We tore ourselves away, at last, from this primeval place, and recrossed the river to the turf market, with its familiar little carts piled high with the dark fuel.
"The bogs are very wet this year, are they not?" I asked an old man.
"They are, sir, God save ye," he replied, his wrinkled face lighting up at the chance to talk to a stranger. "There never was such a year for rain. I'm sixty year, God bless ye, and I've never seen such another." And then he went on to relate the story of his life, with a "God save ye" to every clause. A hearty old fellow he was, in spite of his sixty years; and he had driven his cart of turf down ten miles out of the mountains, that morning, and would drive ten miles back that night; and if he was lucky he would get half a crown--sixty cents--for the load of turf which had taken a hard day's labour to cut, and numerous turnings during a month to dry.
We went on past some fragments of the old walls, with a most romantic arched gateway, and through the fish market, over which the red-skirted women from the Claddagh presided--great strapping creatures, with broad hips and straight backs and shining, good-humoured faces. Most of them were selling an ugly, big-mouthed, unappetising-looking fish, whose name I couldn't catch; but they told us it was a fish for poor people, not for the likes of us, God bless ye--full of bones and scarcely worth the trouble of eating, but plentiful and therefore cheap.
The principal street of Galway is called Shop Street--a name so singularly lacking in imagination that it would prove the English origin of the town at once, were any proof needed--and about midway of this stands a beautiful four-storied building, known as Lynch's Castle, once a fine mansion but now a chandler's shop. The walls are ornamented with carved medallions, and there is a row of sculptured supports for a vanished balcony sticking out like gargoyles all around the top; and over the door there is the stone figure of a monkey holding a child, commemorating the saving of one of the Lynch children from a fire, by a favourite monkey, some centuries ago.
The Lynches were great people in old Galway, and another memorial of them exists just around the corner--a fragment of wall, with a doorway below and a mullioned window above, and it was from this window, so legend says, that James Lynch Fitzstephen, sometime mayor of Galway, hanged his son with his own hands. The principal inscription reads: