Mr. Burke had begun with a snort at the first part of this remark, but checked it in its birth at the frank avowal of the conclusion.
“Wait till ye see it burn, sir,” he said. “Ye’d not want a better fire, barring ye could get a bit of bog-wood to mix with it. Then ye’d not get its aiqual if ye were walking the world all your life.”
“Are those pools deep?” Norah asked, looking at the still brown water, fringed with reeds and sedges.
“Some of ’em’s no depth at all; and there’s some that deep that no man knows the bottom of ’em. They’d take anyone and swallow him entirely, the way he’d never be heard of again; and they do say the bog keeps ’em fresh as if they’d just fallen in, only I dunno would it be true: I never seen anybody that had come out. It’s one of the old stories that do be going in the country.”
“When _we_ talk about a bog, we mean something that looks—well, boggy,” Norah said. “I never thought an Irish bog looked so pretty; all grass and rushes, like a big plain. Why do they call it a bog?”
“You’d know if you got into it,” said Mr. Burke, bearing patiently with the ignorance of the foreigner. “There’s parts of it firm enough to gallop a horse over; but you’d want to know where you were going, it’s that treacherous—it’d let you down as deep as your waist in a second, and it looking safe as a street. Some of the mosses that do be growing on it ’ud warn you: there’s one or two kinds that only grow where it’s deep and quaking. As for pretty—it’s airly yet for flowers; but you’d see it like a garden, in the autumn, with meadowsweet and loosestrife and canavan, that they call the bog-cotton, like snow lying on it. There’s no end to the quare things that do be growing in a bog.”
They passed ass-carts, built up with basket work to form creels, piled high with turf,—generally in the charge of a barefooted urchin, dark-eyed and graceful in his rags, who would fling a cheery “Good-day” at the car rattling by, touching his cap to “the genthry.”
“’Tis a great year for saving turf,” Mr. Burke told them. “There’s no knowing what the war’ll be doing with prices; they say the poor people’ll be hard put to it to go on living at all. So everyone’s getting turf; sure, it’s easier to be hungry if you’re warm. I dunno, at all, why would they make a war: didn’t we have enough and too much to pay for tea and tobacco as it was without the ould Kaiser poking in his nose?” Thus adjusting satisfactorily the responsibility for his financial troubles, Mr. Burke addressed the horse angrily, and drove on in silence.