accounted for by the fact that the nearest railway station (Ardrahan) is
some forty miles distant.

It was early one warm evening when my friend and I arrived in Kraighten.
We had reached Ardrahan the previous night, sleeping there in rooms
hired at the village post office, and leaving in good time on the
following morning, clinging insecurely to one of the typical
jaunting cars.

It had taken us all day to accomplish our journey over some of the
roughest tracks imaginable, with the result that we were thoroughly
tired and somewhat bad tempered. However, the tent had to be erected and
our goods stowed away before we could think of food or rest. And so we
set to work, with the aid of our driver, and soon had the tent up upon a
small patch of ground just outside the little village, and quite near to
the river.

Then, having stored all our belongings, we dismissed the driver, as he
had to make his way back as speedily as possible, and told him to come
across to us at the end of a fortnight. We had brought sufficient
provisions to last us for that space of time, and water we could get
from the stream. Fuel we did not need, as we had included a small
oil-stove among our outfit, and the weather was fine and warm.

It was Tonnison's idea to camp out instead of getting lodgings in one of
the cottages. As he put it, there was no joke in sleeping in a room with
a numerous family of healthy Irish in one corner and the pigsty in the
other, while overhead a ragged colony of roosting fowls distributed
their blessings impartially, and the whole place so full of peat smoke
that it made a fellow sneeze his head off just to put it inside