he was to blame for not marryin' some girl who could have looked after the old woman. He is well off, but there's no girl could put the comether on him, though many have tried,—nice girls, too, as nice as ever put a shawl across their heads."

I remarked that we had been surprised at the number of bachelors in Ireland; we had supposed that all Irishmen married and had "long families," but it was not so at all. Some were too poor to marry, and that we could understand; but many that were not poor preferred to stay single. There were the Rafferty brothers, owners of the Connemara marble quarry; there was the proprietor of the hotel at Castleconnell; and now here was this man.

"It is so," the old woman agreed. "There be many bachelors hereabouts—men too who could well afford to take a wife. The priest gets very warm over it. Not long ago, he said some words about it in the church—he said if it was left to him, he would be puttin' all these bachelors in a boat with a rotten bottom, and sendin' them out to sea, and sink or swim, small loss it would be whatever happened. For he said they were poor creatures, who thought of nothing but their own pleasure, who wasted their money in Dublin, instead of raising a family with it, and who would come to no good end. And I'm thinking that was nothing to what he had been saying to them in private. For of course, before he said anything in public, he had been after them to let him speak to the fathers of some of the nice girls there be about here."

Among the Irish, especially the Irish peasantry, marriage is still largely a matter of arrangement between the families of the young people; though I doubt if it is ever quite so carelessly done as in one of Lever's books, where, after the bargain has been made, the father of three daughters asks the suitor which one it is he wants, and the suitor has them all brought in so that he may inspect them before he makes up his mind. It is always a solemn occasion, however, with the suitor's relatives ranged along one side of a table, and the bride's relatives along the other—male relatives, be it understood, for it is not lucky for a woman to take part in a match-making; and the bargaining is very shrewd and quite without sentiment; but the marriages thus arranged usually turn out well. For, if they are without romance, they are also without illusion. The woman knows beforehand what will be expected of her as wife and mother; the man is quite aware that matrimony has its rough side; and so there is no rude awakening for either. It is really a partnership, in which both are equal, and which both work equally hard to make successful.

But I suspect that, in Ireland as elsewhere, marriage is not the inevitable thing it once was, especially for the men. It may be, as the priest said, that they have grown selfish and think only of their own comfort; or it may be that their needs have become more complex and their ideals harder to satisfy. Whatever the cause, Ireland certainly has her full share of bachelors.

We went to a picture-show at Sligo, that night, and I have never seen a livelier audience. There was, of course, a cowboy film which was received with the keenest pleasure; and there was a lurid melodrama, which culminated in the hero flinging the villain over a high cliff, at which those present rose to their feet and stamped and cheered; and then King George was shown reviewing the Life Guards, and the crowd watched in moody silence—a silence that was painful and threatening. As the troops marched past, gallant and glittering, a sight to stir the blood, there was not the suspicion of a cheer or hand-clap—just a strange, breathless silence. We were to witness the same thing thereafter in "loyal" Derry—the most convincing evidence imaginable of the feeling toward England which every Irishman, Protestant or Catholic, carries deep in his heart.