August evening, moonrise. A drift of ponies on the road. I heard the neighing of them half an hour ago as I came down the glen, and now I can see them, a red, ragged cavalcade, and a cloud of dust about their heels. There are some fourteen ponies in the drift, and three young fellows with long whips are driving them. They give me the time of day as I pass. One of them turns back and shouts after me: “Would you happen to have a match on you, gaffer?” He is a stout-built lad, with a red face, and a mat of black hair falling over his eyes. I feel in my pocket for a box, and give him share of what I have. He thanks me, and I pass on. The air is damp and fragrant, and wisps of fog lie along the ditches and in the hollow places under the hills. The newly-risen moon touches them with wonder and colour.
[NEAR INVER]
A yellow day in harvest. A young girl with a piece of drawn-thread work in her lap, sunning herself in the under wisp of her father’s thatch. I come on her suddenly round a bend in the road. She is taken by surprise (almost as completely as I am) . . . draws her legs in, settles her clothing, half smiles, then hangs her head, blushing with all the pudor of abashed femininity. I pass on.
[ALL SUBTLE, SECRET THINGS]
All subtle, secret things—the smell of bees, twilight on water, a woman’s presence, the humming of a lime-tree in full leaf, a bracken stalk cut through to show the “eagle” in it—all speak to me as to an intimate. I know and feel them all.
[A MADMAN]
I passed an old fellow to-day between Ardara and Narin, doubled up in the ditch with his chin on his knees, and staring at me out of two red eyes that burned in his head like candles.
“Who’s that old fellow?” I asked of a stonebreaker, a perch further down the road.
“Oh, never heed him,” says he—“he’s mad. This is the sixth. There’s a full moon the-night, and he ever goes off at the full o’ the moon. Was he coughing at you? God, you’d think he was giving his last ‘keeks,’ to hear him sometimes!”