For all my love of Carrick I could hardly conceive of living there. It is too bare, too vast. And though there is no frost, though every second bush you see in summer is crimson fuchsia full of blossoms, yet winter must be of a terrible loneliness. But the Donegal that I was brought up in--Donegal of more inhabited and habitable shores by Lough Swilly and Sheephaven and Mulroy--does seem to me a place not for summer visitants only. However, this book concerns itself with summer, and nowhere is summer more delightful. Of course it rains often, and sometimes hard. "Did it rain ony wi' ye?" "It didna tak time to rain; it just cam doun buckets," is a fragment of descriptive dialogue. But take the country as I saw it in mid-July, when London was stewing on a griddle of asphalt and flags, and when English country was all one monotonous deadened green with heavy haze dimming the blueness. Out at Bunlin, beyond Milford, all was green too; I looked from the steep road across a glen breast-deep in bracken, with the curve of Cratlagh wood beyond, and nearer me trim fields of green oats and turnips. There was beauty of line there in Mulroy with its score of scattered islands, in the hills, not very high, but very mountainous, bold, and jagged, falling from the peak of Lough Salt to the glen, and to the Mulroy water, crest by crest, sharp to the last little rocky hillock. There was beauty of colour too, for the green of the bracken was broken by silvery grey stone, with glint of mica in it, showing up through the fern, and crowned or set about with purple cushions of heath, here and there a foxglove adding another and a brighter purple. There was wonderful beauty of detail in the wooding nestled into the hills--wild growth, scrub oak, light, feathery ash and birch, with the gleam of silvery stems, Scotch fir and larch--planted trees, yet falling naturally into forestation which had none of the heaviness, the citizen look of elm and sycamore. All was light, hardy and strong--not a wilderness, but a cared-for country where the eye wandered over a fair expanse of varied beauty, lying there in full summer without summer's drowsiness or blowsiness. Lightness, airiness, was the note of it all--light air, breath of bog-myrtle across the salt of the sea; and even the decent homely people, lacking the graces of Cork and Kerry, had yet in their motion and in their eye just the dash of wildness which marks the Celtic strain.