THERE is reason in the roasting of eggs, and presumably in their poaching, but we are beginning to think we shall never fathom the principle which ordains that the hotel poached egg shall invariably be underdone. Charmed we never so wisely, commanded we never so timely, the same pinkish blobs were placed fluent and quaking before us, the same lavish gush answered the diffident knife puncture, and in a moment our plates became like sunrise painted by an impressionist, with red bacon streaks weltering in the widespread orange glories, and the golden mustard blob surmounting all as serenely as Phœbus Apollo.
This phenomenon was at all events our only specimen of a Letterfrack sunrise. As we sat at breakfast in the coffee-room the mist blew softly against the French windows, and swept past on the road like a procession of ghostly ball dresses; the furniture seemed clammy to the touch, and the paper decorations in the grate mocked the eye with their futile elegance and affectation of summer heat. Our fellow guests, evidently habitués of the place, took only the most casual notice of the weather, and talked of local matters with the zest which so surprises the newcomer; of their single or conglomerated prowess in scrambling up the Diamond mountain, of their tumbling down it, of their tea, their sandwiches, and their wet boots; while we moodily ate our breakfasts, without even self-respect enough to make conversation for one another. Our depression was deepened soon afterwards, on hearing that an ancient raw on Sibbie’s shoulder had been touched by the collar in the drive of the day before, and that unless a person described as “Jack’s father” could put some additional padding into the collar we could not get on to Renvyle that day, though it was only a four mile journey.
The prospect of a day spent in the coffee-room
JACK’S FATHER.
and the little ladies’ drawing-room goaded us to energy. We determined to see the damage for ourselves, and putting on our waterproofs, we paddled out into the yard, and picked our way across it to the stable by some convenient and apparently recognised stepping-stones. The invalid Sibbie was in the darkest stall of the stable, standing in severe preoccupation, with her back to the outer world, and as we delicately approached her we became aware of an eye like that of a murderess rolling at us with a white gleam in the obscurity, and saw that her long, bell-rope tail was drawn tightly in. We hastily agreed that we would take Jack’s word for the rubbed shoulder, and retired into the yard again. At the door of another stable we found the person whose only identity, or indeed profession, seemed to consist in being Jack’s father, sitting on an upturned bucket, with Sibbie’s collar in his lap and a monstrous needle in his hand. He explained that he was putting in a pad at each side, stuffed with cotton wool that he had got “from Herself, within in the house, because ’twould be kindher than the hay.” He had a serious face, with a frill of grey beard, like a Presbyterian minister of the most amiable type, and he looked up as he spoke with an expression that we felt to be kinder even than the cotton wool. “If that collar puts a hurt on the pony agin as long as yee’ll be thravellin’ Connemara, ye may—ye may call me blackbird!”
This handsome permission, emphasised by the tug with which the big needle was dragged through the leather, was evidently the highest reassurance known to the speaker, but, notwithstanding, we felt that even to apply the opprobrious name of blackbird to Jack’s father would be an indifferent consolation if in the midst of a wilderness of moor and mountain we found the red spot appearing on Sibbie’s shoulder. We looked, however, as properly impressed as we were able, and returned to the house in better spirits.
It was not till the afternoon that the weather gave us a chance of starting, and even then it required courage of a high order to turn out of our comfortable quarters into the thick, damp air. The volcanic mountain spikes, that last night had notched the sullen fire of the evening sky, had with one accord taken the veil, and retired from public observation, and the sloping pastures and turnip fields looked as nearly repulsive as was possible for them. Under these circumstances we left Letterfrack without emotion, and proceeded northward towards Renvyle.
After we had gone a little way we began to speculate as to whether the road had been made with an eye to the possibility of a future switchback railway. It seemed to us that at every hundred yards or so we had to get out and trudge up a hill through the mud, our consciences approving our consideration for Sibbie, and our every other feeling bewailing it; then came the scrambling into the trap again at the top, the tucking in of wet rugs, the difficult closing of the door, and having driven down the far side, the next hill rose immediately before us in the mist. The next thing we began to notice was that on every hill we met a donkey-cart and some young cattle, evidently coming from some fair or market. There were two courses of procedure on these occasions. The calves turned and fled before us at full gallop along the way they had come, until retrieved with huge expense of shouting and bad language, or they at once jumped the fence by the roadside and stampeded at large through the fields. The donkey-cart, which generally contained a pig, and an old woman screaming in Irish, had but one method, which was to cross to the wrong side of the road at the critical