4 IRISH HUTS. 



year. The country, all the way from Dublin to Gal- 

 way, is limestone : it presents a flat and rather uninter- 

 esting outline, nowhere rising to any considerable 

 elevation. The richest parts between Dublin and 

 Mullingar (fifty miles) seemed thinly peopled. But 

 after passing Kilcock station, some twenty miles from 

 Dublin, the railway skirts a portion of the Bog of 

 Allen ; and here were congregated a great number of 

 huts, and squalid miserable-looking people. These huts 

 were simply sheds leaning against the face or " breast" 

 of the bog, the walls formed of sods of turf, and the 

 roof covered with sods and rushes, evidently quite unfit 

 to exclude rain. One hut seemed to be just a cave 

 cut out of the deep bog. The wretched people appeared 

 to have located themselves without hindrance, getting 

 no resting-place on the richer land, and swept off here 

 to shift for themselves, as the nearest waste place for such 

 a nuisance to be allowed to stagnate. As the train 

 passed, great numbers of the denizens came running out 

 to see it. One boy, about ten, rushed to a door, per- 

 fectly naked, gazing at us quite unconscious of his own 

 strange appearance. Savage enough it looked, as 

 seen from a most luxuriously fitted railway carriage, and 

 within a few miles of the city of Dublin. 



The hay crop (from the natural grasses) was almost 

 all in the field, a fine crop. Patches of grain were still 

 in shock, more in rickles in the field, and where stacked 

 it was still unthatched. This seems a point in which 

 Irish farmers are very careless. Almost everywhere I 

 observed unthatched stacks, much injured by rain. 



We crossed several extensive bogs — rich black moss, 



