HERE and there in County Wicklow there are a number of little known
places--places with curiously melodious names, such as Aughavanna,
Glenmalure, Annamoe, or Lough Nahanagan--where the people have
retained a peculiar simplicity, and speak a language in some ways
more Elizabethan than the English of Connaught, where Irish was used
till a much later date. In these glens many women still wear
old-fashioned bonnets, with a frill round the face, and the old men,
when they are going to the fair, or to Mass, are often seen in
curiously-cut frock-coats, tall hats, and breeches buckled at the
knee. When they meet a wanderer on foot, these old people are glad
to stop and talk to him for hours, telling him stories of the
Rebellion, or of the fallen angels that ride across the hills, or
alluding to the three shadowy countries that are never forgotten in
Wicklow--America (their El Dorado), the Union and the Madhouse.

'I had a power of children,' an old man who was born in Glenmalure
said to me once; 'I had a power of children, and they all went to
California, with what I could give them, and bought a bit of a
field. Then, when they put in the plough, it stuck fast on them.
They looked in beneath it, and there was fine gold stretched within
the earth. They're rich now and their daughters are riding on fine
horses with new saddles on them and elegant bits in their mouths,
yet not a ha'porth did they ever send me, and may the devil ride
with them to hell!'

Not long afterwards I met an old man wandering about a hill-side,
where there was a fine view of Lough Dan, in extraordinary
excitement and good spirits.