Any moderately well educated young lady will recognise them at once, and exclaim without hesitation, 'How truly English!' or 'How sweetly Swiss!' But no one can depict an Irish town with any hope of having it recognised unless he idealizes boldly, introducing a highly-intelligent pig, or a man in knee-breeches kissing a fancifully-attired colleen.

And then, after all, he might as well have labelled it Irish at once in good plain print, and saved himself the trouble of drawing the symbolic figures.
To describe Ballymoy, therefore, mountains, rivers, and such like natural eccentricities being left out of the count, is to describe fifty other West of Ireland towns.

There is a railway-station, bleak, gray, and windswept, situated, for the benefit of local car-owners, a mile and a half from the town, and the road which connects the two is execrable.
There is a workhouse, in Ballymoy as everywhere else in this lost land the most prominent building.

There is a convent, immense and wonderfully white, with rows and rows of staring windows and a far-seen figure of the Blessed Virgin, poised in a niche above the main door.

There is a Roman Catholic church, gray-walled, gray-roofed, and unspeakably hideous, but large and, like the workhouse and the convent, obtruding itself upon the eye.