A grey loch, lashed into foam by wind from nor’ westward, lapping unquietly among reeds that fringe its margin. Boulders everywhere—erratics from the Ice Age—bleached white with rain. Crotal growing in their interstices, wild-mint, purple orchises and the kingly osmunda fern. A strip of tilled land beyond—green corn, for the most part, and potatoes. Slieve a-Tooey in the distance, a blue shadowy bulk, crossed and recrossed by mist-wreaths chasing one another over it in rapid succession. A rainbow framing all.

[THE OPEN ROAD]

The open road, the sky over it, and the hills beyond. The hills beyond, those blue, ultimate hills; the clouds that look like hills; the mystery plucked out of them, and lo, the sea, stretching away into the vast—white-crested, grey, inscrutable—with a mirage dancing on its furthest verge!

[(1)] Book of Leinster.

[(2)] He had the Old Age Pension.

[(3)] Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, a contemporary of Conchubhair MacNeassa, who was—so tradition has it—born on the same night as Christ.

[(4)] In fact, a “go of water” is a byword there—“Many a girl met her man in a go of water!”

[Transcriber’s Note:]

The following changes have been made to the original text. The first passage presents the text as printed in the original, the second the amended text.