Excerpt from Mearing Stones: Leaves From My Note-Book on Tramp in DonegalThe general light and darkstars, the earth smells, the bat that came out of the shadow of a fuchsia-bush and uttered across a white streak in the sky beyond. And I have tried Wordsworth's sonnet beginning, The world is too much with us, by a criterion no less than that of the Atlantic itself, tumbling in foam on the foreshore of Maghery when daylight was deepening into twilight, and the moon was low over the hills, touching the rock-pools and the sand-pools with akes of carmine light. When I said the sonnet aloud to myself it seemed to rise out of the landscape and to incorporate itself with it again. As my voice rose and fell in the wandering cadences of the verse. Nature, after all, is the final touchstone of art. Tried by it, the counterfeit fails and the unmixed gold is justified.It's a strange world, said a tramp to me to-day. I agreed.

And would you answer me this, gaffer? Said he. Why is it when a man's soul is in his body, and he lusty and well, you think nothing of kicking him about as you would an old cast shoe And the minute the soul goes, and the body is stiffening in death, you draw back from him, hardly daring to touch him for the dread that is on you. Would you answer me that, gaffer I was silent.It's a strange world, sure enough, said the tramp. He rose from the gripe where he lay making rings in the grass with his stick. Good-day, gaffer, said he. God speed your journey. And he took the road, laughing.

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