“WE PURSUED OUR WAY TO RECESS.”
expedition occurred. I turned my head to look with mild surprise at the end of an iron bedstead with which an ingenious farmer had closed an opening in his stone wall, and as I did so my hat soared upwards from my head, and flew like a live thing towards the lake by which we were driving. I followed with as much speed as I possess, while my cousin lay in idiot laughter in the cart, and had the pleasure of seeing my hat plunge with the élan of a Marcus Curtius into a bed of waterlilies by the bank. From this I drew it, pale, half-drowned, but sane and submissive; and placing it in solitary confinement at the bottom of the trap, I donned a chilly knitted Tam o’Shanter, and we pursued our way to Recess.
CHAPTER III.
DECOROUS black posts, with white tops, on either side of a little avenue, a five-pound trout laid out on the hall door-steps, with some smaller specimens of its kind, a group of anglers admiring these, and a fine, unostentatious rain that nobody paid any attention to—these were our first impressions of the Royal Hotel, Recess. With many injunctions as to her “giddiness” about the head, Sibbie was commended to the care of a stable-boy, and we marched over the corpses of the trout into a little hall in which the smell of wet waterproofs and fishing tackle reigned supreme.
Our only information as to the hotels of Connemara had been gathered from a gentleman whose experience dated some thirty years back. He told us that on arriving at the hotel to which fate had consigned him, his modest request for something more substantial than bread and whisky had been received with ill-concealed consternation. A forlorn hope of children was sent forth to find and hunt in a chicken for his dinner; he had watched the search, the chase, the out-manœuvring of the wily victim; he had heard, tempered by a single plank door, its death screech in the kitchen, and he had even gone the length of eating it, when it was at last served up on a kitchen-plate, brown and shrivelled as “She” in her last moments, and boiled with a little hot water as its only sauce. As to the bedrooms, our friend had been almost more discouraging. He said that while he was dining he heard a trampling of feet and the moving of some heavy body in the passage. The door opened, and a feather bed bulged through the narrow doorway into the room, and was spread on the floor by the table. It was then explained that, as he had asked for dinner and a bed, sure there they were for him, and they were elegant clean feathers, and he should have them for eightpence a pound. With some difficulty the traveller made them understand that, though he meant to carry the dinner away with him, he had no such intentions with regard to the bed; and after a more lucid setting forth of his requirements, his host and hostess grasped the position. He was taken into a room which was quite filled by two immense four-post beds, and having been given to understand that one was reserved for domestic requirements, he was offered the other. He was on the point of accepting this couch when a snore arose from its depths.
A FISHERMAN AT RECESS.