BEGGARS ON HORSEBACK. 8i 



supplied the Irishman himself, when it led us past 

 a dreary cabin whose ambition to be rectangularly 

 frightful yielded to the prior necessity of being 

 crooked in a manner that we thought to be achiev- 

 able only by the Irish cottage architect. With 

 squalid, squinting eyes it leered aside upon its 

 cabbage-garden and the pigs that rooted therein, 

 and outwards to the sea down a bare valley. We 

 were sensible then, for the first time, of a greyness 

 that was blunting the sunshine, and the cabin with 

 its malign, dirty face seemed responsible for it. 



The extremes of landscape met where tumbled 

 heaps of grey rock slanted down from the sky to 

 the flat boggy plain that runs out to Port Madoc. 

 That the road should be protected from these 

 suspended avalanches by a single strand of wire- 

 fencing is a fact that no doubt admits of explana- 

 tion, but at a cursory view of things its object was 

 not apparent. The loneliness was absolute, whether 

 we looked inland to crags and oak-woods, or sea- 

 ward along the marshes, but by this time we did 

 not expect anything except loneliness. Coventry 



F 



