“When we talk about a bog, we mean something that looks—well, boggy,” Norah said. “I never thought an Irish bog looked so pretty; all grass and rushes, like a big plain. Why do they call it a bog?”
“You’d know if you got into it,” said Mr. Burke, bearing patiently with the ignorance of the foreigner. “There’s parts of it firm enough to gallop a horse over; but you’d want to know where you were going, it’s that treacherous—it’d let you down as deep as your waist in a second, and it looking safe as a street. Some of the mosses that do be growing on it ’ud warn you: there’s one or two kinds that only grow where it’s deep and quaking. As for pretty—it’s airly yet for flowers; but you’d see it like a garden, in the autumn, with meadowsweet and loosestrife and canavan, that they call the bog-cotton, like snow lying on it. There’s no end to the quare things that do be growing in a bog.”
They passed ass-carts, built up with basket work to form creels, piled high with turf,—generally in the charge of a barefooted urchin, dark-eyed and graceful in his rags, who would fling a cheery “Good-day” at the car rattling by, touching his cap to “the genthry.”
“ ’Tis a great year for saving turf,” Mr. Burke told them. “There’s no knowing what the war’ll be doing with prices; they say the poor people’ll be hard put to it to go on living at all. So everyone’s getting turf; sure, it’s easier to be hungry if you’re warm. I dunno, at all, why would they make a war: didn’t we have enough and too much to pay for tea and tobacco as it was without the ould Kaiser poking in his nose?” Thus adjusting satisfactorily the responsibility for his financial troubles, Mr. Burke addressed the horse angrily, and drove on in silence.
They came to a little river, brawling merrily under a bridge of grey stone. A turn in the road brought trees in view, fringing a lough that lay tranquil in the sunlight; a placid sheet of blue water broken here and there by tiny islands. Towards the end that was nearest, the trees were thickly planted. Between them they caught glimpses of an old stone house nestling in a wilderness of a garden that ran down almost to the edge of the lough.
Patsy Burke swung the little horse in through a gateway, the iron gates of which stood invitingly open. They jogged up a winding avenue, overhung with lofty beech-trees. It ended suddenly in front of the house. Through a wide doorway they could see a dim hall, where a bewildering collection of old guns and blunderbusses was ranged over a massive mahogany table, the legs of which ended in claw-feet that would have drawn a connoisseur like a magnet. Honeysuckle and roses climbed together up the old walls, framing the doorway in blossom.
“Are ye there, ma’am?” bawled Patsy.
A pleasant-faced woman came through the hall quickly.
“I’d have given up expecting you, if that old train was ever in time,” she said, giving a hand to Norah as that damsel hopped from the car. “Aren’t you all tired out, and you travelling since early morning? Come in then—there’s hot water waiting in your rooms, and tea will be ready in ten minutes. Is the luggage coming, Patsy?”
“It is, ma’am,” responded Mr. Burke. “Lasteways, if that image of a John Conolly doesn’t play any of his thricks with the ass.”