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He set off betimes on his long ramble. It was a cloudless July morning–the noon of summer by air and light as well as by the calendar. Even the barest tracts of the bog-land, which vary their aspect as little as may be from shifting season to season, were flecked with golden furze-blossom, and whitened with streaming tufts of fairy-cotton, and sun-warmed herbs were fragrant underfoot. Mick rather hurried over this stage of his “stravade,” partly because he foresaw a blazing hot day, and he wished to be among more broken ground, where there are sheltered hollows scooped in the “knockawns,” and cool patches under their bushes and boulders. He entered the region of these things before his shadow had shrunk to its briefest; for not so very far beyond Kilmacrone the smooth floor of the big bog crumples itself into crusts and ridges, as if it had caught the trick from its bounding ocean; and the nearer it comes to the shore the higher it heaves itself, until at last it is cut short by a sheer cliff wall, with storm-stunted brambles and furzes cowering along the edge, fathoms above a base-line of exuberant weed and foam. The long sea-frontage of this rock-rampart is fissured by only a few narrow clefts. On the left hand, facing oceanward, the coast is a labyrinth of mountain fiords, straits, and bays, where you may see great craggy shoulders and domed summits waver in their crystal calm at the flick of a gull’s dipping wing, or add to the terror of the tempest as they start out black and unmoved behind rifts of swirling mists. On the right there is the same fretwork of land and water, but wrought in less high relief–a tract of lonely strands, where shells and daisies whiten the grass, and pink-belled creepers trail, entangled with tawny-podded wrack, across the shingle. You are apt thereabouts to happen on clattering pebble-banks and curling foam when you are apparently deep among meadows and corn-land, or to come on sturdy green potato-drills round some corner where you had confidently supposed the unstable furrows of the sea. And the intricate ground-plan of the district must be long studied before you can always feel sure whether the low-shelving swarded edges by which you are walking frame salt or fresh water.

Mick was bound eventually for one of those ravines which cleave the cliffs’ precipitous wall and give access to the shore, generally by a deep-sunken sandy boreen. Here, under a tall bank, there are a couple of cabins, besides another which, having lost its roof, may be reckoned as a half; so that Tullykillagin is not a large place, even as places go in its neighbourhood. He knew, however, that he could count upon getting something to eat at either of the two cabins first mentioned, and, indeed, at the bare-raftered one also, if, as often chanced, it was occupied by Tim Fottrel, the gatheremup; and this prospect served for an incentive, feeble enough, though it strengthened a little as the hours wore on. So languid, in fact, was his resolution that at one moment he thought he would just sthreel home again without going any farther; if he went aisy everybody would have cleared out of Kilmacrone before he got back. But at this time he was sitting among some broom-bushes, under which last year’s withered black pods were strewn, and he determined that if there were an odd number of seeds in the first one he opened he would go on to Tullykillagin. There were nine in it, and he logically continued to loiter seaward.

He dawdled so much that when he came to the cliff the sun already hung low over the water, and as he walked along the edge his shadow stretched away far inland across the dappled pale and dark green of the furze-fretted sward. The sea unrolled a ceaseless scroll of faint wild-hyacinth colour, on which invisible breeze-wafts inscribed and erased mysterious curves and strokes like hieroglyphics. Here and there it showed deep purple stains; for a flight of little snowflake clouds were fluttering in from the Atlantic, followed at leisure by deep-folded, glistering drifts, now massed on the horizon-rim to muffle the descending sun. Yet that tide, with all its smoothness, showed a broad band of foam wherever it touched the pebbles, which lay dry before its sliding, for it was on its way in. It had nearly reached the cliff’s foot in most places; but Mick presently came to a point where he looked down on a small field of very green grass, set as an oasis between the waves and the walling rock, with a miniature chaos of heaped-up boulders to left and right. A few of them were scattered over it, and even the highest of these wore a scarf of leathery flat sea-ribbon, in token of occasional submergence; but amongst them grew hawthorn and sloe bushes, and a clump of scarlet-tasselled fuchsia. To heighten the incongruity of its aspect, this pasture was inhabited by a large strawberry cow, who seemed to be enjoying the alternate mouthfuls of seaweed and woodbine, which she munched off a thickly wreathed boulder, untroubled by the fact that the meal bade fair to be her last, since the rising spring tide had already all but cut off access on either hand, and would still flow for some hours.