'I have come back,' he said, 'to live in a bit of a house with my
sister. The island is not the same at all to what it was. It is
little good I can get from the people who are in it now, and
anything I have to give them they don't care to have.'
From what I hear this man seems to have shut himself up in a world
of individual conceits and theories, and to live aloof at his trade
of net-mending, regarded by the other islanders with respect and
half-ironical sympathy.
A little later when I went down to the kitchen I found two men from
Inishmaan who had been benighted on the island. They seemed a
simpler and perhaps a more interesting type than the people here,
and talked with careful English about the history of the Duns, and
the Book of Ballymote, and the Book of Kells, and other ancient
MSS., with the names of which they seemed familiar.
In spite of the charm of my teacher, the old blind man I met the day
of my arrival, I have decided to move on to Inishmaan, where Gaelic
is more generally used, and the life is perhaps the most primitive
that is left in Europe.
I spent all this last day with my blind guide, looking at the
antiquities that abound in the west or north-west of the island.
As we set out I noticed among the groups of girls who smiled at our
fellowship--old Mourteen says we are like the cuckoo with its
pipit--a beautiful oval face with the singularly spiritual
expression that is so marked in one type of the West Ireland women.
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