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. It seems as if the inhabitants of the town must all of them be forced, and that at no distant date, either into religion or pauperism, just as small bodies floating in a pond are sucked into connection with one or other of the logs which lie among them. The shops in the one tortuous street block the footpaths in front of their doors with piles of empty packing-cases. The passenger is saluted, here by a buffet in the face from a waterproof coat suspended outside a draper’s, there by a hot breath of whisky-laden air. Two shops out of every three are public-houses. These occupy a very beautiful position in the economic life of the town. Their profits go to build the church, to pay the priests, and to fill the coffers of the nuns. The making of the profits fills the workhouse. A little aloof stands the Protestant church, austere to look upon, expressing in all its lines a grim reproach of the people’s life. Beyond it, among scanty, stooped trees, is the rectory, gray, as everything else is, wearing, like a decayed lady, the air of having lived through better days.