M Y second cousin and I came to London for ten days in the middle of last June, and we stayed there for three weeks, waiting for a fine day. We were Irish, and all the English with whom we had hitherto come in contact had impressed upon us that we should never know what fine weather was till we came to England. Perhaps we came at a bad moment, when the weather, like the shops, was having its cheap sales. Certainly such half-hours of sunshine as we came in for were of the nature of “soiled remnan

S HALL we admit that, after all, the first stage of our journey was accomplished by means of the mail-car? We had been assured, on reliable authority, that Oughterard, fourteen Irish miles from Galway, was the place where we should find what we wanted, and with a dubious faith we climbed the steep side of the mail car, and wedged ourselves between a stout priest and an English tourist. Above us towered the mail baskets, and a miscellaneous pile of luggage, roped together with that ingenuity that

D ECOROUS black posts, with white tops, on either side of a little avenue, a five-pound trout laid out on the hall door-steps, with some smaller specimens of its kind, a group of anglers admiring these, and a fine, unostentatious rain that nobody paid any attention to—these were our first impressions of the Royal Hotel, Recess. With many injunctions as to her “giddiness” about the head, Sibbie was commended to the care of a stable-boy, and we marched over the corpses of the trout into a little h

S IBBIE looked as suspicious and unamiable as ever when she came to the door next morning; her long day in the stable had evidently not propitiated her in the least, but to her subtle mind had only augured a journey of unprecedented length on the following day. We started, however, with great brilliancy, and with a vulgar semi-circular sweep, like a shop-boy making a capital letter, that Sibbie considered very telling when in society. It took altogether by surprise the penwiper dog, who, with a

I T was nearly four o’clock before we got out of the Ballinahinch avenue on to the Clifden road. A young horse had got loose in the yard just as Sibbie was having her toilet made for the start, and the clattering of hoofs and cracking of whips that ensued had so upset her old-maidish sensibilities, that she refused to leave the stable, till finally, by a noble inspiration on our part, she was backed out of it. She had started from the yard in a state of mingled resentment and terror; even still

F ROM the indications given in the last chapter, the intelligent reader will probably have gathered the fact that we did not sleep well. “It isn’t the little bit they ates I begridges them,” quoted my cousin, as in one of the long watches of the night she wearily lit her candle for the nineteenth time, “but ’tis the continial thramplin’ they keeps up.” Even when the greater part of these foes was either gorged or slain, the sleep that hummed its mellow harmonies in the loft over our heads held f

T HERE is reason in the roasting of eggs, and presumably in their poaching, but we are beginning to think we shall never fathom the principle which ordains that the hotel poached egg shall invariably be underdone. Charmed we never so wisely, commanded we never so timely, the same pinkish blobs were placed fluent and quaking before us, the same lavish gush answered the diffident knife puncture, and in a moment our plates became like sunrise painted by an impressionist, with red bacon streaks welt

[Image of two ladies and the letter W] HEN the iron-studded hall-door of Renvyle House Hotel had closed behind us, we found ourselves in a low-panelled hall, with oaken props for guns and fishing rods, and long black oaken chests along its walls. Everything was old-fashioned, even mediæval, dark, and comfortable. Nothing was in the least suggestive of a hotel, unless it might have been a row of letters and telegrams on the chimney-piece, and I was beginning seriously to fear that we had made a m

T HE sound of the mowing-machine awakened us early on the morning that we were to leave Renvyle House Hotel. To and fro the rattle came, with a measured crescendo and diminuendo that slowly aroused our sleepy minds to the consciousness that the tennis ground was being mown, and that it was Monday, and that—this finally, after sluggish eyes had become aware of pink roses swaying in sunshine in and out of the open window—another fine day had been bestowed upon us whereon to make our journey. The c

W E have never met Julius Cæsar, or the Duke of Wellington, or General Booth, but we are convinced that not one of the three could boast a manner as martial or a soul as dauntless as the sporting curate on a holiday. We came to this conclusion slowly at the Leenane table d’hôte , and there also the companion idea occurred to us that in biting ferocity and headlong violence of behaviour the extra ginger-ale of temperance far exceeds the brandy-and-soda. Opposite to us sat three of them—not brandi