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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of New Irish Comedies, by Lady Augusta Gregory
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: New Irish Comedies
+
+Author: Lady Augusta Gregory
+
+Release Date: March 28, 2004 [EBook #11749]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEW IRISH COMEDIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland and Robert Prince
+
+
+
+
+
+New Comedies
+
+By Lady Gregory
+
+The Bogie Men--The Full Moon--Coats
+Darmer's Gold--McDonough's Wife
+
+COPYRIGHT 1913
+BY LADY GREGORY
+
+
+TO THE RT. HON. W.F. BAILEY
+COUNSELLOR, PEACEMAKER, FRIEND
+
+ABBEY THEATRE, 1913.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  THE BOGIE MEN
+  THE FULL MOON
+  COATS
+  DAMER'S GOLD
+  MCDONOUGH'S WIFE
+  NOTES
+
+
+
+
+THE BOGIE MEN
+
+
+PERSONS
+
+_Taig O'Harragha_ |     BOTH CHIMNEY
+_Darby Melody_    |     SWEEPS
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BOGIE MEN
+
+  _Scene: A Shed near where a coach stops. Darby comes in. Has a tin
+  can of water in one hand, a sweep's bag and brush in the other. He
+  lays down bag on an empty box and puts can on the floor. Is taking a
+  showy suit of clothes out of bag and admiring them and is about to
+  put them on when he hears some one coming and hurriedly puts them
+  back into the bag_.
+
+_Taig: (At door.)_ God save all here!
+
+_Darby:_ God save you. A sweep is it? _(Suspiciously.)_ What
+brought you following me?
+
+_Taig:_ Why wouldn't I be a sweep as good as yourself?
+
+_Darby:_ It is not one of my own trade I came looking to meet with.
+It is a shelter I was searching out, where I could put on a decent
+appearance, rinsing my head and my features in a tin can of water.
+
+_Taig:_ Is it long till the coach will be passing by the
+cross-road beyond?
+
+_Darby:_ Within about a half an hour they were telling me.
+
+_Taig:_ There does be much people travelling to this place?
+
+_Darby:_ I suppose there might, and it being the high road from
+the town of Ennis.
+
+_Taig:_ It should be in this town you follow your trade?
+
+_Darby:_ It is not in the towns I do be.
+
+_Taig:_ There's nothing but the towns, since the farmers in the
+country clear out their own chimneys with a bush under and a bush
+overhead.
+
+_Darby:_ I travel only gentlemen's houses.
+
+_Taig:_ There does be more of company in the streets than you'd
+find on the bare road.
+
+_Darby:_ It isn't easy get company for a person has but two empty
+hands.
+
+_Taig:_ Wealth to be in the family it is all one nearly with
+having a grip of it in your own palm.
+
+_Darby:_ I wish to the Lord it was the one thing.
+
+_Taig:_ You to know what I know--
+
+_Darby:_ What is it that you know?
+
+_Taig:_ It is dealing out cards through the night time I will be
+from this out, and making bets on racehorses and fighting-cocks
+through all the hours of the day.
+
+_Darby:_ I would sooner to be sleeping in feathers and to do no
+hand's turn at all, day or night.
+
+_Taig:_ If I came paddling along through every place this day and
+the road hard under my feet, it is likely I will have my choice way
+leaving it.
+
+_Darby:_ How is that now?
+
+_Taig:_ A horse maybe and a car or two horses, or maybe to go in
+the coach, and I myself sitting alongside the man came in it.
+
+_Darby:_ Is it that he is taking you into his service?
+
+_Taig:_ Not at all! And I being of his own family and his blood.
+
+_Darby:_ Of his blood now?
+
+_Taig:_ A relation I have, that is full up of money and of every
+whole thing.
+
+_Darby:_ A relation?
+
+_Taig:_ A first cousin, by the side of the mother.
+
+_Darby:_ Well, I am not without having a first cousin of my own.
+
+_Taig:_ I wouldn't think he'd be much. To be listening to my
+mother giving out a report of my one's ways, you would maybe believe
+it is no empty skin of a man he is.
+
+_Darby:_ My own mother was not without giving out a report of my
+man's ways.
+
+_Taig:_ Did she see him?
+
+_Darby:_ She did, I suppose, or the thing was near him. She never
+was tired talking of him.
+
+_Taig:_ It is often my own mother would have Dermot pictured to
+myself.
+
+_Darby:_ It is often the likeness of Timothy was laid down to me
+by the teaching of my mother's mouth, since I was able to walk the
+floor. She thought the whole world of him.
+
+_Taig:_ A bright scholar she laid Dermot down to be. A good doing
+fellow for himself. A man would be well able to go up to his promise.
+
+_Darby:_ That is the same account used to be given out of Timothy.
+
+_Taig:_ To some trade of merchandise it is likely Dermot was reared.
+A good living man that was never any cost on his mother.
+
+_Darby:_ To own an estate before he would go far in age Timothy
+was on the road.
+
+_Taig:_ To have the handling of silks and jewelleries and to be
+free of them, and of suits and the making of suits, that is the way
+with the big merchants of the world.
+
+_Darby:_ It is letting out his land to grass farmers a man owning
+acres does be making his profit.
+
+_Taig:_ A queer thing you to be the way you are, and he to be an
+upstanding gentleman.
+
+_Darby:_ It is the way I went down; my mother used to be faulting
+me and I not being the equal of him. Tormenting and picking at me and
+shouting me on the road. "You thraneen," she'd say, "you little
+trifle of a son! You stumbling over the threshold as if in slumber,
+and Timothy being as swift as a bee!"
+
+_Taig:_ So my own mother used to be going on at myself, and be
+letting out shrieks and screeches. "What now would your cousin
+Dermot be saying?" every time there would come a new rent in my rags.
+
+_Darby:_ "Little he'd think of you," she'd say; "you without body
+and puny, not fit to lift scraws from off the field, and Timothy
+bringing in profit to his mother's hand, and earning prizes and
+rewards."
+
+_Taig:_ The time it would fail me to follow my book or to say off
+my A, B, ab, to draw Dermot down on me she would. "Before he was up
+to your age," she would lay down, "he was fitted to say off
+Catechisms and to read newses. You have no more intellect beside him,"
+she'd say, "than a chicken has its head yet in the shell."
+
+_Darby:_ "Let you hold up the same as Timothy," she'd give out,
+and I to stoop my shoulders the time the sun would prey upon my head.
+"He that is as straight and as clean as a green rush on the brink of
+the bog."
+
+_Taig:_ "It is you will be fit but to blow the bellows," my mother
+would say, "the time Dermot will be forging gold." I let on the book
+to have gone astray on me at the last. Why would I go crush and
+bruise myself under a weight of learning, and there being one in the
+family well able to take my cost and my support whatever way it
+might go? Dermot that would feel my keep no more than the lake would
+feel the weight of the duck.
+
+_Darby:_ I seen no use to be going sweating after farmers,
+striving to plough or to scatter seed, when I never could come anear
+Timothy in any sort of a way, and he, by what she was saying, able to
+thrash out a rick of oats in the day. So it fell out I was thrown on
+the ways of the world, having no skill in any trade, till there came
+a demand for me going aloft in chimneys, I being as thin as a needle
+and shrunken with weakness and want of food.
+
+_Taig:_ I got my living for a while by miracle and trafficking in
+rabbit skins, till a sweep from Limerick bound me to himself one
+time I was skinned with the winter. Great cruelty he gave me till I
+ran from him with the brush and the bag, and went foraging around
+for myself.
+
+_Darby:_ So am I going around by myself. I never had a comrade lad.
+
+_Taig:_ My mother that would hit me a crack if I made free with
+any of the chaps of the village, saying that would not serve me with
+Dermot, that had a good top-coat and was brought up to manners and
+behaviour.
+
+_Darby:_ My own mother that drew down Timothy on me the time she'd
+catch me going with the lads that had their pleasure out of the world,
+slashing tops and pebbles, throwing and going on with games.
+
+_Taig:_ I took my own way after, fitting myself for sports and
+funning, against the time the rich man would stretch out his hand.
+Going with wild lads and poachers I was, till they left me carrying
+their snares in under my coat, that I was lodged for three months in
+the gaol.
+
+_Darby:_ The neighbours had it against me after, I not being
+friendly when we were small. The most time I am going the road it is
+a lonesome shadow I cast before me.
+
+_Taig:_ _(Looking out of the door.)_ It is on this day I will be
+making acquaintance with himself. My mother that sent him a request
+to come meet me in this town on this day, it being the first of the
+summer.
+
+_Darby:_ My own mother that did no less, telling me she got word
+from Timothy he would come meet here with myself. It is certain he
+will bring me into his house, she having wedded secondly with a
+labouring man has got a job at Golden Hill in Lancashire. I would
+not recognise him beyond any other one.
+
+_Taig:_ I would recognise the signs of a big man. I wish I was
+within in his kitchen. There is a pinch of hunger within in my heart.
+
+_Darby:_ So there is within in myself.
+
+_Taig:_ Is there nothing at all in the bag?
+
+_Darby:_ It is a bit of a salted herring.
+
+_Taig:_ Why wouldn't you use it?
+
+_Darby:_ I would be delicate coming before him and the smell of it
+to be on me, and all the grand meats will be at his table.
+
+_Taig: (Showing a bottle.)_ The full of a pint I have of porter,
+that fell from a tinker's car.
+
+_Darby:_ I wonder you would not swallow it down for to keep
+courage in your mind.
+
+_Taig:_ It is what I am thinking, I to take it fasting, it might
+put confusion and wildness in my head. I would wish, and I meeting
+with him, my wits to be of the one clearness with his own. It is not
+long to be waiting; it is in claret I will be quenching my thirst
+to-night, or in punch!
+
+_Darby: (Looking out.)_ I am nearly in dread meeting Timothy,
+fearing I will not be pleasing to him, and I not acquainted with his
+habits.
+
+_Taig:_ I would not be afeard, and Dermot to come sparkling in,
+and seven horses in his coach.
+
+_Darby:_ What way can I come before him at all? I would be better
+pleased you to personate me and to stand up to him in my place.
+
+_Taig:_ Any person to put orders on me, or to bid me change my
+habits, I'd give no heed! I'd stand up to him in the spite of his
+teeth!
+
+_Darby:_ If it wasn't for the hearthfires to be slackened with the
+springtime, and my work to be lessened with the strengthening of the
+sun, I'd sooner not see him till another moon is passed, or two moons.
+
+_Taig:_ He to bid me read out the news of the world, taking me to
+be a scholar, I'd give him words that are in no books! I'd give him
+newses! I'd knock rights out of him or any one I ever seen.
+
+_Darby:_ I could speak only of my trade. The boundaries of the
+world to be between us, I'm thinking I'd never ask to go cross them
+at all.
+
+_Taig:_ He to go into Court swearing witnesses and to bring me
+along with him to face the judges and the whole troop of the police,
+I'd go bail I'll be no way daunted or scared.
+
+_Darby:_ What way can I keep company with him? I that was partly
+reared in the workhouse. And he having a star on his hat and a
+golden apple in his hand. He will maybe be bidding me to scour
+myself with soapy water all the Sundays and Holy days of the year! I
+tell you I am getting low hearted. I pray to the Lord to forgive me
+where I did not go under the schoolmaster's rod!
+
+_Taig:_ I that will shape crampy words the same as any scholar at
+all! I'll let on to be a master of learning and of Latin!
+
+_Darby:_ Ah, what letting on? It is Timothy will look through me
+the same as if my eyes were windows, and my thoughts standing as
+plain as cattle under the risen sun! It is easier letting on to have
+knowledge than to put on manners and behaviour.
+
+_Taig:_ Ah, what's manners but to refuse no man a share of your
+bite and to keep back your hand from throwing stones?
+
+_Darby:_ I tell you I'm in shivers! My heart that is shaking like
+an ivy leaf! My bones that are loosened and slackened in the
+similitude of a rope of tow! I'd sooner meet with a lion of the
+wilderness or the wickedest wind of the hills! I thought it never
+would come to pass. I'd sooner go into the pettiest house, the
+wildest home and the worst! Look at here now. Let me stop along with
+yourself. I never let out so much of my heart to any one at all till
+this day. It's a pity we should be parted!
+
+_Taig:_ Is it to come following after me you would, before the
+face of Dermot?
+
+_Darby:_ I'd feel no dread and you being at my side.
+
+_Taig:_ Dermot to see me in company with the like of you! I
+wouldn't for the whole world he should be aware I had ever any
+traffic with chimneys or with soot. It would not be for his honour
+you to draw anear him!
+
+_Darby: (Indignantly.)_ No but Timothy that would make objection
+to yourself! He that would whip the world for manners and behaviour!
+
+_Taig:_ Dermot that is better again. He that would write and
+dictate to you at the one time!
+
+_Darby:_ What is that beside owning tillage, and to need no
+education, but to take rents into your hand?
+
+_Taig:_ I would never believe him to own an estate.
+
+_Darby:_ Why wouldn't he own it? "The biggest thing and the
+grandest," my mother would say when I would ask her what was he doing.
+
+_Taig:_ Ah, what could be before selling out silks and satins.
+There is many an estated lord couldn't reach you out a fourpenny bit.
+
+_Darby:_ The grandest house around the seas of Ireland he should
+have, beautifully made up! You would nearly go astray in it! It
+wouldn't be known what you could make of it at all! You wouldn't
+have it walked in a month!
+
+_Taig:_ What is that beside having a range of shops as wide maybe
+as the street beyond?
+
+_Darby:_ A house would be the capital of the county! One door for
+the rich, one door for the common! Velvet carpets rolled up, the way
+there would no dust from the chimney fall upon them. A hundred
+wouldn't be many standing in a corner of that place! A high bed of
+feathers, curled hair mattresses. A cover laid on it would be flowery
+with blossoms of gold!
+
+_Taig:_ Muslin and gauze, cambric and linen! Canton crossbar!
+Glass windows full up of ribbons as gaudy as the crooked bow in the
+sky! Sovereigns and shillings in and out as plenty as to riddle rape
+seed. Sure them that do be selling in shops die leaving millions.
+
+_Darby:_ Your man is not so good as mine in his office or in his
+billet.
+
+_Taig:_ There is the horn of the coach. Get out now till I'll
+prepare myself. He might chance to come seeking for me here.
+
+_Darby:_ There's a lather of sweat on myself. That's my tin can of
+water!
+
+_Taig: (Holding can from him.)_ Get out I tell you! I wouldn't
+wish him to feel the smell of you on the breeze.
+
+_Darby: (Almost crying.)_ You are a mean savage to go keeping from
+me my tin can and my rag!
+
+_Taig:_ Go wash yourself at the pump can't you?
+
+_Darby:_ That we may never be within the same four walls again, or
+come under the lintel of the one door! _(He goes out.)_
+
+_Taig: (Calling after him while he takes a suit of clothes from
+his bag.)_ I'm not like yourself! I have good clothes to put on me,
+what you haven't got! A body-coat my mother made out--she lost up to
+three shillings on it,--and a hat--and a speckled blue cravat.
+  _(He hastily throws off his sweep's smock and cap, and puts on
+  clothes. As he does he sings:)_
+
+  All round my hat I wore a green ribbon,
+  All round my hat for a year and a day;
+  And if any one asks me the reason I wore it
+  I'll say that my true love went over the sea!
+
+  All in my hat I will stick a blue feather
+  The same as the birds do be up in the tree;
+  And if you would ask me the reason I do it
+  I'll tell you my true love is come back to me!
+
+  _(He washes his face and wipes it, looking at himself in the tin
+  can. He catches sight of a straw hat passing window.)_
+
+Who is that? A gentleman? _(He draws back.)_
+
+   _(Darby comes in. He has changed his clothes and wears a straw hat
+   and light coat and trousers. He is looking for a necktie which he
+   had dropped and picks up. His back is turned to Taig who is standing
+   at the other door.)_
+
+_Taig: (Awed.)_ It cannot be that you are Dermot Melody?
+
+_Darby:_ My father's name was Melody sure enough, till he lost his
+life in the year of the black potatoes.
+
+_Taig:_ It is yourself I am come here purposely to meet with.
+
+_Darby:_ You should be my mother's sister's son so, Timothy
+O'Harragha.
+
+_Taig: (Sheepishly.)_ I am that. I am sorry indeed it
+failed me to be out before you in the street.
+
+_Darby:_ Oh, I wouldn't be looking for that much from you.
+
+   _(They are trying to keep their backs to each other, and to rub
+   their faces cleaner.)_
+
+_Taig:_ I wouldn't wish to be anyway troublesome to you. I am
+badly worthy of you.
+
+_Darby:_ It is in dread I am of being troublesome to yourself.
+
+_Taig:_ Oh, it would be hard for _you_ to be that. Nothing you
+could put on me would be any hardship at all, if it was to walk
+steel thistles.
+
+_Darby:_ You have a willing heart surely.
+
+_Taig:_ Any little job at all I could do for you------
+
+_Darby:_ All I would ask of you is to give me my nourishment and
+my bite.
+
+_Taig:_ I will do that. I will be your serving man.
+
+_Darby:_ Ah, you are going too far in that.
+
+_Taig:_ It's my born duty to do that much. I'll bring your dinner
+before you, if I can be anyway pleasing to you; you that is used to
+wealthy people.
+
+_Darby:_ Indeed I was often in a house having up to twenty chimneys.
+
+_Taig:_ You are a rare good man, nothing short of it, and you
+going as you did so high in the world.
+
+_Darby:_ Any person would go high before he would put his hand out
+through the top of a chimney.
+
+_Taig:_ Having full and plenty of every good thing.
+
+_Darby:_ I saw nothing so plentiful as soot. There is not the
+equal of it nourishing a garden. It would turn every crop blue,
+being so good.
+
+_Taig: (Weeping.)_ It is a very unkind thing to go drawing
+chimneys down on me and soot, and you having all that ever was!
+
+_Darby:_ Little enough I have or ever had.
+
+_Taig:_ To be casting up my trade against me, I being poor and
+hungry, and you having coins and tokens from all the goldpits of the
+world.
+
+_Darby:_ I wish I ever handled a coin of gold in my lifetime.
+
+_Taig:_ To speak despisingly, not pitiful. And I thinking the
+chimney sweeping would be forgot and not reproached to me, if you
+have handled the fooleries and watches of the world, that you don't
+know the end of your riches!
+
+_Darby:_ I am maybe getting your meaning wrong, your tongue being
+a little hard and sharp because you are Englified, but I am without
+new learnments and so I speak flat.
+
+_Taig:_ You to have the millions of King Solomon, you have no
+right to be putting reflections on me! I would never behave that way,
+and housefuls to fall into my hand.
+
+_Darby:_ You are striving to put ridicule on me and to make a fool
+of me. That is a very unseemly thing to do! I that did not ask to go
+hide the bag or the brush.
+
+_Taig:_ There you are going on again. Is it to the customers in
+your shops you will be giving out that it was my lot to go through
+the world as a sweep?
+
+_Darby:_ Customers and shops! Will you stop your funning? Let you
+quit mocking and making a sport of me! That is very bad acting
+behaviour.
+
+_Taig:_ Striving to blacken my face again at the time I had it
+washed pure white. You surely have a heart of marble.
+
+_Darby:_ What way at all can you be putting such a rascally say
+out of your mouth? I'll take no more talk from you, I to be
+twenty-two degrees lower than the Hottentots!
+
+_Taig:_ If you are my full cousin Dermot Melody I'll make you quit
+talking of soot!
+
+_Darby:_ I'll take no more talk from yourself!
+
+_Taig:_ Have a care now!
+
+_Darby:_ Have a care yourself!
+
+   _(Each gives the other a push. They stumble and fall, sitting
+   facing one another. Darby's hat falls off.)_
+
+_Taig:_ Is it _you_ it is?
+
+_Darby:_ Who else would it be?
+
+_Taig:_ What call had you letting on to be Dermot Melody?
+
+_Darby:_ What letting on? Dermot is my full name, but Darby is the
+name I am called.
+
+_Taig:_ Are you a man owning riches and shops and merchandise?
+
+_Darby:_ I am not, or anything of the sort.
+
+_Taig:_ Have you teems of money in the bank?
+
+_Darby:_ If I had would I be sitting on this floor?
+
+_Taig:_ You thief you!
+
+_Darby:_ Thief yourself! Turn around now till I will measure your
+features and your face. _Yourself_ is it! Is it personating my cousin
+Timothy you are?
+
+_Taig:_ I am personating no one but myself.
+
+_Darby:_ You letting on to be an estated magistrate and my own
+cousin and such a great generation of a man. And you not owning so
+much as a rood of ridges!
+
+_Taig:_ Covering yourself with choice clothing for to deceive me
+and to lead me astray!
+
+_Darby:_ Putting on your head a fine glossy hat and I thinking you
+to have come with the spring-tide, the way you had luck through your
+life!
+
+_Taig:_ Letting on to be Dermot Melody! You that are but the cull
+and the weakling of a race! It is a queer game you played on me and
+a crooked game. I never would have brought my legs so far to meet
+with the sooty likes of you!
+
+_Darby:_ Letting on to be my poor Timothy O'Harragha!
+
+_Taig:_ I never was called but Taig. Timothy was a sort of a Holy
+day name.
+
+_Darby:_ Where now are our two cousins? Or is it that the both of
+us are cracked?
+
+_Taig:_ It is, or our mothers before us.
+
+_Darby:_ My mother was a McGarrity woman from Loughrea. It is Mary
+was her Christened name.
+
+_Taig:_ So was my own mother of the McGarritys. It is sisters they
+were sure enough.
+
+_Darby:_ That makes us out to be full cousins in the heel.
+
+_Taig:_ You no better than myself! And the prayers I used to be
+saying for you, and you but a sketch and an excuse of a man!
+
+_Darby:_ Ah, I am thinking people put more in their prayers than
+was ever put in them by God.
+
+_Taig:_ Our mothers picturing us to one another as if we were the
+best in the world.
+
+_Darby:_ Lies I suppose they were drawing down, for to startle us
+into good behaviour.
+
+_Taig:_ Wouldn't you say now mothers to be a terror?
+
+_Darby:_ And we nothing at all after but two chimney sweepers and
+two harmless drifty lads.
+
+_Taig:_ Where is the great quality dinner yourself was to give me,
+having seven sorts of dressed meat? Pullets and bacon I was looking for,
+and to fall on an easy life.
+
+_Darby:_ Gone like the clouds of the winter's fog. We rose out of
+it the same as we went in.
+
+_Taig:_ We have nothing to do but to starve with the hunger, and
+you being as bare as myself.
+
+_Darby:_ We are in a bad shift surely. We must perish with the
+want of support. It is one of the tricks of the world does be played
+upon the children of Adam.
+
+_Taig:_ All we have to do is to crawl to the poorhouse gate. Or to
+go dig a pit in the graveyard, as it is short till we'll be
+stretched there with the want of food.
+
+_Darby:_ Food is it? There is nothing at this time against me
+eating my bit of a herring.
+
+   _(Seizes it and takes a bite.)_
+
+_Taig:_ Give me a divide of it.
+
+_Darby:_ Give me a drop of your own porter so, is in the bottle.
+There need be no dread on you now, of you being no match for your
+grand man.
+
+_Taig:_ That is so. _(Drinks.)_ I'll strive no more to fit myself
+for high quality relations. I am free from patterns of high up
+cousins from this out. I'll be a pattern to myself.
+
+_Darby:_ I am well content being free of you, the way you were
+pictured to be. I declare to my goodness, the name of you put terror
+on me through the whole of my lifetime, and your image to be
+clogging and checking me on every side.
+
+_Taig:_ To be thinking of you being in the world was a holy terror
+to myself. I give you my word you came through my sleep the same as
+a scarecrow or a dragon.
+
+_Darby:_ It is great things I will be doing from this out, we two
+having nothing to cast up against one another. To be quit of Timothy
+the bogie and to get Taig for a comrade, I'm as proud as the Crown
+of France!
+
+_Taig:_ I'm in dread of neither bumble or bagman or bugaboo! I
+will regulate things from myself from this out.
+
+_Darby:_ There to be fineness of living in the world, why wouldn't
+I make it out for myself?
+
+_Taig:_ It is to the harbours of America we will work our way
+across the wideness of the sea. It is well able we should be to go
+mounting up aloft in ropes. Come on Darby out of this!
+
+_Darby:_ There is magic and mastery come into me! This day has put
+wings to my heart!
+
+_Taig:_ Be easy now. We are maybe not clear of the chimneys yet.
+
+_Darby:_ What signifies chimneys? We'll go up in them till we'll
+take a view of the Seven Stars! It is out beyond the hills of Burren
+I will cast my eye, till I'll see the three gates of Heaven!
+
+_Taig:_ It's like enough, luck will flow to you. The way most
+people fail is in not keeping up the heart. Faith, it's well you have
+myself to mind you. Gather up now your brush and your bag.
+
+   _(They go to the door holding each other's hands and singing:
+   "All in my hat I will cock a blue feather," etc.)_
+
+
+_Curtain_
+
+
+
+
+_THE FULL MOON_
+
+  TO ALL SANE PEOPLE IN OR OUT OF CLOON
+  WHO KNOW THEIR NEIGHBOURS TO BE
+  NATURALLY CRACKED OR SOMEWAY QUEER
+  OR TO HAVE GONE WRONG IN THE HEAD.
+
+PERSONS                   [Sidenote: ALL SANE]
+  _Shawn Early_
+  _Bartley Fallon_
+  _Peter Tannian_
+  _Hyacinth Halvey_
+  _Mrs. Broderick_
+  _Miss Joyce_
+  _Cracked Mary_
+  _Davideen,_
+    HER BROTHER, AN INNOCENT
+
+
+THE FULL MOON
+
+   _Scene: A shed close to Cloon Station; Bartley Fallon is sitting
+   gloomily on a box; Hyacinth Halvey and Shawn Early are coming in at
+   door_.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ It is likely the train will not be up to its time,
+and cattle being on it for the fair. It's best wait in the shed. Is
+that Bartley Fallon? What way are you, Bartley?
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ Faith, no way at all. On the drag, on the drag;
+striving to put the bad times over me.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ Is it business with the nine o'clock you have?
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ The wife that is gone visiting to Tubber, and
+that has the door locked till such time as she will come back on the
+train. And I thought this shed a place where no bad thing would be
+apt to happen me, and not to be going through the streets, and the
+darkness falling.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ It is not long till the full moon will be rising.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ Everything that is bad, the falling
+sickness--God save the mark--or the like, should be at its worst at
+the full moon. I suppose because it is the leader of the stars.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ Ah, what could happen any person in the street of
+Cloon?
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ There might. Look at Matt Finn, the coffin-maker,
+put his hand on a cage the circus brought, and the lion took and
+tore it till they stuck him with a fork you'd rise dung with, and at
+that he let it drop. And that was a man had never quitted Cloon.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ I thought you might be sending something to the fair.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ It isn't to the train I would be trusting
+anything I would have to sell, where it might be thrown off the track.
+And where would be the use sending the couple of little lambs I have?
+It is likely there is no one would ask me where was I going. When
+the weight is not in them, they won't carry the price. Sure, the
+grass I have is no good, but seven times worse than the road.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ They are saying there'll be good demand at the fair
+of Carrow to-morrow.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ To-morrow the fair day of Carrow? I was not
+remembering that.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ Ah, there won't be many in it, I'm thinking.
+There isn't a hungrier village in Connacht, they were telling me,
+and it's poor the look of it as well.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ To-morrow the fair day. There will be all sorts
+in the streets to-night.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ The sort that will be in it will be a bad
+sort--sievemakers and tramps and neuks.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ The tents on the fair green; there will be
+music in it; there was a fiddler having no legs would set men of
+threescore years and of fourscore years dancing. I can nearly hear
+his tune.
+
+   _(He whistles_ "The Heather Broom.")
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ You are apt to be going there on the train, I
+suppose? It is well to be you, Mr. Halvey, having a good place in
+the town, and the price of your fare, and maybe six times the price
+of it, in your pocket.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I didn't think of that. I wonder could I
+go--for one night only--and see what the lads are doing.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ Are you forgetting, Mr. Halvey, that you are to
+meet his Reverence on the platform that is coming home from drinking
+water at the Spa?
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ So I can meet him, and get in the train after
+him getting out.
+
+   _(Mrs. Broderick and Peter Tannian come in.)_
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Is that Mr. Halvey is in it? I was looking for
+you at the chapel as I passed, and the Angelus bell after ringing.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Business I have here, ma'am. I was in dread I
+might not be here before the train.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ So you might not, indeed. That nine o'clock
+train you can never trust it to be late.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ To meet Father Gregan I am come, and maybe to
+go on myself.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Sure, I knew well you would be in haste to be
+before Father Gregan, and we knowing what we know.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I have no business only to be showing respect
+to him.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ His good word he will give to Mr. Halvey at the
+Board, where it is likely he will be made Clerk of the Union next
+week.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ His good word he will give to another thing
+besides that, I am thinking.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I don't know what you are talking about.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Didn't you hear the news, Peter Tannian, that
+Mr. Halvey is apt to be linked and joined in marriage with Miss Joyce,
+the priest's housekeeper?
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ I to believe all the lies I'd hear, I'd be a
+racked man by this.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ What I say now is as true as if you were on the
+other side of me. I suppose now the priest is come home there'll be
+no delay getting the license.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ It is not so settled as that.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Why wouldn't it be settled and it being told at
+Mrs. Delane's and through the whole world?
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ She should be a steady wife for him--a fortied
+girl.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ A very good fortune in the bank they are saying she
+has, and she having crossed the ocean twice to America.
+
+_Hartley Fallen:_ It's as good for him to have a woman will keep
+the door open before him and his victuals ready and a quiet tongue
+in her head. Not like that little Tartar of my own.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick_. And an educated woman along with that. A man of
+his sort, going to be Clerk of the Union and to be taken up with
+books and papers, it's likely he'd die in a week, he to marry a dunce.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ So it's likely he would.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ A little shop they are saying she will take, for
+to open a flour store, and you to be keeping the accounts, the way
+you would not spend any waste time.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I have no mind to be settling myself down yet a
+while. I might maybe take a ramble here or there. There's many of my
+comrades in the States.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ To go away from Cloon, is it? And why would you
+think to do that, and the whole town the same as a father and mother
+to you? Sure, the sergeant would live and die with you, and there
+are no two from this to Galway as great as yourself and the priest.
+To see you coming up the street, and your Dublin top-coat around you,
+there are some would give you a salute the same nearly as the Bishop.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ They wouldn't do that maybe and they hearing
+things as I heard them.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ What things?
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ There was a herd passing through from Carrow. It
+is what I heard him saying------
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ You heard nothing of Mr. Halvey, but what is
+worthy of him. But that's the way always. The most thing a man does,
+the less he will get for it after.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ A grand place in Carrow I suppose you had?
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I had plenty of places. Giving out
+proclamations--attending waterworks----.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ It is well fitted for any place he is, and all
+that was written around him and he coming into Cloon.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ Writing is easy.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Look at him since he was here, this twelvemonth
+back, that he never went into a dance-house or stood at a cross-road,
+and never lost a half-an-hour with drink. Made no blunder, made no
+rumours. Whatever could be said of his worth, it could not be too
+well said.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Do you think now, ma'am, would it be any harm I
+to go spend a day or maybe two days out of this--I to go on the
+train----.
+
+_Miss Joyce: (At door, coming in backwards.)_ Go back now, go back!
+Don't be following after me in through the door! Is Mr. Halvey there?
+Don't let her come following me, Mr. Halvey!
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Who is it is in it?
+
+   _(Sound of discordant singing outside.)_
+
+_Miss Joyce:_ Cracked Mary it is, that is after coming back this
+day from the asylum.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I never saw her, I think.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ The creature, she was light this long while and not
+good in the head, and at the last lunacy came on her and she was
+tied and bound. Sometimes singing and dancing she does be, and
+sometimes troublesome.
+
+_Miss Joyce:_ They had a right to keep her spancelled in the asylum.
+She would begrudge any respectable person to be walking the street.
+She'd hoot you, she'd shout you, she'd clap her hands at you. She is
+a blight in the town.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ There is a lad along with her.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ It is Davideen, her brother, that is innocent. He
+was left rambling from place to place the time she was put within
+walls.
+
+   _(Cracked Mary and Davideen come in.
+    Miss Joyce clings to Hyacinth's arm.)_
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ Give me a charity now, the way I'll be keeping a
+little rag on me and a little shoe to my foot. Give me the price of
+tobacco and the price of a grain of tea; for tobacco is blessed and
+tea is good for the head.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ Give out now, Davideen, a verse of "The Heather
+Broom." That's a splendid tune.
+
+_Davideen: (Sings.)_
+
+  Oh, don't you remember,
+  As it's often I told you,
+  As you passed through our kitchen,
+  That a new broom sweeps clean?
+  Come out now and buy one,
+  Come out now and try one--
+
+   _(His voice cracks, and he breaks off, laughing foolishly.)_
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ He has a sweet note in his voice, but to know or
+to understand what he is doing, he couldn't do it.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ Leave him a while. His song that does be clogged
+through the daytime, the same as the sight is clogged with myself. It
+isn't but in the night time I can see anything worth while. Davy is
+a proper boy, a proper boy; let you leave Davy alone. It was himself
+came before me ere yesterday in the morning, and I walking out the
+madhouse door.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ It is often there will fiddlers be waiting to play
+for them coming out, that are maybe the finest dancers of the day.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ Waiting before me he was, and no one to give him
+knowledge unless it might be the Big Man. I give you my word he near
+ate the face off me. As glad to see me he was as if I had dropped
+from heaven. Come hither to me, Davy, and give no heed to them. It
+is as dull and as lagging as themselves you would be maybe, and the
+world to be different and the moon to change its courses with the sun.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ I never would wish to be put within a madhouse
+before I'd die.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ Sorry they were losing me. There was not a better
+prisoner in it than my own four bones.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ Squeals you would hear from it, they were
+telling me, like you'd hear at the ringing of the pigs. Savages with
+whips beating them the same as hounds. You would not stand and
+listen to them for a hundred sovereigns. Of all bad things that can
+come upon a man, it is certain the madness is the last.
+
+_Miss Joyce:_ It is likely she was well content in it, and the
+friends she had being of her own class.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ What way could you make friends with people would
+be always talking? Too much of talk and of noise there was in it,
+cursing, and praying, and tormenting; some dancing, some singing,
+and one writing a letter to a she devil called Lucifer. I not to
+close my ears, I would have lost the sound of Davideen's song.
+
+_Miss Joyce:_ It was good shelter you got in it through the bad
+weather, and not to be out perishing under cold, the same as the
+starlings in the snow.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ I was my seven months in it, my seven months and a
+day. My good clothes that went astray on me and my boots. My fine
+gaudy dress was all moth-eated, that was worked with the wings of
+birds. To fall into dust and ashes it did, and the wings rose up
+into the high air.
+
+_Bartley Fallen_. Take care would the madness catch on to
+ourselves the same as the chin-cough or the pock.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Ah, that's not the way it goes travelling from
+one to another, but some that are naturally cracked and inherit it.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ It is a family failing with her tribe. The most of
+them get giddy in their latter end.
+
+_Miss Joyce:_ It might be it was sent as a punishment before birth,
+for to show the power of God.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ It is tea-drinking does it, and that is the
+reason it is on the wife it is apt to fall for the most part.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Ah, there's some does be thinking their wives
+isn't right, and there's others think they are too right. There to
+be any fear of me going astray, I give you my word I'd lose my wits
+on the moment.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ There are some say it is the moon.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ So it is too. The time the moon is going back, the
+blood that is in a person does be weakening, but when the moon is
+strong, the blood that moves strong in the same way. And it to be at
+the full, it drags the wits along with it, the same as it drags the
+tide.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Those that are light show off more and have the
+talk of twenty the time it is at the full, that is sure enough. And
+to hold up a silk handkerchief and to look through it, you would see
+the four quarters of the moon; I was often told that.
+
+_Miss Joyce:_ It is not you, Mr. Halvey, will give in to an unruly
+thing like the moon, that is under no authority, and cannot be put
+back, the same as a fast day that would chance to fall upon a feast.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ It is likely it is put in the sky the same as a
+clock for our use, the way you would pick knowledge of the weather,
+the time the stars would be wild about it.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ That is very nice now. The thing you'd know,
+you'd like to go on, and to hear more or less about it.
+
+_Miss Joyce: (To H.H.)_ It is a lantern for your own use it will
+be to-night, and his Reverence coming home through the street, and
+yourself coming along with him to the house.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ That's right, Miss Joyce. Keep a good grip of him.
+What do you say to him talking a while ago as if his mind was
+running on some thought to leave Cloon?
+
+_Miss Joyce:_ What way could he leave it?
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ No way at all, I'm thinking, unless there would
+be a miracle worked by the moon.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Ah, miracles is gone out of the world this long
+time, with education, unless that they might happen in your own
+inside.
+
+_Miss Joyce:_ I'll go set the table and kindle the fire, and I'll
+come back to meet the train with you myself.
+
+_(She goes. A noise heard outside.)_
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ What is that now?
+
+_Shawn Early: (At door.)_ Some noise as of running.
+
+_Hartley Fallon: (Going to door.)_ It might chance to be some
+prisoner they would be bringing to the train.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ No, but some lads that are running.
+
+   _(They go out. H.H. is going too, but Mrs. Broderick goes before him
+   and turns him round in doorway.)_
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Don't be coming out now in the dust that was
+formed by the heat is in the breeze. It would be a pity to spoil
+your Dublin coat, or your shirt that is that white you would nearly
+take it to be blue.
+
+   _(She goes out, pushing him in and shutting door after her.)_
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ Ha! ha! ha!
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ What is it you are laughing at?
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ Ha! ha! ha! It is a very laughable thing now, the
+third most laughable thing I ever met with in my lifetime.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ What is that?
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ A fine young man to be shut up and bound in a
+narrow little shed, and the full moon rising, and I knowing what I
+know!
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ It's little you are likely to know about me.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ Tambourines and fiddles and pipes--melodeons and
+the whistling of drums.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I suppose it is the Carrow fair you are talking
+about.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ Sitting within walls, and a top-coat wrapped
+around him, and mirth and music and frolic being in the place we know,
+and some dancing sets on the floor.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I wish I wasn't in this place tonight. I would
+like well to be going on the train, if it wasn't for the talk the
+neighbours would be making. I would like well to slip away. It is a
+long time I am going without any sort of funny comrades.
+
+   _(Goes to door. The others enter quickly, pushing him back.)_
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ Nothing at all to see. It would be best for us
+to have stopped where we were.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Running like foals to see it, and nothing to be
+in it worth while.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ What was it was in it?
+
+_Shawn Early:_ Nothing at all but some lads that were running in
+pursuit of a dog.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ Near knocked us they did, and they coming round
+the corner of the wall.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Is it that it was a mad dog?
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ Ah, what mad? Mad dogs are done away with now by
+the head Government and muzzles and the police.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ They are more watchful over them than they used.
+But all the same, you to see a strange dog afar off, you would be
+uneasy, thinking it might be yourself he would be searching out as
+his prey.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Sure, there did a dog go mad through Galway, and
+the whole town rose against him, and flocked him into a corner, and
+shot him there. He did no harm after, he being made an end of at the
+first.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ It might be that dog they were pursuing after was
+mad, on the head of being under the full moon.
+
+_Cracked Mary: (Jumping up excitedly.)_ That mad dog, he is a
+Dublin dog; he is betune you and Belfast--he is running ahead--you
+couldn't keep up with him.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ There is one, so, mad upon the road.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ There is police after him, but they cannot come up
+with him; he destroyed a splendid sow; nine bonavs they buried or
+less.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ What place is he gone now?
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ He made off towards Craughwell, and he bit a fine
+young man.
+
+_Bartley Fallen:_ So he would too. Sure, when a mad dog would be
+going about, on horseback or wherever you are, you're ruined.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ That dog is going on all the time; he wouldn't stop,
+but go ahead and bring that mouthful with him. He is still on the
+road; he is keeping the middle of the road; they say he is as big as
+a calf.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ It is the police I have a right to forewarn to
+go after him.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ The motor cars is going to get out to track him,
+for fear he would destroy the world!
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ That is a very nice thought now, to be sending
+the motor cars after him to overturn and to crush him the same as an
+ass-car in their path.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ You can't save yourself from a dog; he is after
+his own equals, dogs. He is doing every harm. They are out night and
+day.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ Sure, a mad dog would go from this to Kinvara in a
+half a minute, like the train.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ He won't stay in this country down--he goes the
+straight road--he takes by the wind. He is as big as a yearling calf.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ I wouldn't ever forgive myself I to see him.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ He is not very heavy yet. There is only the relics
+in him.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ They have a right to bring their rifles in
+their hand.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ The police is afraid of their life. They wrote for
+motor cars to follow him. Sure, he'd destroy the beasts of the field.
+A milch cow, he to grab at her, she's settled. Terrible wicked he is;
+he's as big as five dogs, and he does be very strong. I hope in the
+Lord he'll be caught. It will be a blessing from the Almighty God to
+kill that dog.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ He is surely the one is raging through the
+street.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ Why wouldn't he be him? Is it likely there would
+be two of them in it at the one time?
+
+_Shawn Early:_ A queer cut of a dog he was; a lurcher, a bastard
+hound.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ I would say him to be about the size of the foal
+of a horse.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Didn't he behave well not to do ourselves an
+injury?
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ It is likely he will do great destruction. I
+wouldn't say but I felt the weight of him and his two paws around my
+neck.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I will go out following him.
+
+_Shawn Early: (Holding him)_. Oh, let you not endanger yourself!
+It is the peelers should go follow him, that are armed with their
+batons and their guns.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I'll go. He might do some injury going through
+the town.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Ah now, it is not yourself we would let go into
+danger! It is Peter Tannian should go, if any person should go.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ Is it Hyacinth Halvey you are taking to be so far
+before myself?
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Why wouldn't he be before you?
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ Ask him what was he in Carrow? Ask was he a sort
+of a corner-boy, ringing the bell, pumping water, gathering a few
+coppers in the daytime for to scatter on a game of cards.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Stop your lies and your chat!
+
+_Mrs. Broderick: (to Tannian_) You are going light in the head to
+talk that way.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ He is, and queer in the mind. Take care did he get
+a bite from the dog, that left some venom working in his blood.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ So he might, and he having a sort of a little
+rent in his sleeve.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ I to have got a bite from the dog, is it? I did
+not come anear him at all. You to strip me as bare as winter you
+will not find the track of his teeth. It is Shawn Early was nearer
+to him than what I was.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ I was not nearer, or as near as what Mrs. Broderick
+was.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ I made away when I saw him. My chest is not the
+better of it yet. Since I left off fretting I got gross. I am that
+nervous I would run from a blessed sheep, let alone a dog.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ To see any of the signs of madness upon him, it is
+Mr. Halvey the sergeant would look to for to make his report.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ So I would make a report.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ Is it that you lay down you can see signs? Is
+that the learning they were giving you in Carrow?
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Don't be speaking with him at all. It is easy
+know the signs. A person to be laughing and mocking, and that would
+not have the same habits with yourself, or to have no fear of things
+you would be in dread of, or to be using a different class of food.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ I use no food but clean food.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ To be giddy in the head is a sign, and to be
+talking of things that passed years ago.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ I am talking of nothing but the thing I have a
+right to talk of.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ To be nervous and thinking and pausing, and
+playing with knicknacks.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ It never was my habit to be playing with
+knicknacks.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ When the master in the school where I was went
+queer, he beat me with two clean rods, and wrote my name with my own
+blood.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ To take the shoe off their foot, and to hit out
+right and left with it, bawling their life out, tearing their clothes,
+scattering and casting them in every part; or to run naked through
+the town, and all the people after them.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ To be jumping the height of trees they do be, and
+all the people striving to slacken them.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ To steal prayer-books and rosaries, and to be
+saying prayers they never could keep in mind before.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Very strong, that they could leap a
+wall--jumping and pushing and kicking--or to tie people to one
+another with a rope.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ Any fear of any person here being violent, Mr.
+Halvey will get him put under restraint.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ Is it myself you are thinking to put under
+restraint? Would a man would be pushing and kicking and tearing his
+clothes, be able to do arithmetic on a board? Look now at that.
+_(Chalks figures on door.)_ Three and three makes six!--and three--
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ I'm no hand at figuring, but I can say out a
+blessed hymn, what any person with the mind gone contrary in them
+could not do. Hearken now till you'll know is there confusion in my
+mind. _(Sings.)_
+
+  Mary Broderick is my name;
+    Fiddane was my station;
+  Cloon is my dwelling-place;
+    And (I hope) heaven is my destination.
+
+  Mary Broderick is my name,
+    Cloon was my--
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ _(With a cackle of delight.)_ Give heed to them now,
+Davideen! That's the way the crazed people used to be going on in the
+place where I was, every one thinking the other to be cracked.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ _(To Tannian.)_ Look now at your great figuring!
+Argus with his hundred eyes wouldn't know is that a nought or is it a
+nine without a tail.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ Leave that blame on a little ridge that is in the
+nature of the chalk. Look now at Mary Broderick, that it has failed
+to word out her verse.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Ah, what signifies? I'd never get light greatly.
+It wouldn't be worth while I to go mad.
+
+   _(Bartley Fallon gives a deep groan.)_
+
+_Shawn Early:_ What is on you, Bartley?
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ I'm in dread it is I myself has got the venom
+into my blood.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ What makes you think that?
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ It's a sort of a thing would be apt to happen me,
+and any malice to fall within the town at all.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Give heed to him, Hyacinth Halvey; you are the
+most man we have to baffle any wrong thing coming in our midst!
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Is it that you are feeling any pain as of a
+wound or a sore?
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ Some sort of a little catch I'm thinking there
+is in under my knee. I would feel no pain unless I would turn it
+contrary.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ What class of feeling would you say you are
+feeling?
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ I am feeling as if the five fingers of my hand
+to be lessening from me, the same as five farthing dips the heat of
+the sun would be sweating the tallow from.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ That is a strange account.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ And a sort of a megrim in my head, the same as a
+sheep would get a fit of staggers in a field.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ That is what I would look for. Is there some
+sort of a roaring in your ear?
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ There is, there is, as if I would hear voices
+would be talking.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Would you feel any wish to go tearing and
+destroying?
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ I would indeed, and there to be an enemy upon my
+path. Would you say now, Widow Broderick, am I getting anyway flushy
+in the face?
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Don't leave your eye off him for pity's sake. He
+is reddening as red as a rose.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ I could as if walk on the wind with lightness.
+Something that is rising in my veins the same as froth would be
+rising on a pint.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ It is the doctor I'd best call for--and maybe
+the sergeant and the priest.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ There are three thoughts going through my
+mind--to hang myself or to drown myself, or to cut my neck with a
+reaping-hook.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ It is the doctor will serve him best, where it
+is the mad blood that should be bled away. To break up eggs, the
+white of them, in a tin can, will put new blood in him, and whiskey,
+and to taste no food through twenty-one days.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ I'm thinking so long a fast wouldn't serve me. I
+wouldn't wish the lads will bear my body to the grave, to lay down
+there was nothing within it but a grasshopper or a wisp of dry grass.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ No, but to cut a piece out of his leg the doctor
+will, the way the poison will get no leave to work.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ Or to burn it with red-hot irons, the way it will
+not scatter itself and grow. There does a doctor do that out in
+foreign.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ It would be more natural to cut the leg off him
+in some sort of a Christian way.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ If it was a pig was bit, or a sow or a bonav, it to
+show the signs, it would be shot, if it was a whole fleet of them
+was in it.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ I knew of a man that was butler in a big house
+was bit, and they tied him first and smothered him after, and his
+master shot the dog. A splendid shot he was; the thing he'd not see
+he'd hit it the same as the thing he'd see. I heard that from an
+outside neighbour of my own, a woman that told no lies.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ Sure, they did the same thing to a high-up lady
+over in England, and she after being bit by her own little spaniel
+and it having a ring around its neck.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ That is the only best thing to do. Whether the
+bite is from a dog, or a cat, or whatever it may be, to put the
+quilt and the blankets on the person and smother him in the bed. To
+smother them out-and-out you should, before the madness will work.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I'd be loth he to be shot or smothered. I'd
+sooner to give him a chance in the asylum.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ To keep him there and to try him through three
+changes of the moon. It's well for you, Bartley, Mr. Halvey being in
+charge of you, that is known to be a tender man.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ He to have got a bite and to go biting others, he
+would put in them the same malice. It is the old people used to tell
+that down, and they must have had some reason doing that.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ To get a bite of a dog you must chance your life.
+There is no doubt at all about that. It might work till the time of
+the new moon or the full moon, and then they must be shot or
+smothered.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ It is a pity there to be no cure found for it
+in the world.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ There never came out from the Almighty any cure for
+a mad dog.
+
+   _(Bartley Fallon has been edging towards door.)_
+
+_Shawn Early:_ Oh! stop him and keep a hold of him, Mr. Halvey!
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Stop where you are.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ Isn't it enough to have madness before me, that
+you will not let me go fall in my own choice place?
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ The neighbours would think it bad of me to let
+a raving man out into their midst.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ Is it to shoot me you are going?
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I will call to the doctor to say is the padded
+room at the workhouse the most place where you will be safe, till
+such time as it will be known did the poison wear away.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ I will not go in it! It is likely I might be
+forgot in it, or the nurses to be in dread to bring me nourishment,
+and they to hear me barking within the door. I'm thinking it was
+allotted by nature I never would die an easy death.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I will keep a watch over you myself.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ Where's the use of that the time the breath will
+be gone out of me, and you maybe playing cards on my coffin, and I
+having nothing around or about me but the shroud, and the habit, and
+the little board?
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Sure, I cannot leave you the way you are.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ It is what I ever and always heard, a dog to
+bite you, all you have to do is to take a pinch of its hair and to
+lay it into the wound.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ So I heard that myself. A dog to bite any person
+he is entitled to be plucked of his hair.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I'll go out; I might chance to see him.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ You will not, without getting advice from the
+priest that is coming in the train. Let his Reverence come into this
+place, and say is it Bartley or is it Peter Tannian was done
+destruction on by the dog.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ There is a surer way than that.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ What way?
+
+_Shawn Early:_ It takes madness to find out madness. Let you call
+to the cracked woman that should know.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Come hither, Mary, and tell us is there any one
+of your own sort in this shed?
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ That is a good thought. It is only themselves
+that recognise one another.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ Do not ask her! I will not leave it to her!
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Sure, she cannot say more than what yourself has
+said against yourself.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ I'm in dread she might know too much, and be
+telling out what is within in my mind.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ That's foolishness. These are not the ancient
+times, when Ireland was full of haunted people.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ Is a man having a wife and three acres of land
+to be put under the judgment of a witch?
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I would not give in to any pagan thing, but to
+recognise one of her own sort, that is a thing can be understood.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ So it could be too, the same as witnesses in a
+court.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ I will not give in to going to demons or druids
+or freemasons! Wasn't there enough of misfortune set before my path
+through every day of my lifetime without it to be linked with me
+after my death? Is it that you would force me to lose the comforts
+of heaven and to get the poverty of hell? I tell you I will have no
+trade with witches! I would sooner go face the featherbeds.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Say out, girl, do you see any craziness here or
+anything of the sort?
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ Every day in the year there comes some malice into
+the world, and where it comes from is no good place.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ That is it, a venomous dew, as in the year of
+the famine. There is no astronomer can say it is from the earth or
+the sky.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ It is what we are asking you, did any of that
+malice get its scope in this place?
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ That was settled in Mayo two thousand years ago.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Ah, there's no head or tail to that one's story.
+You 'd be left at the latter end the same as at the commencement.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ That dog you were talking of, that is raging
+through the district and the town--did it leave any madness after it?
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ It will go in the wind, there is a certain time
+for that. It might go off in the wind again. It might go shaping off
+and do no harm.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ Where is that dog presently, till some person
+might go pluck out a few ribs of its hair?
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ Raging ever and always it is, raging wild. Sure,
+that is a dog was in it before the foundations of the world.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ Who is it now that venom fell on, whatever
+beast's jaws may have scattered it?
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ It is the full moon knows that. The moon to
+slacken it is safe, there is no harm in it. Almighty God will do
+that much. He'll slacken it like you 'd slacken lime.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ There is reason in what she is saying. Set open the
+door and let the full moon call its own!
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ Don't let in the rays of it upon us or I'm a
+gone man. It to shine on them that are going wrong in the head, it
+would raise a great stir in the mind. Sure, it's in the asylum at
+that time they do have whips to chastise them.
+
+   _(Goes to corner.)_
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ That's it. The moon is terrible. The full moon
+cracks them out and out, any one that would have any spleen or any
+relics in them.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ Do not let in the light of it. I would scruple
+to look at it myself.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ Let you throw open the door, Davideen. It is not
+ourselves are in dread that the white man in the sky will be calling
+names after us and ridiculing us. Ha! ha! I might be as foolish as
+yourselves and as fearful, but for the Almighty that left a little
+cleft in my skull, that would let in His candle through the night
+time.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Hurry on now, tell us is there any one in this
+place is wild and astray like yourself.
+
+   _(He opens the door. The light falls on him.)_
+
+_Cracked Mary: (Putting her hand on him.)_ There was great
+shouting in the big round house, and you coming into it last night.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ What are you saying? I never went frolicking in
+the night time since the day I came into Cloon.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ We were talking of it a while ago. I knew you by
+the smile and by the laugh of you. A queen having a yellow dress,
+and the hair on her smooth like marble. All the dead of the village
+were in it, and of the living myself and yourself.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I thought it was of Carrow she was talking; it
+is of the other world she is raving, and of the shadow-shapes of the
+forth.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ You have the door open--the speckled horses are
+on the road!--make a leap on the horse as it goes by, the horse that
+is without a rider. Can't you hear them puffing and roaring? Their
+breath is like a fog upon the air.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ What you hear is but the train puffing afar off.
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ Make a snap at the bridle as it passes by the bush
+in the western gap. Run out now, run, where you have the bare ridge
+of the world before you, and no one to take orders from but yourself,
+maybe, and God.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Ah, what way can I run to any place!
+
+_Cracked Mary:_ Stop where you are, so. In my opinion it is little
+difference the moon can see between the whole of ye. Come on,
+Davideen, come out now, we have the wideness of the night before us.
+O golden God! All bad things quieten in the night time, and the ugly
+thing itself will put on some sort of a decent face! Come out now to
+the night that will give you the song, and will show myself out as
+beautiful as Helen of the Greek gods, that hanged herself the day
+there first came a wrinkle on her face!
+
+_Davideen: (Coming close, and taking her hand as he sings.)_
+
+  Oh! don't you remember
+  What our comrades called to us
+  And they footing steps
+  At the call of the moon?
+  Come out to the rushes,
+  Come out to the bushes,
+  Where the music is called
+  By the lads of Queen Anne!
+
+   _(They look beautiful. They dance and sing in perfect time
+    as they go out.)_
+
+_Peter Tannian:
+   (Closing the door, and pointing at Hyacinth, who stands gazing
+   after them, and when the door is shut sits down thinking deeply.)_
+It is on him her judgment fell, and a clear judgment.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ She gave out that award fair enough.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ Did you take notice, and he coming into the shed,
+he had like some sort of a little twist in his walk?
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ I would be loth to think there would be any
+poison lurking in his veins. Where now would it come from, and
+Cracked Mary's dog being as good as no dog at all?
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ It might chance, and he a child in the cradle, to
+get the bite of a dog. It might be only now, its full time being come,
+its power would begin to work.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ So it would too, and he but to see the shadow of
+the dog bit him in a body glass, or in the waves, and he himself
+looking over a boat, and as if called to throw himself in the tide.
+But I would not have thought it of Mr. Halvey. Well, it's as hard to
+know what might be spreading abroad in any person's mind, as to put
+the body of a horse out through a cambric needle.
+
+   _(Hyacinth looks at them.)_
+
+_Shawn Early:_ Be quiet now, he is going to say some word.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ There is a thought in my mind. I think it was
+coming this good while.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ Whisht now and listen.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I made a great mistake coming into this place.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ There was some mistake made anyway.
+
+_Hyacinth:_ It is foolishness kept me in it ever since. It is too
+big a name was put upon me.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ It is the power of the moon is forcing the truth
+out of him.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Every person in the town giving me out for more
+than I am. I got too much of that in the heel.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ He is talking queer now anyway.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Calling to me every little minute--expecting me
+to do this thing and that thing--watching me the same as a watchdog,
+their eyes as if fixed upon my face.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ To be giving out such strange thoughts, he
+hasn't much brains left around him.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey: I_ looking to be Clerk of the Union, and the
+place I had giving me enough to do, and too much to do. Tied on this
+side, tied on that side. I to be bothered with business through the
+holy livelong day!
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ It is good pay he got with it. Eighty pounds a
+year doesn't come on the wind.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ In danger to be linked and wed--I never
+ambitioned it--with a woman would want me to be earning through
+every day of the year.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ He is a gone man surely.
+
+_Hyacinth Hakey:_ The wide ridge of the world before me, and to
+have no one to look to for orders; that would be better than roast
+and boiled and all the comforts of the day. I declare to goodness,
+and I 'd nearly take my oath, I 'd sooner be among a fleet of tinkers,
+than attending meetings of the Board!
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ If there are fairies in it, it is in the fairies
+he is.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ Give me a hold of that chain.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ What is it you are about to do?
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ To bind him to the chair I will before he will
+burst out wild mad. Come over here, Bartley Fallon, and lend a hand
+if you can.
+
+   _(Bartley Fallon appears from corner with a_ _chicken crate over
+   his head.)_
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ O Bartley, that is the strangest lightness ever
+I saw, to go bind a chicken crate around your skull!
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ Will you tighten the knots I have tied, Peter
+Tannian! I am in dread they might slacken or fail.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ Was there ever seen before this night such power to
+be in the moon!
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ It would seem to be putting very wild unruly
+thoughts a-through me, stirring up whatever spleen or whatever
+relics was left in me by the nature of the dog.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ Is it that you think those rods, spaced wide, as
+they are, will keep out the moon from entering your brain?
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ There does great strength come at the time the
+wits would be driven out of a person. I never was handled by a
+policeman--but once--and never hit a blow on any man. I would not
+wish to destroy my neighbour or to have his blood on my hands.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ It is best keep out of his reach.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ The way I have this fixed, there is no person
+will be the worse for me. I to rush down the street and to meet with
+my most enemy in some lonesome craggy place, it would fail me, and I
+thrusting for it to scatter any share of poison in his body or to
+sink my teeth in his skin. I wouldn't wonder I to have hung for some
+of you, and that plan not to have come into my head.
+
+   _(Whistle of train heard.)_
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey: (Getting up.)_ I have my mind made up, I am
+going out of this on that train.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ You are not going so easy as what you think.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Let you mind your own business.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ I am well able to mind it.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey: (Throwing off top-coat.)_ You cannot keep me here.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ Give me a hand with the chain.
+   _(They throw it round Hyacinth and hold him.)_
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Is it out of your senses you are gone?
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ Not at all, but yourself that is gone raving mad
+from the fury and the strength of some dog.
+
+_Miss Joyce: (At door.)_ Are you there, Hyacinth Halvey? The train
+is in. Come forward now, and give a welcome to his Reverence.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Let me go out of this!
+
+_Miss Joyce:_ You are near late as it is. The train is about to
+start.
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Let me go, or I'll tear the heart out of ye!
+
+_Shawn Early:_ Oh, he is stark, staring mad!
+
+_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Mad, am I? Bit by a dog, am I? You'll see am I
+mad! I'll show madness to you! Let go your hold or I'll skin you!
+I'll destroy you! I'll bite you! I'm a red enemy to the whole of you!
+Leave go your grip! Yes, I'm mad! Bow wow wow, wow wow!
+
+   _(They let go and fall back in terror, and he rushes out of the
+    door.)_
+
+_Miss Joyce:_ What at all has happened? Where is he gone?
+
+_Shawn Early:_ To the train he is gone, and away in it he is gone.
+
+_Miss Joyce:_ He gave some sort of a bark or a howl.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ He is gone clean mad. Great arguing he had, and
+leaping and roaring.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ _(Taking off crate.)_ He went very near to tear
+us all asunder. I declare I amn't worth a match.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ He made a reel in my head, till I don't know am
+I right myself.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ Bawling his life out, tearing his clothes, tearing
+and eating them. Look at his top-coat he left after him.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ He poured all over with pure white foam.
+
+_Peter Tannian:_ There now is an end of your elegant man.
+
+_Shawn Early:_ Bit he was with the mad dog that went tearing, and
+lads chasing him a while ago.
+
+_Miss Joyce:_ Sure that was Tannian's own dog, that had a bit of
+meat snapped from Quirke's ass-car. He is without this door now.
+_(All look out.)_ He has the appearance of having a full meal taken.
+
+_Bartley Fallon:_ And they to be saying I went mad. That is the
+way always, and a thing to be tasked to me that was not in it at all.
+
+_Mrs. Broderick:_ _(Laying her hand on Miss Joyce's shoulder.)_
+Take comfort now; and if it was the moon done all, and has your
+bachelor swept, let you not begrudge it its full share of praise for
+the hand it had in banishing a strange bird, might have gone wild
+and bawling like eleven, and you after being wed with him, and would
+maybe have put a match to the roof. And hadn't you the luck of the
+world now, that you did not give notice to the priest!
+
+_Curtain_
+
+
+
+
+COATS
+
+
+_Hazel_      EDITOR OF "CHAMPION"
+_Mineog_     EDITOR OF "TRIBUNE"
+_John_       A WAITER
+
+
+   _Scene: Dining room of Royal Hotel Cloonmore_.
+
+_Hazel: (Coming in.)_ Did Mr. Mineog come yet, John?
+
+_John:_ He did not, Mr. Hazel. Ah, he won't be long coming. It's
+seldom he does be late.
+
+_Hazel:_ Is the dinner ready?
+
+_John:_ It is, sir. Boiled beef and parsnips, the same as every
+Monday for all comers, and an apple pie for yourself and Mr. Mineog.
+
+_Mineog: (Coming in.)_ Mr. Hazel is the first tonight. I'm glad to
+see you looking so good.
+
+  _(They take off coats and give to waiter.)_
+
+_Mineog:_ Put that on its own peg.
+
+_Hazel:_ And mine on its own peg to the rear.
+
+_John:_ I will, sir.
+
+   _(He drops coats in putting them up. Then notices broken pane
+   in window and picks up the coats hurriedly, putting them on wrong
+   pegs. Hazel and Mineog have sat down.)_
+
+_Hazel:_ Have you any strange news?
+
+_Mineog:_ I have but the same news I always have, that it is quick
+Monday comes around, and that it is hard make provision for to fill
+up the four sheets of the _Tribune_, and nothing happening in these
+parts worth while. There would seem to be no news on this day beyond
+all days of the year.
+
+_Hazel:_ Sure there is the same care and the same burden on myself.
+I wish I didn't put a supplement to the _Champion_. The deer knows
+what way will I fill it between this and Thursday, or in what place
+I can go questing after news!
+
+_Mineog:_ Last week passed without anything doing. It is a very
+backward place to give information for two papers. If it was not for
+the league is between us, and for us meeting here on every Monday to
+make sure we are taking different sides on every question may turn up,
+and giving every abuse to one another in print, there is no person
+would pay his penny for the two of them, or it may be for the one of
+them.
+
+_Hazel:_ That is so. And the worst is, there is no question ever
+rises that we do not agree on, or that would have power to make us
+fall out in earnest. It was different in my early time. The
+questions used to rise up then were worth fighting for.
+
+_Mineog:_ There are some people so cantankerous they will heat
+themselves in argument as to which side might be right or wrong in a
+war, or if wars should be in it at all, or hangings.
+
+_Hazel:_ Ah, when they are as long on the road as we are, they'll
+take things easy. _Mineog:_ Now all the kingdoms of the earth to go
+struggling on one wrong side or another, or to bring themselves down
+to dust and ashes, it would not break our friendship. In all the
+years past there never did a cross word rise between us.
+
+_Hazel:_ There never will. What are the fights of politics and
+parties beside living neighbourly with one another, and to go
+peaceable to the grave, our selves that are the oldest residents in
+the Square.
+
+_Mineog:_ It will be long indeed before you will be followed to
+the grave. You didn't live no length yet. You are too fresh to go
+out and to forsake your wife and your family.
+
+_Hazel:_ Ah, when the age would be getting up on you, you wouldn't
+be getting younger. But it's yourself that is as full of spirit as a
+four-year-old. I wish I had a sovereign for every year you will
+reign after me in the Square.
+
+_Mineog:_ _(Sneezes.)_ There is a draught of air coming in the
+window.
+
+_Hazel:_ _(Rising.)_ Take care might it be open--no, but a pane
+that is out. There is a very chilly breeze sweeping in.
+
+_Mineog:_ _(Rising.)_ I will put on my coat so. There is no use
+giving provocation to a cold.
+
+_Hazel:_ I'll do the same myself. It is hard to banish a sore
+throat.
+
+   _(They put on coats. John brings in dinner. They sit down.)_
+
+_Mineog:_ See can you baffle that draught of air, John.
+
+_John:_ I'll go in search of something to stop it, sir. This bit
+of a board I brought is too unshapely.
+
+_Mineog:_ Two columns of the _Tribune_ as empty yet as anything
+you could see. I had them kept free for the Bishop's speech and he
+didn't come after.
+
+_Hazel:_ That's the same cause has left myself with so wide a gap.
+
+_Mineog:_ In the years past there used always to be something
+happening such as famines, or the invention of printing. The whole
+world has got very slack.
+
+_Hazel:_ You are a better hand than what I am at filling odd
+spaces would be left bare. It is often I think the news you put out
+comes partly from your own brain, and the prophecies you lay down
+about the weather and the crops.
+
+_Mineog:_ Ah, I might stick in a bit of invention sometimes, when
+I'm put to the pin of my collar.
+
+_Hazel:_ I might maybe make an attack on the _Tribune_ for that.
+
+_Mineog:_ Ah, what is it but a white sin. Sure it tells every
+person the same thing. It doesn't tell many lies, it goes somewhere
+a near it.
+
+_Hazel:_ I spent a good while this evening searching through the
+shelves of the press I have in the office. I write an article an odd
+time, when there is nothing doing, that might come handy in a hurry.
+
+_Mineog:_ So have I a press of the sort, and shelves in it. I am
+after going through them to-day.
+
+_Hazel:_ But it's hard find a thing would be suitable, unless you
+might dress it up again someway fresh.
+
+_Mineog:_ I made a thought and I searching a while ago. I was
+thinking it would be a very nice thing to show respect to yourself,
+and friendliness, putting down a short account of you and of all you
+have done for your family and for the town.
+
+_Hazel:_ That is a strange thing now! I had it in my mind to do
+the very same service to yourself.
+
+_Mineog:_ Is that so?
+
+_Hazel:_ Your worth and your generosity and the way you have
+worked the _Tribune_ for your own and for the public good.
+
+_Mineog:_ And another thing. I not only thought to write it but I
+am after writing it.
+
+_Hazel: (Suspiciously.)_ You had not much time for that.
+
+_Mineog:_ I never was one to spare myself in anything that could
+benefit a friend.
+
+_Hazel:_ Neither would I spare myself. I have my article wrote.
+
+_Mineog:_ I have a mind to read my own one to you, the way you
+will know there is nothing in it but what is friendly and is kind.
+
+_Hazel:_ I will do the same thing. There's nothing I have said in
+it but what you will like to be hearing.
+
+_Mineog: (Who has rummaged pockets.)_ I thought I put it in the
+inside pocket--no matter--here it is.
+
+_Hazel: (Rummaging.)_ Here is my one. I was thinking I had it lost.
+
+_Mineog: (Reading, after he has turned over a couple of sheets rapidly)_
+"Born and bred in this Square, he took his chief pride in his native
+town."
+
+_Hazel: (Turning over two sheets.)_ "It was in this parish and
+district he spent the most part of his promising youth--Richly
+stored with world-wide knowledge."
+
+_Mineog:_ "Well able to give out an opinion on any matter at all."
+
+_Hazel:_ "To lay down his mind on paper it would be hard to beat
+him."
+
+_Mineog:_ "With all that, humble that he would halt and speak to
+you the same as a child----" I'm maybe putting it down a bit too
+simple, but the printer will give it a little shaping after.
+
+_Hazel:_ So will my own printer be lengthening out the words for
+me according to the type and the letters of the alphabet he will
+have plentiful and to spare.
+
+_Mineog:_ "Well looking and well thought of. A true Irishman in
+supporting all forms of sport."
+
+_Hazel:_ What's that? I never was one for betting on races or
+gaining prizes for riddles.
+
+_Mineog:_ It is strange now I have no recollection of putting that
+down. It is I myself in the days gone by would put an odd shilling
+on a horse.
+
+_Hazel:_ These typewriters would bother the world. Wait now--let
+me throw an eye on those papers you have in your hand.
+
+_Mineog:_ Not at all. I would sooner be giving it out to you myself.
+
+_Hazel:_ Of course it is very pleasing to be listening to so nice
+an account--but lend it a minute.
+
+   _(Puts out hand.)_
+
+_Mineog:_ Bring me now a bottle of wine, John--you know the
+sort--till I'll drink to Mr. Hazel's good health.
+
+_John:_ I will, sir.
+
+_Hazel:_ No, but bring it at my own expense till I will drink to
+Mr. Mineog. Just give me a hold of that paper for one minute only.
+
+_Mineog:_ Keep patience now. I will go through it with no delay.
+
+_Hazel:_ _(Making a snap.)_ Just for one minute.
+
+_Mineog:_ _(Clapping his hand on it.)_ What a hurry you are in!
+Stop now till I'll find the place. "Very rarely indeed has been met
+with so fair and so neighbourly a man."
+
+_Hazel:_ Give me a look at it.
+
+_Mineog:_ What is it ails you? You are uneasy about something.
+What is it you are hiding from me?
+
+_Hazel:_ What would I have to hide but that the papers got mixed
+in some way, and you have in your hand what I wrote about yourself,
+and not what you wrote about myself?
+
+_Mineog:_ What way did they get into the wrong pocket now?
+
+_Hazel: (Putting MS. in his pocket.)_ Give me back my own and I
+will give you back your own.
+
+_Mineog:_ I don't know. You are putting it in my mind there might
+be something underhand. I would like to make sure what did you say
+about me in the heel. _(Turns over.)_ "He was honest and widely
+respected." _Was_ honest--are you saying me to be a rogue at this
+time?
+
+_Hazel:_ That's not fair dealing to be searching through it
+against my will.
+
+_Mineog:_ "He was trusted through the whole townland." _Was_
+trusted--is it that you are making me out to be a thief?
+
+_Hazel:_ Well, follow your own road and take your own way.
+
+_Mineog:_ "----Mr. Mineog leaves no family to lament his loss, but
+along with the _Tribune_, which he fostered with the care of a father,
+we offer up prayers for the repose of his soul." _(Stands up.)_ It
+is a notice of my death you are after writing!
+
+_Hazel:_ You should understand that.
+
+_Mineog:_ An obituary notice! Of myself! Is it that you expect me
+to quit the living world between this and Thursday?
+
+_Hazel:_ I had no thought of the kind.
+
+_Mineog:_ I'm not stretched yet! What call have you to go offer
+prayers for me?
+
+_Hazel:_ I tell you I had it put by this long time till I would
+have occasion to use it.
+
+_Mineog:_ Is it this long time, so, you have been waiting for my
+death?
+
+_Hazel:_ Not at all.
+
+_Mineog:_ You to kill me to-day and to think to bury me to-morrow!
+
+_Hazel:_ Can't you listen? I was wanting something to fill space.
+
+_Mineog:_ Would nothing serve you to fill space but only my own
+corpse? To go set my coffin making and to put nettles growing on my
+hearth! Wouldn't it be enough to rob my house or to make an attack
+upon my means? Wouldn't that fill up the gap?
+
+_Hazel:_ Let you not twist it that way!
+
+_Mineog:_ The time I was in the face of my little dinner to go
+startle me with a thing of the sort! I'm not worth the ground I
+stand on! For the _Champion_ of next Thursday! I to be dead ere
+Thursday!
+
+_Hazel:_ I looked for no such thing.
+
+_Mineog:_ What is it makes you say me to be done and dying? Am I
+reduced in the face?
+
+_Hazel:_ You are not.
+
+_Mineog:_ Am I yellow and pale and shrunken?
+
+_Hazel:_ Why would you be?
+
+_Mineog:_ Would you say me to be crampy in the body? Am I staggery
+in the legs?
+
+_Hazel:_ I see no such signs.
+
+_Mineog:_ Is it in my hand you see them? Is it lame or is it
+freezed-brittle like ice?
+
+_Hazel:_ It is as warm and as good as my own.
+
+_Mineog:_ Let me take a hold of you till you will tell me has it
+the feel of a dead man's grip.
+
+_Hazel:_ I know that it has not.
+
+_Mineog:_ Is it shaking like a bunch of timber shavings?
+
+_Hazel:_ Not at all, not at all.
+
+_Mineog:_ It should be my hearing that is failing from me, or that
+I am crippled and have lost my walk.
+
+_Hazel:_ You are roaring and bawling without sense.
+
+_Mineog:_ Let the _Champion_ go to flitters before I will die to
+please it! I will not give in to it driving me out of the world
+before my hour is spent! It would hardly ask that of a man would be
+of no use and no account, or even of a beast of any consequence.
+
+_Hazel:_ Who is asking you to die?
+
+_Mineog:_ Giving no time hardly for the priest to overtake me and
+to give me the rites of the Church!
+
+_Hazel:_ I tell you there is no danger of you giving up at all!
+Every person knows there must some sickness come before death. Some
+take it from a neighbour and it is put on others by God.
+
+_Mineog:_ Even so, it's hard say.
+
+_Hazel:_ You have not a ha'p'orth on you. No complaint in the
+world wide.
+
+_Mineog:_ That's nothing! Sickness comes upon some as sudden as to
+clap their hands.
+
+_Hazel:_ What are you talking about? You are thinking us to be in
+the days of the cholera yet!
+
+_Mineog:_ There are yet other diseases besides that.
+
+_Hazel:_ You put the measles over you and we going the road to
+school.
+
+_Mineog:_ There is more than measles has power bring a man down.
+
+_Hazel:_ You had the chin-cough passed and you rising. We were cut
+at the one time for the pock.
+
+_Mineog:_ A disease to be allotted to you it would find you out,
+and you maybe up twenty mile in the air!
+
+_Hazel:_ Ah, what disease could have you swept in the course of
+the next two days?
+
+_Mineog:_ That is what I'm after saying--unless you might have
+murder in your mind?
+
+_Hazel:_ Ah, what murder!
+
+_Mineog:_ What way are you thinking to do away with me? To shoot
+me with the trigger of a gun and to give me shortening of life?
+
+_Hazel:_ The trigger of a gun! God bless it, I never fingered such
+a thing in the length of my life!
+
+_Mineog:_ To take aim at me and destroy me; to shoot me in forty
+halves like a crow in the time of the wheat!
+
+_Hazel:_ Oh, now, don't say a thing like that!
+
+_Mineog:_ Or to drown me maybe in the river, enticing me across
+the rotten plank of the bridge. _(Seizing bottle.)_ Will you tell me
+on the virtue of your oath, is death lurking in that sherry wine?
+
+_Hazel: (Pulling out paper.)_ Ah, God bless your jig! And how
+would I know is it a notice of my own death has come into my hand in
+the pocket of this coat I put on me through a mistake?
+
+_Mineog:_ Give it here. That's my property!
+
+_Hazel: (Reading.)_ "We sympathise with Mrs. Hazel and the family."
+There is proof now. Is it that you would go grieving with my wife and
+I to be living yet?
+
+_Mineog:_ I didn't follow you out beyond this world with craving
+for the repose of your soul. It is nothing at all beside what you
+wrote.
+
+_Hazel:_ Oh, I bear no grudge at all against you. I am not huffy
+and crabbed like yourself to go taking offence. Sure Kings and big
+people of the sort are used to see their dead-notices made ready
+from the hour of their birth out. And it is not anything printed on
+papers or any flight of words on the _Tribune_ could give me any
+concern at all. See now will I be put out. _(Reads.)_ What now is
+this? "Mr. Hazel was of good race, having in him the old stock of
+the country, the Mahons, the O'Hagans, the Casserlys----." Where now
+did you get that? I never heard before, a Casserly to be in my
+fathers.
+
+_Mineog:_ It might be on the side of the mother.
+
+_Hazel:_ It was not. My mother was a girl of the Hessians that was
+born in the year of the French. My grandmother was Winefred Kane.
+
+_Mineog:_ What is being out in one name towards drawing down the
+forecast of all classes of deaths upon myself?
+
+_Hazel:_ There are twenty thousand things you might lay down and I
+would give them no leave to annoy me. But I have no mind any strange
+family to be mixed through me, but to go my own road and to carry my
+own character.
+
+_Mineog:_ I would say you to be very crabbed to be making much of
+a small little mistake of the sort.
+
+_Hazel:_ I will not have blood put in my veins that never rose up
+in them by birth. You to have put a slur maybe on the whole of my
+posterity for ever. That now is a thing out of measure.
+
+_Mineog:_ It might be the Casserlys are as fair as the Hessians,
+and as well looking and as well reared.
+
+_Hazel:_ There's no one can know that. What place owns them? My
+tribe didn't come inside the province. Every generation was born and
+bred in this or in some neighbouring townland.
+
+_Mineog:_ Sure you will be but yourself whatever family may be
+laying claim to you.
+
+_Hazel:_ Any person of the Casserlys to have done a wrong deed at
+any time, the neighbours would be watching and probing my own brood
+till they would see might the track of it break out in any way. It
+ran through our race to be hard tempered, from the Kanes that are
+very hot.
+
+_Mineog:_ Why would the family of the Casserlys go doing wrong
+deeds more than another?
+
+_Hazel:_ I would never forgive it, if it was the highest man in
+Connacht said it.
+
+_Mineog:_ I tell you there to be any flaw in them, it would have
+worked itself out in yourself ere this.
+
+_Hazel:_ Putting on me the weight of a family I never knew or
+never heard the name of at all. It is that is killing me entirely.
+
+_Mineog:_ Neither did I ever hear their name or if they ever lived
+in the world, or did any deed good or bad in it at all.
+
+_Hazel:_ What made you drag them hither for to write them in my
+genealogies so?
+
+_Mineog:_ I did not drag them hither----Give me that paper.
+_(Takes MS. and looks at it.)_ What would it be but a misprint?
+Hessian, Casserly. There does be great resemblance in the sound of a
+double S.
+
+_Hazel:_ Whether or no, you have a great wrong done me! The person
+I had most dependence on to be the most person to annoy me! If it
+was a man from the County Mayo I wouldn't see him treated that way!
+
+_Mineog:_ Have sense now! What would signify anything might be
+wrote about you, and the green scraws being over your head?
+
+_Hazel:_ That's the worst! I give you my oath I would not go
+miching from death or be in terror of the sharpness of his bones,
+and he coming as at the Flood to sweep the living world along with me,
+and leave no man on earth having penmanship to handle my deeds, or
+to put his own skin on my story!
+
+_Mineog:_ Ah it's likely the both of us will be forgotten and our
+names along with us, and we out in the meadow of the dead.
+
+_Hazel:_ I will not be forgotten! I have posterity will put a good
+slab over me. Not like some would be left without a monument, unless
+it might be the rags of a cast waistcoat would be put on sticks in a
+barley garden, to go flapping at the thieves of the air.
+
+_Mineog:_ Let the birds or the neighbours go screech after me and
+welcome, and I not in it to hear or to be annoyed.
+
+_Hazel:_ Why wouldn't we hear? I'm in dread it's too much I'll hear,
+and you yourself sending such news to travel abroad, that there is
+blood in me I concealed through my lifetime!
+
+_Mineog:_ What you are saying now has not the sense of reason.
+
+_Hazel:_ Tom Mineog to say that of me, that was my trusty comrade
+and my friend, what at all will strangers be putting out about me?
+
+_Mineog:_ Ah, what call have you to go lamenting as if you had
+lost all on this side of the sea!
+
+_Hazel:_ You to have brought that annoyance on me, what would
+enemies be saying of me? That it was in my breed to be cracked or to
+have a thorn in the tongue. There's a generation of families would
+be great with you, and behind you they would be backbiting you.
+
+_Mineog:_ They will not. You are of a family doesn't know how to
+say a wrong word.
+
+_Hazel:_ A rabbit mushroom they might say me to be, with no memory
+behind or around me!
+
+_Mineog:_ Not at all. The world knows you to be civil and brought
+up to mannerly ways.
+
+_Hazel:_ They might say me to have been a foreigner or a Jew man!
+
+_Mineog:_ I can bear witness you have no such yellow look. And
+Hazel is a natural name.
+
+_Hazel:_ It's likely they'll say I was a sheep-stealer or a tinker
+that went foraging around after food!
+
+_Mineog:_ You that never put your hand on a rabbit burrow or stood
+before a magistrate or a judge!
+
+_Hazel:_ They'll put me down as a grabber that was ready to quench
+a widow's fire!
+
+_Mineog:_ Oh, where are you running to at all my dear man!
+
+_Hazel:_ And I not to be able at that time to rise up and to get
+satisfaction! I to be wandering as a shadow and to see some schemer
+spilling out his lies! That would be the most grief in death! I to
+hit him a blow of my fist and he maybe not to feel it or to think it
+to be but a breeze of wind!
+
+_Mineog:_ You are going too far entirely!
+
+_Hazel:_ I to give out a strong curse on him and on his posterity
+and his land. It would kill my heart if he would take it to be no
+human voice, but some vanity like the hissing of geese!
+
+_Mineog:_ I myself would recognise your voice, and you to be
+living or dead.
+
+_Hazel:_ You say that now. But my ghost to come calling to you in
+the night time to rise up and to clear my character, you would run
+shivering to the priest as from some unnatural thing. You would call
+to him to come banish me with a Mass!
+
+_Mineog:_ The Lord be between us and harm.
+
+_Hazel:_ To have no power of revenge after death! My strength to
+go nourish weeds and grass! A lie to be told and I living I could go
+lay my case before the courts. So I will too! I'll silence you! I'll
+learn you to have done with misspellings and with death notices!
+I'll hinder you bringing in Casserlys! I go take advice from the
+lawyer! _(Goes towards door.)_
+
+_Mineog:_ I'll go lay down my own case and the way that you have
+my life threatened!
+
+_Hazel:_ I'll get justice and a hearing. The Judge will give in to
+my say!
+
+_Mineog:_ I that will put you under bail! I'll bind you over to
+quit prophesying!
+
+_Hazel:_ I'll break the bail of the sun and moon before I'll give
+you leave to go brand me with strange names the same as you would
+tarbrand a sheep! I'll put yourself and your _Tribune_ under the law
+of libel!
+
+_Mineog:_ I'll make a world's wonder of you! I'll give plenty and
+enough to the _Champion_ to fill out its windy pages that time!
+
+_Hazel: (At door.)_ I will lay my information before you will
+overtake me!
+
+_Mineog: (Seizing him.)_ I will lay my information against you for
+theft and you bringing away my coat!
+
+_Hazel:_ I have no intention of bringing it away!
+
+_Mineog:_ Is it that you will deny it? Don't I know that spot of
+grease on the sleeve?
+
+_Hazel:_ Did I never carve a goose? Why wouldn't there be a spot
+of grease on my own sleeve?
+
+_Mineog:_ Strip it off of you this minute!
+
+_Hazel:_ Give me back my own coat, so!
+
+_Mineog:_ What are you talking about! That's a great wonder now.
+So it is not my own coat.
+
+_Hazel:_ Strip it off before you will quit the room!
+
+_Mineog:_ I'll be well pleased casting it off!
+
+_Hazel:_ You will not cast it on the dust and the dirt of the floor!
+_(Helps him.)_ Go easy now.----That's it----
+
+   _(Takes it off gently and places it on chair.)_
+
+_Mineog:_ Give me now my own coat!
+
+_Hazel: (Struggling with it.)_ It fails me to get it off.
+
+_Mineog:_ What way did you get it on?
+
+_Hazel:_ It is that it is made too narrow.
+
+_Mineog:_ No, but yourself that has too much bulk.
+
+_Hazel: (Struggling.)_ There now is a tear!
+
+_Mineog: (Taking his arm.)_ Mind now, you'll have it destroyed.
+
+_Hazel:_ Give me a hand, so.
+
+_Mineog: (Helping him gently.)_ Have a care--it's a bit tender in
+the seams----give me here your hand--it is caught in the rip of the
+lining.
+
+_John: (Coming in, puts pie on table.)_ Wait now, sir, till I'll
+aid you to handle Mr. Hazel's coat.
+
+   _(Whips off coat, takes up other coat, hangs both on pegs.)_
+
+The apple pie, Sir.
+
+   _(Hazel sits down, gasping and wiping his face.
+      Mineog turns his back.)_
+
+_John:_ Is there anything after happening, Mr. Hazel?
+
+_Hazel:_ There is not--unless some sort of a battle.
+
+_John:_ Ah, what signifies? There to be more of battles in the
+world there would be less of wars.
+
+   _(He pushes Mineog's chair to table.)_
+
+_Hazel: (After a pause.)_ Apple pie?
+
+_Mineog: (Sitting down.)_ Indeed, I am not any way inclined for
+eating.
+
+   _(Takes plate. John stuffs a cushion into window pane and picks up
+    MSS.)_
+
+_John:_ Are these belonging to you, Mr. Mineog?
+
+_Mineog:_ Let you throw them on the coals of the fire, where we
+have no use for them presently.
+
+_Hazel: (Stopping John and taking them.)_ Thursday is very near at
+hand. Two empty columns is a large space to go fill.
+
+_Mineog:_ Indeed I am feeling no way fit to go writing columns.
+
+_Hazel: (Putting his MS. in his pocket.)_ There is nothing ails
+them only to begin a good way after the start, and to stop before
+the finish.
+
+_Mineog: (Putting his MS. in his pocket.)_ We'll do that. We can
+put such part of them as we do not need at this time back in the
+shelf of the press.
+
+_Hazel: (Filling glasses and lifting his.)_ That it may be long
+before they will be needed!
+
+_Mineog: (Lifting glass.)_ That they may _never_ be needed!
+
+_Curtain_
+
+
+
+
+
+
+DAMER'S GOLD
+
+  A COMEDY IN TWO ACTS
+
+PERSONS
+
+_Patrick Kirwan_      CALLED DAMER
+_Staffy Kirwan_         HIS BROTHER
+_Delia Hessian_         HIS SISTER
+_Ralph Hessian_           HER HUSBAND
+_Simon Niland_        THEIR NEPHEW
+
+
+
+
+
+DAMER'S GOLD
+
+
+ACT I
+
+
+   _Scene: The kitchen in Damer's house. Outer door at back. Door
+   leading to an inner room to right. A dresser, a table, and a couple
+   of chairs. An old coat and hat hanging on the wall. A knocking is
+   heard at door at back. It is unlatched from outside. Delia comes in_.
+
+_Delia: (Looking round cautiously and going back to door.)_ You
+may come in, Staffy and Ralph. There would seem to be no person here.
+
+_Staffy:_ Take care would Damer ask us to cross the threshold at
+all. I would not ask to go pushing on him, but to wait till he would
+call to us himself. He is not an easy led man.
+
+_Delia: (Crossing and knocking at inner door.)_ He is not in it.
+He is likely slipped out unknownst.
+
+_Ralph:_ Herself that thought to find him at the brink of death
+and nearing his last leap, after what happened him with the jennet.
+We heard tell of it as far as we were.
+
+_Delia:_ What ailed him to go own a jennet, he that has means to
+stable a bay horse would set the windows rattling on the public road,
+and it sparkling over the flintstones after dark?
+
+_Staffy:_ Sure he owns no fourfooted beast only the dog abroad in
+its box. To make its way into the haggard the jennet did, the time
+it staggered him with a kick. To forage out some grazing it thought
+to do, beyond dirt and scutchgrass among the stones. Very cross
+jennets do be, as it is a cross man it met with.
+
+_Delia:_ A queer sort of a brother he is. To go searching Ireland
+you wouldn't find queerer. But as soon as I got word what happened I
+bade Ralph to put the tacklings on the ass. We must have nature
+about us some way. There was silence between us long enough.
+
+_Ralph:_ She was thinking it might be the cause of him getting his
+death sooner than God has it promised to him, and that it might turn
+his mind more friendly like towards us, he knowing us to be at hand
+for to settle out his burying.
+
+_Delia:_ Why wouldn't it, and we being all the brothers and
+sisters ever he had, since Jane Niland, God rest her soul, went out
+last Little Christmas from the troubles and torments of the world.
+
+_Staffy:_ There is nothing left of that marriage now, only one
+young lad is said to be mostly a fool.
+
+_Delia:_ It is ourselves can bear witness to that, where he came
+into the house ere yesterday, having no way of living, since death
+and misfortune scattered him, but as if he was left down out of the
+skies.
+
+_Ralph:_ He has not, unless the pound piece the mother put into
+his hand at the last. It is much she had that itself. The time Tom
+Niland died from her, he didn't leave her hardly the cat.
+
+_Staffy:_ The lad to have any wit around him he would have come
+travelling hither along with yourselves, to see would he knock any
+kindness out of Damer.
+
+_Ralph:_ It is what herself was saying, it would be no advantage
+to him to be coming here at all, he being as he is half light, where
+there is nothing only will or wit could pick any profit out of Damer.
+She did not let on to him what side were we facing, and we
+travelling out from Loughtyshassy.
+
+_Staffy:_ It is likely he will get tidings as good as yourself. It
+is said, and said largely, Damer has a full gallon jar of gold.
+
+_Ralph:_ There is no one could lift it--God bless it--they were
+telling me. Filled up it is and brimmed to the very brink.
+
+_Staffy:_ His heart and his soul gone into it. He is death on that
+gallon of gold.
+
+_Delia:_ He would give leave to the poorhouse to bury him, if he
+could but put in his will they should leave it down with his bones.
+
+_Staffy:_ A man could live an easy life surely and that much being
+in the house.
+
+_Delia:_ There is no more grasping man within the four walls of
+the world. A strange thing he turning to be so ugly and prone to
+misery, where he was reared along with myself. I have the first
+covetous person yet to meet I would like! I never would go thrusting
+after gold, I to get all Lord Clanricarde's estate.
+
+_Ralph:_ She never would, only at a time she might have her own
+means spent and consumed.
+
+_Staffy:_ The house is very racked beside what it was. The
+hungriest cabin in the whole ring of Connemara would not show out so
+empty and so bare.
+
+_Delia: (Taking up a jug.)_ No sign in this vessel of anything
+that would leave a sign. I'll go bail he takes his tea in a black
+state, and the milk to be rotting in the churn.
+
+_Ralph: (Handling a coat and hat hanging on a nail.)_ That's a
+queer cut of a hat. That now should have been a good top-coat in its
+time.
+
+_Delia:_ For pity's sake! That is the top-coat and the hat he used
+to be wearing and he riding his long-tailed pony to every racecourse
+from this to the Curragh of Kildare. A good class of cloth it should
+be to last out through seventeen years.
+
+_Staffy:_ The time he was young and fundless he had not a bad
+reaching hand. He never was thrifty but lavish till he came into the
+ownership of the land. It is as if his luck left him, he growing
+timid at the time he had means to lose.
+
+_Delia:_ Every horse he would back at that time it would surely
+win all before it. I saw the people thronging him one time, taking
+him in their arms for joy, and the winnings coming into his hand. It
+is likely they ran out through the fingers as swift nearly as they
+flowed in.
+
+_Staffy:_ He grew to be very dark and crabbed from the time of the
+father's death. His mind was on his halfpenny ever since.
+
+_Delia: (Looking at dresser.)_ Spiders' webs heaped in ridges the
+same as windrows in a bleach of hay. What now is that there above on
+the upper shelf?
+
+_Ralph: (Taking it from top shelf.)_ It is but a pack of cards.
+
+_Staffy:_ They should maybe be the very same that brought him
+profit in his wild days. He always had a lucky hand.
+
+_Delia: (Dusting them.)_ You would give your seven oaths the dust
+to have been gathering on them since the time of the Hebrews' Flood.
+I'll tell you now a thing to do. We being here before him in the
+house, why wouldn't we ready it and put some sort of face upon it,
+the way he would be in humour with us coming in.
+
+_Ralph:_ And the way he might incline to put into our hand some
+good promise or some gift.
+
+_Delia: (Dusting.)_ I would wish no gift from any person at all,
+but that my mind is set at this time on a fleet of white goats and a
+guinea-hen are to be canted out from the Spanish woman at Lisatuwna
+cross by reason of the hanging gale.
+
+_Staffy:_ That was the way with you, Delia, from the time you
+could look out from the half-door, to be coveting pictures and
+fooleries, that would shape themselves in your mind.
+
+_Delia:_ There is no sin coveting things are of no great use or
+profit, but would show out good and have some grandeur around them.
+Those goats now! Browsing on the blossoms of the bushes they would be,
+or the herbs that give out a sweet smell. Stir yourself, Staffy, and
+throw your eye on that turf beyond in the corner. It is that wet you
+could wring from it splashes and streams. Let you rise the ashes
+from the sods are on the hearth and redden them with a goosewing, if
+there is a goosewing to be found. There is no greater beauty to be
+met with than the leaping of a little yellow flame.
+
+_Staffy:_ In my opinion there will no pay-day come for this work,
+but only a thank-you job; a County Clare payment, 'God spare you the
+health!'
+
+_Delia:_ Let you do it, Ralph so. _(Takes potatoes from a sieve.)_
+A roasted potato would be a nice thing to put before him, in the
+place of this old crust of a loaf. Put them in now around the sods,
+the way they will be crispy before him.
+
+_Ralph: (Taking them.)_ And the way he will see you are a good
+housekeeper and will mind well anything he might think fit to give.
+
+_Delia: (At clock.)_ I'll set to the right time of day the two
+hands of the clock are pointing a full hour before the sun. Take,
+Staffy, that pair of shoes and lessen from them the clay of the land.
+That much of doing will not break your heart. He will be as proud as
+the fallen angels seeing the way we have all set out before him.
+
+   _(A harsh laugh is heard at inner door. They turn and see Damer
+    watching them.)_
+
+_Ralph:_ Glory be to God!
+
+_Delia:_ It is Damer was within all the time!
+
+_Staffy:_ What are you talking about, Delia? It is Patrick you
+were meaning to say.
+
+_Damer:_ Let her go on prattling out Damer to my face, as it is
+often she called it behind my shoulders. Damer the chandler, the
+miser got the spoil of the Danes, that was mocked at since the time
+of the Danes. I know well herself and the world have me christened
+with that nickname.
+
+_Ralph:_ Ah, it is not to dispraise you they put it on you, but to
+show you out so wealthy and so rich.
+
+_Damer:_ I am thinking it is not love of my four bones brings you
+on this day under my thatch?
+
+_Staffy:_ We heard tell you were after being destroyed with a
+jennet.
+
+_Damer:_ Picking up newses and tidings of me ye do be. It is short
+the delay was on you coming.
+
+_Delia:_ And I after travelling through the most of the day on the
+head of you being wounded and hurt, thinking you to be grieving to
+see one of your own! And I in dread of my life stealing past your
+wicked dog.
+
+_Damer:_ My joy he is, scaring you with his bark! If it wasn't for
+him you would have me clogged and tormented, coming in and bothering
+me every whole minute.
+
+_Delia:_ There is no person in Ireland only yourself but would
+have as much welcome for me to-day as on the first day ever they saw
+me!
+
+_Damer:_ What's that you are doing with my broom?
+
+_Delia:_ To do away with the spider's webs I did, where the
+shelves were looped with them and smothered. Look at all that came
+off of that pack of cards.
+
+_Damer:_ What call had you to do away with them, and they
+belonging to myself? Is it to bleed to death I should and I to get a
+tip of a billhook or a slasher? You and your vagaries to have left
+me bare, that I would be without means to quench the blood, and it
+to rise up from my veins and to scatter on every side!
+
+_Delia:_ Is it that you are without e'er a rag, and that ancient
+coat to be hanging on the wall?
+
+_Damer:_ The place swept to flitters! What is that man of yours
+doing and he handling my turf?
+
+_Ralph:_ It was herself thought to be serviceable to you, setting
+out the fuel that was full of dampness where it would get an air of
+the fire.
+
+_Damer:_ To dry it is it? _(Seizes sods and takes them from the
+hearth.)_ And what length would it be without being burned and
+consumed and it not to be wet putting it on? _(Pours water over it.)_
+And I after stacking it purposely in the corner where there does be
+a drip from the thatch.
+
+_Ralph:_ She but thought it would be more answerable to you being
+dry.
+
+_Damer:_ What way could I bear the expense of a fire on the hearth
+and it to leave smouldering and to break out into a blaze? A month's
+cutting maybe to go to ashes within three minutes, and into wisps of
+smoke. And the price of turf in this year gone wild out of measure,
+and it packed so roguish you could read the printed speeches on the
+paper through the sods you do be buying in the creel.
+
+_Staffy:_ I was saying myself not to meddle with it. It is hurry
+is a worse friend than delay.
+
+_Damer:_ Where did you get those spuds are roasting there upon
+the hearth?
+
+_Ralph:_ Herself that brought them out from the sieve, thinking to
+make ready your meal.
+
+_Damer:_ My seed potatoes! Samples I got from the guardians and
+asked in the shops and in stores till I'd gather enough to set a few
+ridges in the gardens would serve me through the length of the year!
+
+_Delia:_ Let you be satisfied so with your mouldy bit of loaf.
+   _(Breaks a bit from it and hands it to him.)_
+
+_Damer:_ Do not be breaking it so wasteful! The mice to have news
+there was as much as that of crumbs in the house, they would be
+running the same as chickens around the floor!
+
+_Ralph:_ Thinking to be comfortable to you she was, the way you
+would make us welcome from this out.
+
+_Damer:_ Which of ye is after meddling with my clock?
+
+_Delia:_ It was a full hour before its time.
+
+_Darner:_ It to be beyond its time, wouldn't that save fire and
+candles sending me to my bed early in the night? Leave down those
+boots! _(Takes them from Staffy.)_ Is it that you are wearing out
+the uppers with scraping at them and scratching! Is it to rob me ye
+are come into this place?
+
+_Delia:_ I tell you we only came in getting word that you were
+done and dying.
+
+_Damer:_ Ha! Is it to think I was dying ye did? Well, I am not. I
+am not so easy quenched. Strength and courage I have, to keep a fast
+grip of what I own.
+
+_Delia:_ Let you not be talking that way! We are no grabbers and
+no thieves!
+
+_Damer:_ I have it in my mind that ye are. Very ravenous to run
+through my money ye are.
+
+_Delia:_ The world knows I am not ravenous! I never gave my heart
+to silver or to gold but only to the thing it would bring in. But to
+hold from me the thing my heart is craving after, you might as well
+blacken the hearth.
+
+_Damer:_ Striving to scare me out of my courage and my wits, the
+way I'll give in to go making my will.
+
+_Ralph:_ She would not be wishful you to do that the time your
+mind would be vexed.
+
+_Damer:_ I'll make it, sick or sound, if I have a mind to make it.
+
+_Delia:_ Little thanks you'll get from me if you make it or do not
+make it. That is the naked truth.
+
+_Damer:_ The whole of ye think yourselves to be very managing and
+very wise!
+
+_Delia:_ Let you go will it so to an asylum for fools.
+
+_Damer:_ Why wouldn't I? It is in the asylums all the sense is
+these times. There is only the fools left outside.
+
+_Delia:_ You to bestow it outside of your own kindred for to
+benefit and comfort your soul, all the world will say it is that you
+had it gathered together by fraud.
+
+_Staffy:_ Do not be annoying him now.
+
+_Delia:_ I will not. But the time he will be lying under the
+flagstone, it is holly rods and brambles will spring up from out of
+his thorny heart.
+
+_Damer:_ A hasty, cranky woman in the house is worse than you to
+lay your hand upon red coals! I know well your tongue that is as
+sharp as the sickle of the moon!
+
+_Delia:_ The character you will leave after you will be worse out
+and out than Herod's!
+
+_Damer:_ The devil upon the winds she is! That one was born into
+the world having the use of the bow and arrows!
+
+_Delia:_ You not to give fair play to your own, it is a pitiful
+ghost will appear in your image, questing and craving our prayers!
+
+_Damer:_ I know well what is your aim and your drift!
+
+_Delia:_ I say any man has a right to give thanks to the heavens,
+and he having decent people to will his means to, in place of people
+having no call to it.
+
+_Damer:_ Whoever I'll will it to will have call to it!
+
+_Delia:_ Or to part with it to low people and to mean people, and
+you having it to give.
+
+_Damer:_ Having it to give is it? Do you see that lock on the door?
+
+_Delia:_ I do see it and have eyes to see it.
+
+_Damer:_ Can you make any guess what is inside of it?
+
+_Delia:_ It is likely it is what there is so much talk about, your
+own full gallon of gold.
+
+   _(Ralph takes off his hat.)_
+
+_Damer:_ Lay now your eye to that lock hole.
+
+_Ralph: (Looking through keyhole.)_ It is all dusky within. It
+fails me to see any shining thing.
+
+   _(Staffy and Delia put their eyes to keyhole but draw back
+    disappointed.)_
+
+_Darner:_ If you cannot see it, try can you get the smell of it.
+Take a good draw of it now; lay your head along the hinges of the
+door. So now ye may quit and scamper out of this, the whole throng
+of ye, robbers and hangmen and bankbreakers, bargers and bad
+characters, and you may believe me telling you that is the nearest
+ye ever will come to my gold!
+
+   _(He bangs back into room locking door after him.)_
+
+_Delia:_ He has no more nature than the brutes of the field,
+hunting and howling after us.
+
+_Staffy:_ Yourself that rose him out of his wits and his senses.
+We will sup sorrow for this day's work where he will put curses
+after us. It is best for us go back to my place. It may be to-morrow
+that his anger will be cured up.
+
+_Ralph:_ I thought it was to lay him out with candles we were
+brought here. I declare I came nearer furnishing out a corpse myself
+with the start I got.
+
+_Delia:_ There is no dread on me. When he gets in humour I will
+tackle up again to him. It is too far I came to be facing back to
+Loughtyshassy and I fasting from the price of my goats! Little
+collars I was thinking to buckle around their neck the same as a
+lady's lapdog, and maybe so far as a small clear-sounding bell.
+
+   _(They go out, Damer comes back. He puts on clock, rakes out fire,
+   picks up potatoes and puts them back in sieve, takes bread into his
+   room. There is a knock at the door. Then it is cautiously opened and
+   Simon Niland comes in, and stands near the hearth. Damer comes back
+   and sees him.)_
+
+_Damer:_ What are you looking for?
+
+_Simon:_ For what I won't get seemingly, that is a welcome.
+
+_Damer:_ Maybe it's for fists you are looking?
+
+_Simon:_ It is not, before I will get my rest. I couldn't box
+to-night if I was the Queen of England.
+
+_Damer:_ Have you any traffic with that congregation is after
+going out?
+
+_Simon:_ I seen no person good or bad, but a dog and it on the
+chain.
+
+_Damer:_ You to have in you any of the breed of the Kirwans that
+is my own, I'd rise the tongs and pitch you out from the door!
+
+_Simon:_ I suppose you would not begrudge me to rest myself for a
+while, _(Sits down.)_
+
+_Damer:_ I'll give leave to no strolling vagabond to sit in any
+place at all.
+
+_Simon:_ All right so.
+   _(Tosses a coin he takes from his pocket, tied in a spotted
+    handkerchief.)_
+
+_Damer:_ What's that you're doing?
+
+_Simon:_ Pitching a coin I was to see would it bid me go west or
+east.
+
+_Damer:_ Go toss outside so.
+
+_Simon: (Stooping and groping.)_ I will after I will find it.
+
+_Damer:_ Hurry on now.
+
+_Simon:_ Wait till I'll kindle a match.
+   _(Lights one and picks up coin.)_
+
+_Damer:_ What is that in your hand?
+
+_Simon:_ You should know.
+
+_Damer:_ Is it gold it is?
+
+_Simon:_ It is all I have of means in the world. I never handled a
+coin before it, but my bite to be given me and my bed.
+
+_Damer:_ You'll mind it well if you have sense.
+
+_Simon:_ It is towards the east it bade me go. I'll travel as far
+as the races of Knockbarron to-morrow.
+
+_Damer:_ You'll be apt to lose it going to races.
+
+_Simon:_ I'll go bet with it, and see what way will it turn out.
+
+_Damer:_ You to set all you own upon a horse that might fail at
+the leaps! It is a very foolish thing doing that.
+
+_Simon:_ It might not. Some have luck and are born lucky and more
+have run through their luck. If I lose it, it is lost. It would not
+keep me long anyway. I to win, I will have more and plenty.
+
+_Damer:_ You will surely lose it.
+
+_Simon:_ If I do I have nothing to get or to fall back on. It is
+some other one must take my charges.
+
+_Damer:_ A great pity to go lose a gold sovereign to some schemer
+you never saw before.
+
+_Simon:_ Sure you must take some risk. You cannot put your hands
+around the world.
+
+_Damer:_ It to be swept by a trick of the loop man!
+
+_Simon:_ It is not with that class I will make free.
+
+_Damer:_ To go lose the whole of it in one second of time!
+
+_Simon:_ I will make four divides of it.
+
+_Damer:_ To go change it into silver and into copper! That would
+be the most pity in the world.
+
+_Simon:_ I'll chance it all upon the one jock so.
+
+_Damer:_ Gold! Believe me it is a good thing to hold and a very
+heartbreak the time it is lost. _(Takes it in his hand.)_ Pure gold!
+There is not a thing to be got with it as worthy as what it is itself!
+There is no comfort in any place and it not in it. The Queen's image
+on it and her crown. Solid between the fingers; weighty in the palm
+of the hand; as beautiful as ever I saw.
+
+_Simon:_ It is likely it is the same nearly as any other one.
+
+_Damer:_ Gold! My darling it is! From the hollows of the world to
+the heights of the world there is no grander thing to be found. My
+bone and my marrow! Let me have the full of my arms of it and I'll
+not ask the flowers of field or fallow or the dancing of the Easter
+sun!
+
+_Simon:_ I am thinking you should be Damer. I heard said Damer has
+a full crock of gold.
+
+_Damer:_ He has not! He has not!
+
+_Simon:_ That is what the world says anyway. I heard it as far as
+the seaside.
+
+_Damer:_ I wish to my God it was true!
+
+_Simon:_ Full and brimming to the brink. That is the way it was
+told.
+
+_Damer:_ It is not full! It is not! Whisper now. It is many a time
+I thought it to be full, full at last, full at last!
+
+_Simon:_ And it wasn't after?
+
+_Damer:_ To take it and to shake it I do. It is often I gave
+myself a promise the time there will be no sound from it, I will
+give in to nourish myself, I will rise out of misery. But every time
+I will try it, I will hear a little clatter that tells me there is
+some space left; some small little hole or gap.
+
+_Simon:_ What signifies that when you have so much in it?
+
+_Damer:_ Weightier it gets and weightier, but there will always be
+that little sound. I thought to stop it one time, putting in a
+fistful of hayseed; but I felt in my heart that was not dealing fair
+and honest with myself, and I rose up and shook it out again, rising
+up from my bed in the night time. I near got my death with the cold
+and the draught fell on me doing that.
+
+_Simon:_ It is best for me be going on where I might find my bed,
+
+_Damer:_ Hearken now. I am old and the long road behind me. You
+are young and in your strength. It is you is rich, it is I myself
+that is poor. You know well, you to get the offer, you would not
+change your lot with my own.
+
+_Simon:_ I suppose I might not. I'd as lief keep my countenance
+and my run.
+
+_Darner:_ Isn't it a great pity there to be that hollow within in
+my gallon, and the little coin that would likely just fill it up, to
+be going out of the house?
+
+_Simon:_ Is it that you are asking it of me?
+
+_Damer:_ You might never find so good a way to open Heaven to
+yourself with a charity. To be bringing peace to an old man that has
+not long to live in the world! You wouldn't think now how quiet I
+would sleep, and the good dreams would be going through me, and that
+gallon jar to be full and to make no sound the time I would roll it
+on the floor. That would be a great deed for one little pound piece
+to do!
+
+_Simon:_ I'll toss you for it.
+
+_Damer:_ I would not dare put anything at all upon a chance.
+
+_Simon:_ Leave it alone so. _(Turns away.)_
+
+_Damer: (Seizing him.)_ It would make such a good appearance in
+the little gap!
+
+_Simon:_ Head or harp?
+
+_Damer:_ No, I'm in dread I might lose.
+
+_Simon:_ Take your chance or leave it.
+
+_Damer:_ I to lose, you may kill me on the moment! My heart is
+driven down in the sole of my shoe!
+
+_Simon:_ That is poor courage.
+
+_Damer:_ There is some shiver forewarning me I will lose! I made a
+strong oath I never would give in again to try any sort of chance.
+
+_Simon:_ You didn't make it but with yourself.
+
+_Damer:_ It was through my luck leaving me I swore against betting
+and gaming.
+
+_Simon:_ It might turn back fresh and hearty where you gave it so
+long a rest.
+
+_Damer:_ Well--maybe----
+
+_Simon:_ Here now.
+
+_Damer:_ I dare not.
+
+_Simon: (Going to door.)_ I'll make my bet so according to a dream
+I had. It is on a red horse I will put it to-morrow.
+
+_Damer:_ No--stop--wait a minute.
+
+_Simon:_ I'll win surely following my dream.
+
+_Damer:_ I might not lose.
+
+_Simon:_ I'm in dread of that. All turns to the man is rich.
+
+_Damer:_ I'll chance it!
+
+_Simon:_ You said no and I'll take no.
+
+_Damer:_ You cannot go back of your word.
+
+_Simon:_ Let me go out from you tempting me.
+
+_Damer: (Seizing him.)_ Heads! I say heads!
+
+_Simon:_ Harps it is. I win.
+
+_Damer:_ My bitter grief! Ochone!
+
+_Simon:_ I'll toss you for another.
+
+_Damer:_ You will not. What's tosses? Look at here what is put in
+my way! _(Holds up pack of cards.)_
+
+_Simon:_ Where's the stakes?
+
+_Damer:_ Wait a second. _(Goes into room.)_
+
+_Simon:_ Hurry on or I won't stop.
+
+_Damer:_ Let you not stir out of that!
+   _(Comes back and throws money on table.)_
+
+_Simon:_ Come on so.
+   _(Shuffles cards.)_
+
+_Darner:_ Give me the pack. _(Cuts.)_ I didn't feel a card between
+my fingers this seven and a half-score years!
+
+_Simon:_ Spades are trumps.
+
+_Darner: (Lighting candle.)_ I'll win it back! I won't begrudge
+spending a penny candle, no, or two penny candles! I'll play you to
+the brink of day!
+
+_Curtain_
+
+
+
+
+ACT II
+
+
+   _The next morning. The same kitchen. Simon Niland is lying asleep
+   on the hearth. Ralph and Staffy are looking at him_.
+
+_Staffy:_ Who is it at all is in it?
+
+_Ralph:_ Who would it be but Simon Niland, that is come following
+after us.
+
+_Staffy:_ Stretched and sleeping all the same as if there was a
+pin of slumber in his hair, as in the early times of the world. The
+day passing without anything doing. That one will never win to a
+fortune.
+
+_Ralph:_ It would be as well for ourselves maybe he not to be too
+great with Damer.
+
+_Staffy:_ Will Delia make any headway I wonder. She had good
+courage to go face him, and he abroad on the land, sitting stooped
+on the bent body of a bush.
+
+_Ralph:_ I wonder what way did that lad make his way into this
+place. Wait now till I'll waken and question him.
+
+   _(Shakes Simon.)_
+
+_Simon: (Drowsily.)_ Who is that stirring me?
+
+_Ralph:_ Rouse yourself up now.
+
+_Simon:_ Do not be rousing me, where I am striving to catch a hold
+of the tail of my last dream.
+
+_Staffy:_ Is it seeking for a share of Damer's wealth you are come?
+
+_Simon:_ I never asked and never looked for it.
+
+_Staffy:_ You are going the wrong road to reach to it.
+
+_Simon:_ A bald cat there was in the dream, was keeping watch over
+jewelleries in a cave.
+
+_Staffy:_ No person at all would stretch out his hand to a lad
+would be rambling and walking the world, and it in its darkness and
+sleep, and be drowsing and miching from labour through the hours the
+sun has command of.
+
+_Delia: (At the door)_. Is it that ye are within, Staffy and Ralph?
+
+_Ralph:_ We are, and another along with us.
+
+_Delia:_ Put him out the door!
+
+_Ralph:_ Ah, there's no danger of him coming around Damer. He is
+simple and has queer talk too.
+
+_Delia:_ Put him out I say! _(Pushes Simon to door.)_ Let him
+drowse out the day in the car shed! I tell you Damer is at hand!
+
+_Ralph:_ Has he the frown on him yet?
+
+_Staffy:_ Did his anger anyway cool down?
+
+_Delia:_ He is coming I say. I am partly in dread of him. I am
+afeard and affrighted!
+
+_Ralph:_ He should be in terrible rages so. There was no dread on
+you yesterday, and he cursing and roaring the way he was.
+
+_Delia:_ He is mad this time out and out. Wait now till you'll see!
+
+   _(She goes behind dresser. Damer comes to the door. Staffy goes
+    behind a chair. Ralph seizes a broom.)_
+
+_Damer: (At door.)_ Are you acquainted with any person, Ralph
+Hessian, is in need of a savage dog?
+
+_Staffy:_ Is it that you are about to part Jubair your dog?
+
+_Damer:_ I have no use for him presently.
+
+_Staffy:_ Is it that you are without dread of robbers coming for
+to knock in your skull with a stone? Or maybe out in the night it is
+to burn you out of the house they would.
+
+_Damer:_ What signifies, what signifies? All must die, all must die.
+The longest person that will live in the world, he is bound to go in
+the heel. Life is a long road to travel and a hard rough track under
+the feet.
+
+_Staffy:_ Mike Merrick the huckster has an apple garden bought
+against the harvest. He should likely be seeking for a dog. There do
+be little lads passing to the school.
+
+_Damer:_ He might want him, he might want him.
+   _(He leans upon half-door.)_
+
+_Staffy:_ Is it that you are tired and wore out carrying the load
+of your wealth?
+
+_Damer:_ It is a bad load surely. It was the love of money
+destroyed Buonaparte where he went robbing a church, without the men
+of learning are telling lies.
+
+_Staffy:_ I would never go so far as robbery, but to bid it
+welcome I would, and it coming fair and easy into my hand.
+
+_Damer:_ There was a king out in Foreign went astray through the
+same sin. His people that made a mockery of him after his death,
+filling up his jaws with rendered gold. Believe me, any person goes
+coveting after riches puts himself under a bad master.
+
+_Staffy:_ That is a master I'd be willing to engage with, he to
+give me my victuals and my ease.
+
+_Damer:_ In my opinion it was to keep temptation from our path the
+gold of the world was covered under rocks and in the depths of the
+streams. Believe me it is best leave it where it is, and not to
+meddle with the Almighty.
+
+_Staffy:_ You'd be best without it. It is the weight of it is
+bowing you to your grave. When things are vexing your mind and you
+are trouble minded they'll be going through your head in the night
+time. There is a big shift and a great change in you since yesterday.
+There is not the half of you in it. You have the cut of the
+misfortune.
+
+_Damer:_ I am under misfortune indeed.
+
+_Staffy:_ Give over now your load to myself before the coming of
+the dusk. The way you are there'll be nothing left of you within
+three days. There is no way with you but death.
+
+_Delia:_ _(To Ralph.)_ Let you raise your voice now, and come
+around him on my own behalf.
+
+_Ralph:_ It is what herself is saying, you to be quitting the
+world as it seems, it is as good for you make over to her your crock
+of gold.
+
+_Damer:_ I would not wish, for all the glories of Ireland, to
+leave temptation in the path of my own sister or my kin, or to twist
+a gad for their neck.
+
+_Delia:_ _(To Ralph.)_ Tell him I'll chance it.
+
+_Damer:_ At the time of the judgment of the mountain, when the sun
+and moon will be all one with two blackberries, it is not being
+pampered with plenty will serve you, beside being great with the
+angels!
+
+_Delia:_ _(Shrinking back.)_ I would as soon nearly not get it at
+all, where it might bring me to the wretched state of Damer!
+   (_Dog heard barking.)_
+
+_Damer:_ I'll go bring my poor Jubair out of this. A great sin and
+a great pity to be losing provision with a dog, and the image of the
+saints maybe to be going hungry and bare. How do I know what troop
+might be bearing witness against me before the gate of heaven? To be
+cherishing a ravenous beast might be setting his teeth in their limbs!
+To give charity to the poor is the best religion in Ireland. Didn't
+our Lord Himself go beg through three and thirty years? _(He goes.)_
+
+_Delia: (Coming forward.)_ Will you believe me now telling you he
+is gone unsteady in the head?
+
+_Staffy:_ I see no other sign. He is a gone man surely. His
+understanding warped and turned backward. To see him blighted the
+way he is would stir the heart of a stone.
+
+_Ralph:_ He surely got some vision or some warning, or there lit
+on him a fit or a stroke.
+
+_Staffy:_ Twice a child and only once a man. He is turned to be
+innocent with age.
+
+_Ralph:_ It would be a bad thing he to meet with his death unknown
+to us.
+
+_Delia:_ It would be worse again he that is gone out of his
+latitude to be brought away to the asylum.
+
+_Ralph:_ I don't know.
+
+_Delia:_ But I know. He to die, and to make no will, it is
+ourselves, by rule and by right, that would lay claim to his wealth.
+
+_Staffy:_ So we could do that, and he to come to his end in the
+bad place, God save the mark!
+
+_Delia:_ Would you say there would be no fear the Government might
+stretch out and take charge of it, saying him to be outside of his
+reason?
+
+_Ralph:_ That would be the worst of all. We to be forced to hire
+an attorney against them, till we would break one another at law.
+
+_Delia:_ He to be stopping here, and being light in the brain, it
+is likely some thief travelling the road might break his way in and
+sweep all.
+
+_Ralph:_ It would be right for us keep some sort of a watch on it.
+
+_Staffy:_ What way would we be sitting here watching it, the same
+as a hen on a pebble of flint, through a quarter or it might be
+three quarters of a year? He might drag for a good while yet, and
+live and linger into old days.
+
+_Delia:_ To take some cross turn he might, and to come at us
+violent and maybe tear the flesh from our bones.
+
+_Staffy:_ It is best for us do nothing so, but to leave it to the
+foreknowledge of God.
+
+_Delia:_ There is but the one thing to do. To bring it away out of
+this and to lodge it within in my own house. We can settle out a
+place under the hearth.
+
+_Staffy:_ We can make a right division of it at such time as the
+end will come.
+
+_Ralph:_ What way now will we bring away the crock?
+
+_Delia:_ Let you go outside and be watching the road while Staffy
+will be bringing out the gold.
+
+_Staffy:_ Ah, I'm not so limber as what Ralph is. There does be
+giddiness and delay in my feet. It might fail me to heave it to a
+hiding place and to bring it away unknownst.
+
+_Delia:_ Let you go out so and be keeping a watch, and Ralph will
+put it on the ass-car under sacks.
+
+_Ralph:_ Do it you. I am not of his own kindred and his family.
+Any person to get a sketch of me bringing it away they might nearly
+take myself to be a thief.
+
+_Delia:_ We are doing but what is fair and is right.
+
+_Ralph:_ Maybe so. But any neighbour to be questioning me, it
+might be hard put a skin on the story.
+
+_Delia:_ There is no person to do it but the one. _(Calls from the
+door.)_ Come in here from the shed, Simon Niland, if the
+sluggishness is banished from your eyesight and from your limbs.
+
+_Simon: (At door_) I was thinking to go travel my road.
+
+_Delia:_ Have you any desire to reach out your hand for to save a
+mortal life?
+
+_Simon: (Coming in.)_ Whose life is that?
+
+_Staffy:_ The man of this house that is your uncle and is owner of
+wealth closed up in a jar. We now being wittier than himself, that
+has lost his wits, have our mind made up to bring it away.
+
+_Simon:_ Outside of his knowledge is it?
+
+_Staffy:_ It will be safe and well minded and lodged in loyal
+keeping, it being no profit to him that is at this time shook and
+blighted, but only a danger to his days.
+
+_Delia:_ The seven senses to be going astray on him, what would
+ail any tramp or neuk that would be passing the road, not to rob him
+and to lay him stone dead?
+
+_Staffy:_ Go in now and bring out from the room and to such place
+as we will command, that gallon jar of gold.
+
+_Ralph:_ It being certain it will be brought away from him, it is
+best it to be kept in the family, and not to go nourishing lawyers
+or thieves.
+
+_Simon:_ Is it to steal it I should?
+
+_Staffy:_ What way will it be stealing, and the whole of us to be
+looking on at your deed?
+
+_Simon:_ Ah, what call have I to do that much and maybe put myself
+in danger of the judge, for the sake of a man is without sense.
+
+_Delia:_ Let you do it for my own sake so. You heard me giving out
+news on yesterday of the white goats are on the bounds of being sold.
+The neighbours will give me no more credit, where they loaned me the
+price of a crested side car was auctioned out at a quality sale.
+
+_Ralph:_ Picking the eyes out of my own head they are, to pay the
+little bills they have against her.
+
+_Delia:_ I am no way greedy, I would ask neither food or bite, I
+would not begrudge turning Sunday into Friday if I could but get my
+heart's desire. Such a thing now as a guinea-hen would be bringing
+fashion to the door, throwing it a handful of yellow meal, and it in
+its speckled plumage giving out its foreign call!
+
+_Simon:_ I have no mind to be brought within the power of the law.
+
+_Delia:_ You that are near in blood to refuse me so small an asking,
+what chance would I have sending requests to Heaven that is beyond
+the height of the clouds!
+
+   _(Weeps.)_
+
+_Staffy:_ That's the way with them that are reared poor, they are
+the hardest after to humour, striving to bring everything to their
+own way. But there's a class of people in the world wouldn't do a
+hand's turn, no more than the bird upon the tree.
+
+_Ralph:_ I wonder you not to give in to us, when all the world
+knows God formed young people for to be giving aid to elder people,
+and beyond all to them that are near to them in blood.
+
+_Staffy:_ Look now, Simon, let you be said and led by me. You
+having no great share of wisdom we are wishful to make a snug man of
+you and to put you on a right road. Go in now and you will not be
+kept out of your own profit and your share, and a harbour of plenty
+beyond all.
+
+_Simon:_ It might be guarded by a serpent in a tree, or by
+unnatural things would be in the similitude of cats.
+
+_Staffy:_ Ah, that class is done away with this good while.
+
+_Ralph:_ There is no person having sense, but would take means, by
+hook or by crook, to make his pocket stiff and he to be given his
+fair chance. It is to save you from starvation we are wishful to do,
+as much as to bring profit to ourselves.
+
+_Staffy:_ You not to follow our say you will be brought to burn
+green ferns to boil your victuals, or to devour the berries of the
+bush.
+
+_Simon:_ I would not wish a head to follow me and leap up on the
+table and wrestle me, or to drink against me with its gory mouth.
+
+_Staffy:_ You that have not the substance of a crane's marrow, to
+go shrink from so small a bidding, let you go on the shaughraun or
+to the workhouse, where you would not take our advice.
+
+_Simon:_ I'll go do your bidding so. I will go bring out the crock.
+
+_Staffy:_ There is my whiteheaded boy! I'll keep a watch, the way
+Damer will not steal in on us without warning.
+
+_Ralph:_ He should have the key in some secret place. It is best
+for you give the lock a blow of your foot.
+
+_Simon:_ I'll do that.
+   _(He gives door a kick. It opens easily.)_
+
+_Delia:_ Was I right now saying Damer is turned innocent? Sure the
+door was not locked at all.
+
+_Simon: (Dragging out jar.)_ Here it is now.
+
+_Ralph:_ So it is and no mistake.
+
+_Staffy:_ There should be great weight in it.
+
+_Ralph:_ I am in dread it might work a hole down through the
+timber of the car.
+
+_Delia:_ Why wouldn't we open it here? It would be handier
+bringing it away in small divides.
+
+_Ralph:_ The way we would make sure of getting our own share at
+the last.
+
+_Delia:_ Let you draw out the cork from it.
+
+_Ralph:_ I don't know can I lift it. _(Stoops and lifts it easily.)_
+The Lord protect and save us! There is no weight in it at all!
+
+_Staffy: (Seizing and shaking it.)_ Not a one penny in it but
+clean empty. That beats all.
+
+_Delia:_ It is with banknotes it is stuffed that are deaf and do
+be giving out no sound. _(She pokes in a knitting pin.)_ Nothing in
+it at all, but as bare as the canopy of heaven!
+
+_Ralph:_ There being nothing within in it, where now is the gold?
+
+_Staffy:_ Some person should have made away with it.
+
+_Delia:_ Some robber or some great rogue. A terrible thing such
+ruffians to be around in the world! To turn and rob a poor man of
+all he had spared and had earned.
+
+_Staffy:_ They have done him a great wrong surely, taking from him
+all he had of comfort in his life.
+
+_Ralph:_ My grief it is there being no more hangings for thieves,
+that are worse again than murderers that might do their deed out of
+heat. It is thieving is the last crime.
+
+_Staffy:_ We to lay our hand on that vagabond we'll give him
+cruelty will force him to Christian habits.
+
+_Ralph:_ Take care might he be nearer than what you think!
+   (_He points at Simon. All look at him.)_
+
+_Staffy:_ Sure enough it is with himself only we found him on the
+hearth this morning.
+
+_Delia:_ He hasn't hardly the intellect to be the thief.
+
+_Simon:_ I tell you I never since the day I was born could be
+charged with the weight of a brass pin!
+
+_Staffy:_ It is to Damer, my fine boy, you will have to make out
+your case.
+
+_Simon:_ So I will make it out. Where now is Damer?
+
+_Staffy:_ He is gone down the road, where he brought away Jubair
+the dog.
+
+_Simon:_ What are you saying? The dog gone is it? _(Goes to door.)_
+
+_Ralph: (Taking hold of him.)_ What makes you go out in such a
+hurry?
+
+_Simon:_ What is that to you?
+
+_Delia:_ What cause has he to be making a run?
+
+_Simon:_ Let me mind my own business.
+
+_Staffy:_ It is maybe our own business.
+
+_Simon:_ To make a search I must in that dog's kennel of straw.
+
+_Delia:_ Go out, Ralph, till you will bring it in.
+
+   _(Ralph goes out.)_
+
+_Staffy: (Seizing him_) A man to go rush out headlong and money
+after being stolen, I have no mind to let him make his escape.
+
+_Delia:_ If you are honest let you stop within and not to put a
+bad appearance upon yourself making off.
+
+_Simon:_ Let me out! I tell you I have a thing concealed in the box.
+
+_Staffy:_ A strange place to go hiding things and a queer story
+altogether.
+
+_Delia:_ Do not let go your hold. He to go out into the street, he
+has the wide world before him.
+
+_Ralph: (Dragging kennel in.)_ Here now is the box.
+
+_Simon: (Breaking away and searching it)_ Where at all is it
+vanished?
+
+_Staffy:_ It is lies he was telling. There is nothing at all
+within in it only a wisp of barley straw.
+
+_Simon:_ Where at all is it?
+
+_Staffy:_ What is it is gone from you?
+
+_Simon:_ Not a one pound left!
+
+_Delia:_ Why would you look to find coins of money down in
+Jubair's bed?
+
+_Simon:_ It is there I hid it.
+
+_Staffy:_ What is it you hid?
+
+_Simon:_ All that was in the crock and that I took from it. Where
+now is my bag of gold?
+
+_Staffy:_ Do you hear what he is after saying?
+
+_Ralph:_ A lad of that sort will not be safe but in the gaol. Let
+us give him into the grip of the law.
+
+_Delia:_ No, but let the man owned it do that.
+
+_Staffy:_ So he can task him with it, and he drawing to the door.
+
+_Delia: (Going to it.)_ It is time for you, Patrick, come in.
+
+   _(Damer comes in dragging a sack.)_
+
+_Ralph:_ You are after being robbed and left bare.
+
+_Delia:_ Not a one penny left of all you have cast into its mouth.
+
+_Ralph:_ Herself made a prophecy you would be robbed with the
+weakening of your wits, and sure enough it has come about.
+
+_Delia:_ Not a tint of it left. What now do you say, hearing that?
+
+_Damer: (Sitting down by the hearth and laying down sack.)_ If it
+should go it must go. That was allotted to me in the skies.
+
+_Delia:_ Is it that you had knowledge ere this of it being swept
+and lost?
+
+_Damer:_ If I had not, why would I have been setting my mind upon
+eternity and striving to bring to mind a few prayers? And to have
+parted with my wicked dog?
+
+_Delia:_ Let you turn around till you will see before you the man
+that is the robber and the thief!
+
+_Simon:_ Thief yourself! You that had a plan made up to bring it
+away.
+
+_Damer:_ Delia, Delia, what was I laying down a while ago? It is
+the love of riches has twisted your heart and your mind.
+
+_Delia:_ Is it that you are contented to be made this one's prey?
+
+_Damer:_ It was foretold for me, I to go stint the body till I
+near put myself to death without the Lord calling on me, and to lose
+every whole pound after in one night's card playing.
+
+_Delia:_ Is it at cards you lost it?
+
+_Damer:_ With that same pack of cards you laid out under my hand,
+I lost all I had gathered to that one.
+
+_Staffy:_ Well, there is nothing so certain in the world as the
+running of a fool to a fool.
+
+_Delia:_ Is it taking that lad you are to be a fool? I thinking
+him to be as simple as you'd see in the world, and he putting bread
+upon his own butter as we slept!
+
+_Ralph:_ We to have known all then we know now, we need not have
+wasted on him our advice.
+
+_Damer:_ Give me, boy, one answer. What in the world wide put
+venture into you that made you go face the dog?
+
+_Simon:_ Ah, what venture? And he being as he is without teeth?
+
+_Damer:_ You know that, what no one in the parish or out of it
+ever found out till now! You should have put your hand in his jaw to
+know that much! A right lad you are and a lucky lad. I would nearly
+wish you of my own blood and of my race.
+
+_Delia:_ Of your own blood is it?
+
+_Damer:_ That is what I would wish.
+
+_Delia:_ Is it that you are taking Simon Niland to be a stranger?
+
+_Damer:_ What Simon Niland?
+
+_Delia:_ Your own nephew and only son to your sister Sarah.
+
+_Damer:_ Do you tell me so! What way did it fail me to recognise
+that, and he having daring and spirit the same as used to be rising
+up in myself in my early time?
+
+_Delia:_ He was born the very year of you coming into possession
+of this place.
+
+_Damer:_ The same year my luck turned against me, and every horse
+I would back would get the staggers on the course, or would fail to
+rise at the leaps. All the strength of fortune went from me at that
+time, it is into himself it flowed and ran. The dead spit and image
+of myself he is. Stop with me here through the winter season and
+through the summer season! You to be in the house it is not an
+unlucky house will be in it. The Royalty of England and of Spain
+cannot touch upon yourself. I am prouder of you than if you wrote
+the wars of Homer or put down Turgesius of the Danes! You are a lad
+that can't be beat. It is you are the Lamb of Luck!
+
+_Staffy:_ What call has he or any of us to be stopping under
+Damer's roof and he owning but the four walls presently and a poor
+little valley of land?
+
+_Ralph:_ There is nothing worth while in his keeping, and all he
+had gathered after being robbed.
+
+_Damer:_ Is that what you are saying? Well, I am not so easy
+robbed as you think! _(Takes bag from the sack and shakes it.)_ Is
+that what you call being robbed?
+
+_Simon:_ That is my treasure and my bag!
+
+_Staffy:_ I thought it was after being brought away from the two
+of you.
+
+_Damer:_ You are out of it! It is Jubair did that much for me.
+Jubair, my darling, it is tonight I'll bring him back to the house!
+It is not in the box he will be any more but alongside the warmth of
+the hearth. The time I went unloosing his chain, didn't he scrape
+with his paw till he showed me all I had lost hid in under the straw,
+and it in a spotted bag! _(Opens and pours out money.)_
+
+_Simon:_ It is as well for you have it back where it stopped so
+short with myself.
+
+_Damer:_ Is it that I would keep it from you where it was won fair?
+It is a rogue of a man would do that. Where would be the use, and I
+knowing you could win it back from me at your will, and the five
+trumps coming into your hand? It is to share it we will and share
+alike, so long as it will not give out!
+
+_Delia:_ A little handsel to myself would do the both of you no
+harm at all.
+
+_Damer:_ Delia, my darling, I'll go as far as that on this day of
+wonders. I'll handsel you and welcome. I'll bestow on you the empty
+jar. _(Gives it to her.)_
+
+_Delia:_ I'll take it. I'll let on it to be weighty and I facing
+back into Loughtyshassy.
+
+_Ralph:_ The neighbours seeing it and taking you to be his heir
+you might come to your goats yet.
+
+_Delia:_ Ah, what's goats and what is guinea-hens? Did ever you
+see yoked horses in a coach, their skin shining out like shells,
+rising their steps in tune the same as a patrol of police? There are
+peacocks on the lawns of Lough Cutra they were telling me, having
+each of them a hundred eyes. _(Goes to door.)_
+
+_Simon: (Putting his hand on the jar.)_ I don't know. _(To Damer_)
+It might be a nice thing for the two of us to start gathering the
+full of it again.
+
+_Damer:_ Not a fear of me. Where heaping and hoarding that much
+has my years withered and blighted up to this, it is not to storing
+treasure in any vessel at all I will give the latter end of my days,
+or to working the skin off my bones. Give me here that coat.
+(_Puts it on.)_ If I was tossed and racked a while ago I'll show
+out good from this out. Come on now, out of this, till we'll face to
+the races of Loughrea and of Knockbarron. I was miserable and
+starved long enough. _(Puts on hat.)_ I'm thinking as long as I'll be
+living I'll take my view of the world, for it's long I'll be lying
+when my eyes are closed and seeing nothing at all!
+
+   _(He seizes a handful of gold and puts it in Simon's pocket and
+   another in his own. They turn towards the door.)_
+
+_Curtain_
+
+
+
+
+McDONOUGH'S WIFE
+
+PERSONS
+
+_McDonough, a piper._
+_First Hag._
+_Second Hag._
+
+
+
+McDONOUGH'S WIFE
+
+   _Scene: A very poor room in Galway with outer and inner door.
+   Noises of a fair outside. A Hag sitting by the fire. Another
+   standing by outer door_.
+
+_First Hag:_ Is there e'er a sign of McDonough to be coming?
+
+_Second Hag:_ There is not. There were two or three asking for him,
+wanting him to bring the pipes to some spree-house at the time the
+fair will be at an end.
+
+_First Hag:_ A great wonder he not to have come, and this the fair
+day of Galway.
+
+_Second Hag:_ He not to come ere evening, the woman that is dead
+must go to her burying without one to follow her, or any friend at
+all to flatten the green scraws above her head.
+
+_First Hag:_ Is there no neighbour at all will do that much, and
+she being gone out of the world?
+
+_Second Hag:_ There is not. You said to ask Pat Marlborough, and I
+asked him, and he said there were plenty of decent women and of
+well-reared women in Galway he would follow and welcome the day they
+would die, without paying that respect to one not belonging to the
+district, or that the town got no good account of the time she came.
+
+_First Hag:_ Did you do as I bade you, asking Cross Ford to send
+in a couple of the boys she has?
+
+_Second Hag:_ What a fool I'd be asking her! I laid down to her
+the way it was. McDonough's wife to be dead, and he far out in the
+country, and no one belonging to her to so much as lift the coffin
+over the threshold of the door.
+
+_First Hag:_ What did she say hearing that?
+
+_Second Hag:_ She put a big laugh out of her, and it is what she
+said: "May the devil die with her, and it is well pleased the street
+will be getting quit of her, and it is hard say on what mountain she
+might be grazing now."
+
+_First Hag:_ There will no help come burying her so.
+
+_Second Hag:_ It is too lofty McDonough was, and too high-minded,
+bringing in a woman was maybe no lawful wife, or no honest child
+itself, but it might be a bychild or a tinker's brat, and he giving
+out no account of her generations or of her name.
+
+_First Hag:_ Whether or no, she was a little giddy. But that is
+the way with McDonough. He is sometimes an unruly lad, but he would
+near knock you with his pride.
+
+_Second Hag:_ Indeed he is no way humble, but looking for
+attendance on her, as if she was the youngest and the greatest in
+the world.
+
+_First Hag:_ It is not to humour her the Union men will, and they
+carrying her to where they will sink her into the ground, unless it
+might be McDonough would come back, and he having money in his hand,
+to bring in some keeners and some hired men.
+
+_Second Hag:_ He to come back at this time it is certain he will
+bring a fist-full of money.
+
+_First Hag:_ What makes you say that to be certain?
+
+_Second Hag:_ A troop of sheep-shearers that are on the west side
+of the fair, looking for hire from the grass farmers. I heard them
+laying down they met with McDonough at the big shearing at
+Cregroostha.
+
+_First Hag:_ What day was that?
+
+_Second Hag:_ This day week for the world.
+
+_First Hag:_ He has time and plenty to be back in Galway ere this.
+
+_Second Hag:_ Great dancing they had and a great supper at the
+time the shearing was at an end and the fleeces lodged in the big
+sacks. It is McDonough played his music through the night-time. It
+is what I heard them saying, "He went out of that place weightier
+than he went in."
+
+_First Hag:_ He is a great one to squeeze the pipes surely. There
+is no place ever he went into but he brought the whip out of it.
+
+_Second Hag:_ His father was better again, they do be saying. It
+was from the other side he got the gift.
+
+_First Hag:_ He did, and from beyond the world, where he
+befriended some in the forths of the Danes. It was they taught him
+their trade. I heard tell, he to throw the pipes up on top of the
+rafters, they would go sounding out tunes of themselves.
+
+_Second Hag:_ He could do no more with them than what McDonough
+himself can do--may ill luck attend him! It is inhuman tunes he does
+be making; unnatural they are.
+
+_First Hag:_ He is a great musician surely.
+
+_Second Hag:_ There is no person can be safe from him the time he
+will put his "come hither" upon them. I give you my word he set
+myself dancing reels one time in the street, and I making an attack
+on him for keeping the little lads miching from school. That was a
+great scandal to put upon a decent woman.
+
+_First Hag:_ He to be in the fair to-day and to take the fancy,
+you would hear the nailed boots of the frieze-coated man footing
+steps on the sidewalk.
+
+_Second Hag:_ You would, and it's likely he'd play a notion into
+the skulls of the pampootied boys from Aran, they to be kings of
+France or of Germany, till they'd go lift their head to the clouds
+and go knocking all before them. And the police it is likely
+laughing with themselves, as if listening to the talk of the
+blackbird would be perched upon a blessed bush.
+
+_First Hag:_ I wonder he did not come. Could it be he might be
+made away with for the riches he brought from Cregroostha? It would
+be a strange thing now, he to be lying and his head broke, at the
+butt of a wall, and the woman he thought the whole world of to be
+getting her burial from the workhouse.
+
+   _(A sound of pipes.)_
+
+_Second Hag:_ Whist, I tell you! It's the sound of the pipes. It
+is McDonough, it is no other one.
+
+_First Hag:_ _(Getting up.)_ I'm in dread of him coming in the
+house. He is a hasty man and wicked, and he vexed. What at all will
+he say and she being dead before him? Whether or no, it will be a
+sharp grief to him, she to scatter and to go. He might give me a
+backstroke and drive me out from the door.
+
+_Second Hag:_ Let you make an attack upon himself before he will
+have time to make his own attack.
+
+_McDonough:_ _(Coming in.)_ Catherine! Where is she? Where is
+Catherine?
+
+_First Hag:_ Is it readying the dinner before you, or wringing out
+a shirt for the Sunday like any good slave of a wife, you are used
+to find your woman, McDonough?
+
+_McDonough:_ What call would she have stopping in the house with
+the withered like of yourself? It is not to the crabbed talk of a
+peevish hag a handsome young woman would wish to be listening and
+sport and funning being in the fair outside.
+
+_First Hag:_ Go look for her in the fair so, if it is gadding up
+and down is her habit, and you being gone out from her sight.
+
+_McDonough: (Shaking her.)_ Tell me out, where is she?
+
+_First Hag:_ Tell out what harbour were you yourself in from the
+day you left Cregroostha?
+
+_McDonough:_ Is it that she got word?--or that she was tired
+waiting for me?
+
+_First Hag:_ She is gone away from you, McDonough.
+
+_McDonough:_ That is a lie, a black lie.
+
+_First Hag:_ Throwing a lie in a decent woman's face will not
+bring you to the truth.
+
+_McDonough:_ Is it what you are laying down that she went away
+with some other man? Say that out if you have courage, and I'll
+wring your yellow windpipe.
+
+_First Hag:_ Leave your hand off me and open the room door, and
+you will see am I telling you any lie.
+
+_McDonough: (Goes to door, then stops.)_ She is not in it. She
+would have come out before me, and she hearing the sound of the pipes.
+
+_First Hag:_ It is not the sound of the pipes will rouse her, or
+any sound made in this world at all.
+
+_McDonough: (Trembling.)_ What is it?
+
+_First Hag:_ She is gone and she is not living.
+
+_McDonough:_ Is it to die she did? _(Clutches her.)_
+
+_First Hag:_ Yesterday, and the bells ringing, she turned her face
+to the south and died away. It was at the hour of noon I knew and
+was aware she was gone. A great loss it to be at the time of the fair,
+and all the lodgers that would have come into the house.
+
+_McDonough:_ It is not truth. What would ail her to die?
+
+_First Hag:_ The makings of a child that came before its time, God
+save the mark! She made a bad battle at the last.
+
+_McDonough:_ What way did it fail you to send me out messengers
+seeking me when you knew her to be done and dying?
+
+_First Hag:_ I thought she would drag another while. There was no
+time for the priest itself to overtake her, or to put the little
+dress of the Virgin in her hand at the last gasp of death.
+
+   _McDonough goes into the room. He comes out as if affrighted, leans
+   his head against the wall, and breaks into a prayer in Irish:_
+
+_"An Athair tha in Naomh, dean trocaire orainn! A Dia Righ an Domhain,
+ dean trocaire orainn! A Mhuire Mathair Dia, dean trocaire orainn!"_
+
+_Second Hag:_ _(Venturing near.)_ Do not go fret after her,
+McDonough. She could not go through the world forever, and
+travelling the world. It might be that trouble went with her.
+
+_McDonough:_ Get out of that, you hags, you witches you! You
+croaking birds of ill luck! It is much if I will leave you in the
+living world, and you not to have held back death from her!
+
+_Second Hag:_ That you may never be cross till you will meet with
+your own death! What way could any person do that?
+
+_McDonough:_ Get out the door and it will be best for you!
+
+_Second Hag:_ You are talking fool's talk and giving out words
+that are foolishness! There is no one at all can put away from his
+road the bones and the thinness of death.
+
+_McDonough:_ I to have been in it he would not have come under the
+lintel! Ugly as he is and strong, I would be able for him and would
+wrestle with him and drag him asunder and put him down! Before I
+would let him lay his sharp touch on her I would break and would
+crush his naked ribs, and would burn them to lime and scatter them!
+
+_First Hag:_ Where is the use raving? It is best for you to turn
+your hand to the thing has to be done.
+
+_McDonough:_ You to have stood in his path he might have brought
+you away in her place! That much would be no great thing to ask, and
+your life being dead and in ashes.
+
+_First Hag:_ Quieten yourself now where it was the will of God.
+She herself made no outcry and no ravings. I did my best for her,
+laying her out and putting a middling white sheet around her. I went
+so far as to smoothen her hair on the two sides of her face.
+
+_McDonough: (Turning to inner door.)_ Is it that you are gone from
+me, Catherine, you that were the blossom of the branch!
+
+   _(Old woman moans.)_
+
+It is a bad case you to have gone and to have left me as lonesome
+after you as that no one ever saw the like!
+
+   _(The old woman moans after each sentence.)_
+
+I to bring you travelling you were the best traveller, and the best
+stepper, and the best that ever faced the western blast, and the
+waves of it blowing from you the shawl! I to be sore in the heart
+with walking you would make a smile of a laugh. I would not feel the
+road having your company; I would walk every whole step of Ireland.
+
+I to bring you to the dance-house you would dance till you had them
+all tired, the same in the late of the day as in the commencement!
+Your steps following quick on one another the same as hard rain on a
+flagstone! They could not find your equal in all Ireland or in the
+whole ring of Connemara!
+
+What way did it fail me to see the withering of the branches on
+every bush, as it is certain they withered the time laughter died
+with your laugh? The cold of winter has settled on the hearth. My
+heart is closed up with trouble!
+
+_First Hag:_ It is best for us shut the door and to keep out the
+noises of the fair.
+
+_McDonough:_ Ah, what sort at all are the people of the fair, to
+be doing their bargaining and clutching after their luckpenny, and
+she being stark and quiet!
+
+_First Hag:_ She has to be buried ere evening. There was a
+messenger of a clerk came laying that down.
+
+_McDonough:_ May ill luck attend him! Is it that he thinks she
+that is gone has no person belonging to her to wake her through the
+night-time?
+
+_First Hag:_ He sent his men to coffin her. She will be brought
+away in the heel of the day.
+
+_McDonough:_ It is a great wake I will give her. It would not be
+for honour she to go without that much. Cakes and candles and drink
+and tobacco! The table of this house is too narrow. It is from the
+neighbours we should borrow tables.
+
+_First Hag:_ That cannot be. It is what the man said, "This is a
+common lodging-house. It is right to banish the dead from the living."
+He has the law with him, and custom. There is no use you thinking to
+go outside of that.
+
+_McDonough:_ My lasting grief it will be I not to get leave to
+show her that respect!
+
+_First Hag:_ "There will a car be sent," he said, "and two boys
+from the Union for to bear her out from the house."
+
+_McDonough:_ Men from the Union, are you saying? I would not give
+leave to one of them to put a hand anigh or anear her! It is not
+their car will bring her to the grave. That would be the most pity
+in the world!
+
+_First Hag:_ You have no other way to bring her on her road. It is
+best for you give in to their say.
+
+_McDonough:_ Where are the friends and the neighbours that they
+would not put a hand tinder her?
+
+_First Hag:_ They are after making their refusal. She was not well
+liked in Galway. There is no one will come to her help.
+
+_McDonough:_ Is that truth, or is it lies you have made up for my
+tormenting?
+
+_First Hag:_ It is no lie at all. It is as sure as the winter's
+frost. You have no one to draw to but yourself.
+
+_McDonough:_ It is mad jealous the women of Galway were and wild
+with anger, and she coming among them, that was seventeen times
+better than their best! My bitter grief I ever to have come next or
+near them, or to have made music for the lugs or for the feet of
+wide crooked hags! That they may dance to their death to the devil's
+pipes and be the disgrace of the world! It is a great slur on
+Ireland and a great scandal they to have made that refusing! That
+the Corrib River may leave its merings and rise up out of its banks
+till the waves will rise like mountains over the town and smother it,
+with all that is left of its tribes!
+
+_First Hag:_ Be whist now, or they will be angered and they
+hearing you outside in the fair.
+
+_McDonough:_ Let their day not thrive with the buyers and the
+sellers in the fair! The curse of mildew on the tillage men, that
+every grain of seed they have sowed may be rotten in the ridges, and
+the grass corn blasted from the east before the latter end of harvest!
+The curse of the dead on the herds driving cattle and following after
+markets and fairs! My own curse on the big farmers slapping and
+spitting in their deal! That a blood murrain may fall upon their
+bullocks! That rot may fall upon their flocks and maggots make them
+their pasture and their prey between this and the great feast of
+Christmas! It is my grief every hand in the fair not to be set
+shaking and be crookened, where they were not stretched out in
+friendship to the fair-haired woman that is left her lone within
+boards!
+
+_Second Hag: (At door.)_ Is it a niggard you are grown to be,
+McDonough, and you with riches in your hand? Is it against a new
+wedding you are keeping your pocket stiff, or to buy a house and an
+estate, that it fails you to call in hired women to make a right
+keening, and a few decent boys to lift her through the streets?
+
+_McDonough:_ I to have money or means in my hand, I would ask no
+help or be beholden to any one at all.
+
+_Second Hag:_ If you had means, is it? I heard by true telling
+that you have money and means. "At the sheep-shearers' dance a high
+lady held the plate for the piper; a sovereign she put in it out of
+her hand, and there was no one of the big gentry but followed her.
+There never was seen so much riches in any hall or home." Where now
+is the fifty gold sovereigns you brought away from Cregroostha?
+
+_McDonough:_ Where is it?
+
+_Second Hag:_ Is it that you would begrudge it to the woman is
+inside?
+
+_McDonough:_ You know well I would not begrudge it.
+
+_First Hag:_ A queer thing you to speak so stiff and to be running
+down all around you, and your own pocket being bulky the while.
+
+_McDonough:_ _(Turning out pocket.)_ It is as slack and as empty
+as when I went out from this.
+
+_Second Hag:_ You could not have run through that much.
+
+_McDonough:_ Not a red halfpenny left, or so much as the image of
+a farthing.
+
+_First Hag:_ Is it robbed and plundered you were, and you walking
+the road?
+
+_McDonough:_ _(Sitting down and rocking himself.)_ I wish to my
+God it was some robber stripped and left me bare! Robbed and
+plundered! I was that, and by the worst man and the unkindest that
+ever was joined to a woman or lost a woman, and that is myself.
+
+_First Hag:_ Is it to lose it unknownst you did?
+
+_McDonough:_ What way did I lose it, is it? I lost it knowingly
+and of my own will. Thrown on counters, thrown on the drink-house
+floor, given for spirits, given for porter, thrown for drink for
+friends and acquaintances, for strangers and strollers and vagabonds.
+Scattered in the parish of Ardrahan and at Labane cross. Tramps and
+schemers lying drunk and dead drunk at the butt of every wall.
+   _(Buries head in his hands.)_
+
+_First Hag:_ That is what happened the gold yourself and the pipes
+had won? You made no delay doing that much. You have a great wrong
+done to the woman inside, where you left her burying bare.
+
+_Second Hag:_ She to be without a farthing dip for her corpse, and
+you after lavishing gold.
+
+_First Hag:_ You have a right to bruise your knees making
+repentance, you that lay on the one pillow with her. You to be
+putting curses upon others and making attacks on them! I would make
+no complaint, you to be naked at your own burying and at the very
+hour of death, and the rain falling down on your head.
+
+_McDonough:_ Little I mind what happens me. There is no word you
+can put out of your mouth can do me any injury at all. Oh, Catherine,
+it is best for me go hang myself out of a tree, and my carcass to be
+torn by savage dogs that went famished through a great length of time,
+and my bones left without a token or a flag or a headstone, and my
+name that was up at one time to be forgotten out of mind!
+   _(He bursts out sobbing.)_
+
+_First Hag:_ The shadows should be lengthening in the street. Look
+out would you see the car to be coming.
+
+_Second Hag:_ It was a while ago at the far corner of the fair.
+They were but waiting for the throng to lessen.
+
+_First Hag:_ They are making too much delay.
+
+_Second Hag:_ I see a hint of the livery of the poorhouse coming
+through the crowd.
+
+_First Hag:_ The men of the Union are coming to bring her away,
+McDonough. There is nothing more to be done. She will get her burial
+from the rates.
+
+_McDonough:_ Oh, Catherine, Catherine! Is it I myself have brought
+you to that shame and that disgrace!
+
+_Second Hag:_ You are making too much of it. Little it will signify,
+and we to be making clay, who was it dug a hole through the nettles
+or lifted down the sods over our head.
+
+_First Hag:_ That is so. What signifies she to be followed or to
+be going her lone, and her eyes being shut to the world?
+
+_McDonough:_ Is that the thought ye have within ye, ye Galway hags?
+It is easy known it is in a trader's town you were bred, and in a
+street among dealers.
+
+_First Hag:_ I was but saying it does not signify.
+
+_McDonough:_ But I say it does signify! I will tell that out to
+you and the world! That might be the thought of a townsman or a
+trader, or a rich merchant itself that had his estate gained by
+trafficking, for that is a sort does be thinking more of what they
+can make out of the living than of keeping a good memory of the dead!
+
+_First Hag:_ There are worthier men than yourself, maybe, in
+storehouses and in shops.
+
+_McDonough:_ But I am of the generations of Orpheus, and have in
+me the breed of his master! And of Raftery and Carolan and O'Daly
+and all that made sounds of music from this back to the foundations
+of the earth! And as to the rich of the world, I would not humble my
+head to them. Let them have their serving men and their labourers
+and messengers will do their bidding. But the servant I myself
+command is the pipes that draws its breath from the four winds, and
+from a wind is beyond them again, and at the back of the winds of
+the air. She was a wedded woman and a woman having my own gold ring
+on her hand, and my own name put down with hers in the book. But she
+to have been a shameless woman as ye make her out to be, and sold
+from tinker to tinker on the road it is all one! I will show Galway
+and the world that it does signify; that it is not fitting
+McDonough's wife to travel without company and good hands under her
+and good following on the road. Play now, pipes, if you never played
+before! Call to the keeners to follow her with screams and beating
+of the hands and calling out! Set them crying now with your sound
+and with your notes, as it is often you brought them to the
+dance-house!
+
+   _(Goes out and plays a lament outside.)_
+
+_First Hag: (Looking out.)_ It is queer and wild he is, cutting
+his teeth and the hair standing on him.
+
+_Second Hag:_ Some high notion he has, calling them to show honour
+to her as if she was the Queen of the Angels.
+
+_First Hag:_ To draw to silence the whole fair did. Every person
+is moving towards this house.
+
+   _(A murmur as of people. McDonough comes in, stands at door, looking
+   out.)_
+
+_McDonough:_ I squeeze the pipes as a challenge to the whole of
+the fair, gentle noble and simple, the poor and the high up. Come
+hither and cry Catherine McDonough, give a hand to carry her to the
+grave! Come to her aid, tribes of Galway, Lynches and Blakes and
+Frenches! McDonough's pipes give you that command, that have learned
+the lamentation of the Danes.
+
+Come follow her on the road, trades of Galway, the fishermen, and
+the carpenters, and the weavers! It is by no short road we will
+carry her that never will walk any road from this out! By
+Williams-gate, beside Lynch's gallows, beside the gaol of the
+hangings, the salmon will make their leap as we pass!
+
+_Men at Door:_ We will. We will follow her, McDonough.
+
+_Others:_ Give us the first place.
+
+_Others:_ We ourselves will carry her!
+
+_McDonough:_ Faith, Catherine, you have your share and your choice
+this day of fine men, asking to carry you and to lend you their
+strength.
+
+I will give no leave to traffickers to put their shoulder under you,
+or to any that made a refusal, or any seaside man at all.
+
+I will give leave to no one but the sheep-shearers from Eserkelly,
+from Moneen and Cahirlinny and the whole stretch of Cregroostha. It
+is they have friendship for music, it is they have a wish for my
+four bones.
+
+   _(Sheep-shearers come in. They are dressed in white flannel. Each
+   has a pair of shears at his side. The first carries a crook.)_
+
+_First Sheep-shearer:_ Is it within there she is, McDonough?
+
+_First Hag:_ Go in through the door. The boards are around her and
+a clean quilt over them. Have a care not to leave down your hands on
+it, and they maybe being soiled with the fair.
+
+   _(They take off their hats and go in.)_
+
+_McDonough: (Turning to her door.)_ If you got no great honour
+from your birth up, and went barefoot through the first of your youth,
+you will get great respect now and will be remembered in the times
+to come.
+
+There is many a lady dragging silk skirts through the lawns and the
+flower knots of Connacht, will get no such grand gathering of people
+at the last as you are getting on this day.
+
+It is the story of the burying of McDonough's wife will be written
+in the book of the people!
+
+   _(Sheep-shearers appear at inner door. McDonough goes out,
+   squeezing    the pipes. Triumphant music is heard from outside.)_
+
+
+_Curtain_
+
+
+
+
+
+NOTES
+
+
+THE BOGIE MEN
+
+A message sent to America from Dublin that our Theatre had been
+"driven out with hisses"; an answering message from New York that
+the _Playboy_, the cause of battle, was now "as dead as a doornail,"
+set me musing with renewed delight on our incorrigible genius for
+myth-making, the faculty that makes our traditional history a
+perpetual joy, because it is, like the Sidhe, an eternal
+Shape-changer.
+
+At Philadelphia, the city of trees, where in spite of a day in the
+police court and before a judge, and the arrest of our players at
+the suit not of a Puritan but a publican, and the throwing of
+currant cake with intent to injure, I received very great personal
+kindness, a story of his childhood told by my host gave me a fable
+on which to hang my musings; and the Dublin enthusiast and the
+American enthusiast who interchanged so many compliments and made so
+brave a show to one another, became Dermot and Timothy, "two
+harmless drifty lads," the _Bogie Men_ of my little play. They were
+to have been vagrants, tatterdemalions, but I needed some dress the
+change of which would change their whole appearance in a moment, and
+there came to mind the chimney sweepers of my childhood.
+
+They used to come trotting the five miles from Loughrea, little
+fellows with blue eyes shining out from soot-black faces, wearing
+little soot-coloured smocks. Our old doctor told us he had gone to
+see one of them who was sick, and had found him lying in a box, with
+soot up to his chin as bedding and blanket.
+
+Not many years ago a decent looking man came to my door, with I
+forget what request. He told me he had heard of ghosts and fairies,
+but had never met with anything worse than himself, but that he had
+had one great fright in his lifetime. Its cause had been the
+squealing and outcry made by two rats caught in one trap, that had
+come clattering down a flight of steps one time when he was a little
+lad, and had come sweeping chimneys to Roxborough.
+
+[Music: AIR OF "ALL AROUND MY HAT I WILL WEAR A GREEN RIBBON!"]
+
+
+
+THE FULL MOON
+
+It had sometimes preyed on my mind that _Hyacinth Halvey_ had been
+left by me in Cloon for his lifetime, bearing the weight of a
+character that had been put on him by force. But it failed me to
+release him by reason, that "binds men to the wheel"; it took the
+call of some of those unruly ones who give in to no limitations, and
+dance to the sound of music that is outside this world, to bring him
+out from "roast and boiled and all the comforts of the day." Where he
+is now I do not know, but anyway he is free.
+
+Tannian's dog has now become a protagonist; and Bartley Fallon and
+Shawn Early strayed in from the fair green of _Spreading the News_,
+and Mrs. Broderick from the little shop where _The Jackdaw_ hops on
+the counter, as witnesses to the miracle that happened in Hyacinth's
+own inside; and it is likely they may be talking of it yet; for the
+talks of Cloon are long talks, and the histories told there do not
+lessen or fail.
+
+As to Davideen's song, I give the air of it below. The Queen Anne in
+it was no English queen, but, as I think, that Aine of the old gods
+at whose hill mad dogs were used to gather, and who turned to grey
+the yellow hair of Finn of the Fianna of Ireland. It is with some
+thought of her in their mind that the history-tellers say "Anne was
+not fair like the Georges but very bad and a tyrant. She tyrannised
+over the Irish. She was very wicked; oh! very wicked indeed!"
+
+[Music: AIR OF "THE HEATHER BROOM!"]
+
+
+COATS
+
+I find some bald little notes I made before writing _Coats_.
+"Hazel is astonished Mineog can take such a thing to heart, but it
+is quite different when he himself is off ended." "The quarrel is so
+violent you think it can never be healed, but the ordinary
+circumstances of life force reconciliation. They are the most
+powerful force of all." And then a quotation from Nietzsche,
+"A good war justifies every cause."
+
+
+DAMER'S GOLD
+
+In a lecture I gave last year on playwriting I said I had been
+forced to write comedy because it was wanted for our theatre, to put
+on at the end of the verse plays, but that I think tragedy is easier.
+For, I said, tragedy shows humanity in the grip of circumstance, of
+fate, of what our people call "the thing will happen," "the Woman in
+the Stars that does all." There is a woman in the stars they say,
+who is always hurting herself in one way or other, and according to
+what she is doing at the hour of your birth, so will it happen to
+you in your lifetime, whether she is hanging herself or drowning
+herself or burning herself in the fire. "And," said an old man who
+was telling me this, "I am thinking she was doing a great deal of
+acting at the time I myself made my start in the world." Well, you
+put your actor in the grip of this woman, in the claws of the cat.
+Once in that grip you know what the end must be. You may let your
+hero kick or struggle, but he is in the claws all the time, it is a
+mere question as to how nearly you will let him escape, and when you
+will allow the pounce. Fate itself is the protagonist, your actor
+cannot carry much character, it is out of place. You do not want to
+know the character of a wrestler you see trying his strength at a
+show.
+
+In writing a little tragedy, _The Gaol Gate_, I made the scenario in
+three lines, "He is an informer; he is dead; he is hanged." I wrote
+that play very quickly. My two poor women were in the clutch of the
+Woman in the Stars.... I knew what I was going to do and I was able
+to keep within those three lines. But in comedy it is different.
+Character comes in, and why it is so I cannot explain, but as soon
+as one creates a character, he begins to put out little feet of his
+own and take his own way.
+
+I had been meditating for a long time past on the mass of advice
+that is given one by friends and well-wishers and relations, advice
+that would be excellent if the giver were not ignorant so often of
+the one essential in the case, the one thing that matters. But there
+is usually something out of sight, of which the adviser is unaware,
+it may be something half mischievously hidden from him, it may be
+that "secret of the heart with God" that is called religion. In the
+whole course of our work at the theatre we have been I may say
+drenched with advice by friendly people who for years gave us the
+reasons why we did not succeed.... All their advice, or at least
+some of it, might have been good if we had wanted to make money, to
+make a common place of amusement. Our advisers did not see that what
+we wanted was to create for Ireland a theatre with a base of realism,
+with an apex of beauty. Well, last summer I made a fable for this
+meditation, this emotion, at the back of my mind to drive.
+
+I pictured to myself, for I usually first see a play as a picture, a
+young man, a mere lad, very sleepy in the daytime. He was surrounded
+by people kind and wise, who lamented over his rags and idleness and
+assured him that if he didn't get up early and do his work in the
+daytime he would never know the feel of money in his hand. He
+listens to all their advice, but he does not take it, because he
+knows what they do not know, that it is in the night time precisely
+he is filling his pocket, in the night when, as I think, we receive
+gifts from the unseen. I placed him in the house of a miser, an old
+man who had saved a store of gold. I called the old man Damer, from
+a folk-story of a chandler who had bought for a song the kegs of
+gold the Danes had covered with tallow as a disguise when they were
+driven out of Ireland, and who had been rich and a miser ever after.
+I did not mean this old man, Damer, to appear at all. He was to be
+as invisible as that Heaven of which we are told the violent take it
+by force. My intention at first was that he should be robbed, but
+then I saw robbery would take too much sympathy from my young lad,
+and I decided the money should be won by the lesser sin of
+cardplaying, but still behind the scenes. Then I thought it would
+have a good stage effect if old Damer could just walk once across
+the stage in the background. His relations might have come into the
+house to try and make themselves agreeable to him, and he would
+appear and they would vanish.  ... Damer comes in, and contrary to
+my intention, he begins to find a tongue of his own. He has made his
+start in the world, and has more than a word to say. How that play
+will work out I cannot be sure, or if it will ever be finished at all.
+But if ever it is I am quite sure it will go as Damer wants, not as I
+want.
+
+That is what I said last winter, and now in harvest time the play is
+all but out of my hands. But as I foretold, Damer has taken
+possession of it, turning it to be as simple as a folk-tale, where
+the innocent of the world confound the wisdom of the wise. The idea
+with which I set out has not indeed quite vanished, but is as if
+"extinct and pale; not darkness, but light that has become dead."
+
+As to Damer's changes of mood, it happened a little time ago, when
+the play was roughly written, but on its present lines, that I took
+up a volume of Montaigne, and found in it his justification by high
+examples:
+
+"Verilie it is not want but rather plentie that causeth avarice. I
+will speake of mine owne experience concerning this subject. I have
+lived in three kinds of condition since I came out of my infancie.
+The first time, which continued well nigh twentie yeares, I have
+past it over as one who had no other means but casual without any
+certaine maintenance or regular prescription. My expenses were so
+much the more carelessly laid out and lavishly employed, by how much
+more they wholly depended on fortunes rashnesse and exhibition. I
+never lived so well at ease.... My second manner of life hath been to
+have monie: which when I had once fingred, according to my condition
+I sought to hoorde up some against a rainy day.... My minde was ever
+on my halfe-penny; my thoughts ever that way. Of commoditie I had
+little or nothing.... And after you are once accustomed, and have
+fixed your thoughts upon a heape of monie, it is no longer at your
+service; you dare not diminish it; it is a building which if you
+touch or take any part from it, you will think it will all fall. And
+I should sooner pawne my clothes or sell a horse, with lesse care
+and compulsion than make a breach into that beloved purse which I
+kept in store.... I was some yeares of the same humour: I wot not
+what good Demon did most profitably remove me from it, like to the
+Siracusan, and made me to neglect my sparing.... I live from hand to
+mouth, from day to day, and have I but to supplie my present and
+ordinarie needs I am satisfied....  And I singularly gratifie myself
+this correction came upon me in an age naturally inclined to
+covetousnesse, and that I am free from that folly so common and
+peculiar to old men, and the most ridiculous of all humane follies.
+Feraulez who had passed through both fortunes and found that
+encrease of goods was no encrease of appetite to eat, to sleepe or
+to embrace his wife; and who on the other side felt heavily on his
+shoulders the importunitie of ordering and directing his
+Oeconomicall affairs as it doth on mine, determined with himselfe to
+content a poore young man, his faithfull friend, greedily gaping
+after riches, and frankly made him a present donation of all his
+great and excessive riches, always provided hee should undertake to
+entertaine and find him, honestly and in good sort, as his guest and
+friend. In which estate they lived afterwards most happily and
+mutually content with the change of their condition."
+
+And so I hope it may come to pass with the remaining years of Simon
+and of Damer.
+
+
+
+McDONOUGH'S WIFE
+
+In my childhood there was every year at my old home, Roxborough, or,
+as it is called in Irish, Cregroostha, a great sheep-shearing that
+lasted many days. On the last evening there was always a dance for
+the shearers and their helpers, and two pipers used to sit on chairs
+placed on a corn-bin to make music for the dance. One of them was
+always McDonough. He was the best of all the wandering pipers who
+went about from house to house. When, at my marriage, I moved from
+the barony of Dunkellin to the neighbouring barony of Kiltartan, he
+came and played at the dance given to the tenants in my honour, and
+he came and played also at my son's coming of age. Not long after
+that he died. The last time I saw him he came to ask for a loan of
+money to take the train to Ennis, where there was some fair or
+gathering of people going on, and I would not lend to so old a friend,
+but gave him a half-sovereign, and we parted with kindly words. He
+was so great a piper that in the few years since his death myths
+have already begun to gather around him. I have been told that his
+father was taken into a hill of the Danes, the Tuatha de Danaan, the
+ancient invisible race, and they had taught him all their tunes and
+so bewitched his pipes that they would play of themselves if he
+threw them up on the rafters. McDonough's pipes, they say, had not
+that gift, but he himself could play those inspired tunes. Lately I
+was told the story I have used in this play about his taking away
+fifty sovereigns from the shearing at Cregroostha and spending them
+at a village near. "I said to him," said the old man who told me this,
+"that it would be better for him to have bought a good kitchen of
+bacon; but he said, 'Ah, when I want more, I have but to squeeze the
+pipes.'" The story of his wife's death and burial as I give it has
+been told to me here and there. That is my fable, and the emotion
+disclosed by the story is, I think, the lasting pride of the artist
+of all ages:
+
+  "We are the music makers
+  And we are the dreamers of dreams....
+  We in the ages lying
+  In the buried past of the earth
+  Built Nineveh with our sighing,
+  And Babel itself with our mirth."
+
+I wrote the little play while crossing the Atlantic in the _Cymric_
+last September. Since it was written I have been told at Kinvara
+that "McDonough was a proud man; he never would go to a wedding
+unasked, and he never would play through a town," So he had laid
+down pride for pride's sake, at that time of the burying of his wife.
+
+In Galway this summer one who was with him at the end told me he had
+a happy death, "But he died poor; for what he would make in the long
+nights he would spend through the summer days." And then she said,
+"Himself and Reilly and three other fine pipers died within that year.
+There was surely a feast of music going on in some other place."
+
+
+_Dates of production of plays_.
+
+THE BOGIE MEN was first produced at the Court Theatre, London, July 8,
+1912, with the following cast:
+
+_Taig O'Harragha_         J. M. KERRIGAN
+_Darby Melody_            J. A. O'ROURKE
+
+THE FULL MOON was first produced at the Abbey
+Theatre, Dublin, on November 10, 1910, with the
+following cast:
+
+_Shawn Early_             J. O'ROURKE
+_Bartley Fallon_          ARTHUR SINCLAIR
+_Peter Tannian_           SIDNEY MORGAN
+_Hyacinth Halvey_         FRED. O'DONOVAN
+_Mrs. Broderick_          SARA ALLGOOD
+_Miss Joyce_              EILEEN O'DOHERTY
+_Cracked Mary_            MAIRE O'NEILL
+_Davideen_                J. M. KERRIGAN
+
+COATS was first produced at the Abbey Theatre,
+Dublin, December, 1910, with the following cast:
+
+_Mineog_                  ARTHUR SINCLAIR
+_Hazel_                   J. M. KERRIGAN
+_John_                    J. A. O'ROURKE
+
+DAMER'S GOLD was first produced at the Abbey
+Theatre November 21, 1912, with the following cast:
+
+_Delia Hessian_           SARA ALLGOOD
+_Staffy Kirwan_           SIDNEY MORGAN
+_Ralph Hessian_           J. M. KERRIGAN
+_Damer_                   ARTHUR SINCLAIR
+_Simon Niland_            A. WRIGHT
+
+
+McDONOUGH'S WIFE has not yet been produced by the Abbey Company.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's New Irish Comedies, by Lady Augusta Gregory
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