Kerry. Looking down the drop of five or six hundred feet, the height
is so great that the gannets flying close over the sea look like
white butterflies, and the choughs like flies fluttering behind
them. One wonders in these places why anyone is left in Dublin, or
London, or Paris, when it would be better, one would think, to live
in a tent or hut with this magnificent sea and sky, and to breathe
this wonderful air, which is like wine in one's teeth.

Here and there on this headland there are little villages of ten or
twenty houses, closely packed together without any order or roadway.
Usually there are one or two curious beehive-like structures in
these villages, used here, it is said, as pigsties or storehouses.
On my way down from Sybil Head I was joined by a tall young man, who
told me he had been in the navy, but had bought himself out before
his time was over. 'Twelve of us joined from this place,' he said,
'and I was the last of them that stayed in it, for it is a life that
no one could put up with. It's not the work that would trouble you,
but it's that they can't leave you alone, and that you must be ever
and always fooling over something.'

He had been in South Africa during the war, and in Japan, and all
over the world; but he was now dressed in homespuns, and had
settled down here, he told me, for the rest of his life. Before we
reached the village we met Maurice, the fisherman I have spoken of
and we sat down under a hedge to shelter from a shower. We began to
talk of fevers and sicknesses and doctors--these little villages
are often infested with typhus--and Maurice spoke about the
traditional cures.

'There is a plant,' he said, 'which is the richest that is growing