Peeped Into A Turret
And Was Insolently Asked What We Meant By A Splendid But Ill-Tongued
Peacock; Admired The Ivy Green That Happed The Bare Walls And Noticed
That The Chickens Roosted There In Its Shelter.
We drove home by another way, among gay, green woods under the shelter
of mighty rocks, passed more ruins.
We stopped to examine these older
ruins of the ancient O'Ruarkes. A Milesian gentleman showed us through
them. It is the correct thing to have a ruin on your place; it is a kind
of patent of gentility. If a banshee could be thrown in along with a
ruin, a new man would give a great price for an old place. But banshees
are getting scarce and decline to be caught. This ruin has been patched
over, clumsily but earnestly, so that hardly a speck of the original
ruin is left. It was delightful to listen to our Milesian guide. My
companion was bound to get some information out of him. He was cautious,
not knowing who we were or what design we might have to entangle him in
his talk; he was determined that he would not give the desired
information. He conquered. The ruins were not worth sixpence altogether
to look at, but I gave him sixpence as a tribute to genius. And so in
the dim evening we drove back to Sligo.
XXX.
SLIGO'S GOOD LANDLORDS - THE POLICE AND THEIR DUTIES - A DOUBTFUL
COMPLIMENT - AN AMAZON.
It has been something wonderful to me that when I left Leitrim, I
seemed to have left all bad landlords behind me.
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