He was a drifting silent man full of hidden passion, and loved wild islands, because there, set out in the light of day, he saw what lay hidden in himself. There is passage after passage in which he dwells upon some moment of excitement. He describes the shipping of pigs at Kilronan on the North Island for the English market: wheeamer was getting near, the whole drove was moved down upon the slip and the curraghs were carried out close to the sea. Then each beast was caught in its turn and thrown on its side, while its legs were hitched together in a single knot, with a tag of rope remaining, by which it could be carried.
Probably the pain inflicted was not great, yet the animals shut their eyes and shrieked with almost human intonations, till the suggestion of the noise became so intehat the men and women who were merely looking on grew wild with excitement, and the pigs waiting their turn foamed at the mouth and tore each other with their teeth.
After a while there ause. The whole slip was covered with amass of sobbing animals, with here and there a terrified woman croug among the bodies and patting some special favourite, to keep it quiet while the curraghs were being lauhen the screaming began again while the pigs were carried out and laid in their places, with a waistcoat tied round their feet to keep them from damaging the vas. They seemed to know where they were going, and looked up at me over the gunnel with an ignoble desperation that made me shudder to think that I had eaten this whimpering flesh. When the last curragh went out, I was left on the slip with a band of women and children, and one old boar who sat looking out over the sea.
The women were over?excited, and when I tried to talk to them they crowded round me and began jeering and shrieking at me because I am not married. A dozen screamed at a time, and so rapidly that I could not uand all they were saying, yet I was able to make out that they were taking advantage of the absence of their husbands to give me the full volume of their pt. Some little boys who were listening threw themselves down, writhing with laughter among the sea?weed, and the young girls grew red and embarrassed and stared down in the surf. The book is full of such ses. Now it is a crowd going by train to the Parnell celebration, now it is a woman cursing her son who made himself a spy for the poliow it is an old woman keening at a funeral. Kio his delight in the harsh grey stones, in the hardship of the life there, in the wind and in the mist, there is always delight in every moment of excitement, whether it is but the hysterical excitement of the womehe pigs, or some primary passion. Ondeed, the hidden passion instead of finding expression by its choice among the passions of others, shows itself in the most direct way of all, that of dream. Last night, he writes, at Innismaan, after walking in a dream among buildings with strangely intense light on them, I heard a faint rhythm of music beginning far away on some stringed instrument.
It came closer to me, gradually increasing in quiess and volume with an irresistibly definite progression.
When it was quite he sound began to move in my nerves and blood, te me to dah them.
I khat if I yielded I would be carried away into some moment of terrible agony, so I struggled to remain quiet, holding my kogether with my hands.
The musicreased tinually, sounding like the strings of harps tuo a fotten scale, and hav