the wall. May I cross over and get it?' That was too much for me.
'Well, go on,' I said, 'and if ever I catch you again woe betide
you.' I let him go then, and he rushed madly over the wall and
disappeared. A few days later I discovered, not at all to my
surprise, that he lived half a mile away, and was intimately related
to a small boy who came to the house every morning to run messages
and clean the boots. Yet it must not be thought that this young man
was dishonest; I would have been quite ready the next day to trust
him with a ten-pound note.






Glencree





THIS morning the air is clear, and there is a trace of summer again.
I am sitting in a nook beside the stream from the Upper Lake, close
down among the heather and bracken and rushes. I have seen the
people going up to Mass in the Reformatory, and the valley seems
empty of life.

I have gone on, mile after mile, of the road to Sally Gap, between
brown dykes and chasms in the turf with broken foot-bridges across
them, or between sheets of sickly moss and bog-cotton that is unable