242 STRAY-AWAYS 



in his preface to the first of these, makes, indeed, a 

 concession to human weakness when he says of 

 Carleton that "few writers more demand, or would 

 better repay, a careful editing of his works." It 

 would have been more merciful had Mr. Figgis himself 

 performed this office rather naore drastically, and (as, in 

 a pleasing variety of metaphors, he remarks) "sifted the 

 chaff from the grain," and thus permitted his author's 

 " real athletic self " to be seen. It must be admitted 

 that the task would be one that demanded no mean 

 share of intrepidity. It is a difficult point to decide 

 if a peasant dialect, offered, as in these books, by the 

 hogshead, is more tedious to the foreigner or to the 

 compatriot of the peasant. The foreigner flounders 

 on from page to page, seeking rest and finding none, 

 accepting, with humihty born of ignorance, the floods 

 of elisions, of misplaced vowels, of supernumerary h's, 

 that weary the conscientious reader without succeed- 

 ing in bringing to him " the scent of the hay across 

 the footlights." The compatriot, approaching the 

 task from a different angle, asks himself in bewilder- 

 ment if these extravagances and violences, these (to 

 an Irishman) humiliatingly exaggerated buffooneries, 

 convey any genuine suggestion of the Irish farmers 

 and workmen who, with decent self-respect and 

 sobriety, now walk this lower earth. 



If there be a quality that more especially marks 

 the recitals of a Southern or Western Irish peasant, it 

 is a species of reticence, of sardonic under-statement, 

 of intensity, indeed, but intensity implied and with- 

 held. Their stories have something of the pregnant 

 simplicity of Old Testament narrative. There is the 

 same confidence in the intelligence of the hearer, the 

 same unerring selection of the structural facts of 

 the case. 



It fell once to the lot of the writer to receive from a 

 carpenter of Munster a recit intime of an incident in 



