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I had arranged to stay with Father MacTurnan till Monday, and I had driven many miles along the road that straggles like a grey thread through the brown bog. On either side there were bog-holes, and great ruts in the road; the horse shied frequently, and once I was preparing to leap from the car, but the driver assured me that the old horse would not leave the road.
Even now, after fourteen hundred years of Christianity, the Connaught or Kerry peasant still hears the shriek of his early gods in the sob of the waves or the howling of the autumn storms. Fish demons gleam out of the sides of the mountains, and the black bog-holes are the haunts of slimy monsters of inconceivable horror.
Patriotism is claimed for the Nationalist members, who, according to Nationalist sheets, were lifted from bog-holes, tripe shops, and small whiskey shops to decide the destinies of empires, to revel in comparative luxury, to enjoy a certain social distinction, to exchange their native bogs for the British metropolis, and to draw a salary beyond their wildest dreams.
Back in the pit-gloom, with a grim smile now and then relaxing the tight-set compression of his thin lips, and with eyes that stared like a night-owl's into the gloom ahead of him, Breault poled steadily on. Dripping from the bog-holes and lathered with mud, it was the mystery of Breault's noiseless presence somewhere near him in the still night that drew Peter continually deeper into the swamp.
However, we would not, and he gave instructions to the Galway boy how to keep clear of the sloughs and bog-holes; observing to me that "them stranger horses are good for little in Connemara nothing like a Connemara pony for that!"
"It's so dark," said Dick, "I can hardly see my hand. Mind how you go, father; there are some deep bog-holes about here." "Then you stand fast, my boy." "Hadn't you better stand fast too, father?" "And both perish in the wet and cold, my boy! No. I'll soon find the road. It must be close by."
Soon the forest thickened, and the track they followed wound its way round great trunks of primeval oaks, or the edges of bog-holes, or through brakes of thorns. Hard enough it was to find it at times, since the snow made it one with the bordering ground, and the gloom of the oaks was great.
From Chotusitz he spreads out leftwards towards the Brtlinka Brook, difficult ground that, unfit for cavalry, with its bog-holes, islands, gullies and broken surface; better have gone across the Brtlinka with mere infantry, and leant on the wall of that Deer-park of Schuschitz with perhaps only 1,000 horse to support, well rearward of the infantry and this difficult ground?
In this manner the earlier emigrants went forward, driving their heavily laden wagon by day and sleeping at night by the camp. After they had passed the region of roads and bridges they had to literally hew their way; cutting down bushes, prying their wagon out of bog-holes, building bridges or poling themselves across streams on rafts. But, in defiance of every obstacle, they pressed forward.
"That's probably the way Frank would go," concluded Ned, pointing to the right, "and that's the way we want to go." His companions agreed with him, and off they started. As they advanced they found the woods growing more dense, and, as had Frank, they had to make long circuits at times, to avoid bog-holes. They kept on for some time, but saw no signs of their chum.
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