3rd virce
Patrick he resayved them
So deacent and so plesant
He is as nice a man in features as I ever saw before
When they sat to his table with turkeys and bacon
With Brandy and good ale he would suplie as many more.
He got aninvetation to Dublin with they ladies
They brought him in their pheatons he was playing as they were going
He is the best fluit player from Cliften to Glasnevan
They thought he was inchanted his music was so neat.

4th virce
His fluit is above mention
It is the best youtencal (utensil)
That ever yet was mentioned sunce the race of Man
He got it by great intrest as a presant from the gentry
It was sent to him by finvarra the rular of Nockma.

There are many more varces (or virces) in which the glories of Ross, of “Robirt” Martin, and of his “tinant,” are hymned with equal ardour, but I think these samples suffice.

CHAPTER XIV
RICKEEN

The journey from Drishane to Ross was first made by me in February, 1889. As the conventional crow flies, or as, on the map, the direct line is drawn, the distance is no more than a hundred miles, but by the time you have steered east to Cork, and north-west to Limerick, and north to Ennis, and to Athenry, and to Galway, with prolonged changes (and always for the worse), at each of these places, you begin to realise the greatness of Ireland, and to regard with awe the independent attitude of mind of her railway companies. It would indeed seem that the Sinn Fein movement, “Ourselves Alone,” might have been conceived and brought forth by any one of the lines involved in the trajet from Cork to Galway. I cannot say what are the conditions now, but there was a time when each connecting link was separated by an interval of just as many minutes as enabled the last shriek of the train as it left the station to madden the ear of the traveller. Once I have been spared this trial; it was at Limerick; a member of the staff was starting with his bride on their honeymoon. The station palpitated; there were white satin ribbons on the engine, a hoar-frost of rice on the platform; there was also a prolonged and sympathetic delay, while the bride kissed the remainder of the staff. And thus, with the aid of a fleet porter, and by travelling in “fateful Love’s high fellowship,” I succeeded in shortening my journey by some two hours, and in taking unawares the train at “The Junction” (which, as everyone in Munster knows, is the Limerick Junction).

February is a bad month for the West of Ireland, but there are places, like people, that rely on features and are independent of complexion. Ross was grey and cold, windy, rainy, and snowy, but its beauty did not fail. Martin and I heeded the occasional ill-temper of the weather as little as two of the wild duck whom we so assiduously strove to shoot. We had been lent a boat and a gun, and there are not many pleasanter things to do in a still February twilight than to paddle quietly along the winding waterways among the tall pale reeds of Ross Lake; in the thrilling solitude and secrecy of those dark and polished paths anything may be expected, from a troop of wild swans, or the kraken, down to the alternative thrill of the splashing, swishing burst upwards of the duck, as the boat invades their hidden haven. We walked enormously; visiting the people in the little villages on the estate, making exciting and precarious short cuts across bogs; getting “bushed” in those strange wildernesses, where hazel and blackthorn scrub has squeezed up between the thick-sown limestone boulders of West Galway, and a combination has resulted that makes as impenetrable a barrier as can well be imagined. We wandered in the lovely Wood of Annagh, lovely always, but loveliest as I saw it later on, in April, when primroses, like faint sunlight, illumined every glade and filled the wood with airs of Paradise. We explored the inmost recesses of Tully Wood, which is a place of mystery, with a prehistoric baptismal “bullán” stone, and chapel, in its depths. There are quagmires in Tully, “shwally-holes” hidden in sedge among the dark fir-trees, and somewhere, deep in it, you may come on a tiny lake among the big, wildly-scattered pine-stems, and a view between them over red and brown bog to the pale, windy mountains of Connemara.

I was having a holiday from writing, and was painting any model, old or young, that I could suborn to my use. We searched the National Schools for red-haired children, for whom I had a special craving, and, after considerable search, were directed to ask in Doone for the house of one Kennealy, which harboured “a Twin,” “a foxy Twin”; and there found “The Twin,” i.e. two little girls of surpassing ugliness, but with hair of such burnished copper as is inevitably described by the phrase “such as Titian would have loved to paint.”

There are few evasions of a difficulty more bromidic and more unwarrantable. “A sunset such as Turner would have loved to paint.” “A complexion such as Sir Joshua would have loved to paint.” The formula is invariable. It is difficult to decide whether the stricken incapacity of description, or the presumption of a layman in selecting for a painter his subject, is the more offensive.

“Oh, what a handsome sunset you have!”

I have heard at a garden party a lady thus compliment the proprietor of the decoration.