out of the ground, and in the old times the women used to be giving
it to their children till they'd be growing up seven feet maybe in
height. Then the priests and doctors began taking everything to
themselves and destroyed the old knowledge, and that is a poor
thing; for you know well it was the Holy Mother of God who cured her
own Son with plants the like of that, and said after that no mother
should be without a plant for ever to cure her child. Then she threw
out the seeds of it over the whole world, so that it's growing every
place from that day to this.'

I came out to-day, a holiday, to the Great Blasket Island with a
schoolmaster and two young men from the village, who were coming for
the afternoon only. The day was admirably clear, with a blue sea and
sky, and the voyage in the long canoe--I had not been in one for
two or three years--gave me indescribable enjoyment. We passed
Dunmore Head, and then stood Out nearly due west towards the Great
Blasket itself, the height of the mountains round the bay and the
sharpness of the rocks making the place singularly different from
the sounds about Aran, where I had last travelled in a curagh. As
usual, three men were rowing--the man I have come to stay with, his
son, and a tall neighbour, all dressed in blue jerseys, homespun
trousers and shirts, and talking in Irish only, though my host could
speak good English when he chose to. As we came nearer the island,
which seemed to rise like a mountain straight out of the sea, we
could make out a crowd of people in their holiday clothes standing
or sitting along the brow of the cliff watching our approach, and
just beyond them a patch of cottages with roofs of tarred felt. A
little later we doubled into a cove among the rocks, where I landed
at a boat slip, and then scrambled up a steep zig-zag pathway to the
head of the cliff where the people crowded round us and shook hands