"We were told there was a photographer's just this side of the village. Do you know where it is?"
"I do, your honour."
"How far is it?"
"'Tis just over there beyont. If you will step up on the car, I'll have ye there in a minute. I'm goin' right past it."
Of course we got up. And, as the jarvey had said, the photographer's shop was just around the next bend. But before I got down, I made a bargain with him to drive us back to our hotel, and, after I had left my films, we set merrily off through the gathering dusk.
"There's one thing I don't understand," I said, at last. "The porter at the hotel said it was only two miles to the village. Yet we walked for an hour without getting there."
"He meant Irish miles, your honour," explained the jarvey, laughing. "There is an old saying that 'an Irish mile is a mile and a bit, and the bit is as long as the mile.' You see, here in ould Ireland we always stretch everything."
I have found since that the Irish mile is about a mile and a quarter; but this is no real measure of its elasticity. More than once thereafter we saw one mile stretch out to three; and we soon came to realise that the Irish mind is extremely vague and inexact when it comes to distances and directions.
We got back to the hotel to have our first view of what proved to be a nightly ceremony. On a stand in the entrance hall was a huge platter, and on the platter lay a huge salmon, and a card leaning against it announced that it weighed fourteen pounds and had been caught that day by Captain Gregory, and there were flowers all about it, so it's a proud fish it should have been. There were five or six other salmon on a lower table, each with a card giving its weight—anywhere from five pounds to eleven—and the whole collection represented the day's catch of the guests of the hotel.
For the hotel, being handy to the lakes, and clean and comfortable and homelike, is a favourite resort of the fishermen who come to Killarney during the salmon season. Every evening while we were there, as the fishermen came in, tired and wet, with their boatmen tramping behind them carrying the fish—if there were any—they were met at the door by the rotund porter, his face beaming like a full moon—a red harvest moon!—and the fish would be solemnly weighed, and the biggest would be decorated with flowers and awarded the place of honour, and the others would be grouped around it, and after dinner, the fishermen would stand and look at them, their hands deep in their pockets; and later on there would be a great bustle as the fish were wrapped in straw and tied up, ready to be sent by parcel-post to admiring friends back home!