the mountain, and it near eaten by the crows.'

Then he went on to tell me how different the country had been when
he was a young man.

'We had nothing to eat at that time,' he said, 'but milk and
stirabout and potatoes, and there was a fine constitution you
wouldn't meet this day at all. I remember when you'd see forty boys
and girls below there on a Sunday evening, playing ball and
diverting themselves; but now all this country is gone lonesome and
bewildered, and there's no man knows what ails it.'

There are so few girls left in these neighbourhoods that one does
not often meet with women that have grown up unmarried. I know one,
however, who has lived by herself for fifteen years in a tiny hovel
near a cross roads much frequented by tinkers and ordinary tramps.
As she has no one belonging to her, she spends a good deal of her
time wandering through the country, and I have met her in every
direction, often many miles from her own glen. 'I do be so afeard of
the tramps,' she said to me one evening. 'I live all alone, and what
would I do at all if one of them lads was to come near me? When my
poor mother was dying, "Now, Nanny," says she, "don't be living on
here when I am dead," says she; "it'd be too lonesome." And now I
wouldn't wish to go again' my mother, and she dead--dead or alive I
wouldn't go again' my mother--but I'm after doing all I can, and I
can't get away by any means.' As I was moving on she heard, or
thought she heard, a sound of distant thunder.

'Ah, your honour,' she said, 'do you think it's thunder we'll be
having? There's nothing I fear like the thunder. My heart isn't