THE THICK SKULL OF THE FORTUNATE

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I

 Once a number of Idic peasantry found a very thick skull in the cemetery where the poet Egil was buried. Its great thic<bdo>?9９ｌib?</bdo>kness made them feel certain it was the skull of a great man, doubtless of Egil himself. To be doubly sure they put it on a wall and hit it hard blows with a hammer. It got white where the blows fell but did not break, and they were vihat it was in truth the skull of the poet, and worthy of every honour. In Ireland we have much kinship with the Iders, or “Dane藏书网s” as we call them and all other dwellers in the Sdinavian tries. In some of our mountainous and barren places, and in our seaboard villages, we still test each other in much the same way the Iders tested the head of Egil. We may have acquired the from those a Danish pirates, whose desdants the people of Rosses tell me still remember every field and hilloc<var></var>k in Ireland whice beloo their forebears, and are able to describe Rosses itself as well as any native. There is one seaboard distriown as Roughley, where the men are never known to shave or trim their wild red beards, and where there is a fight ever on foot. I have seen them at a boat-race fall foul of each other, and after much loud Gaelic, strike each other with oars.

 The first boat had gone aground, and by dint of hitting out with the lo9９ｌｉｂ?ng oars kept the sed boat from passing, only to give the victory to the third. One day the Sligo people say a man frhley was tried in Sligo for breaking a skull in a row, and made the defe unknown in Ireland, that some heads are so thin you ot be responsible for them. Having turned with a look of passionate pt towards the solicitor wh<q>.</q>o roseg, and cried, “that little fellow’s skull if ye were to hit it would go like an egg-shell,” he beamed upon the judge, and said in a wheedling voice, “but a man might away at your lordship’s for a fht.”

 II 

 I wrote all this years ago, out of what were even then old memories. I was in Roughley the other day, and found it much like other desolate places. I may have been thinking of Moughorow, a much wilder place, for the memories of one’s childhood are brittle things to lean upon.

 1902.

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