"A lonely spot, too. I don't see another near it for miles on any side."
"Nor is there. His chapel is at Murrah, about three miles off. My eyes isn't over good; but I don't think there's any smoke coming out of the chimley."
"You are right—there is not."
"He's not at home, then, and that's a bad job for us, for there's not another place to stop the night in."
"But there will be surely some one in the house."
"Most likely not; 'tis a brat of a boy from Murrah does be with him when he's at home, and I'm sure he's not there now."
This reply was not very cheering, nor was the prospect itself much brighter. The solitary cabin, to which we were approaching, stood in a rugged glen, the sides of which were covered with a low furze, intermixed here and there with the scrub of what once had been an oak forest. A brown, mournful tint was over every thing—sky and landscape alike; and even the little stream of clear water that wound its twining course along, took the same color from the gravelly bed it flowed over. Not a cow nor sheep was to be seen, nor even a bird; all was silent and still.
"There's few would like to pass their lives down there, then!" said my companion, as if speaking to himself.
"I suppose the priest, like a soldier, has no choice in these matters."
"Sometimes he has, though. Father Doogan might have had the pick of the county, they say; but he chose this little quiet spot here. He's a friar of some ordher abroad, and when he came over, two or three years ago, he could only spake a little Irish, and, I believe, less English; but there wasn't his equal, for other tongues, in all Europe. They wanted him to stop and be the head of a college somewhere in Spain, but he wouldn't. 'There was work to do in Ireland,' he said, and there he'd go, and to the wildest and laste civilized bit of it besides; and ye see that he was not far out in his choice when he took Murrah."