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An Aran man, repeating to me The Grief of a Girl's Heart in Irish told me it was with that song his mother had often sung him to sleep as a child.

In a few days the substance is as hard as the limestone, and has to be broken with crowbars before it can be placed in curaghs for transport to Kilronan, where it is tested to determine the amount of iodine contained, and paid for accordingly. In former years good kelp would bring seven pounds a ton, now four pounds are not always reached. In Aran even manufacture is of interest.

The schoolmaster made many jokes in English and Irish while the little hostess served our tea and then the kitchen filled up with young men and women the men dressed like ordinary fishermen, the women wearing print bodices and coloured skirts, that had none of the distinction of the dress of Aran and a polka was danced, with curious solemnity, in a whirl of dust.

There it boomed out again, thundering full against Siabod on the left; and Siabod tossed it on to Moel Meirch, who answered from all her clefts and peaks with a long confused battle-growl, and then tossed it across to Aran; and Aran, with one dull, bluff report from her flat cliff, to nearer Lliwedd; till, worn out with the long bufferings of that giant ring, it sank and died on Gwynnant far below but ere it died, another and another thunder-crash burst, sharper and nearer every time, to hurry round the hills after the one which roared before it.

The divisions in the arts are almost all in the first instance technical, and the great schools of drama have been divided from one another by the form or the metal of their mirror, by the check chosen for the rapidity of dialogue. Synge found the check that suited his temperament in an elaboration of the dialects of Kerry and Aran.

Such was the authority with which he spoke, that the poor midwife durst not refuse to go, however much it was her duty to stay where she was. So she mounted behind him, and off they went, like the flight of a swallow, through Cwmllan, over the Bwlch, down Nant yr Aran, and over the Gadair to Cwm Hafod Ruffydd before the poor woman had time even to say Oh!

This can well be seen at Inis-na-ghoill in Lough Corrib, on the Aran Islands off Galway, at Glendalough, at Inis-cleraun in Lough Ri, at Clonmacnois, at Iniscaltra, and on many another island and promontory of the south and west. During this time, and after, we find the most elaborate carvings on door and arch and window, equal in skill to what is found in book or metal work.

Father McPhilpin holds some honorary official position in connection with the Aran fisheries, and from him I derived most of my information. Another authority assured me that the Araners were not grateful to England nor to Mr. Balfour, and spoke of the viper that somebody warmed in his bosom with disagreeable results.

He has told us that his usual method in a poor man's cabin was to make them forget that he was there, but in Aran on these visits he always tried to add to the fun, and to his personal prestige with conjuring tricks, fiddling, piping, taking photographs, etc. Some of the Islanders were much attached to him.

Various grounds existed on which it was felt that a conclusion could be drawn. The Scriptural genealogies connected Asshur with Aran, Pier, and Joktan, the allowed progenitors of the Armaeians or Syrians, the Israelites or Hebrews, and the northern or Joktanian Arabs.