"Don't bother," I said to her. "I'll get along all right without that. I'll be in Clogher about twelve."
"O, you will," she said. "Well, just take these in case you don't. And I don't think you will."
I took the biscuits, then lifted up my suitcase and started to leave the house. "Wait a minute," she cried. She went into a room and returned with a Holy Water bottle. She sprinkled me with it and said, "May God bless and look after you, and bring you safely to your journey's end."
She then pointed out the road to me and I began my walk to Clogher. The road lay between low, flat-lying lands for the better part of two miles. There was neither hedge nor ditch dividing the fields from the road; nor were there any trees for shade. It was a most lonely road; I walked on for hours and never met a soul. The sun was roasting hot that day, and I was heavily laden. Besides the suitcase containing the two kits which I was carrying, I was wearing a tweed skirt and a raincoat over my uniform. As I walked, the fields on one side of the road changed and in their place were bogs. An intolerable thirst grew upon me and there was nothing with which to slake it.
Gradually the road became a mountain road. Had I not been so tired, what with the weight of the suitcases and the clothes I was wearing and the broiling sun, I could have admired the quiet, shadeless road that stretched along for miles trimming the skirt of the mountains. The mountains sloped away so gently from the road as to seem no more than hills. Patches of olive green and brown edged with a brighter green rose one above the other, each one more pleasing. Here and there the trimming was the golden furze or whin bushes; and on towards the top patches of purple and blue told of the presence of wild hyacinths. And above all was the pure blue and white of the sky. Below, the mountains, on the left of the road stretched the bog as far as I could see, brown, brown, browner, and finally black. Here and there, standing cut sharply against the dark background, danced the ceanawan—the bogrose—disputing for place with the ever-present furze. Yet all I could think of was that I must walk for miles on that lonely country road, with never a tree for shade and never a house to get a drink in.
I knew by the height of the sun that it was nearly twelve o'clock, yet I had not come to Ballygawley. In terror I thought for an instant that I had taken the wrong road, and then I remembered that the woman had told me that there was only the one road until I came to Sixmilecross.
At a distance from me and walking towards me I saw an old man. I tried to hurry towards him but could not. With every step the suitcase was growing heavier and my hands were becoming so sore that to hold the handle was absolute pain. And my thirst was growing. I could not understand how it was that I had not met with running water, it is usually so plentiful in Ireland. Finally my thirst grew so clamorous that I knelt down by the bog, lifted some of the brackish, stagnant bog-water in my hands and drank it. Immediately I began to think, "What if I contract some illness from drinking that water—what if I get fever——" And I had visions of being taken ill by the roadside with no one to look after me. Rut the old man was very near me now, and as we came abreast I asked him, "Am I near Ballygawley?"
"Ballygawley," he replied. "Daughter dear, you are six weary long miles from Ballygawley."
"Six miles!" I thought in despair. "How had the girl made such a mistake?"