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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Strangers at Lisconnel, by Barlow Jane
+
+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: Strangers at Lisconnel
+
+Author: Barlow Jane
+
+Release Date: July 31, 2006 [EBook #18957]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRANGERS AT LISCONNEL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Melissa Er-Raqabi, Ted Garvin and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+STRANGERS AT LISCONNEL
+
+_A SECOND SERIES OF IRISH IDYLLS_
+
+
+BY
+
+JANE BARLOW
+
+
+
+
+  NEW YORK
+  DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
+  1895
+
+
+  _Copyright, 1895_,
+
+  by
+
+  Dodd, Mead and Company.
+
+
+
+
+  TO
+
+  M. L. B.
+
+  [Gaelic: Is fada mé beo do dhiaigh.]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                       PAGE
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+OUT OF THE WAY                            1
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+JERRY DUNNE'S BASKET                     14
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+MRS. KILFOYLE'S CLOAK                    31
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+A GOOD TURN                              53
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+FORECASTS                                80
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+A FAIRING                               112
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+MR. POLYMATHERS                         139
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+HONORIS CAUSA                           168
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+BOYS' WAGES                             211
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+CON THE QUARE ONE                       235
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+MAD BELL                                271
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+A FLITTING                              303
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+A RETURN                                324
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+GOOD LUCK                               340
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+OUT OF THE WAY
+
+
+To Lisconnel, our very small hamlet in the middle of a wide bogland, the
+days that break over the dim blue hill-line, faint and far off, seldom
+bring a stranger's face; but then they seldom take a familiar one away,
+beyond reach, at any rate of return before nightfall. In fact, there are
+few places amid this mortal change to which we may come back after any
+reasonable interval with more confidence of finding things just as we
+left them, due allowance being made for the inevitable fingering of
+Time. We shall find some old people who have aged under it, and some
+who, as certain philosophers would hold, have grown younger again. The
+latter may be seen just beginning, perhaps, to sit up stiff on a woman's
+arm, or starting for a trial crawl over mother earth; and of them we
+remark that there is another little Ryan or Quigley; while the former
+stay sunning themselves so inertly, or totter about so shakily, that we
+notice at once how much old Sheridan, or the Widow Joyce, has failed
+since last year. These babies and grandparents often associate a good
+deal with one another at the stage when the old body is still capable of
+"keepin' an eye on the child," and the child still resorts to all fours
+if it wants to get up its highest speed. But this companionship does not
+last long in any given case. Very soon the expanding and the contracting
+sphere cease to touch closely. On the one hand, the world widens into
+more spacious tracts for nimbler and bolder ranging over with all manner
+of remarkable things growing and living upon it, to be gathered and
+captured, or at least sought and chased, among pools, and hillocks and
+swampy places. On the other, it shrinks to within the limits of a few
+dwindling furlongs and perches, traversed ever more feebly, until at
+length even the nearest stone, on which the warm rays can be basked in,
+seems to have moved too far off, and the flicker-haunted nook by the
+hearth-fire becomes the end of the whole day's journey.
+
+Thus the generations, as they succeed one another, wave-like preserve a
+well-marked rhythm in their coming and going--play, work, rest--not to
+be interrupted by anything less peremptory than death or disablement.
+This wag-by-the-wall swings and swings its bobbed pendulum without
+pause, but one swing is much like the other, and their background never
+varies. Little Pat out stravading of a fine morning on the great
+brown-wigged bog, and, it may be hoped, enjoying himself thoroughly, is
+taking the same first steps in life as young Pat his father, now busy
+cutting turf-sods, and old Pat, his grandfather, idly watching them
+burn, with a pipe, if in luck, to keep alight. And the Lisconnel folk,
+therefore, because the changes wrought by human agency come to them in
+unimposing forms, are strongly impressed by the vast natural
+vicissitudes of things which rule their destinies. The melting of season
+into season, and year into year, the leaf-like withering and drifting
+away of the old from among the fresh springing growths, are ever before
+their eyes, and the contemplation steeps them in a sense of the
+transitoriness of things good and bad. Even the black soil they tread on
+may next year flutter up into a vanishing blue column through a
+smoke-hole in somebody's thatch. They carry this sense with a light and
+heavy heart. In like manner they make the very most of all unusual
+events. They find materials for half-an-hour's talk in the passage by
+their doors of one of those rarely coming strangers, who do appear from
+time to time, as frequently, indeed, as anybody would expect, having
+surveyed the thoroughfare that links us with humanity. For if we follow
+it southward, where, like the unvanishing wake of some vessel, it
+streaks the level plain, that is lonely as a wide water, but stiller, we
+pass by Dan O'Beirne's forge, now neighbourless, and through humble
+Duffclane, and on to Ballybrosna, our Town; but we must go many a mile
+further to reach anything upon which you would bestow that title. Or, if
+we turn northward, we only find it seaming another ample fold of
+bogland, outspread far and far beyond Lisconnel before a grey hill-range
+begins to rise in slow undulations, crested with furze and broom. Here
+we smell turf-smoke again, and see a cabin-row that is Sallinbeg, and
+hence the road strikes north-westward in among the mountains, where a
+few mottled-faced sheep peer down over it from their smooth green walks,
+but do not care to trust their black velvet legs upon it. And then, by
+the time that the air has become sea-scented, the road climbs to the
+top of a hill, and stops there abruptly, as if it had been travelling
+all the while merely to look at the view. The truth is that the funds
+for its construction would go no further, and, in consequence, wayfarers
+coming along by the shore still have to tread out a path for themselves
+across a gap of moorland, if they are bound for Lisconnel.
+
+You may perceive, therefore, that Lisconnel lies out of the way, on the
+route to no places of importance, and as its own ten or a dozen little
+houses are, I fear, collectively altogether insignificant, it has small
+reason to expect many visitors. The Widow M'Gurk said one day that you
+might as well be living at the bottom of the boghole for any company you
+got the chance of seeing; but this was an exaggeration. She was vexed
+when she made the remark, because Mrs. Dooley, old Dan O'Beirne's
+married daughter, then staying at the forge, had promised to come and
+inspect a pair of marketable chickens, in anticipation of which Mrs.
+M'Gurk had wetted a cup of tea and used up her last handful of wholemeal
+for a cake, that Mrs. Dooley, who was in rather affluent circumstances,
+might not think them "too poorly off altogether." But, after all, the
+hours had slipped blankly by, and nobody had arrived. So the widow had
+ruefully put her teapot to sit on the hob until himself came in--for,
+properly speaking, she was at this time not yet a widow--and had stepped
+down her tussocky slope with her double disappointment to Mrs. Kilfoyle.
+
+Mrs. Kilfoyle was knitting at her door and not looking out over the bog,
+where the flushed light of the sunset drowsed on the black sod in an
+almost tangible fire-film. Against it the poppies stood up dark and
+opaque, but the large white daisies had caught the wraith of the glow on
+their glimmering discs. She had been thinking how not so long ago her
+son Thady used to come whistling home to her across the bog when the
+shadows stretched their longest. The sunset still came punctually every
+evening, but had grown wonderfully lonesome since the kick of a
+cross-tempered cart-horse had silenced his whistling and stopped his
+home-coming for ever. Thady's whistling had been indifferent, considered
+as music, yet it had sounded pleasant in her ears, and Mrs. M'Gurk's
+trouble seemed to her not very serious. However, she replied to her
+complaint: "Ah, sure, woman dear, like enough she might be here
+to-morra."
+
+"And if she is, she'll be very apt to not get e'er a chuck or a chucken
+off of me--not the feather of a one," said Mrs. M'Gurk, resentfully,
+"plenty of other things I have to do besides wastin' me time waitin' for
+people that don't know their own minds from one minyit to the next, and
+makin' a fool of meself star-gazin' along the road, and ne'er a fut
+stirrin' on it no more than if it was desolit wildernesses."
+
+She would not for the world have alluded to her expenditure of more
+material resources, and accordingly had to explain her vexation by
+putting a fictitious value upon her time, which, in reality, was just
+then drearily superabundant.
+
+"Sure," suggested Mrs. Kilfoyle, "the poor woman maybe was kep' at home
+some way, and she wid ivery intintion to be comin'. I declare, now,
+you'd whiles think things knew what you was manin' in your mind, and riz
+themselves up agin it a' purpose to prevint you, they happen that
+conthráry."
+
+As Mrs. M'Gurk's experience did not dispose her to gainsay this
+proposition, and she was nevertheless disinclined to be mollified by it,
+she likewise had recourse to generalities, and said:
+
+"'Deed then it's welcome anybody is to stop away if they're wishful,
+hindered or no. Long sorry I'd be to have people disthressin' themselves
+streelin' after _me_." And she added, rather inconsistently, the remark
+already mentioned: "But the likes of this place I never witnessed. You
+might as well be livin' at the bottom of the blackest ould boghoule
+there, for e'er a chance you have to be seein' a bit of company."
+
+"And it's yourself 'ud make the fine sizeable waterask, ma'am," a
+high-pitched voice said suddenly from within doors, causing Mrs. M'Gurk
+to start and peer into the dark opening behind her, somewhat taken aback
+at finding that she had had an unsuspected audience, which is always
+more or less of a shock. The first object she descried through the hazy
+dusk was the figure of the old woman known to Lisconnel as Ody
+Rafferty's aunt, but in fact so related to his father, sitting with her
+short black dudeen by the delicate pink and white embers, for the
+evening was warm and the fire low. Ody himself was leaning against the
+wall, critically examining Brian Kilfoyle's blackthorn, and forming a
+poor opinion of it with considerable satisfaction. Not that he bore
+Brian any ill-will, but because this is his method of attaining to
+contentment with his own possessions.
+
+"Whethen now and is it yourself that's in it, Ody Rafferty?" said Mrs.
+M'Gurk, as she recognised him. "And what talk have you out of you about
+waterasks? You're the great man, bedad."
+
+"Me aunt's lookin' in on Mrs. Kilfoyle, ma'am," said Ody, "be raison of
+Brian bein' off to the Town. And right enough you and me knows what's
+took him there; and so does Norah Finegan. Och, good luck to the pair of
+thim."
+
+"Coortin'," said his aunt, who preferred to put things briefly and
+clearly. "But I was tellin' Mrs. Kilfoyle to not be frettin', for sure
+God is good, and they'll be apt to keep her in it all's one."
+
+"Goodness may pity you, woman," said Mrs. M'Gurk. "Brian 'ud as lief
+take and bring home a she _hyenna_, and it ravin' mad, as anybody 'ud
+look crooked at his mother, I very well know."
+
+"Norah's a rael dacint little slip of a girl," Mrs. Kilfoyle said
+tranquilly, considering that her son's character needed no certificate.
+But the old woman only grunted doubtfully, and said: "Och, is she?" For
+she had been a superfluous aunt so long that she found it hard to
+believe in anything better than toleration.
+
+"Talkin' of company," said Ody, to change the subject--which his aunt's
+remarks often disposed people to do--"Mad Bell's just after shankin'
+back wid herself; she's below colloguin' wid Big Anne. It's a fine long
+tramp she's took this time; so if she was in the humour she'd a right to
+ha' plinty to be tellin' us."
+
+"Well, now, I'm glad the crathur's home," said Mrs. Kilfoyle. "It's
+lonesome in a manner to think of the little ould bein' rovin' about the
+world like a wisp of hay gathered up on the win'; for all, tubbe sure,
+it's her own fancy starts her off."
+
+"I won'er where to she wint this time," said Mrs. M'Gurk.
+
+"You might as well," said Ody, "be won'erin' where a one of thim
+saygulls goes, when it gives a flourish of its ould flippers and away
+wid itself head foremost--barrin', in coorse, that Mad Bell's bound to
+keep on the dhry land at all ivents. But from Sallinbeg ways she come
+this evenin', singin' 'Garry Owen' most powerful--I know that much."
+
+"Ah, then she might be chance ha' been as far as Laraghmena, and ha'
+seen a sight of me brother Mick and Theresa," Mrs. Kilfoyle said, with
+wistful interest. For at Lisconnel we still look not a little to the
+reports brought by stray travellers for news of absent friends, much as
+we did before the days of penny posts and mail trains. And our
+geographical lore is vague enough to impede us but slightly in our hopes
+of obtaining information from any quarter. Only the probability seems to
+be increased if the newcomer arrives from the direction in which our
+friend departed.
+
+"Sure she might so," said Ody. "But niver a tell she'll tell onless she
+happens to take the notion in the quare ould head of her. It's just be
+the road of humouring her now and agin, and piecin' her odd stories
+together, you git e'er a discovery, so to spake, of the places she's
+after bein' in."
+
+The scenes of Mad Bell's wanderings did indeed reveal themselves to her
+neighbours confusedly and dispersedly in her fitful and capricious
+narrative, like glimpses of a landscape caught through a shifting mist.
+As this sometimes distorts the objects that loom within it, so Mad
+Bell's statements were occasionally misleading. Once, for example, she
+threw the Quigley family into most distracted concern by her accounts of
+the terrific "shootin' and murdherin' and massacreein'" she had seen in
+progress down away at Glasgannon, where Joe Quigley had taken service
+with a strong farmer; these disturbances being in reality nothing more
+than a muster of the county militia.
+
+"But I can tell you how she thravelled a good step of the way home," Ody
+now continued, "for she tould me herself. The Tinkers gave her a lift in
+their ould cart. Somewheres beyant Rosbride she met wid them; glory be
+to goodness 'twasn't any nearer here they were, the ould thieves of sin.
+Howane'er, _Mrs. M'Gurk_ belike 'ud be wishful to see thim comin' along.
+Fine company they'd be for anybody begorrah. Troth, it's the quare ugly
+boghoule she'd find the aquil of thim at the bottom of."
+
+Mrs. M'Gurk, however, said protestingly, "Och, wirrasthrew, man, don't
+be talkin' of the Tinkers. They'd a right to not be let set fut widin
+tin mile of any dacint place. Thim or the likes of any such rogues."
+
+And Mrs. Kilfoyle said, "I'd liefer than a great deal they kep' out of
+it. Ne'er a one of the lot of them I ever beheld but had the eyes
+rowlin' in his head wid villiny. And the childer, goodness help them, do
+be worse than the grown people."
+
+And Ody Rafferty's aunt said, "Bad cess to the whole of them."
+
+For in Lisconnel nobody has a good word to say of the Tinkers.
+
+The tribe and their many delinquencies have even supplied us with a bit
+of the proverbial philosophy in which not a little of our local history
+is epitomised. The saying, "As pat as thievin' to a tinker" is probably
+quoted among us as frequently as any other, except, perhaps, one which
+refers to Jerry Dunne's basket. This latter had its origin in a certain
+event, not like the former in the long-accumulating observation of
+habits and propensities, and to explain it therefore is to write a
+chapter of our chronicles. Moreover, the event in question is otherwise
+not unimportant from a sociological point of view, because it is very
+likely to have been the first morning call ever made at Lisconnel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+JERRY DUNNE'S BASKET
+
+
+So it is worth while to tell the reason why people at Lisconnel
+sometimes respond with irony to a question: "What have I got? Sure, all
+that Jerry Dunne had in his basket." The saying is of respectable
+antiquity, for it originated while Bessy Joyce, who died a year or so
+back, at "a great ould age entirely," was still but a slip of a girl. In
+those days her mother used often to say regretfully that she didn't know
+when she was well off, like Rody O'Rourke's pigs, quoting a proverb of
+obscurer antecedents. When she did so she was generally thinking of the
+fine little farm in the county Clare, which they had not long since
+exchanged for the poor tiny holding away in the heart of the black bog;
+and of how, among the green fields, and thriving beasts, and other good
+things of Clonmena, she had allowed her content to be marred by such a
+detail as her Bessy's refusal to favour the suit of Jerry Dunne.
+
+Mrs. Joyce eagerly desired a brilliant alliance for Bessy, who was
+rather an important daughter, being the only grown-up girl, and a very
+pretty one, among a troop of younger brethren; so it seemed contrary
+enough that she wouldn't look the same side of the road as young Jerry,
+who was farming prosperously on his own account, and whose family were
+old friends and neighbours, and real respectable people, including a
+first cousin nothing less than a parish priest. Yet Bessy ran away and
+hid herself in as ingeniously unlikely places as a strayed calf whenever
+she heard of his approach, and if brought by chance into his society
+became most discouragingly deaf and dumb.
+
+It is true that at the time I speak of Bessy's prospects fully entitled
+her to as opulent a match, and no one apparently foresaw how speedily
+they would be overcast by her father's improvidence. But Andy Joyce had
+an ill-advised predilection for seeing things what he called "dacint and
+proper" about him, and it led him into several imprudent acts. For
+instance, he built some highly superior sheds in the bawn, to the
+bettering, no doubt, of his cattle's condition, but very little to his
+own purpose, which he would indeed have served more advantageously by
+spending the money they cost him at Moriarty's shebeen. Nor was he left
+without due warning of the consequences likely to result from such
+courses. The abrupt raising of his rent by fifty per cent, was a broad
+hint which most men would have taken; and it did keep Andy quiet,
+ruefully, for a season or two. Then, however, having again saved up a
+trifle, he could not resist the temptation to drain the swampy corner of
+the farthest river-field, which was as kind a bit of land as you could
+wish, only for the water lying on it, and in which he afterwards raised
+himself a remarkably fine crop of white oats. The sight of them "done
+his heart good," he said, exultantly, nothing recking that it was the
+last touch of farmer's pride he would ever feel. Yet on the next
+quarter-day the Joyces received notice to quit, and their landlord
+determined to keep the vacated holding in his own hands; those new sheds
+were just the thing for his young stock. Andy, in fact, had done his
+best to improve himself off the face of the earth, and he should
+therefore have been thankful to retain a foothold, even in a
+loose-jointed, rush-roofed cabin away at stony Lisconnel. Whether
+thankful or no, there, at any rate, he presently found himself
+established with all his family, and the meagre remnant of his hastily
+sold-off gear, and the black doors of the "house" seeming to loom ahead
+whenever he looked into the murky future.
+
+The first weeks and months of their new adversity passed slowly and
+heavily for the transplanted household, more especially for Andy and his
+wife, who had outgrown a love of paddling in bogholes, and had acquired
+a habit of wondering "what at all 'ud become of the childer, the
+crathurs." One shrill-blasted March morning Andy trudged off to the fair
+down below at Duffclane--not that he had any business to transact there,
+unless we reckon as such a desire to gain a respite from regretful
+boredom. He but partially succeeded in doing this, and returned at dusk
+so fagged and dispirited that he had not energy to relate his scraps of
+news until he was half through his plate of stirabout. Then he observed
+"I seen a couple of boys from home in it."
+
+"Whethen now, to think of that," said Mrs. Joyce with mournful interest,
+"which of them was it?"
+
+"The one of them was Terence Kilfoyle," said Andy.
+
+Mrs. Joyce's interest flagged, for young Kilfoyle was merely a
+good-looking lad with the name of being rather wild. "Ah sure _he_ might
+as well be in one place as another," she said indifferently. "Bessy,
+honey, as you're done, just throw the scraps to the white hin where
+she's sittin'."
+
+"He sez he's thinkin' to settle hereabouts," said Andy; "I tould him
+he'd a right to go thry his fortin somewhere outlandish, but he didn't
+seem to fancy the idee, and small blame to him. A man's bound to get his
+heart broke one way or the other anywheres, as far as I can see. I met
+Jerry Dunne too."
+
+"Och and did you indeed?" said Mrs. Joyce, kindling into eagerness
+again.
+
+Jerry had been absent from Clonmena at the time of their flitting, and
+they had heard nothing of him since; but she still cherished a flicker
+of hope in his connection, which the tidings of his appearance in the
+neighbourhood fanned and fed.
+
+"And he's quit out of it himself," Andy continued, "for the ould uncle
+of his he's been stoppin' wid this while back at Duffclane's after dyin'
+and lavin' him a fine farm and a hantle of money, and I dunno what all
+besides. So it's there he's goin' to live, and he's gave up the ould
+place at Clonmena, as well he may, and no loss to him on it, for he sez
+himself he niver spent a pinny over it beyont what he'd be druv to, if
+he wanted to get e'er a crop out of it at all, and keep things together
+in any fashion: he wasn't such a fool." Andy hesitated, as if on the
+brink of a painful theme, and resumed with an effort: "He's bought
+Magpie and the two two-year-olds off of Peter Martin. Chape enough he
+got them, too, though he had to give ten shillin's a head more for them
+than Martin ped me."
+
+"Mavrone, but some people have the luck," said Mrs. Joyce.
+
+"And Jerry bid me tell you," said Andy, the memory of his lost cattle
+still saddening his tone, "that he might be steppin' up here to see you
+to-morra or next day."
+
+At this Mrs. Joyce's face suddenly brightened, as if she had been
+summoned to share Jerry Dunne's good luck. She felt almost as if that
+had actually happened. For his visit could surely signify nothing else
+than that he meant to continue his suit; and under the circumstances,
+Bessy's misliking was a piece of folly not to be taken into account.
+Besides that, the girl, she thought, looked quite heartened up by the
+news. So she replied to her husband: "'Deed then, he'll be very
+welcome," and the sparkle was in her eyes all the rest of the evening.
+
+On the morrow, which was a bright morning with a far-off pale blue sky,
+Mrs. Joyce hurried over her readying-up, that she might be prepared for
+her possible visitor. She put on her best clothes, and as her wardrobe
+had not yet fallen to a level with her fortune, she was able to array
+herself in a strong steel-grey mohair gown, a black silk apron with
+three rows of velvet ribbon on it besides the binding, a fine small
+woollen shawl of very brilliant scarlet and black plaid, with a pinkish
+cornelian brooch to pin it at the throat, all surmounted by a snowy
+high-caul cap, in those days not yet out of date at Lisconnel, where
+fashions lag somewhat. She noticed, well-pleased, Bessy's willingness to
+fall in with the suggestion that she should re-arrange her hair and
+change her gown after the morning's work was done; and the inference
+drawn grew stronger, when, for the first time since their troubles, the
+girl began to sing "Moll Dhuv in Glanna" while she coiled up her long
+tresses.
+
+All that forenoon Mrs. Joyce had happy dreams about the mending of the
+family fortunes, which would be effected by Bessy's marriage with Jerry
+Dunne. When her neighbour, Mrs. Ryan, looked in, she could not forbear
+mentioning the expected call, and was further elated because Mrs. Ryan
+at once remarked: "Sure, 'twill be Bessy he's after," though she
+herself, of course, disclaimed the idea, saying: "Och musha, ma'am, not
+at all." The Ryans were tenants who had also been put out of Clonmena,
+and they occupied a cabin adjoining the Joyces', these two dwellings,
+backed by the slopes of the Knockawn, forming the nucleus of Lisconnel.
+
+About noon, Paddy, the eldest boy, approached at a hand gallop,
+bestriding a donkey which belonged to the gang of men who were still
+working on the unfinished road. As soon as the beast reached the
+open-work stone wall of the potato-field it resolutely scraped its rider
+off, a thing it had been vainly wishing to do all along the fenceless
+track. Paddy, however, alighted unconcerned among the clattering stones,
+and ran on with his tidings. These were to the effect that he was "after
+seein' Jerry Dunne shankin' up from Duffclane ways, a goodish bit below
+the indin' of the road, and he wid a great big basket carryin', fit to
+hould a young turf-stack."
+
+The intelligence created an agreeable excitement, which was undoubtedly
+heightened by the fact of the basket. "Very belike," said Mrs. Ryan,
+"he's bringin' somethin' to you, or it might be Bessy." And while Mrs.
+Joyce rejoined deprecatingly: "Ah sure, woman alive, what would the poor
+lad be troublin' himself to bring us all this way?" she was really
+answering her own question with a dozen flattering conjectures. The
+basket must certainly contain _something_, and there were so few by any
+means probable things that would not at this pinch have come acceptably
+to the Joyces' household, where the heavy pitaty sack grew light with
+such alarming rapidity, and the little hoard of corn dwindled, and the
+childer's appetites seemed to wax larger day by day. She had not quite
+made up her mind, when Jerry arrived, whether she would wish for a bit
+of bacon--poor Andy missed an odd taste of it so bad--or for another
+couple of hens, which would be uncommonly useful now that her own few
+had all left off laying.
+
+Mrs. Ryan having discreetly withdrawn, Mrs. Joyce stood alone in her
+dark doorway to receive her guest, and, through all her flutter of hope,
+she felt a bitter twinge of housewifely chagrin at being discovered in
+such miserable quarters. The black earth flooring at her threshold
+gritted hatefully under her feet, and the gusts whistling through the
+many chinks of her rough walls seemed to skirl derisively. She was
+nevertheless resolved to put the best possible face upon the situation.
+
+"Well, Mrs. Joyce, ma'am, and how's yourself this long while?" said
+Jerry Dunne, coming up. "Bedad I'm glad to see you so finely, and it's
+an iligant place you've got up here."
+
+"Ah, it's not too bad whatever," said Mrs. Joyce, "on'y 'twas a great
+upset on us turnin' out of the ould house at home. Himself had a right
+to ha' left things the way he found them, and then it mightn't iver ha'
+happened him. But sure, poor man, he niver thought he'd be ruinatin' us
+wid his conthrivances. It's God's will. Be steppin' inside to the fire,
+Jerry lad; there's a thin feel yet in the win'."
+
+Jerry, stepping inside, deposited his basket, which did not appear to be
+very heavy, rather disregardfully by him on the floor. Mrs. Joyce would
+not allow herself to glance in its direction. It struck her that the
+young man seemed awkward and flustered, and she considered this a
+favourable symptom.
+
+"And what way's Mr. Joyce?" said Jerry. "He was lookin' grand whin I
+seen him yisterday."
+
+"'Deed, he gits his health middlin' well enough, glory be to goodness,"
+she said; "somewhiles he'll be frettin' a bit, thinkin' of diff'rent
+things, and when I tell him he'd better lave botherin' his head wid
+them, he sez he might as aisy bid a blast of win' to not be blowin'
+through a houle. Och, Andy's a quare man. He's out and about now
+somewheres on the farm."
+
+Mrs. Joyce put a spaciousness into her tone wholly disproportionate to
+their screed of tussocks and boulders; and then paused, hoping that the
+next inquiry might relate to Bessy.
+
+But what young Jerry said was, "You've got a great run, anyway, for the
+fowls."
+
+The irrelevance of the remark disappointed Mrs. Joyce, and she replied a
+little tartly: "A great run you may call it, for begorrah our hearts is
+broke huntin' after the crathurs, and they strayin' off wid themselves
+over the width of the bog there, till you've as much chance of catchin'
+them as the sparks flyin' up the chimney."
+
+"That's unhandy, now," said Jerry. He sat for some moments reflectively
+ruffling up his flaxen hair with both hands, and then he said, "Have you
+the big white hin yit that you got from me a while ago?"
+
+"We have so bedad," said Mrs. Joyce, not loth to enlarge upon this
+subject. "Sure we made a shift to bring a few of the best chickens we
+had along wid us, and sorry we'd ha' been to lose her, and she a
+won'erful layer, and after you a-givin' her to us in a prisint that
+way."
+
+"There was some talk that time," said Jerry, "about me and Bessy."
+
+"Ay, true for you, there was," said Mrs. Joyce, in eager assent, "plinty
+of talk." She would have added more, but he was evidently in a hurry to
+speak again.
+
+"Well, there's none now," he said. "Things is diff'rent altogether. If
+I'd ha' known, I'd ha' kep' the hin. The fact of the matter is I'm about
+gettin' married to Sally Coghlan, that's me poor uncle's wife's niece.
+He's after leavin' her what he had saved up. She's a fine figure of a
+girl as iver you saw, and as good as gould, and the bit of lan' and the
+bit of money had a right to go the one way. So I was thinkin', Mrs.
+Joyce, I might as well be takin' home the ould him wid me--things bein'
+diff'rent now, and no talk of Bessy. Sally has a great wish for a white
+hin, and we've ne'er a one of that sort at our place. I've brought a wad
+of hay in the basket meself, for 'fraid yous might be short of it up
+here." Jerry gave a kick to the basket, which betrayed the flimsy nature
+of its contents by rolling over with a wobble on its side.
+
+At this critical moment Mrs. Joyce's pride rallied loyally to the rescue
+of her dignity and self-respect, proving as effectual as the ice-film
+which keeps the bleakest pool unruffled by the wildest storm wing. With
+the knell of all her hope clanging harshly in her ears, she smiled
+serenely, and said gaily: "Ay bedad, himself was tellin' us somethin'
+about it last night. Sure, I'm rael glad to hear tell of your good luck,
+and I wish you joy of it. And will you be gettin' married agin
+Shrovetide? Och, that's grand. But the white hin now--the on'y thing is
+the crathur's been sittin' on a clutch of eggs since Monday week. So
+what are we to do at all?"
+
+"There's hapes of room for the whole of them in the basket, for that
+matter," Jerry suggested promptly.
+
+"Ah, sure, it's distroyed they'd be, jogglin' along, and the crathur
+herself 'ud go distracted entirely; sorra a bit of good you'd get of
+her. But look here, Mr. Dunne, I've got another out there as like her as
+if the both of them had come out of the one egg, and you could be takin'
+that instid. It's a lucky thing I didn't set her to sit the way I was
+intendin'; on'y I niver could get a clutch gathered for her, be raison
+of the lads aitin' up the eggs on me. Sure, I can't keep them from the
+little bosthoons when they be hungry."
+
+"'Twould be all the same thing to me, in coorse, supposin' she was
+equally so good," Jerry admitted with caution.
+
+"Ivery feather she is," said Mrs. Joyce. "I seen her runnin' about there
+just this minute; you can be lookin' at her yourself."
+
+She went towards the door as she spoke, and was somewhat taken aback to
+perceive her husband leaning against the wall close outside. How much of
+the discussion he might have heard, she could not tell. The white hen
+also appeared within easy reach, daintily resplendent under the sunshine
+on a background of black turf. And Mrs. Ryan, standing darkly framed in
+her doorway, was very certain to be an interested observer of events.
+For the moment Mrs. Joyce's uppermost anxiety was to avoid any betrayal
+of discomfiture, and she accordingly said in a loud and cheerful tone:
+
+"Och, and are you there, Andy? Jerry Dunne's wishful for the loan of a
+clockin' hin, so I'm about catchin' him the young white one to take home
+wid him."
+
+But, to her intense disgust, Jerry, who had followed her with his
+basket, said remonstrantly: "Whethen now, Mrs. Joyce, the way I
+understand the matter there's no talk in it of borryin' at all. I'm on'y
+takin' her back instid of the ould one, and I question would any
+raisonable body stand me out I don't own her be rights. It's an unjust
+thing to be spakin' of loans."
+
+Mrs. Joyce was so dumbfounded by this rebuff that she could only hide
+her confusion by displaying an exaggerated activity in the capture of
+the hen.
+
+Her husband, however, said blandly, "Och, don't make yourself onaisy,
+man. Loan or no loan, you needn't be under any apperhinsion we'll be
+comin' after her wid a basket. Divil a much. Stir yourself, Kitty, and
+be clappin' her in under the lid. He's in a hurry to get home to his
+sweetheart wid the iligant prisint he's after pickin' up for her. Ay,
+that's right, woman alive; give a tie to the bit of string, and then
+there's nothin' to be delayin' him."
+
+After this everybody said good-bye with much politeness and affability,
+though withal a certain air of despatch, as if they were conscious of
+handling rather perishable goods. And when Jerry was beyond earshot,
+Andy, looking after him, remarked, "I niver liked a bone in that
+fellow's skin. Himself and his ould basket. The lads 'ill be prisintly
+comin' in to their dinners."
+
+"D'you know where Bessy is?" said Mrs. Joyce, her heart sinking still
+lower at the thought of the disappointment, which she had presumably
+been helping to prepare for her daughter.
+
+"When I seen her a while back, she was out there wid the childer,
+discoorsin' to Terence Kilfoyle," Andy said contentedly.
+
+"Musha, good gracious, Terence Kilfoyle, and what's _he_ come after?"
+she said in a bitter tone.
+
+"He stepped up wid a couple of pounds of fresh butter and a dozen of
+eggs. He said he minded Bessy havin' a fancy for duck-eggs, and he
+thought we mightn't happen to have e'er a one up here. She seemed as
+pleased as anythin'. But if you ax _me_, Kitty," he said with a
+twinkle, "I've a notion he's come after somethin' more than our ould
+hin."
+
+"He's a great young rogue," said Mrs. Joyce. Yet there was an accent of
+relief in her voice, and on her face a reflection of her husband's
+smile.
+
+And Jerry Dunne's basket still occupies its niche in the stores of our
+proverbial philosophy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+MRS. KILFOYLE'S CLOAK
+
+
+The opprobrious proverb already mentioned is not the only permanent mark
+of unpopularity that the Tinkers have earned for themselves at
+Lisconnel. Their very name has become a term of reproach among us, so
+that "an ould tinker" is recognised as an appropriate epithet for any
+troublesome beast or disagreeable neighbour. If they were not
+case-hardened by long experience, they would surely be mortified
+sometimes at the reception with which they meet almost wherever they go.
+The approach of the two queer vehicles in which they now generally
+travel is watched by displeased eyes all over our countryside, and they
+are so to speak lighted on their way by the gleam of suspicious or
+resentful glances. And it must be admitted that their evil reputation
+has not been bestowed upon them gratuitously. According to Ody Rafferty,
+"The like of such a clanjamfry of thievin' drunken miscreants, you
+wouldn't aisy get together, if you had a spring-trap set for them at the
+Ould Fellow's front door for a month of Sundays. And if himself didn't
+do a hard day's work the time he was consthructin' them, he niver done
+one in his life, and that's a fac'." But Ody is apt to be particularly
+severe in his strictures upon the Tinkers, because he feels an
+aggravated form of rivalry existing between him and them. For the
+wiliness which is understood to be Ody's forte also pre-eminently
+characterises many of the Tinkers' nefarious proceedings, and this makes
+it seem to him that they not only set their wits against his, but throw
+discredit upon his favourite quality by the glaring moral defects which
+they exhibit in conjunction with it. One's pleasure in being described
+admiringly as "the ould boyo that's in it," is much diminished when one
+hears the same thing said bitterly of some slieveen who has filched a
+poor body's meal bag, or run off with a lone widdy woman's fowl.
+
+Still, although the Tinkers' name has become a by-word among us through
+a long series of petty offences rather than any one flagrant crime,
+there is a notable misdeed on record against them, which has never been
+forgotten in the lapse of many years. It was perpetrated soon after the
+death of Mrs. Kilfoyle's mother, the Widow Joyce, an event which is but
+dimly recollected now at Lisconnel, as nearly half a century has gone
+by. She did not very long survive her husband, and he had left his roots
+behind in his little place at Clonmena, where, as we know, he had farmed
+not wisely, but too well, and had been put out of it for his pains to
+expend his energy upon our oozy black sods and stark-white boulders. But
+instead he moped about fretting for his fair green fields and few
+proudly-cherished beasts--especially the little old Kerry cow. And at
+his funeral the neighbours said: "Ah bedad, poor man, God help him, he
+niver held up his head agin from that good day to this."
+
+When Mrs. Joyce felt that it behoved her to settle her affairs, she
+found that the most important possession she had to dispose of was her
+large cloak. She had acquired it at the prosperous time of her marriage,
+and it was a very superior specimen of its kind, its dark-blue cloth
+being superfine, and its ample capes and capacious hood being
+double-lined and quilted, and stitched in a way which I cannot pretend
+to describe, but which made it a most substantial and handsome garment.
+If Mrs. Joyce had been left entirely to her own choice in the matter, I
+think she would have bequeathed it to her younger daughter Theresa,
+notwithstanding that custom clearly designated Bessy Kilfoyle, the
+eldest of the family, as the heiress. For she said to herself that poor
+Bessy had her husband and childer to consowl her, any way, but little
+Theresa, the crathur, had ne'er such a thing at all, and wouldn't have,
+not she, God love her. "And the back of me hand to some I could name."
+It seemed to her that to leave the child the cloak would be almost like
+keeping a warm wing spread over her in the cold wide world; and there
+was no fear that Bessy would take it amiss.
+
+But Theresa herself protested strongly against such a disposition,
+urging for one thing that sure she'd be lost in it entirely if ever she
+put it on, a not unfounded objection, as Theresa was several sizes
+smaller than Bessy, and even she fell far short of her mother in stature
+and portliness. Theresa also said confidently with a sinking heart: "But
+sure, anyhow, mother jewel, what matter about it? 'Twill be all gone to
+houles and flitters and thraneens, and so it will, plase goodness,
+afore there's any talk of anybody else wearin' it except your own ould
+self." And she expressed much the same conviction one day to her
+next-door neighbour, old Biddy Ryan, to whom she had run in for the loan
+of a sup of sour milk, which Mrs. Joyce fancied. To Biddy's sincere
+regret she could offer Theresa barely a skimpy noggin of milk, and only
+a meagre shred of encouragement; and by way of eking out the latter with
+its sorry substitute consolation, she said as she tilted the jug
+perpendicularly to extract its last drop:
+
+"Well, sure, me dear, I do be sayin' me prayers for her every sun goes
+over our heads that she might be left wid you this great while yet;
+'deed I do so. But ah, acushla, if we could be keepin' people
+that-a-way, would there be e'er a funeral iver goin' black on the road
+at all at all? I'm thinkin' there's scarce a one livin', and he as ould
+and foolish and little-good-for as you plase, but some crathur'ill be
+grudgin' him to his grave, that's himself may be all the while wishin'
+he was in it. Or, morebetoken, how can we tell what quare ugly misfortin
+thim that's took is took out of the road of, that we should be as good
+as biddin' thim stay till it comes to ruinate them? So it's prayin' away
+I am, honey," said old Biddy, whom Theresa could not help hating heart
+sickly. "But like enough the Lord might know better than to be mindin' a
+word I say."
+
+And it seemed that He did; at any way the day soon came when the heavy
+blue cloak passed into Mrs. Kilfoyle's possession.
+
+At that time it was clear, still autumn weather, with just a sprinkle of
+frost, white on the wayside grass, like the wraith of belated moonlight,
+when the sun rose, and shimmering into rainbow stars by noon. But about
+a month later the winter swooped suddenly on Lisconnel: with wild winds
+and cold rain that made crystal-silver streaks down the purple of the
+great mountain-heads peering in over our bogland.
+
+So one perishing Saturday Mrs. Kilfoyle made up her mind that she would
+wear her warm legacy on the bleak walk to Mass next morning, and
+reaching it down from where it was stowed away among the rafters wrapped
+in an old sack, she shook it respectfully out of its straight-creased
+folds. As she did so she noticed that the binding of the hood had ripped
+in one place, and that the lining was fraying out, a mishap which should
+be promptly remedied before it spread any further. She was not a very
+expert needlewoman, and she thought she had better run over the way to
+consult Mrs. O'Driscoll, then a young matron, esteemed the handiest and
+most helpful person in Lisconnel.
+
+"It's the nathur of her to be settin' things straight wherever she
+goes," Mrs. Kilfoyle said to herself as she stood in her doorway waiting
+for the rain to clear off, and looking across the road to the sodden
+roof which sheltered her neighbour's head. It has long been lying low,
+vanquished by a trouble which even she could not set to rights, and some
+of the older people say that things have gone a little crookeder in
+Lisconnel ever since.
+
+The shower was a vicious one, with the sting of sleet and hail in its
+drops, pelted about by gusts that ruffled up the puddles into ripples,
+all set on end, like the feathers of a frightened hen. The hens
+themselves stood disconsolately sheltering under the bank, mostly on one
+leg, as if they preferred to keep up the slightest possible connection
+with such a very damp and disagreeable earth. You could not see far in
+any direction for the fluttering sheets of mist, and a stranger who had
+been coming along the road from Duffclane, stepped out of them abruptly
+quite close, to Mrs. Kilfoyle's door, before she knew that there was
+anybody near. He was a tall, elderly man, gaunt and grizzled, very
+ragged, and so miserable-looking that Mrs. Kilfoyle could have felt
+nothing but compassion for him had he not carried over his shoulder a
+bunch of shiny cans, which was to her mind as satisfactory a passport as
+a ticket-of-leave. For although these were yet rather early days at
+Lisconnel, the Tinkers had already begun to establish their reputation.
+So when he stopped in front of her and said: "Good-day, ma'am," she only
+replied distantly, "It's a hardy mornin'," and hoped he would move on.
+But he said: "It's cruel could, ma'am," and continued to stand looking
+at her with wide and woful eyes, in which she conjectured--erroneously
+as it happened--hunger for warmth or food. Under these circumstances
+what could be done by a woman who was conscious of owning a
+redly-glowing hearth with a big black pot, fairly well filled, clucking
+and bobbing upon it? To possess such wealth as this, and think seriously
+of withholding a share from anybody who urges the incontestable claim of
+wanting it, is a mood altogether foreign to Lisconnel, where the
+responsibilities of property are, no doubt, very imperfectly understood.
+Accordingly Mrs. Kilfoyle said to the tattered tramp: "Ah, thin, step
+inside and have a couple of hot pitaties." And when he accepted the
+invitation without much alacrity, as if he had something else on his
+mind, she picked for him out of the steam two of the biggest potatoes,
+whose earth-coloured skins, cracking, showed a fair flouriness within;
+and she shook a little heap of salt, the only relish she had, on to the
+chipped white plate as she handed it to him, saying, "Sit you down be
+the fire there, and git a taste of the heat."
+
+Then she lifted her old shawl over her head, and ran out to see where at
+all Brian and Thady were gettin' their deaths on her under the pours of
+rain; and as she passed the Keoghs' adjacent door--which was afterwards
+the Sheridan's, whence their Larry departed so reluctantly--young Mrs.
+Keogh called her to come in and look at "the child," who being a new and
+unique possession was liable to develop alarmingly strange symptoms, and
+had now "woke up wid his head that hot, you might as well put your hand
+on the hob of the grate." Mrs. Kilfoyle stayed only long enough to
+suggest, as a possible remedy, a drop of two-milk whey. "But ah sure,
+woman dear, where at all 'ud we come by that, wid the crathur of a goat
+scarce wettin' the bottom of the pan?" and to draw reassuring omens
+from the avidity with which the invalid grabbed at a sugared crust. In
+fact, she was less than five minutes out of her house; but when she
+returned to it, she found it empty. First she noted with a moderate
+thrill of surprise that her visitor had gone away leaving his potatoes
+untouched, and next, with a rough shock of dismay, that her cloak no
+longer lay on the window seat where she had left it. From that moment
+she never felt any real doubts about what had befallen her, though for
+some time she kept on trying to conjure them up, and searched wildly
+round and round and round her little room, like a distracted bee strayed
+into a hollow furze-bush, before she sped over to Mrs. O'Driscoll with
+the news of her loss.
+
+It spread rapidly through Lisconnel, and brought the neighbours together
+exclaiming and condoling, though not in great force, as there was a fair
+going on down beyant, which nearly all the men and some of the women had
+attended. This was accounted cruel unlucky, as it left the place without
+any one able-bodied and active enough to go in pursuit of the thief. A
+prompt start might have overtaken him, especially as he was said to be
+"a thrifle lame-futted," though Mrs. M'Gurk, who had seen him come down
+the hill, opined that "'twasn't the sort of lameness 'ud hinder the
+miscreant of steppin' out, on'y a quare manner of flourish he had in a
+one of his knees, as if he was gatherin' himself up to make an offer at
+a grasshopper's lep, and then thinkin' better of it."
+
+Little Thady Kilfoyle reported that he had met the strange man a bit
+down the road, "leggin' it along at a great rate, wid a black rowl of
+somethin' under his arm that he looked to be crumplin' up as small as he
+could"--the word "crumpling" went acutely to Mrs. Kilfoyle's heart--and
+some long-sighted people declared that they could still catch glimpses
+of a receding figure through the hovering fog on the way towards
+Sallinbeg.
+
+"I'd think he'd be beyant seein' afore now," said Mrs. Kilfoyle, who
+stood in the rain, the disconsolate centre of the group about her door;
+all women and children except old Johnny Keogh, who was so bothered and
+deaf, that he grasped new situations slowly and feebly, and had now an
+impression of somebody's house being on fire. "He must ha' took off wid
+himself the instiant me back was turned, for ne'er a crumb had he
+touched of the pitaties."
+
+"Maybe he'd that much shame in him," said Mrs. O'Driscoll.
+
+"They'd a right to ha' choked him, troth and they had," said Ody
+Rafferty's aunt.
+
+"Is it chokin'?" said young Mrs. M'Gurk, bitterly. "Sure the bigger
+thief a body is the more he'll thrive on whatever he gits--you might
+think villiny was as good as butter to people's pitaties--you might so.
+Shame how are you? Liker he'd ate all he could swally in the last place
+he got the chance of layin' his hands on anythin'."
+
+"Och, woman alive, but it's the fool you were to let him out of your
+sight," said Ody Rafferty's aunt. "If it had been me, I'd niver ha' took
+me eyes off him, for the look of him on'y goin' by made me flesh creep
+upon me bones."
+
+"'Deed was I," said Mrs. Kilfoyle, sorrowfully, "a fine fool. And vexed
+she'd be, real vexed, if she guessed the way it was gone on us, for the
+dear knows what dirty ould rapscallions 'ill get the wearin' of it now.
+Rael vexed she'd be."
+
+This speculation was more saddening than the actual loss of the cloak,
+though that bereft her wardrobe of far and away its most valuable
+property, which should have descended as an heirloom to her little
+Katty, who, however, being at present but three months old, lay
+sleeping happily unaware of the cloud that had come over her prospects.
+
+"I wish to goodness a couple of the lads 'ud step home wid themselves
+this minit of time," said Mrs. M'Gurk. "They'd come up wid him yet, and
+take it off of him ready enough. And smash his ugly head for him if he
+would be givin' them any impidence."
+
+"Aye, and 'twould be a rael charity--the mane baste--or sling him in one
+of the boghoules," said the elder Mrs. Keogh, a mild-looking little old
+woman. "I'd liefer than nine nine-pennies see thim comin' along. But I'm
+afeard it's early for thim yet."
+
+Everybody's eyes turned, as she spoke, towards the ridge of the
+Knockawn, though with no particular expectation of seeing what they
+wished upon it. But, behold, just at that moment three figures, blurred
+among the grey rain-mists, looming into view.
+
+"Be the powers," said Mrs. M'Gurk, jubilantly, "it's Ody Rafferty
+himself. To your sowls! Now you've a great good chance, ma'am, to be
+gettin' it back. He's the boy 'ill leg it over all before him"--for in
+those days Ody was lithe and limber--"and it's hard-set the thievin'
+Turk 'ill be to get the better of him at a racin' match--Hi--Och." She
+had begun to hail him with a call eager and shrill, which broke off in a
+strangled croak, like a young cock's unsuccessful effort. "Och, murdher,
+murdher, murdher," she said to the bystanders, in a disgusted undertone.
+"I'll give you me misfort'nit word thim other two is the pólis."
+
+Now it might seem on the face of things that the arrival of those two
+active and stalwart civil servants would have been welcomed as happening
+just in the nick of time; yet it argues an alien ignorance to suppose
+such a view of the matter by any means possible. The men in invisible
+green tunics belonged completely to the category of pitaty-blights,
+rint-warnin's, fevers, and the like devastators of life, that dog a man
+more or less all through it, but close in on him, a pitiful quarry, when
+the bad seasons come and the childer and the old crathurs are starvin'
+wid the hunger, and his own heart is broke; therefore to accept
+assistance from them in their official capacity would have been a
+proceeding most reprehensibly unnatural. To put a private quarrel or
+injury into the hands of the peelers were a disloyal making of terms
+with the public foe; a condoning of great permanent wrongs for the sake
+of a trivial temporary convenience. Lisconnel has never been skilled in
+the profitable and ignoble art of utilising its enemies. Not that
+anybody was more than vaguely conscious of these sentiments, much less
+attempted to express them in set terms. When a policeman appeared there
+in an inquiring mood, what people said among themselves was: "Musha cock
+him up. I hope he'll get his health till I would be tellin' him," or
+words to that effect; while in reply to his questions they made
+statements superficially so clear and simple, and essentially so
+bewilderingly involved, that the longest experience could do little more
+for a constable than teach him the futility of wasting his time in
+attempts to disentangle them.
+
+Thus it was that when Mrs. Kilfoyle saw who Ody's companions were, she
+bade a regretful adieu to her hopes of recovering her stolen property.
+For how could she set him on the Tinker's felonious track without
+apprising them likewise? You might as well try to huroosh one chicken
+off a rafter and not scare the couple that were huddled beside it. The
+impossibility became more obvious presently as the constables striding
+quickly down to where the group of women stood in the rain and wind
+with fluttering shawls and flapping cap-borders, said briskly, "Good-day
+to you all. Did any of yous happen to see e'er a one of them tinkerin'
+people goin' by here this mornin'?"
+
+It was a moment of strong temptation to everybody, but especially to
+Mrs. Kilfoyle, who had in her mind that vivid picture of her precious
+cloak receding from her along the wet road, recklessly wisped up in the
+grasp of as thankless a thievin' black-hearted slieveen as ever stepped,
+and not yet, perhaps, utterly out of reach, though every fleeting
+instant carried it nearer to that hopeless point. However, she and her
+neighbours stood the test unshaken. Mrs. Ryan rolled her eyes
+deliberatively, and said to Mrs. M'Gurk, "The saints bless us, was it
+yisterday or the day before, me dear, you said you seen a couple of them
+below near ould O'Beirne's?"
+
+And Mrs. M'Gurk replied, "Ah, sure, not at all, ma'am, glory be to
+goodness. I couldn't ha' tould you such a thing, for I wasn't next or
+nigh the place. Would it ha' been Ody Rafferty's aunt? She was below
+there fetchin' up a bag of male, and bedad she came home that dhreeped,
+the crathur, you might ha' thought she'd been after fishin' it up out
+of the botthom of one of thim boghoules."
+
+And Mrs. Kilfoyle heroically hustled her Thady into the house as she saw
+him on the brink of beginning loudly to relate his encounter with the
+strange man, and desired him to whisht and stay where he was in a manner
+so sternly repressive that he actually remained there as if he had been
+a pebble dropped into a pool, and not, as usual, a cork to bob up again
+immediately.
+
+Then Mrs. M'Gurk made a bold stroke, designed to shake off the hampering
+presence of the professionals, and enable Ody's amateur services to be
+utilised while there was yet time.
+
+"I declare," she said, "now that I think of it, I seen a feller crossin'
+the ridge along there a while ago, like as if he was comin' from
+Sallinbeg ways, and accordin' to the apparence of him I wouldn't won'er
+if he _was_ a one of thim tinker crathurs--carryin' a big clump of cans
+he was, at any rate--I noticed the shine of thim. And he couldn't ha'
+got any great way yet to spake of, supposin' there was anybody lookin'
+to folly after him."
+
+But Constable Black crushed her hopes as he replied, "Ah, it's nobody
+comin' _from_ Sallinbeg that we've anything to say to. There's after
+bein' a robbery last night down below at Jerry Dunne's--a shawl as good
+as new took, that his wife's ragin' over frantic, along wid a sight of
+fowl and other things. And the Tinkers that was settled this long while
+in the boreen at the back of his haggard is quit out of it afore
+daylight this mornin', every rogue of them. So we'd have more than a
+notion where the property's went to if we could tell the road they've
+took. We thought like enough some of them might ha' come this way."
+
+Now Mr. Jerry Dunne was not a popular person in Lisconnel, where he has
+even become, as we have seen, proverbial for what we call "ould
+naygurliness." So there was a general tendency to say, "The divil's cure
+to him," and listen complacently to any details their visitors could
+impart. For in his private capacity a policeman, provided that he be
+otherwise "a dacint lad," which, to do him justice, is commonly the
+case, may join, with a few unobtrusive restrictions, in our neighbourly
+gossips; the rule, in fact, being--Free admission except on business.
+
+Only Mrs. Kilfoyle was so much cast down by her misfortune that she
+could not raise herself to the level of an interest in the affairs of
+her thrifty suitor, and the babble of voices relating and commenting
+sounded as meaningless as the patter of the drops which jumped like
+little fishes in the large puddle at their feet. It had spread
+considerably before Constable Black said to his comrade--
+
+"Well, Daly, we'd better be steppin' home wid ourselves as wise as we
+come, as the man said when he'd axed his road of the ould black horse in
+the dark lane. There's no good goin' further, for the whole gang of
+them's scattered over the counthry agin now like a seedin' thistle in a
+high win'."
+
+"Ay bedad," said Constable Daly, "and be the same token, this win' ud
+skin a tanned elephant. It's on'y bogged and drenched we'd git. Look at
+what's comin' up over there. That rain's snow on the hills, every could
+drop of it; I seen Ben Bawn this mornin' as white as the top of a
+musharoon, and it's thickenin' wid sleet here this minute, and so it
+is."
+
+The landscape did indeed frown upon further explorations. In quarters
+where the rain had abated it seemed as if the mists had curdled on the
+breath of the bitter air, and they lay floating in long white bars and
+reefs low on the track of their own shadow, which threw down upon the
+sombre bogland deeper stains of gloom. Here and there one caught on the
+crest of some grey-bouldered knoll, and was teazed into fleecy threads
+that trailed melting instead of tangling. But towards the north the
+horizon was all blank, with one vast, smooth slant of slate colour, like
+a pent-house roof, which had a sliding motion onwards.
+
+Ody Rafferty pointed to it and said, "Troth, it's teemin' powerful this
+instiant up there in the mountains. 'Twill be much if you land home
+afore it's atop of you; for 'twould be the most I could do myself."
+
+And as the constables departed hastily, most people forgot the stolen
+cloak for a while to wonder whether their friends would escape being
+entirely drownded on the way back from the fair.
+
+Mrs. Kilfoyle, however, still stood in deep dejection at her door, and
+said, "Och, but she was the great fool to go let the likes of him set
+fut widin her house."
+
+To console her Mrs. O'Driscoll said, "Ah, sure, sorra a fool were you,
+woman dear; how would you know the villiny of him? And if you'd turned
+the man away widout givin' him e'er a bit, it's bad you'd be thinkin'
+of it all the day after."
+
+And to improve the occasion for her juniors, old Mrs. Keogh added, "Ay,
+and morebetoken you'd ha' been committin' a sin."
+
+But Mrs. Kilfoyle replied with much candour, "'Deed, then, I'd a dale
+liefer be after committin' a sin, or a dozen sins, than to have me poor
+mother's good cloak thieved away on me, and walkin' wild about the
+world."
+
+As it happened the fate of Mrs. Kilfoyle's cloak was very different from
+her forecast. But I do not think that a knowledge of it would have been
+consolatory to her by any means. If she had heard of it, she would
+probably have said, "The cross of Christ upon us. God be good to the
+misfort'nit crathur." For she was not of at all an implacable temper,
+and would, under the circumstances, have condoned even the injury that
+obliged her to appear at Mass with a flannel petticoat over her head
+until the end of her days. Yet she did hold the Tinkers in a perhaps
+somewhat too unqualified reprobation. For there are tinkers and tinkers.
+Some of them, indeed, are stout and sturdy thieves, veritable birds of
+prey, whose rapacity is continually questing for plunder. But some of
+them have merely the magpies' and jackdaws' thievish propensity for
+picking up what lies temptingly in their way. And some few are so honest
+that they pass by as harmlessly as a wedge of high-flying wild duck. And
+I have heard it said that to places like Lisconnel their pickings and
+stealings have at worst never been so serious a matter as those of
+another flock, finer of feather, but not less predacious in their
+habits, who roosted, for the most part, a long way off, and made their
+collections by deputy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+A GOOD TURN
+
+
+Along the road to Sallinbeg little seemed to be abroad besides foul
+weather, but there was a great deal of that. The gusts that came
+flapping wide-winged over the bog met the wayfarer with a furious hurtle
+and grapple, as if for want of better sport they had concentrated all
+their forces upon his sole repulse; and the drops they dashed into his
+blinded eyes and against his benumbed hands were as icy as they could be
+without ceasing to be wet. Their combined assaults were calculated
+feelingly to persuade a man of his uninfluential position in the scheme
+of things--his voice in this matter was so tyrannically howled down--or,
+if of less philosophic mind, to bring home to him the special
+disadvantages of going half-starved and clad in threadbare tatters. This
+was the plight of Thady Quinlan as, leaving Lisconnel, soon lapt out of
+sight behind him amid the grey web of the rain-mists, he tramped
+haltingly away, with Mrs. Kilfoyle's cloak bundled under his arm, and
+the dread of pursuit on his mind, and in his heart a great remorse, the
+object of which you are perhaps guessing wrongly. But he had also a hope
+and a purpose, and is therefore not wholly to be pitied, although the
+one did wane until the other looked impossible, as mile after mile
+unrolled its drenched and dreary length without bringing him apparently
+nearer to his goal.
+
+All the while, however, he was slowly gaining upon a traveller, who had
+taken the same road a few hours earlier, hopelessly and aimlessly, and
+even more inadequately equipped than he. It was his sister Judy Quinlan,
+from whom he had parted on the worst of terms about three o'clock that
+morning. The fact is that the Tinkers' raid upon Jerry Dunne's premises,
+although carried out with unusual success, had led, not at all
+unusually, to complications when it was time to divide the spoil. Over
+Mrs. Dunne's second-best shawl it was that the difficulty arose. Mrs.
+Dunne, despite her husband's thrifty turn, owned many shawls, few of
+them inferior enough to be worn at all frequently, and she had pinned on
+this one three times only during the half-dozen years of her
+proprietresship. So it was certainly bitter bad luck that she should by
+chance have worn it to Confession on Friday, and got it soaked coming
+home, and hung it up in the passage by the back door to dry slowly,
+"instead of to be all cockled into gathers wid the heat of the fire
+blazin' on it, you stookawn," as she explained with exasperation to
+Ellen Roe, her servant-girl, who had officiously suggested the kitchen
+hearth. For this precaution proved tragically self-defeating, and put
+its object into the very hands of Thady Quinlan and Joe Smith, when,
+under cover of the wild, wet night, they forced the feeble lock, and
+made a clean sweep of all portable property that lay within easy reach.
+The shawl formed the most valuable prize. It was very admirable, indeed,
+being of a dappled fawn colour, with an arabesque border of shaded
+chocolate and amber; but in the eyes of its new owners its greatest
+charm was its weight and thickness. Judy Quinlan declared, pinching a
+fold fondly between a finger and thumb, that just the feel of it done
+your heart good. Her own shawl was really only a ragged cotton
+table-cover, and had, as she often remarked, "no more warmth in it than
+an ould dish-clout." I should observe, to make the situation clear, that
+the Tinkers' confraternity at this time consisted of Thady Quinlan and
+his sister Judy, and their married sister Maggie Smith, with her
+husband, and his brother, and his father, and three or four children.
+Hence it is obvious that in any dispute which might arise between Judy
+and Maggie, the latter was likely to have numbers preponderantly upon
+her side. And this was what now actually took place, the place being the
+driest end of the un-roofed cabin in Dunne's boreen, where the Tinkers
+had for some time past made their camp.
+
+The screed of thatch still adhering to the wall sheltered their fire of
+purloined sods, and it burned steadily and strongly between the blasts
+which made its red flame duck and sweel, and sent the white ash-flakes
+fluttering. So there was light enough to show how covetous gleams from
+the sisters' eyes flashed together on the shawl, of which each held a
+corner. And no great wisdom was needed to forecast a storm. Mrs. Smith's
+shawl was undeniably better than Judy's by many degrees but she had not
+the magnanimity to consider this, even so far as to propose that Judy
+should at any rate enjoy the reversion of her own. On the contrary, she
+had rapidly planned its division between her two little ragged girls.
+Judy, for her part, had set her heart desperately upon the acquisition,
+and she deemed it her best policy to say in a tone studiously
+matter-of-course:
+
+"Faix, now, it's glad enough I'll be to get shut of this ould wad that's
+on me. Every breath of win' goes thro' it as ready as if it was a
+crevice in a wall, fit to freeze you into mortar."
+
+A very vain device, for her sister promptly rejoined with a sarcastic
+laugh and a tightened grip: "Musha moyah, how bad you are entirely.
+Don't you wish you may?" which intimated plainly that the shawl was not
+to be had uncontested.
+
+At this crisis Judy had fully expected to be backed up by Thady; but he
+naturally taking a more dispassionate view of the matter, recognised
+with reluctance the futility of pitting himself singly against three
+opponents, two of them better men than he, who was "no great things at
+all, let alone havin' one knee quare." Therefore he turned his back upon
+the controversy, and feigned unconsciousness of it, instead of bouncing
+up and saying with appropriate action, "And I'd like to know who at
+all's got a better right to it than herself has?"
+
+His defection aggrieved her so bitterly, that the fiercest of her wrath
+turned upon him; and after a wrangle wherein all the parties concerned
+had made liberal use of those "aculeate and proper" words against which
+the wary Bacon warns his quarrelling readers, she flounced away into the
+darkness of the small hours of the stormy December morning, loudly
+avowing her determination never to see a sight of the ugly, dirty,
+mane-spirited poltroon, or open her lips to him as long as she had an
+eye or a tongue in her head. Jeering laughter followed her exit on a
+skirl of sleet-fledged wind.
+
+She seethed over her anger for many a long mile, to such fierceness was
+its flame fed by disappointment and more potent jealousy. For had not
+Thady, the only person she cared much about in all the world, turned
+against her and sided with Maggie, "who was always a greedy grabbin'
+little toad ever since she stood the height of a creepy stool?" It was
+an hour or so before daybreak when she sat down to rest under an immense
+bulging boulder that loomed dimly on her beside the road a little way
+beyond Lisconnel. Then she began to look backwards and forwards. Far
+back to the time when her father kept a little shop in Bantry, before he
+was stone broke one bad year and took to carrying the remnant of his
+stock-in-trade about in a basket as a higgler, which eventually led
+other members of his family to wander, less reputably, for their
+livelihoods. She remembered that even in those days Thady was always her
+ally, and had lamed himself for life by a fall on the road when running
+to rescue her from the Hutchinsons' wicked mastiff, who had knocked her
+down near their gate, and was standing over her with a growl and a grin
+of which she still sometimes dreamed. And again she remembered how once
+she had been laid up for a long while with the fever, and had crept out
+of the Union infirmary to find that her relations, supposing her dead,
+had all "tuk off wid thimselves to the States," and was keening like one
+demented over her desertion outside McNeight's public, when what should
+come familiarly round the corner but Thady himself, who had stopped
+behind, foregoing his assisted passage, because the divil a fut of him
+would stir out of it so long as there might be e'er a chance at all of
+Judy coming back. Whereupon it recurred vividly to her mind how she had
+just called him, among other things, "a great dirty, good-for-nothin'
+hulk of a poltroon," and had expressed a hope that she might never again
+see sign nor sight of any such a hijjis baste hobblin' anywheres on her
+road; to which he had rejoined that she might go to blazes and welcome
+for anythin' _he_ had to say agin it, and that bedad a crosser-tempered
+ould weasel of a wizened-up ould witch wouldn't be apt to land there in
+a hurry. At last, being very tired, she escaped for a while from these
+fluctuations of wrath and ruth into a nook of sleep, but the bitter cold
+routed her out of it soon after sunrise, and she took the road again,
+cramped and numbed, in the teeth of the gusty showers that were still
+stalking over the bogland.
+
+As she went, the hills beyond Sallinbeg rose up frowning before her
+through rifts in the cold white fleece trailed and knotted about their
+front of harsh purple gloom, on which the streaks and patches of ravines
+and fences and fields, with here and there a cabin gleaming, began by
+degrees to be traced dimly as if a fragment of the countryside were
+reflected on a dark thunder-cloud. But she was now thinking more about
+her journey's end than about anything she saw on the way thither--the
+bleak many-windowed workhouse at Moynalone that she well knew must be
+presently her fate. Since she had thrown herself on her own resources,
+three ha'pence was all she could command for ransom from the durance
+into which self-preservation assuredly would not forbear to betray her.
+Experience gave a dreary definiteness to anticipation. Once again she
+would morning by morning awaken in the grim whitewashed ward to all the
+old hardness and roughness of existence with a tyrannous restraint and
+monotony superadded. She said to herself, it is true, that she might as
+well be in one place as another, since she would not have Thady to go
+along with anymore--the black-hearted, thievin' miscreant--and if she
+had as much wit in her as an ould water-rat, she'd just creep away into
+some dry ditch, and be done with the whole of it. Still, as she did come
+short of that wisdom, the alternative continued to lie across her path,
+a murky shadow, which she could by no means evade nor disperse.
+
+The invisible sun was low when Judy came to a place where the road
+forks, sending one branch to creep across the level bogland towards
+Sallinbeg, and one to climb up among the first tilted slopes of the
+mountains. Here the Rosbride river comes jostling its way down a rocky
+ravine spanned at the mouth by a bridge, past which the swift, brown
+stream darts along in a more spacious and smoother channel, bound for
+Rosbride Bay. Judy stood for a while and looked down over the parapet at
+the swirls of creamy foam that swept under the arch. Then she took out
+of her pocket a battered-looking heel of a loaf, and began to munch it.
+But before she had half finished it, she tossed the crust away into the
+river, being too heartsick to go on eating once the rage of hunger was
+subdued. She wished sincerely that she dared fling herself after it, but
+she was far too much cowed by cold and weariness to muster the courage
+for such a resolve. Perhaps there was not under Irish skies that
+December day, a more miserable woman than Judy Quinlan as she stood all
+alone in the world on Rosbride bridge, while a black mountain rampart
+lifted itself slowly against the shrouded west, and the dusk thickened
+on the long, shelterless road, whence eager blasts whistled a summons to
+her, nearer and nearer, till they fluttered her rags, and keened about
+her ears, and chilled her to the bone.
+
+Suddenly something heavy and soft seemed to grasp her by the shoulders,
+and thence fall around her in long, wide folds, covering her from head
+to foot, much as if a small tent had been blown down on her. Of course
+she screamed shrilly, and almost in the same breath she saw that Thady
+was at her elbow. He had for some little time been stalking her warily,
+with the great coat expanded ready to throw over her, and having done
+so, was now holding it on with a rough hug. The joy with which he had at
+last caught sight of the forlorn, bedraggled figure had overflowed
+irrepressibly into this joke, and its successful accomplishment put the
+finishing touch to his happiness. As for Judy, if the sun had leaped up
+again in a fiery flurry, till the hills and the plain and the river were
+all flooded with flushed light, gleaming and glowing, it would have but
+dimly symbolised the transfiguration of her world. In the twinkling of
+an eye her stark despair was changed into rapturous relief, a miracle
+which just at first made the marvellous cloak seem almost a matter of
+course. Any good thing might naturally be expected to befall her since
+Thady was not estranged and lost to her after all. "Whethen now, and is
+it yourself come streelin' along?" she said. "You tuk your time, bedad.
+I'm here this half-hour."
+
+"Sure, I stopped till I would get a thrifle of things together," said
+Thady. "And what d'you call that for an ould flitterjig?"
+
+"It's not too bad," said Judy, stroking down the cape with caressing
+fingers. "A grand weight there's in it, to be sure. But where at all did
+you come by it? You're not after gettin' it off of thim thievin'
+rapscallions of Smiths, anyway?"
+
+"Thim or the likes of thim--sure not at all," said Thady, loftily.
+"'Twas in a house away down below there at Lisconnel. A young woman bid
+me step in to ait a pitaty, and, tellin' you the truth, I'd no fancy to
+be delayin', for I'd a mistrust in me mind that the pólis was follyin'.
+The notion I had was to ax her had she seen you goin' by, on'y I wasn't
+wishful to be lettin' on I was anythin' to you, in case they come along.
+So I thought she might be chance pass the remark herself. But out she
+ran, and the first thing I noticed was this consarn lyin' convanient to
+me hand in the windy. And wid that I whipped it up and made off. For
+anythin' I could tell, I might ha' met me fine gintleman full tilt at
+the door; and begorrah, it's as heavy to carry as a pair of fat geese.
+Howane'er, I knew it's distressed you were entirely for the want of such
+a thing, and bejabers, you've got it now."
+
+"Troth have I," said Judy, delightedly groping her way about her new
+garment. "Rael dacint it was of you to be bringin' it to me, for
+perished and lost I did be, and that's no lie. Och but it's the grand
+one. Look at the hood there is to it. Sure it's as good as a little
+house of your own. You might be out under buckets of wet in it, and
+ne'er a tint you'd git whatever."
+
+"Ay, or, for that matter, takin' a rowl through the river there, and
+sorra the harm it 'ud do you wid that on," said Thady, with pride. "But
+we'd better be quittin' out o' this," he added, with a shrug and a
+shiver, "for the win's tarrible, and there's a shower comin' up on us
+yonder as thick as thatch. I was thinkin' you'd maybe had thrampin'
+enough for this day. 'Twill be as dark prisintly as the inside of a cow,
+and we'd see daylight agin before we come to Moynalone. So we might put
+the night over under th'ould bridge. There's a good dry strip along the
+one side of it, and the way the rain's dhrivin' we'd git a grand
+shelter."
+
+Judy readily agreed, and they descended the little stony footpath which
+led down to the river. Beneath the arch, where Thady's booted steps
+reverberated hollowly, they found, as he had said, a broadish strip of
+dry ground, for the bridge had allowed the stream ample measure in its
+stride. The little platform was bordered by a scattering of stones and
+boulders, amongst which the shallow water gurgled. It seemed to Thady
+and Judy that their quarters would be very tolerable; but they soon made
+a discovery which promised luxury indeed. This was a dead branch, which
+lay at one end of the arch, having evidently been floated down the
+current, and perhaps hauled out of the water by some thrifty body, who,
+however, had made no further use of it. Long ago that must have been,
+for it was dried and bleached till it glimmered through the dusk like an
+intricate white skeleton. Better fuel no one could desire. Thady made
+for it at once with knife and matchbox, and in a few minutes crackling
+flames were crunching up the twigs and gnawing at a log. The red light
+washed flickering over the wet walls, and was caught on the glancing of
+the water as it fled by, rapid and dark. Blue smoke trailed up lazily
+against the frame of the arch, blurring gleams of tossed foam as it
+melted out into the mist.
+
+But a fire naturally suggested food, and Judy said ruefully, after
+feeling in her empty pocket: "It's starved wid the hunger you'll be,
+Thady, and the sorra a taste of anythin' have I in the world. 'Deed now,
+if I'd on'y known the way it 'ud be, and I passin' thim houses below in
+the boreen a while ago! I seen where there was a big cake of
+griddle-bread coolin' itself, laned agin the windy-ledge, and man nor
+mortal near it. I might ha' raiched it down as aisy as puttin' me fut to
+the ground. But sure I was that knocked about wid one thing and another,
+I thought I wouldn't be bothered wid it, so I just left it where it was,
+I did so--may God forgive me," she said, with unfeigned contrition.
+
+Thady, however, did not seem to share in her regrets. He was lifting his
+cluster of cans off his shoulders, and extracting from one of them a
+bundle tied up in a red handkerchief. "Is it starved you'd have us?" he
+said as he untied the first corner. "Starved! How are you?" And he
+continued to repeat: "Is it starvin' she said?" while he was undoing the
+several knots. When they were all unfastened, the handkerchief was seen
+to hold a number of eggs and a fair supply of broken bread. Thady might
+well scout the possibility of famishing. "That's somethin' like," he
+said, as he saw Judy surveying his stores, "and I've a shillin'
+somewheres besides."
+
+"Glory be!" said Judy, looking as if she could scarcely realise a world
+with which they were so much beforehand.
+
+"And we'll be givin' them a boil in a one of the little saucepans," said
+Thady. "Raw eggs do be ugly could brashes, and we've plinty of wather
+handy--lashins and lavins of dhrink runnin' on tap there, so to spake."
+
+Supper was accordingly prepared on these simple lines with much success.
+They boiled many eggs and ate them, using their scraps of bread for
+plates--an expedient not unknown at far earlier banquets--and they
+scooped up water to drink out of the palms of their hands--also in an
+old-fashioned manner. But when they had finished Thady gave a
+comparatively modern touch to the entertainment by lighting his pipe. He
+occupied the nearest place to the fire, in consideration for the
+scarecrow-like raggedness of his garments, which now began to weigh upon
+Judy's mind amid the comfort of her magnificent wrap.
+
+"Froze stiff you'll be in thim ould tatters, man alive," she said
+despondently. "Sure, you might as well be slingin' yourself round wid
+the ould wisps of spiders' webs up over your head for any substance
+there is in thim. I won'er, now, could I conthrive to reive the top-cape
+off of this. 'Twould be as good that way as a cloak apiece for the two
+of us."
+
+Thady, however, said decidedly: "Blathers, not _at all_. Is it
+destroyin' it you'd be after? I'm plinty warm enough." And he rolled the
+big red handkerchief which had held the eggs into many folds about his
+neck, tucking it down under his coat-collar all round. "There was a
+surprisin' hate in it," he said.
+
+By this time the dusk far and near had gloomed into darkness--the black
+beetle had scared away the grey moth. As Thady and Judy sat with their
+backs to the curving wall, they caught only fitful glimpses of the
+opposite one when any long-fronded flickers of the fire-light waved
+across and touched it. More often they fell short, and made quivering
+circles shine where they struck the broken water in the mid-stream.
+Without, beyond either arch, nothing was distinguishable except glimmers
+of white foam shaken and tossing. On the left, looking up the river, it
+seemed as if many spectral hands, borne nearer and nearer, came waving
+and beckoning out of the night, to pass by and away down the river,
+still beckoning and waving, carried further and further, on into the
+night again. Every now and then a waft of the wind sighed in on them
+along with the river, puffing about the flame and smoke, and blowing
+ice-cold in their faces. When it had passed Thady always inquired: "Is
+it warm at all, Jude?" and she always answered, drawing "its" folds
+together with ostentatious satisfaction: "Och scaldin'."
+
+But between whiles there was little conversation to interrupt the
+monologue of the river, which seemed to find itself many voices under
+the bridge. The one unceasing rustle of the main stream was frayed along
+its margin into a myriad finer noises of murmuring and plashing, as the
+massed foliage on a bough dwindles at its edges into more delicate
+traceries of distinct sprays and leaves. Round some stones the water
+whispered mysteriously, coiling in and out of gurgling recesses, and
+against others it broke with a clear chiming tinkle as if elfin anvils
+rang; here it droned on with a bee's hum soft and steady, and here it
+chuckled and chirped, bubbling up in sudden little rapids and cascades.
+At Judy's feet was a thin flat stone, which rested loosely on the top of
+another, and flap-flapped, bobbing up and down as the ripple rose and
+fell. Sitting idle in the firelight, warmed and fed to unwonted
+contentment, Judy watched it half drowsily for a while. Presently she
+said:
+
+"That's the very way the lid of our ould kettle would be goin' at home
+when it was on the boil, and me poor mother 'ud bid us keep an eye on
+it--like enough to keep us out of divilmint. Och, but that was a cosy
+little room of a could night. D'you mind it, Thady?"
+
+"Ay, sure," said Thady, "but it's one while ago."
+
+"It is that. A matter of thirty year and more, anyway, since we owned
+the little shop. Sure now I remimber the day they shut it up, and put us
+out of it, as plain as if it was on'y this mornin'. Grand we that was
+childer thought it, because of somebody givin' us the ind of an ould jar
+of sweets out of the windy to pacify us. Bedad the fightin' we had over
+it was fit to ha' raised the town. But I grabbed meself a biggish lump
+of peppermint twist, and would be slinkin' behind me mother to finish
+it, and she talkin' at the door to ould Mrs. McClenaghan, and I heard
+her sayin' her heart was broke. So I got wond'rin' to myself if the
+raison was maybe that we'd ate it all on her. Och, but it's the quare
+foolishness people does be remimberin'!"
+
+"Belike the raison of that is because it's as plinty as anythin' else
+wid thim," said Thady, cynically, "or maybe a trifle plintier."
+
+"Sure we was on'y brats thim times," said Judy, apologetically. "For
+anythin' we could tell we might as well be streelin' about under the
+width of the sky like a string of wild duck, as stoppin' at home wid a
+roof over our misfort'nit heads. Ould Mrs. McClenaghan next door had a
+cloak the same pattern as this," Judy continued, selecting her memories
+with better judgment. "But 'twas all tatters at the bottom, not worth a
+bawbee to mine."
+
+And Thady said with interest: "Had she now?"
+
+"And as for me ould shawl," Judy went on, "it's been a scandal and a
+caution this last three or four year; droppin' in bits it is, and small
+blame to it. I wish I'd a penny for every mile I've tramped in it. Do
+you remimber the joke me mother had about it's bein' a conthráry thing
+that people thravellin' 'ud always begin a mile at the wrong ind? She'd
+be talkin' that way to hearten up me father; but as often as not he'd
+on'y let a roar at her to whisht, he was that discouraged. 'Twas a great
+wish he had, poor man, to git her back settled in a little place of her
+own before he was took. But 'twas in the big barracks of a Union at
+Monaghan----"
+
+"Well, it's all one to the two of thim now anyway," said Thady, finding
+that Judy's reminiscences of their family history did not tend to
+enliven his meditations over his pipe.
+
+"Ah sure, everythin' will be all one to the whole of us, plase God, one
+of these days," said Judy, who in her present mood could not easily have
+realised the keen contentions and scorching jealousies of the night
+before; "and when we get done with the thrampin', 'twill make little
+enough differ whether it's one mile we wint or twinty hunderd. On'y I'd
+liefer than a good dale thim two had had better luck wid it all. Cruel
+put about they were many a time, and wantin' the bit to keep the life in
+thim, and it just fretted out of thim in the ind I'm thinkin'. The
+thought of it comes agin a body when one's sittin' warm and snug," Judy
+said, gazing remorsefully round her shadowy, gusty lodging, and then
+into the flames, lighting up a bare earth-patch, and down at the dark
+folds that fell about her as she crouched on it. She seemed sunk into a
+reverie. But after a while she looked up and said without apparent
+relevance: "Heaven be her bed this night, the cratur. Thady, you
+heathen, we'd a right to be sayin' the Rosary before we git too stupid
+altogether. The eyes of you are droppin' into your head wid sleep this
+minnit."
+
+"And me just after lightin' me pipe," remonstrated Thady.
+
+"Ah thin, hurry up and finish it," said Judy, betraying by this
+injunction an invincible ignorance touching a man's sentiments towards
+his last screw of tobacco, "or else I'll be off sound. It's the fine
+warmth makes me sleepy. Sure wid this on me sorra a breath of could gits
+next or nigh me to be keepin' me awake."
+
+"Och thin, wait till it's out," said Thady.
+
+"I will so," said Judy. "Sling another stick on the fire, lad, the way
+you won't be perished sittin' there in thim woful ould rags. I've plinty
+of prayers I might be sayin' till you're ready."
+
+But in a little while, Thady, lingering over his pipe, became aware,
+somewhat to his relief, that she had gone fast asleep, muffled up to the
+chin in her cloak, with her head leaning back against the stone wall. He
+sat and looked at her for some moments with an expression partly
+complacent and partly compunctious. "Bedad now the crathur was bein'
+perished alive before I brought that to her," he said to himself. "Very
+apt she was to be gettin' her death. 'Twas great luck I had entirely to
+pick it up. It's the hard life the likes of her has whatever thrampin'
+around. Ay, glory be to God, 'twas the best good turn iver I done her."
+
+Just at the time when Thady the Tinker was making these reflections
+while the firelight flickered and the waters fleeted under Rosbride
+bridge, some mile or so higher up the stream, where the long mountain
+slopes are folded closer and steeper about it, a great turmoil had
+arisen in a deep hollow among walls of the bare rock. Down one face of
+these, a huge glistering slab, the river had for certain thousands of
+years been taking a foamy leap; but to-night it happened that the rains,
+beating for many days on the mountains, had eaten away the clay setting
+which cemented a ponderous lump of rock into a niche immediately over
+the fall, and the mass had now crashed down into the channel on the very
+verge, blocking all the waterway. This, however, was a door hard to keep
+shut, when every affluent rill and runnel out on the broad mountain
+shoulders went darting swift and white, so that every minute swelled the
+forces gathering pent in the barred passage. As the bridled torrent
+seethed and climbed, hissing, behind that barrier, the great stone
+tottered and swayed, and before the first foam-crest could overpeer it,
+yielded to the weight of waters leaned against it, and rocks and flood,
+thunderously roaring, rushed down together.
+
+The sound of it, dulled into a moan, came through Rosbride bridge, and
+Thady, who had grown very drowsy, thought to himself that the wind was
+getting up, and that they couldn't have done better than stop where they
+were, instead of to be setting off tramping on such a dirty wild night.
+God knew where they might have got to.
+
+The flood that broke away, with wave tumbled over wave, out of the
+whirling pool, had not far to race down its stony stairs before it
+reached a place with a turbulent floor, where the white mouths of other
+two streams foamed into it through rock-rifts, loud-throated on either
+hand. Thenceforward the water which had threaded the large boulders in
+heavy strands coiled like monstrous braids of snaky locks, rose up and
+drew together above their tallest heads into a single obliterating fold,
+as it slid on smoothly with only now and then a quiver puckering its
+surface, as if it had rolled over some live creature that writhed. Its
+mounded solidity made its rapid motion look strange and terrible. Where
+circles of thin froth swam round on it slowly, it was as black and white
+as a bit of the bog in a snowstorm or under a drift of summer daisies.
+At the turn of the ravine's last winding above the bridge, it plucked
+away as it passed a small company of fir-trees, that long had dropped
+their cones and needles into the river from a coign of vantage on a
+jutting crag, and a minute after, anybody who had looked up from beneath
+the arch would have seen the glimmering points of foam extinguished like
+lights, further and nearer, lost amid the shadowy onsweeping of
+something that set all the darkness astir as if it were one vast wing
+unfurling. And then for a moment, in the narrow space lit by the fading
+fire, he would have known that he was cut off from the world by chaos,
+which poised towards him a formless surging front, and stooped and fell.
+But as it happened nobody was keeping a watch there.
+
+What wakened Thady was the clang of his cluster of tinware, which the
+wave dashed against the wall behind him. But before he knew this, it had
+gathered him up and swung him across with it over to the other side of
+the arch. There he caught hold of a twisted ivy-tod and a bough of
+mountain-ash, whence he dropped on the bank, and crawled up it out of
+reach, commenting in forcible language upon the occurrence, by which he
+was still astoundedly bewildered.
+
+Judy, who was aroused in like manner, had her chance too. For a branch
+of the same tree crooked a friendly arm towards her as she was borne
+past, and she would have grasped it only that the weight of her heavy
+cloth cloak dragged her down. So that instead of returning to dry land
+for many a long day's tramp, she went out to sea in company with sundry
+wrenched-off boughs, and mats of heather, and bundles of withered
+bracken, and other such waifs and strays, none of which were ever again
+heard tidings of any more than they were inquired after in the lonely
+places they had left. Only for some stormy days the wrecked and sodden
+banks of the Rosbride river were haunted by a forlorn-looking object of
+a lame tramp, who sought vainly what his despair hoped to find. As he
+roamed about in it, he had just one spell of consolation, which he was
+often muttering over to himself. It was something he called, "The best
+turn, anyway, I iver done the crathur in her life. Little enough, God
+knows, little enough, but the best good turn."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+FORECASTS
+
+
+When Mrs. Joyce used in her last days to predict regretfully that her
+youngest daughter would never marry, she said a bold word, for at this
+time still Theresa's years fell short of twenty, and she was generally
+recognised as the prettiest girl to be seen at Mass in the small, ugly
+chapel down beyant near Ballybrosna. Some people, it is true, said that
+she was "just a fairy of a crathur, and too little for anythin'," and
+she was, no doubt, diminutive in size. Nor had she any brilliancy of
+colouring to make amends in a humming-bird's fashion for the
+insignificance of her proportions, resembling rather, with her dark eyes
+and hair, one of those filmy white blossoms which look the paler and
+frailer for their knots of ebon stamens, or the delicate moth who shows
+fine black pencillings among his pearly down. Still, nobody denied that
+she had "an uncommon purty face of her own," and the neighbours,
+moreover, always found her "plisant and frindly and gay enough," when
+they found her at all. But they remarked among themselves that one
+seldom seen e'er a sight of Therasa Joyce these times anywheres about.
+They supposed she was took up wid lookin' after her mother, who wasn't
+gettin' her health over well this good while back. I think myself that
+Theresa's invisibility could be only in part accounted for thus, as the
+explanation does not cover the fact that to slip the wrong side of the
+dyke, or turn aside among screening hillocks and hollows when she
+noticed the approach of her acquaintances, was the course she always
+adopted if she could achieve it without hurting anybody's feelings.
+Theresa much disliked doing this, as a rule, though she broke it on one
+occasion in a way that surprised and puzzled those who knew her best.
+
+But whether Mrs. Joyce forecast the future rightly or wrongly, she had
+certainly an erroneous impression on her mind when, as often happened,
+she wound up her disconsolate musings by saying resentfully, "And the
+back of me hand to some I could name." If she had proceeded to do so,
+she would probably have mentioned persons who had done nothing to bring
+about the result she was deploring, and she never thought of connecting
+it with the events which had accompanied Ody Rafferty's flitting from
+the Three Mile Farm more than a twelvemonth before Denis O'Meara came to
+the place.
+
+Until Ody took up his abode at Lisconnel he had always lived with his
+father, who farmed a remote bit of land out towards Lough Glenglas. It
+was a holding which had been wrested from the grip of a surrounding bog
+by earlier generations of Raffertys, who were a strenuous race; but in
+Ody's father's time their energies had taken a turn not conducive to
+reclamation, or even to the maintenance of what was already won. All
+Ody's many elder brethren--sisters there were none--had run wild, and
+ended by running it so far afield that the narrow, whitewashed house,
+lonesome and bleak, saw them no more. Its mistress also died, failing,
+perhaps, other means of exit--running wild being in her case
+impracticable--and finding life impossibly dreary without Ned, the
+least-good-for of her sons; and the household was thus reduced to old
+Michael Rafferty, and his aunt, and little Ody. These domestic changes,
+in conjunction with other untoward chances, sadly hindered farming
+operations, and nature made prompt use of the pause. Season by season
+the patch of tilled ground seemed to shrink at the wish of the greedy
+black land that girdled it about. The outlying fields grew first garish
+with golden ragweed and scarlet poppies, and then dull green again with
+the brown-knotted rushes and sombre sedge, and all other marish growths,
+until the re-annexation was complete, and they once more were
+homogeneous part and parcel of the conquering bog. Old Michael used to
+trudge heavily round his dwindling territories, which were haunted by
+memories of better days. There had been a time when they had actually
+"kep' a pair of plough-horses." I believe that he would have fretted his
+heart out much sooner than he did if it had not been for Ody, his only
+remaining son, "whose aquils," his aunt Moggy sometimes remarked rather
+bitterly, "he consaited you wouldn't find plintier in the world than an
+apple sittin' on a sloe-bush." As the boy grew up the old man's pride
+and pleasure in him were tempered by apprehensions lest he should "take
+off wid himself like the other lads." However, Ody never did this nor
+anything worse than wax somewhat over-confident and self-opiniated; and
+a year or so before his father's death he became associated with Felix
+O'Beirne in the management of an illicit still off away in the bog,
+which gave him an object in life, and had a sobering and settling effect
+upon him.
+
+He was not more than twenty when his father suddenly died one early
+spring morning, and he found himself left responsible for a few acres
+well cropped with weeds, and sundry arrears of rent to be extracted from
+their produce. Whereupon he resolved to abandon the struggle, and set up
+on a less ambitious footing in one of the cabins at Lisconnel. So he got
+ready for the move by selling off his little bit of live stock, all
+except Rory, the old black pony, who had a very large head and a white
+face like a grotesque mask, and with whom he would not have parted on
+the most tempting terms. As for his great-aunt Moggy, when she heard of
+this arrangement, she resigned herself to her fate, which was obviously
+the Union away at Moynalone. What else should become of her, since she
+was past field-work, and nobody could expect Ody now to be bothered with
+keeping her idle, and he with scarce a penny to his name after settling
+with Mr. Nugent. "Ody," she reflected, "didn't mind a thraneen what way
+he had things in the house, and didn't care to be keepin' fowls, so what
+good 'ud he get out of her at all?" Moggy was a dull and rather
+cross-tempered old person, who had grown up in souring shade, and never
+had a life of her own to live, nor yet a faculty for slipping smoothly
+into other people's. Her slight intercourse with Ody had hitherto
+chiefly consisted of quarrels. In fact, only the day before his father's
+death, they had fallen out abusively about the broiling of some bacon,
+and this seemed to make her destination all the more inevitable.
+Therefore Moggy likewise set about her few dismal preparations,
+oppressed by a stunned sense that the black hour she had been dreading
+most of her life was now just going to strike.
+
+On the morning of the day Ody was to flit she held a sort of carouse at
+her solitary breakfast over the remnant of a pound of tea which she had
+saved after the wake. Tea was ten prices fifty years ago, and a very
+rare luxury at the Three Mile Farm. As she poured it strong and black
+out of the badly broken teapot, the whole one being packed up, she
+thought that was the last time she'd ever have the chance again in this
+world to be wetting herself a cup of tea, and she thickened it
+recklessly with lumps of damp brown sugar, and swung it round in her
+cracked saucer to cool, and tried hard to enjoy it. She was still
+lingering over it when Ody came into the kitchen, which caused her, poor
+soul, instinctively to thrust away the betraying teapot out of sight on
+the black hob.
+
+"What way was you intindin' to go, then, aunt?" said Ody.
+
+"To Moynalone?" she said, turning to face her future with a deep sinking
+of heart. "Sure, I suppose it's trampin' over I'll be."
+
+"And I won'er how long you think to be doin' it," said Ody--"a matter of
+ten mile?"
+
+"Where's the hurry at all, supposin'?" said his aunt, desperately.
+
+"Blathers!" said Ody, "there's room in the cart waitin' ready. You'd be
+better bundlin' yourself into it than to be sittin' here all the mornin'
+delayin' us."
+
+"'Deed, then, beggars drive as chape as they walk," she said, "and I
+might as well be gettin' the lift as far as you can take me."
+
+The old white-faced pony preferred to pace slowly on the long bog-road,
+and, as Ody always respected his whims, the journey barely ended with
+the March daylight. The old, sad-visaged woman sat all the while under
+her muffling shawl in silent apathy undisturbed, and as during the
+latter stages of the drive a blinking drowsiness co-operated with her
+want of interest in the scenes through which she jogged, she naturally
+looked around her in bewilderment when roused by the jerk of the
+stopping cart. She expected to find herself in the streets of Moynalone,
+drawn up, probably, at the door of the big Union workhouse. But, instead
+of its long rows of casements staring down blankly on her, she saw only
+the one mole's-eye window of a tiny whitewashed cabin peering at her
+from beneath its thatched eaves, and all about it the great lonely bog
+spreading away with never a trace of any town.
+
+"Och, wirrasthrew, man, what are you after doin' on me?" she said,
+beginning to bewail herself querulously. "Sure you haven't brought me to
+any place at all. Every hour of the black night it'ill be afore ever
+I'll get there now, and the Union'ill be shut, and what's to become of
+me then I dunno. You'd a right to ha' tould me----"
+
+"Blathers!" said her nephew, "git down out of that wid your yawpin'.
+D'you want the folk here to think you're a sackful of ould hins? And go
+in and be seein' after a bit of fire; it's late enough to be sure. What
+fool's talk have you about the Union, and bad luck to it? You'll find
+the things for the supper in the inside of the ould churn. Union,
+moyah!"
+
+And old Moggy, alighting with cramped limbs, entered her home at
+Lisconnel, feeling blissfully as if she had been _unpacked_ out of a
+most horrible nightmare.
+
+Ody was probably actuated by several unassorted motives in dealing thus
+with his superfluous old great-aunt. Pride and pity and perversity and
+generosity--all had, no doubt, some influence upon his conduct, while
+long use and wont had unawares given her the same sort of hold upon his
+affections that was possessed in a much higher degree by Rory, the pony,
+whose humours were of course easier to put up with than human foibles.
+But the old woman measured his magnanimity by the immensity of the
+benefit which it had conferred upon her, and with a strong revulsion of
+feeling she formed an opinion of his virtues and talents as exalted
+quite as that which she had often secretly jibed at in his father.
+Accordingly she sang his praises unweariedly among their new neighbours,
+and, as Ody was vain enough not to dislike the echoes which reached him,
+he soon began to look upon her with more complacency, so that they
+agreed much better than heretofore. She found no small solace, too,
+after her long cronyless isolation up at the Three Mile Farm, in the
+company of Mrs. Joyce, and Mrs. Keogh, and the other Lisconnel dames. In
+short, a kind of Indian summer of content seemed to be setting in for
+her. Moggy's mind, however, was of the self-tormenting type, and soon
+devised means of marring it. They took the form of apprehensions that
+Ody would presently get married, and that thereupon "the wife would put
+her out of it." If she had only known, Ody was at this time, as for many
+years ensuing, far too much taken up with himself, and Rory, and "the
+little consarn away in the bog," to entertain any such project; but as
+it was she felt that the event, with all its direful consequences,
+perpetually hung over her, and might at any moment bring her new
+prosperity to a miserable end. Her impending great-niece-in-law was a
+vaguely appalling spectre, who threatened to take the roof from over her
+head, and the bit out of her mouth, and turn her adrift to founder
+hopelessly on the workhouse doorsteps. But it was not until more than a
+year after their settlement at Lisconnel that she endued her bogey with
+one definite form, by making up her mind that Ody "was thinkin' of
+Theresa Joyce."
+
+Her reason was that she had one fine evening seen him carrying Theresa's
+water-pail for her down the hill, an ordinary act of courtesy enough,
+but the sight of which suddenly darkened the world before her foolish
+old eyes more dismally than if the golden fleece of the summer sunset
+had been smothered under the blackest pall ever woven in cloud-looms.
+"Fine colloguin' they're havin' together," she said to herself as she
+watched them and their long shadows down the slope, "and he sloppin' the
+half of it over the edge instead of mindin' what he's doin'. It's
+throwin' me out on the side of the road she'll be." In reality Theresa
+was wondering why there would be, a quare black sidimint like, in the
+water on some days and not on others; and Ody was explaining the
+phenomenon confidently and erroneously on an extemporised theory of his
+own. But to old Moggy's fears it seemed quite possible that they might
+be fixing the wedding-day. For Theresa Joyce herself she had no manner
+of misliking at all, considering her to be "a very dacint plisant-spoken
+little girl," but Mrs. Ody Rafferty seemed none the less certain to
+evict her without remorse. And Ody's aunt retired to rest that night in
+a despondent mood.
+
+It was just about this time that Denis O'Meara came to stay at Lisconnel
+on sick leave. The O'Mearas lived in one of the three cabins which used
+to stand near the O'Beirne's forge, but which the great Famine and Fever
+year left tenantless for ever after. Their household consisted of the
+two infirm old people with their melancholy middle-aged son Tim, and
+their sickly grandson, little Joe Egan, who was Denis's cousin. Now
+Denis had been wounded in a battle somewhere out in India, and had been
+promoted sergeant--"and he but a young boyo so to spake"--and owned four
+medals, and stood six foot three in his stockings, and was as fine a
+figure of a man as you could wish to see, let alone his gorgeous scarlet
+uniform, which was a sight to behold; so if he was not a hero, get me
+one, as we say in Lisconnel. But Lisconnel was quite satisfied with him
+in that worshipful character, and found it very easy to adopt the
+appropriate attitude towards him. For Denis was good-natured and
+cheerful and never conceited at all, nor vain when there was anything
+more to the purpose for him to be; qualities which have an irresistible
+fascination in distinguished personages and make their followers' duty
+a pleasure. It was wonderful how his sojourn enlivened everybody, even
+his mournful little old grandmother, whose gratification expressed
+itself chiefly in regrets that his poor father and mother had not lived
+to see the illigant man he'd grown. When she said this to the younger
+matrons of Lisconnel, they thought that the crathurs' fate was
+commiserable indeed, and earnestly hoped that they themselves would be
+spared, plase God, to witness the splendid careers that lay before their
+own Denises at present playing among the puddles. But the older ones had
+to content themselves with the knowledge that if they had only just so
+happened to get the same chances, their own lads would have done the
+very same things; a fact which seemed to give them a sort of
+hypothetical proprietorship in Denis's glory. His presence brightened up
+society as a tall poppy brightens up all a sombre potato-plot, and his
+conversation brought strange lands and extraordinary events within one
+remove--a single pair of eyes and ears--of everybody's experience. For
+many years after "the summer we had Denis O'Meara up here" made a vivid
+time-mark in our annals; and I fancy that the stories of some of his
+exploits, with their outlines looming large through a mythical
+mistiness, still float in our atmosphere. There is at least one legend
+relating how a soldier out in the East cut off a mad elephant's head at
+a stroke of his sabre, with the hero of which Denis O'Meara could
+probably be identified. Altogether he was so exceptionally brilliant a
+figure both in himself and in his fortunes, that the interest which he
+excited had no element of envy in it, as might have been the case had
+emulation seemed less utterly beyond everybody's reach.
+
+Next to his cousin, Joe Egan, a stunted, starved-looking sprissawn of a
+lad, perhaps the most appreciative of his admirers was big Hugh
+McInerney, whom people were apt to call an omadhawn. He also was,
+comparatively speaking, a stranger at Lisconnel, having come there only
+that spring to give John O'Driscoll a hand with the building of his mud
+cabin, after which he stayed about doing what odd jobs offered at that
+slack season of the year. Now and then he tramped on distillery business
+for Felix O'Beirne, and generally acquitted himself in a manner which
+appeared worthy of contempt to young Ody Rafferty, who was his companion
+on these expeditions. Ody expressed his opinion in unqualified terms,
+saying, "Sure it 'ud disgust you to see him moonin' along like an ould
+donkey strayed out of a fair." But his senior partner, rather to his
+annoyance, persisted in replying, "But, mind you, the chap's no fool."
+He had nobody belonging to him at Ballybrosna, whence he came, and some
+people said that he had been a workhouse child.
+
+At the time of Denis O'Meara's arrival, he was darning the widow Joyce's
+thatch for her, and "not killin' himself ever the job," as people said,
+when they reckoned how many days he had been visible crawling about on
+the top of her little house, a conspicuous position in which he looked,
+Mrs. Con Ryan remarked, "a quarer great gawk than he did on dry lan'."
+He was occupied thus on the first afternoon that Denis walked up there
+with some of the other lads, and while they talked to Mrs. Joyce and
+Theresa underneath, the thatcher took a leisurely and critical survey of
+the scarlet and golden newcomer, from his wonderfully polished boots to
+his sleek dark head and fierce moustache. The verdict he pronounced to
+himself with unfeigned satisfaction was, "Grandeur's no name for him."
+Hugh himself, of large and lumbering frame, had a shag of reddish
+flaxen hair, which made thatch-like eaves above his small, light-blue
+eyes and high burnt-brick-coloured cheek-bones. He wore whitey-brown
+rags. After the rest had gone on and in, he slithered down to the ground
+and told Theresa, who was still standing by the door, that she didn't
+look the size of a bit of a lady-bird beside the soldier fellow. If
+anybody else had made this personal remark, Theresa might have been a
+little hurt by it, as she wished herself of more imposing stature; but
+sure nobody minded poor Hugh McInerney; at any rate she said, "Aye, he's
+a terrible big man, isn't he? Apt to knock the head off himself he'd be
+if he was offerin' to come in at our door."
+
+However, on the very next day Denis contrived to accomplish that feat
+without any such accident when he called in at the Joyces' to ask was
+his grandmother there--which she was not, nor indeed likely to be.
+Failing to find the old woman, he postponed his quest for the present
+and stayed talking to Theresa, who, as it happened, was at home; and
+then he stopped again outside to help Hugh McInerney by handing him up
+some rolls of green-sodded scraws and slippery bundles of rushes. His
+long reach made him serviceable here, though his left arm was still
+partially disabled by the sabre-cut that had invalided him. The gleam of
+the red coat at the Joyces' door had apparently as fascinating an effect
+upon Lisconnel as if the place had been inhabited by a population that
+bellowed and gobbled its greetings instead of saying, "How's yourself,
+lad?" and "It's a grand day, thank God," as it came sauntering up
+dispersedly from various quarters. Before many minutes had passed quite
+a numerous group were collected, for in these long midsummer days there
+is little to be done up here except save the turf, a business which fine
+weather makes short work of. In the weeks before the potato-digging,
+employment becomes as scarce as the pitaties themselves, and the hours
+hang limp and flaccid between the meals which punctuate them with a
+plateful of coarse-grained gruel. Therefore to Christy Sheridan and
+Terence Kilfoyle, with half a dozen of their neighbours, the sight of
+their distinguished visitor was an oasis in a very arid desert, and they
+made towards it thirstily.
+
+By and by the group drifted away from the road before the Joyces' house
+into the rough sward behind it; rather literally drifted, as the cause
+of the move was the wind, a strong soft west wind which had been blowing
+over the bog all the morning in great wide gusts. They seemed to lean
+hard against whatever they met, and made standing still an effort, and
+devastated conversation by carrying off important fragments of it
+uncaught, no matter how loudly one bawled. But the big boulders and
+furze-clumps strewn about in a slight depression close by offered seats
+and shelter opportunely; so amongst them presently appeared Denis
+O'Meara's scarlet tunic, and Theresa Joyce's brown-striped shawl, and
+Mrs. Ryan's white-frilled flapping cap, which she said was bein'
+fluttered to destruction off her ould head, and Hugh McInerney's
+many-rifted caubeen, for he declared that until the flurry of the blast
+went down a bit you might as well be lettin' on to thatch the sails
+whirlin' of a win'mill. And the rest of the company following suit might
+be described in terms of their attire as for the most part sad-coloured
+and dilapidated. It was just such a gathering as may be sitting to sun
+themselves at Lisconnel this day--if it happens to be a fine summer
+one--but with a touch of brilliance, both for eye and ear, added by the
+young soldier's presence. They had, however, but fitful gleams to bask
+in, for the sky was all feathered over with little silver-white plumes,
+which the wind kept ruffling by so fast that the light flickered in and
+out continually, as if it had come through a canopy of large slowly
+waving leaves. Still, they gossiped beneath it with much satisfaction,
+and catechised Denis about his adventures, and told him all the news of
+the countryside; and there seemed to be no particular reason why they
+should not go on doing so indefinitely. What in the end broke up the
+assembly was a slight mishap that befell Theresa Joyce.
+
+It cannot be denied that Theresa was rather vain about her long black
+hair, which she had only of late begun to put up in thick silken coils.
+Her mother said you had to take your two hands to a one of them, like as
+if you were twisting a big _suggawn_ (hay-rope); and they looked almost
+too heavy for her small head, no matter how closely they were wound
+about it. A rippling wave, moreover, ran through these tresses, which
+were exceedingly soft and fine; so her vanity was perhaps excusable. At
+any rate, it led her to fashion herself a small knot of cherry-coloured
+ribbon made of a bit that had trimmed the sleeve of her mother's purple
+merino gown. It was a _very_ small knot, because most of the bit had got
+mildewed lying up, before Theresa grew to concern herself about such
+things. But it looked as bright in her hair as a ruddy berry on a dark
+foliaged creeper, and she wore it with a pleasure, which was destined to
+be brief. For as she sat knitting with the quietly creeping fingers of
+an expert in that art, a vagrant gust maliciously whisked off her little
+gawd, and tossing it contumeliously on the ground, as if it were not
+worth carrying, began to puff it along, skimming over the heather and
+tussocks. Denis O'Meara all but rescued it for her, only that Hugh
+McInerney--the omadhawn--starting forward at the same time, blundered up
+against him, and tumbled with him into a furze-bush. And before they
+picked themselves up, the cherry-coloured knot had met its fate in the
+shape of the Ryans' black and white kid. She was tethered close by, and
+had been apparently absorbed in scratching her forehead with her left
+hind foot in a way that said much for the limberness of her youthful
+joints. But as the bit of ribbon flirted past her she made a rapid
+snatch, and swallowed it at a gulp. Mrs. Ryan stood dismayed at possible
+serious consequences to the kid, and Theresa at the certain loss of her
+scrap of finery; and everybody else was saying to Hugh McInerney: "Och,
+you great omadhawn, why couldn't you keep yourself aisy? He had it safe
+enough on'y for you gettin' under his feet"--everybody, that is, except
+Denis O'Meara, who said: "Sure now the both of us wasn't mindin' rightly
+where we was chargin' to; and the raison of that belike was the nayther
+of us thinkin' so much of what we was runnin' after, as of who we was
+runnin' for--and small blame to us bedad."
+
+But Hugh's self-esteem was not restored by the good-natured excuse. He
+said: "Truth it is, I'd a right to ha' sted quiet. For the on'y notion I
+had was puttin' meself for'ard to be gettin' a hould of it before any of
+the others." And he walked off crestfallen to resume his perch on the
+thatch.
+
+As for Theresa, she ignored Denis's pretty speech, and said 'deed now
+she remembered her mother had bid her step up and see what way Ody
+Rafferty's aunt was that morning. And she, too, withdrew from the group
+to make this visit of inquiry.
+
+As she passed on her way under the place where Hugh was thatching, he
+dropped a small handful of rushes on her head to call her attention, and
+when she looked up she saw his red-brick-hued face in a wild
+tow-coloured halo peering down at her from over the eaves. "I am sorry I
+lost it on you," he said.
+
+"Ah, no matter about it; and it wasn't your fau't more than another's,"
+said Theresa.
+
+"You'd ha' had it now," said Hugh, "if it wasn't for the little goat
+gettin' the chance to ait it while himself was tumblin' over me. But I'd
+as lief have your hair the way it is now. It is the blackest ever I
+seen. One might think you'd gathered it out of the middles of them red
+poppies there. Stick a couple of them in it, if you want anythin'; but
+to my mind it's better widout. On'y if you've the fancy to be tyin' the
+bit of red string through it, I'm sorry it was ate."
+
+Hugh's head drew back, and disappeared from her view; but next moment
+she heard him say mournfully: "What am I after doin'? Puttin' me fut
+that far down a houle it's caught fast between a couple of rafters.
+Firrm it is, begorrah. If I don't mind what I'm at, it's pullin' the
+half of their house down, and wranchin' me ankle I'll be before I free
+meself." And she saw him struggling cautiously on the roof all the
+while she was ascending the slope to Ody Rafferty's door, within which
+his aunt was at present a prisoner.
+
+A reluctant and repining one she was, having been seized with a bad
+attack of lumbago at a time when she felt particularly anxious to keep a
+vigilant eye upon what occurred in her neighbourhood, instead of being
+left dependent upon hearsay for a knowledge of anything happening
+outside her four draughty walls. Many a care-infested hour she fretted
+away between them. For how could she tell with what insidious steps the
+calamity to ensue from Ody's courtship of Theresa Joyce might all the
+while be stealing on her? She dared not confide her fears to any
+neighbour, nor would she have put much faith in the report of
+observation unwhetted thereby; and she lived in daily dread of hearing
+the news announced as no mere conjecture or rumour, but a very hard
+fact. As the days wore on the idea took possession of her more and more
+completely, but she could only wreak her helpless ill-humour by doing
+foolish and futile things, such as dilating to Ody upon the imprudence
+of getting married, and the undesirable qualities of black-looking slips
+of colleens--a simple and ingenious expedient for putting him out of
+conceit with all and any of them; while she assumed towards Theresa a
+demeanor so glum and repellent that the girl could not attribute it
+entirely to the irritability caused by rheumatic twinges, and from one
+of her charitably intentioned visits returned with a disconcerted
+expression, and a resolve, which she kept, to pay no more. But in fact
+Ody was during these weeks even more than usually engrossed by the
+affairs of the inobtrusive little manufactory, which he and Felix
+O'Beirne superintended away in a retired part of the bog; and not they
+alone, but Lisconnel collectively, had been going through some
+excitement on this account. This was occasioned by the livelier interest
+which the police had recently manifested in that branch of home
+industry, stimulated by admonitions from their authorities to the effect
+that the hunting down of illicit stills, and confiscation of the
+produce, might with advantage be carried on more energetically. Hence
+had resulted several appearances in Lisconnel of the constabulary from
+Ballybrosna and other stations, and when these occurred Ody was in his
+element of wiles and stratagems. More than once he enjoyed the moment of
+their visitors' departure on a wild-goose chase, "consaitin' they've got
+us be the hind leg this time for sartin;" and long did he chuckle over
+the evening when they came and "sat discoorsin' as plisint and aisy as a
+rabbit in its houle," by a hearth where there was "enough of the stuff
+to float the lot of them lyin' widin six inches of their shiny brogues."
+It was, however, thought expedient to guard against a repetition of this
+perilous entertainment, and the contraband crocks were transferred to a
+still more secluded hiding-place in the queer tiny sod-and-stone shanty
+with Hugh McInerney, who had displayed unexpected strategical ability
+and presence of mind under late emergencies, now knocked up for himself
+in a hollow behind the hill. So old Moggy's fears might have been better
+employed. Then about this time, too, a thrill was caused by the
+mysterious horseman, who visited the O'Beirnes' forge one night, and got
+old Felix to break open for him an immensely strong, small iron box
+which he carried. The same box being found next morning lying empty in
+the little Lisconnel stream, beside which the horse, "a grand big roan,"
+was quietly grazing, while his rider was nowhere, nor was ever after
+anywhere, to be seen; an incident which gave scope for infinite
+speculation at Lisconnel.
+
+All these things happened before Ody's aunt got about again. By that
+time it was well on in August, and the season having been hot and dry,
+Lisconnel's oat-patches were already reflecting as if in a mirror,
+tarnished somewhat and rusted, the broad golden blaze that had looked
+down on them so steadily, and people had begun to think about reaping.
+The Ryans' field, indeed, was so ripe by the day of Ballybrosna Big
+Fair, that Paddy Ryan commissioned Hugh McInerney to bring him back a
+reaping-hook from it. Hugh was going to attend it on business of his
+own, and Ody Rafferty had some bulkier commissions to execute in behalf
+of his neighbours. But he encountered some difficulties in getting under
+way, due to the inopportune devices of old Rory, whom he proposed to
+bring with him. Ody had been careful not to put on his best clothes
+until he had caught the beast, because, as he remarked, "He well knew
+the crathur 'ud be off wid himself hidin' in the unhandiest place the
+divil 'ud put in his mind, if he noticed e'er a dacint stitch on him."
+Yet despite this precaution, when his master went to look for him after
+breakfast, no black pony was in sight.
+
+"And he that'll be foosterin' everywhere under your feet other whiles,
+he's that fond of company," said Ody's aunt, who hobbled out of doors
+for the first time to assist in the search. "Belike he's seen you
+rubbin' up your brogues, and be raison of that he's took off wid
+himself. Bedad, now the big ould head of him is as full of desate as it
+can hould."
+
+"He's a notorious schemer, God forgive him," Ody said, rather sadly, for
+it went against the grain with him to admit defects in Rory.
+
+But his scheming bade fair to prove successful, as Ody after long
+hunting stood baffled at the door, with his expedition seemingly
+frustrated, when Hugh McInerney passing by reported that he "was after
+seein' the baste lanin' gathered up close agin the back of the big stone
+above there, wid a continted grin on the ould gob of him that 'ud
+frighten you wid the villiny was in it." Whereupon the two young men
+went to dislodge him from his fool's paradise, and the three started
+together without further delay.
+
+Till a short way down the road they met old Felix O'Beirne, and with him
+Denis O'Meara, at whose heels followed Joe Egan, ragged and small, his
+habit being to dog his splendid cousin so persistently that old Mrs.
+Byers next door said she wondered "the young chap didn't of an odd
+while take him be the two shoulders and sling him over the dyke."
+
+"So you're off to the fair," said old O'Beirne. "And is it sellin' the
+pony you'd be at last? Sure, now, he'll be the pick of the market,
+that's sartin."
+
+"Ah, they'll niver give me me price for him, the naygurs," said Ody.
+
+"Our Captin-Commandin' here had a right to take him off of you for a
+throoper," said old O'Beirne, "and, faix, there wouldn't be his aquil in
+the len'th and breadth of the army. What 'ud you offer for him, lad?
+Look at the size of the head he has on him, and the onnathural white
+face of him that's fit to scare a rigimint before it, if there was
+nothin' else."
+
+"Is it broke bankrupt you'd have me then?" said Denis, "settin' up to be
+buyin' meself mounts of that expinsive discripshin?"
+
+"Musha, good gracious, man, promise him the first thruppinny-bit you
+meet floatin' down the river on a grindstone, and you'll be buyin' every
+hair in his tail," said the old man. "But come along and don't be
+delayin' thim. They're goin' after fairin's for their sweethearts, the
+way you'd be yourself if you worn't too great a naygur. Or, maybe,
+there isn't anythin' good enough for her to be had in Ballybrosna--is
+that the raison of it?"
+
+Little Joe was beginning to say in a resentful shout: "Naygur
+yourself--he and I are goin' to get----" But Denis pulled him on
+jocularly by the collar, and the parties went their several ways.
+
+Ody then said: "Sweethearts is it? He's the quare ould man for talkin'.
+Glory be to the great goodness, I'm throubled wid ne'er a one. 'Here's
+out of it,' sez I. 'Onnathural,' sez he, musha cock him up, and himself
+shoein' ould garrons all the days of his life. Hi along, Rory, jewel!"
+
+But Hugh said, meditatively, and more than half to himself, which was
+rather a habit of his: "Well, now, for the matter of the fairin', it's
+just the best len'th of ribbon I can get thim to give me for a shillin'.
+Yella it's to be. I wasn't long aither plannin' a way to find out the
+colour she'd like. Sure, I gave her a bunch of flowers wid poppies in
+it, and daisies, and furze-blossom, and foxglove, and forgit-me-not, and
+midowsweet, and sez I to her, which of thim was the finest coloured.
+And, sez she, the furze-blossom was, be raison of it bein' the bright
+gould all over, that the others had mostly only a spark of somewheres
+inside. So it's to be yella. Tellin' you the truth, I'd liefer she
+wouldn't be wearin' e'er such a thing at all, anyways not in her hair,
+that's a sight purtier just in the big black twists. But, sure, it's the
+fancy she has, and morebetoken, I think bad of me lettin' the little
+goat swally the weeny bit she had on her. Ay bedad, I'd a right to be
+bringin' it to her; and, at all evints, I'd be doin' a foolish thing to
+come home widout it, and me not gettin' the bit of fat bacon these six
+weeks next Saturday to make up the price. I won'er now what len'th
+they'd give you for one shillin'?"
+
+But Ody, who had not been listening, only said, oracularly: "Och! that's
+accordin'," which did not materially assist Hugh's speculations.
+
+Yellow ribbons were not plentiful at Ballybrosna fair, and Hugh
+McInerney had to ask for them vainly at several stalls before he came to
+an old-clothes cart, where the proprietress, being hot and cross, took
+him aback by replying: "And who ever heard tell of sellin' ribbons be
+the len'th, you quare-lookin' stookawn?"
+
+"Sure it's meself couldn't say but you might; I niver had any call to be
+buyin' such a thing before. But a bit that one shillin' 'ud be the
+price of is what I'm wishful to be gettin', if it was yella--and beggin'
+your pardon, ma'am," Hugh answered with a glib meekness, which mollified
+the old woman as much as his not undesigned mention of his shilling.
+
+So she said, "'Deed, now, I believe I've a splindid yella bit
+somewheres, a trifle creased in the folds, that I could make you a
+prisint of for a shillin'." And she rummaged, and unrolled before him
+interminable coils of vivid dandelion-hued ribbon. "The grand colour of
+it couldn't be bet," she said, "in Ireland. You could see it a mile off,
+and you wouldn't get the match of it in Dublin under half-a-crown. If
+she wouldn't be plased wid that, you've got an odd one to satisfy."
+
+Ody with Rory came by as she was wrapping it up in paper, and Hugh,
+pointing to his purchase with a melancholy air, said, in an aggrieved
+tone: "It's a _terrible_ quantity they're about givin' me--yards and
+yards--enough to rope round a haystack; and it's an ojis colour. Troth,
+now, if she takes the notion to be stickin' the whole of it on top of
+the little black head of her, it's an objec' she'll make of herself, she
+will so. It's a pity. I'd liefer there hadn't been the half of it."
+
+"What for then are you gettin' more than enough of whatever it is?" Ody
+asked not unreasonably. "Supposin' you wanted any such thrash at all at
+all."
+
+"Ah, sure, I settled in me own mind to be spendin' me shillin' on it,
+and that's the way it is," Hugh said resignedly. "Maybe she'll have more
+wit, the bit of a crathur; she might never put it on. So now I've on'y
+to see after Paddy Ryan's rapin'-hook, and then I'm done. And is it
+carryin' them two bags all the way home you'd be? Sure there's plinty of
+room for them on the baste."
+
+"Ay, is there?" said Ody. "But the fac' is Rory's in none too good a
+temper this minyit, goodness help him, and he'll be apt to thravel more
+contint, the crathur, if he sees he's not the on'y body wid a loadin'."
+
+"Rax me over the one of them," said Hugh, "I've nought barrin' the bit
+of ribbon, and the rapin'-hook 'ill be nothin' to me at all."
+
+And in this way they plodded back to Lisconnel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A FAIRING
+
+
+Up at Lisconnel, meanwhile, as the idle hours loitered by, Ody
+Rafferty's aunt grew tired of her solitary housekeeping, and late in the
+afternoon she made her way down as far as the Joyces'. Here a number of
+the neighbours were sitting about in almost the same place where Theresa
+had sustained the loss of her cherry-coloured knot. But to-day there
+were no rough breezes stirring to bring about such disasters by their
+unmannerly pranks. The sun-steeped air was so still that the thick
+bushes stood as steady as the boulders, and even the rushes nodded
+slightly and stiffly. As the old woman hobbled down the slope she saw
+Denis O'Meara's scarlet uniform gleaming martially against a background
+of dark broom and hoary rock. Its wearer was, however, very peacefully
+employed in pulling the silky floss off the heads of the bog-cotton,
+which lay in a great heap before him on a flat-topped boulder, with a
+big bunch of many-hued wild flowers beside it. Theresa Joyce, who sat
+opposite to him, was pulling bog-cotton too, though less diligently, for
+it might have been noticed that she often looked off her work, and
+towards the scrap of road that lay within her ken. Joe Egan was at his
+cousin's elbow, and a few other lads and lasses made a rough circle. But
+old Mrs. Joyce, and old Mrs. Ryan, and old Paddy Ryan, and old Felix
+O'Beirne had established themselves on a low grassy bank at a little
+distance. It was kept so closely cropped by the Ryans' goat that its
+dandelions grew dwarfed and stalkless, and were set flat in the fine
+sward like mock suns. All this day the real sun had shone on it so
+strongly that the air was aromatic with the odour of its dim-blossomed
+herbs, and to touch it was like laying your hand on the warm side of
+some sleek-coated beast. Old Paddy said you might think you were sitting
+on the back of an ould cow, but his wife rejoined that "you'd have to go
+far enough from Lisconnel, worse luck, before you'd get the chance of
+doin' such a thing." And she shook her head over the reflection so
+regretfully that a matter-of-fact person might have inferred her to have
+been formerly much in the habit of enjoying seats on the backs of cows.
+
+These elders, from where they sat, commanded a comprehensive view of the
+crops of Lisconnel, its potatoes and oats, green and gold, meshed in
+their grey stone fences, and flecked with obstructive boulders and
+laboured cairns. In the middle of the Ryans' neighbouring field there is
+a block of quartzite, as big as a small turf-stack, which gleamed
+exceedingly white from amongst the deep muffling greenery of the
+potato-plants. Mrs. Joyce had been praising their thriving aspect to old
+Paddy, who, however, was disposed to express a gloomy view of them.
+
+"It's too rank they're growin' altogether," he said; "ne'er a big crop
+you'll get under that heigth of haulms. 'Heavy thatchin' and light
+liftin',' as the sayin' is."
+
+To Felix O'Beirne the smooth leafy surface recalled a far-off incident
+of the War, when the dense foliage of a certain potato-field had
+permitted the execution of a curious military manoeuvre. It was one of
+old O'Beirne's favourite stories, and he often related it at full
+length, but to-day it was cut short by the arrival of Ody Rafferty's
+aunt, whom Mrs. Joyce and Mrs. Ryan were prompt to greet, making room
+for her between them on the bank with an alacrity which somehow conveyed
+an impression of uneasiness lest she should establish herself elsewhere.
+
+Presently she said: "And what at all is Theresa busy wid over
+yonder--and young O'Meara? Is it bogberries they're after pullin'?"
+
+Mrs. Joyce said: "No, ma'am, it isn't bogberries;" and left further
+explanations to Mrs. Ryan, with the air of one who refrains from
+self-glorification, but counts upon its being done for her, more
+gracefully, by deputy.
+
+"Sure wasn't he out on the bog the len'th of the day, since early this
+mornin', he and little Joe, gadrin' her the bog-cotton?" said Mrs. Ryan.
+"The full of a pitaty-creel he brought her. They have it there in a
+hape."
+
+"'Twas because he heard her sayin' last night she wished she had a good
+bit of it to stuff the pillow she's makin' me," put in Mrs. Joyce. "Off
+he went after it the first thing this mornin'."
+
+"Whethen now, is that the way of the win'?" said Ody Rafferty's aunt,
+with a pleased smile, striking out unfamiliar paths among her wrinkles.
+"Troth, but I'm rael glad to hear it. Bedad, it's a grand thing for
+little Theresa."
+
+"He's a very dacint poor lad," Mrs. Joyce said, looking over with pride
+at the handsome young sergeant, and thinking that Ody Rafferty's aunt
+must have some good nature in her after all, since she was so evidently
+glad of their good luck.
+
+"'Deed but there's not a finer young man in the kingdom of Connaught
+this day," said Mrs. Ryan, who could, of course, be frankly laudatory.
+"And wid everybody's good word, high and low, and drawin' grand pay, and
+the colonel in his rigimint ready to do a turn for him any time, and a
+rael steady kind-hearted lad to the back of that. But sure he's after as
+nice a little girl as he'd ha' found anywheres, wid all his thravellin',
+and as good as gould. He'll be very apt to be spakin' out to her
+prisintly, for it's gettin' near his lave's ind, and what for would they
+be waitin'? But to my mind it's as good as made up after what he's done
+to-day."
+
+In a little while after this Ody Rafferty's aunt slipped away, and set
+off hobbling along the road towards Duffclane. She wanted to intercept
+her grand-nephew on his way home and tell him this news. For all day she
+had been haunted by an apprehension that Ody meant to return with a
+fairing for Theresa, the presentation of which might bring about a
+crisis in his courtship very disastrous from her own point of view. Old
+Moggy surveyed her world rather steadily at all times from that
+particular outlook, finding in her solitary superfluousness little to
+deflect her gaze. The disappointment which, on her own theory, these
+tidings would bring to Ody did not do so now, and she put her best foot
+foremost, animated by the pleasure of telling some new thing, one,
+moreover, that threw a reassuring light upon her situation. With even
+her amended opinion of the lad she could hardly imagine that he would
+have a chance against magnificent Denis O'Meara, whom nobody would have
+ever expected to look for a wife in poor little Lisconnel--but you never
+could tell, and she felt that it still behoved her to be on her guard
+against all possible perils. Therefore she at present thought it
+expedient to waylay Ody, and let him know that if he had any notion of
+Theresa Joyce, he was a day after the fair.
+
+Hobbling on bent and breathless, wrapped in her rusty black shawl, with
+her shadow flitting far out over the level bog amid the slanted beams,
+she looked a not inappropriate messenger of woe, symbolically impotent
+and insignificant; a little dark speck in the wide westering light; a
+feeble stir of life creeping on the verge of a vast silent solitude;
+and full, withal, of baseless fears and futile plots, concerning the
+withered shred of existence that remained to her. She was just in the
+nick of time, she said to herself, when she saw the trio presently
+coming over the top of the hill. Ody was pointing out conciliatingly to
+the morose Rory how they'd be at home now nearly in the time he'd be
+waggin' his tail; and Hugh McInerney was resolving that he would go on
+straight to his own place, and defer the presentation of the ugly yellow
+ribbon until to-morrow. All three were hot and fagged and dusty.
+
+"Well, lad, and what's the best good news wid you?" Ody's aunt said to
+him, as they met.
+
+"Little enough," said Ody.
+
+"And you comin' out of a fair?" she said. "Bedad now, we make a better
+offer at it ourselves up here for the matter of news."
+
+"What's that at all?" said Ody.
+
+"Sure amn't I just after hearin' tell of a grand weddin' there's goin'
+to be prisintly?" said his aunt, "and that doesn't happen every day of
+the year."
+
+"Och, a weddin'," said Ody. "I was thinkin' maybe there was somethin'
+quare at our little place beyant yonder. But as long as it's nothin'
+worser than weddin's you're hearin' tell of, I'm contint, if you
+listened the two ears off your head."
+
+"It's Denis O'Meara and Theresa Joyce has made a match of it," said his
+aunt, conscious that she was slightly overstating facts; "settled up it
+is on'y this evenin'. And the weddin's bound to be before his lave's
+out--so there's for you."
+
+"Sure good luck to the both of thim," said Ody, "Theresa Joyce is a
+plisant little bein', I'll say that for her, and divil a bit of harm
+there is in O'Meara aither. A fine chap he is for a sodger; not that
+they're any great things as far as I can see--just pólis a thrifle
+smartened up."
+
+Ody's thoughts were for the moment running on the police, a couple of
+whom he had lately espied at a short distance coming across the bog.
+
+"Well, if you wanted to see the two of thim," said his aunt, raising her
+voice as he began to drive Rory on, "there they are, just at the back of
+her place, sortin' the stuff he's after gettin' her on the bog. He
+brought her the full of the pitaty-creel. Her mother's as plased over it
+as anythin', and sot up too, aye is she bedad."
+
+The old woman was for the time being almost as much disappointed as
+relieved by the equanimity with which Ody had received her tidings; yet
+if she had but known, they had not failed to produce a strong sensation.
+Only she never thought of considering how they might affect that quare
+big gawk Hugh McInerney. What did occur to her in his connection as he
+begun to trudge alongside her after the pony, was that "he was as ugly
+as if he had been bespoke." For Hugh's long tramp under the sultry sun
+had scorched him a deeper and more uniform red brick than usual, and his
+shock of tow-coloured hair jutting from beneath an unnoticeable round
+cap, looked more than ever like thatch over his blinking blue eyes. When
+they had gone a few yards in silence he suddenly said musingly--
+
+"I dunno why he wouldn't have as good a right to be bringin' her
+anythin' she had a fancy for off the bog in a pitaty-creel, as me to be
+buyin' her len'ths of hijis-coloured ribbons to make a show of herself
+wid. But all the same, I'd as lief he'd let it alone. For some raison or
+other I've the wish in me mind I was slingin' the whole of it into one
+of thim bog-houles out there--and that 'ud be no thing to go do on
+her.... And that was a quare story the ould woman had about thim
+gettin' married. Somebody was apt to be makin' a fool of her. Who was it
+would be tellin' her I won'er?"
+
+But old Moggy partly overheard and said: "Thim that knew what they was
+talkin' about, supposin' it's any affair of yours."
+
+So he did the rest of his meditating inaudibly. He said to himself that
+he was steppin' home straight--continuing the while to walk in quite the
+opposite direction--and that he wouldn't be goin' to the Joyces' place
+to-night at all; what 'ud bring him there, and it gettin' so late? But
+of course he went there, as surely as a swimming bubble goes over the
+cataract's smooth lip, or a fascinated little bird down the snake's
+throat.
+
+For the sensation which he had begun to experience, and which was a
+strong one, and strange to him, was nothing less than jealousy. He was
+jealous of that pitaty-creel.
+
+When he came to the place Ody's aunt had told of, he found a group of
+young Joyces and Ryans and others gathered among the boulders and bushes
+in a circle of which the heap of bog-cotton formed the centre; and a
+glance having showed him that it included Denis and Theresa, he sat down
+facing them, and said to himself:
+
+"If I'd known, now, it was bog-cotton she was wantin', I could ha' been
+gadrin' her plinty last night after I come home. There's a gran' big
+moon these times, wid lashin's and lavin's of light to be gettin' thim
+kind of glimmerin' things by. I seen a black place below between the
+sthrame of wather and the roadside all waved over white wid it, like as
+if it was a fall of snow thryin' could it flutter off away wid itself
+agin out of the world. I'd have got her enough to fill a six-fut sack.
+What for didn't the crathur tell me?"
+
+Pursuing these and other such reflections Hugh's attention, which at all
+times had a long tether, strayed far afield. He did not hear Denis
+O'Meara inquire of him twice whether Ody Rafferty had got his fine price
+for the old pony; not yet Peter Ryan rejoin after an interval that he
+supposed it was such a big one, anyway, Hugh McInerney couldn't get it
+out of his mouth--that was sizable enough. No doubt it was this symptom
+of absentmindedness that emboldened Thady Joyce to set about twitching
+out of Hugh's pocket the flimsy paper parcel seen protruding from it, a
+feat which he achieved undetected, while his surrounding accomplices
+nudged one another and whispered: "Och he has it now--whoo-oo he'll do
+it."
+
+Thady conveyed what he had filched to Molly and Nelly Ryan, who
+manipulated it for some time amid much giggling; and then Nelly, with
+dexterous audacity pinned their handiwork on to the cap of her neighbour
+Denis O'Meara, who sat all unawares. Thus it came to pass that when Hugh
+was at last roused to a vague sense of tittering all round him, which
+reached him much as the clacking chirp of sparrows gets meaninglessly
+into our frayed morning dreams, and looking up out of his reverie,
+stared about him for an explanation, the first thing his eyes lit on was
+Denis's smart cap surmounted by a mass of gaudy yellow ribbon in immense
+bows and loops and streamers, flapping and waggling absurdly at every
+movement made by their unsuspecting wearer. And the spectacle caught his
+breath, and dazzled his sight with a sudden scorching blast of wrath.
+For it seemed to him that Denis was not making merely a mock of him and
+his fairing, which he thought intrinsically of small amount, but through
+it of Theresa herself and her foolish little fancies. And there sat
+Theresa looking on, with a quick pink flush, and shining eyes, and a
+quiver about her mouth. The next moment Hugh had hurled at the bedizened
+cap what he happened to be holding in his hand. And this was Paddy
+Ryan's new reaping-hook.
+
+Thereupon followed a terrible confusion and clamour, which seemed to
+fill at a sweep all the spacious drowsy light of the sunsetting. For the
+missile had gone surely to its mark, and had not simply knocked off
+Denis's cap, but made a shocking gash in his temple, so that there were
+only too sufficient reasons for the rising shrieks of "Holy Virgin, he's
+murdhered--he's kilt!" Amid all the turmoil, with Denis fallen on the
+ground, and Hugh standing staring, and everybody else rushing through
+other like crows in a storm, one person alone appeared to act with a
+definite purpose, and that was little Joe Egan. The event had made him
+like one possessed with rage and despair. To Joe, weakly and timorous
+and not over-wise, his valiant, handsome, good-natured soldier cousin
+had come as the most splendid apparition that had shined upon him in the
+dim course of his fifteen years; and he had spent the past three months
+in adoring it very devoutly. So that now to see him laid low suddenly in
+this savage fashion was a sight that might well cause a burning thirst
+for vengeance upon the miscreant who had dealt the stroke. Joe generally
+had to get his revenges wreaked by deputy; and now, as he darted away,
+his intention was to find the pólis somewhere, and bring them to take up
+"that great bastely murdherin' divil, Hugh McInerney," and if by any
+means possible get him hung. He attained his object sooner than might
+have been expected, as not far down the road a pair of constables were
+run into by a small tatterdemalion figure, who, choking and stammering
+and writhing in an ague fit of fury, proceeded to inform them that "Big
+Hugh McInerney was just after murdherin' Denis O'Meara up above
+there--takin' the head off him wid a rapin'-hook," and, further, that
+"if they looked in the dirty thief's little place at the fut of the
+hill, they'd find that every other stone in the walls of it was nothin'
+else but a crock of poteen."
+
+This was the cause of the police's prompt arrival on the scene, where
+nobody resented Joe's action. Denis's injury, though so grave, happily
+did not seem to be mortal, in fact, on this occasion young Dan O'Beirne,
+albeit scarcely more than a spalpeen, displayed a handiness and resource
+about bandaging and other remedies, which foreshadowed his future
+reputation throughout the district for knowledgableness in surgery and
+medicine. Hugh McInerney was, of course, at once arrested, without any
+resistance on his part, or any sympathy from the indignant neighbours.
+He appeared to be what old Will Sheridan termed, "fallen into a serious
+consternation," and was heard to make only one remark. It was when
+people were saying that Theresa Joyce had took a wakeness, and her
+brothers had carried her indoors. "Och, the crathur," he said, "and it
+might aisy have hit her, very aisy. Miself's the quare divil."
+
+Once the police and their prisoner had gone, Denis having been brought
+into the Ryans' house, a deep and melancholy hush settled down upon
+Lisconnel, as if a murky wing had flapped out its brief flare of
+excitement. The whole thing had happened so quickly that the rich light
+from the west was still bronzing the edges of the flat-ledged furze
+boughs, and rosing their white stems, when the little hollow behind the
+Joyces' house rested quiet and deserted, with no traces left of the
+company lately there assembled, except a litter of silky white
+bog-cotton tufts, soon to be swept away by the breeze, and the unchancy
+yellow ribbon, which had been torn out of Denis's cap, and lay coiling
+among the rough grass, whence, as the dusk thickened, it glinted like
+the wraith of a lost sunbeam or a ray from an evil star.
+
+But that night fell very dark, with a moon so closely veiled that the
+flaggers and bulrushes waving their swords and spears fast by, dwindled
+into mere rustlings and murmurs--the air was full of them. At the
+dimmest hour anybody who had stolen out of a neighbouring door, and
+passed between the faintly glimmering white boulders, as if in search of
+something lost there, might have seemed only one of the whispering
+shadows. And these might have begun so say, "Sorra aught can I do at
+all, at all. And ne'er a soul is there to spake a word--all of thim agin
+him, and it no fau't of his, when he would be torminted that way. They'd
+no call to go play such a thrick on him, and he didn't mane it a'
+purpose, I very well know; but the other chap was intindin' to annoy
+him, sittin' there wid a great ugly grin on his face. I wish he'd never
+come next or nigh Lisconnel." But be that as it may, when the next
+morning's light twinkled among the dewy blades, the yellow ribbon had
+disappeared.
+
+After this the days seemed to drag heavily at Lisconnel, where a dulness
+and flatness had come over society. Dr. Hamilton had carried off Denis
+O'Meara to Ballybrosna, and there was nothing to fill up the blank he
+left except speculations about his chances of recovery, and censures
+upon Hugh McInerney, monotonously unanimous. In his favour, indeed, no
+one seemingly had a word to say. People declared that "they'd never have
+thought he'd take and do such a thing, for though he might ha' been a
+quare sort of bosthoon, he was always dacint and paiceable." But
+cancelled praise is the bitterest of blame; and they added that "it was
+rael outrageous of him to go do murdher on the likes of Denis O'Meara,
+and no credit to Lisconnel for it to be happenin' him there. Iligant
+charácters it 'ud be givin' them if he wint back to the rigimint wid his
+eyes slashed out of his head, as much as to say he hadn't a fair chance
+among us unless he'd come wid his side-arms."
+
+The neighbours were of opinion, too, that "it was no wonder little
+Theresa Joyce had got a bit moped and quiet, after her sweetheart bein'
+as good as destroyed before her eyes, and it hard to say if she'd ever
+see a sight of him again."
+
+"It was a misfort'nit thing," Mrs. Con Ryan remarked one day, when the
+subject was under discussion, "that young O'Meara hadn't actually spoke
+out before it happint thim. 'Twould ha' made her a dale aisier in her
+mind now, I wouldn't won'er. Because the way the matter stands, he
+might take up wid some diff'rint notion, and just be off wid himself
+like a cloud blown out of the sky, and she couldn't be sayin' a word, if
+she was ever so sure of what he was intindin'."
+
+Young Mrs. Keogh, to whom she made the observation, refused to entertain
+this view, and replied, "Sorra a fear is there of that. It was aisy to
+see he'd ha' gone to the Well of the World's End after her, let alone
+steppin' up from the Town, if he's spared to get his health. Ay, he'll
+be comin' back for her one of these fine days, sure enough, plase God."
+
+But the fulfilment of her confident prediction looked several degrees
+more doubtful in the light of one of the two pieces of news which Mrs.
+Carbery, accompanied by her daughter Rose, conveyed to the Joyces' on a
+bright September morning a short while after. Her son had come home with
+it from the Town too late the night before. One of them was that Hugh
+McInerney, who had been awaiting the assizes in Moynalone Jail, had died
+of the fever there on last Friday. There was nothing very surprising in
+this event, as Hugh's open-air life could have but ill acclimatised him
+to the atmosphere of the unclean little jail; and it was not likely to
+be very deeply deplored at Lisconnel, where he had not been known long,
+nor, as we have seen, much to his advantage.
+
+As Mrs. Carbery sat in the three-cornered arm-chair, with the sun-dazzle
+off a burnished mug on the dresser shimmering into her eyes, and making
+her blink quaintly, she said, with rather severe solemnity, that "she
+hoped the young fellow had had time to repint of his sins, or else it
+was very apt to be a bad look-out for him, and he after comin' widin a
+shavin' of takin' another man's life no time at all ago, so to
+spake--ne'er a chance but it would be clear in everybody's
+recollection."
+
+Mrs. Joyce, however, said: "Ah, sure maybe the crathur wasn't intindin'
+any such great harm all the while, God be good to him. And, anyway,
+where he's gone he'll find plinty ready to be spakin' up for him, and
+puttin' the best face they can on the matter."
+
+"Ay will he," said old Biddy Ryan, who was calling too, "and bedad it's
+one great differ there is, be all accounts, between that place and this.
+For here if a misfort'nit body does aught amiss, the first notion the
+rest of us have, God forgive us, is to be axin' what worser he was
+manin', like as if it was some manner of riddle, that there's bound to
+be an answer to, if one could find it."
+
+"'Deed, and I dunno if they haven't very far to look, ma'am," said Mrs.
+Carbery, with dignity, "when a chap does his endeavours to take the head
+off another man wid a rapin'-hook, ma'am."
+
+"And _I_ dunno, ma'am, for that matter," said old Biddy, also with
+dignity, "if it's any such a great dale better to have one's mind took
+up wid invintin' other people's bad intintions than if it was wid one's
+own."
+
+"Ah, well! I wouldn't be thinkin' too bad of poor Hugh McInerney, at all
+events," said Mrs. Joyce. "'Twas maybe a sort of accident, for he seemed
+a dacint crathur afore that. Och now, to think it's on'y a few odd weeks
+since he was creepin' about over our heads up there, mendin' th' ould
+thatch! You'd whiles hear him hummin' away, talkin' to himself like some
+sort of big bee--and in his grave to-day! But isn't it a lucky thing
+that he's lavin' nobody belongin' to him to be breakin' their hearts
+frettin' after him? Theresa, child dear, you've ne'er a stim of light to
+be workin' in, sittin' there in the corner."
+
+But Theresa said she had light enough to blind her, and was only
+winding a skein, and could see better to do that in the dark. So Mrs.
+Carbery passed on to her second piece of news, which, though less
+tragical than the first, was not likely to sound very cheerfully in the
+ears of some among her audience. It ran that her son Ned was "after
+seein' Denis O'Meara down beyant, and that he was doin' finely, next
+door to himself again: and that the people in the Town did be sayin' he
+was coortin' Mary Anne Neligan, the people's daughter that he was
+lodgin' wid--a terrible fortin she was said to have--and that he'd be
+very apt to be takin' her along wid him prisintly when his lave was up."
+Mrs. Carbery supposed they were none of them ever likely to see him
+again up at Lisconnel. And the rest of the neighbours, having heard her
+tale, supposed so likewise, and said among themselves that Theresa Joyce
+was to be pitied.
+
+Yet not many days after this, while the early autumn weather was still
+soft-aired and mellow-lighted over our blue-misted bogland, where the
+leaves and berries were brightening, and even the little frosty-grey
+cups on the lichened boulders getting a scarlet thread at the rim, on
+one clear, dew-dashed morning, who but Denis O'Meara himself should
+come stepping into Lisconnel? The neighbours who saw him go by were glad
+to notice that he looked as well as ever he did in his life, and he
+greeted them all blithely though briefly, eluding every attempt to
+entangle him in conversation, and making very straight for the Widow
+Joyce's house, which was by these same observers considered to betoken a
+healthy frame of mind.
+
+Only Mrs. Joyce and Mrs. Kilfoyle were in the little brown room when he
+arrived, but they gave him a cordial welcome, and he took a seat from
+which he could keep a watch on the door while they talked about
+different things. One of these, naturally, was the melancholy end of
+Denis's assailant--poor Hugh McInerney--and Mrs. Joyce said it was
+little enough they'd have thought a while ago that it would be Denis
+who'd come back. "But indeed," she said, "if anythin' had took you, we'd
+ha' been in no hurry ever to set eyes on the other unlucky bosthoon."
+
+Denis said: "Faith, ma'am, I'd give six months' pay the thing had never
+happint. Divil a bit of harm I believe there was in poor McInerney; and
+I spoke to Dr. Hamilton to spake to Mr. Nugent and the other magistrates
+for him; but they said, after what me cousin Joe let out about the
+poteen at his place, the pólis would be wishful to keep him convanient
+to thim for a while; and to be sure, they kep' him too long altogether.
+I know, ma'am, young Rafferty and the rest had his shanty pulled down
+before the pólis come up next day; but they thought they'd git somethin'
+out of him. The little jackass ought to ha' held his tongue. It was a
+pity, bedad. Hard lines it is on a man to be losin' his life, you may
+say, along wid his temper, just be raison of a bit of a joke."
+
+Still as he looked out into the sunshine he could not help thinking that
+he would have had a greater loss of his life than poor Hugh McInerney,
+who, it was evident, would always have met with a cold reception from
+everybody at the Joyces'. Then he said to Mrs. Joyce: "And how's
+Theresa, ma'am?"
+
+Mrs. Joyce was in the middle of replying that she was grandly, and had
+just run over to Mrs. Keogh on a message, when Theresa herself came in.
+
+Denis jumped up quickly, saying: "Ah, Theresa, it's a great while since
+I've seen you."
+
+But Theresa only lifted her head without turning it, and walked straight
+on as if nobody had accosted her.
+
+"Arrah, now, Theresa darlint, don't you see Denis O'Meara?" said her
+mother, puzzled and rather dismayed.
+
+And then Theresa did turn and look at him. "Yis, I see him," she
+said--and, indeed, she might as easily have overlooked the red flame in
+a lantern as the tall scarlet lancer in her mother's little
+misty-cornered room. "I see him," she said, "and I hate the sight of
+him." And thereupon she turned again, and walked out of the door,
+leaving a dead silence behind her.
+
+This was one of the very few harsh sayings that Theresa Joyce has
+uttered in the course of her long life, and it came like a shock upon
+her hearers.
+
+Mrs. Joyce at last said blankly: "What at all has took the child?"
+
+And Bessie Kilfoyle said to Denis, who stood dumbfounded: "But indeed
+now, you may be sure there's not a many up here, at any rate, who do
+that."
+
+But he replied: "If _she_ does, it's many enough for me, Mrs. Kilfoyle.
+And I won't stop here to be drivin' her out of the house. So I'll say
+good-bye to yous kindly, for I'll be off now to Dublin to-morra or next
+day."
+
+"And in coorse," Mrs. Joyce remarked ruefully, after he had departed,
+retreading his steps through the bright fresh morning with so
+crestfallen a mien that all the neighbours knew things had not run
+smoothly, "you couldn't raisonably expec' him to stay here to be hated
+the sight of. And indeed, what wid one thing and another, it's none too
+good thratement the poor lad's got up at Lisconnel, more's the pity."
+
+Theresa herself never had any explanation to offer of "why she would be
+that cross wid poor Denis O'Meara." Her mother accounted for it by pique
+at the Carberys' ill-timed gossip about his imaginary courtship of Mary
+Anne Neligan; and Mrs. Kilfoyle was for a while inclined to the same
+opinion, until one day by chance she espied in the little old tin box
+which contained Theresa's treasures, a roll of bright yellow ribbon
+wrapped up very carefully; and thenceforward she silently ceased to hope
+that things might all come right yet, if Denis O'Meara came back again
+on leave.
+
+So, although Mrs. Joyce may have drawn wrong inferences, the results
+were much as she had foreseen. Theresa never married, and when her
+mother died she went to live with her brother Mick at Laraghmena, where
+she is living still, notwithstanding that it is so long since all this
+happened--since the fine summer when Denis O'Meara was at Lisconnel, and
+Hugh McInerney, who luckily left nobody to be breaking their hearts
+fretting after him, died in Moynalone Jail.
+
+The yellow ribbon lies safely in her box, and with it a grimy bit of
+paper, brought to her one day by a trusty hand, to which Hugh found out
+a way of committing it "before he was took bad entirely." Theresa
+herself has never deciphered its wild scrawls, being an unlettered
+person, but its bearer read it over to her until she knew it by heart
+every word. "For your own self the yella ribin is," the letter ran, "but
+don't be wearin' it unless you like it. And I'm sorry the man got hit;
+but I do be dhramin' most nights that it's you I'm after rapin' the
+little black head off of; and I'd liefer lose me life than think I'd be
+after hurtin' a hair of it. But the Divil was busy wid me that evenin'.
+And I'm very apt never to get the chance to set fut again out on the big
+bog. It 'ud do me heart good to see the sun goin' down in it a great way
+off, for this is a quare small place. It's a long while. But sure, to
+the end of all the days of me life," it said to her, like an echo
+beaten back from the walls of the great abysm, "it's of yourself I'll be
+thinkin' off away in contintmint at Lisconnel."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MR. POLYMATHERS
+
+
+It was to an accidental circumstance that Lisconnel owed the prolonged
+sojourn there of perhaps the most distinguished scholar who has ever
+visited us. For when he arrived at O'Beirne's forge one misty June
+evening, the night's lodging only was all he asked or desired. But in
+those times, now some fifty years since, we had "a terrible dale of
+sickness about in the country," and next morning the stranger was down
+with the fever, which, although so mild a case that even Bridget
+O'Beirne never gave him over more than twice in the same day, brought
+his journey perforce to a halt. At the beginning he was very loth to
+believe that he must relinquish his intention of reaching Dublin by a
+certain date--the first Monday in July; however, having once recognised
+the impossibility of doing so, he showed no haste to quit his quarters,
+and his stay with the O'Beirnes lengthened into months as the summer
+slipped away. At this time the forge was owned by Felix O'Beirne,
+blacksmith, shebeener, and ex-whiteboy, and with him lived his orphan
+grandsons, Daniel and Nicholas, his very old, ancient mother, who still
+drew enjoyment in whiffs through the stem of her black dudeen, and his
+elderly sister, Bridget, who had taken little pleasure in anything since
+the redcoats shot her sweetheart in the War. The missing third
+generation was represented occasionally when Mrs. Dooley, Felix's
+married daughter, came on a visit. It was conjectured among them that
+"the fancy the ould gintleman had for larnin' all manner to young
+Nicholas continted him to stop." And this may have had something to do
+with it, though less, probably, than the vaguer fact that he from the
+first "took kindly" to the O'Beirnes, and they to him. His appearance
+puzzled them a little. He was of a massive, large-boned frame, such as
+nature seems to design for rough uses; but, as Felix remarked, "you
+could aisy tell be ivery finger and thumb on him that hard work wasn't
+the handle he'd took a hould of the world by." He wore a very long, grey
+frieze coat, and a chimney-pot hat so old and tall that it looked as if
+it must have grown slowly to its great height. When he took it off he
+uncovered a shock of soft white hair, like the wig of a seeded
+groundsel, about a face which was furrowed and wrinkled ruggedly enough,
+in a different pattern somehow from what is commonly seen at Lisconnel,
+where sun and wind have a large share in the process. His baggage
+consisted of two bundles, very unequal in size and weight. The contents
+of the smaller one were mainly a shirt and three socks, knotted loosely
+in a blue cotton handkerchief; the other was done up carefully in
+sacking, and he liked to have it under his eye.
+
+Of course the O'Beirnes' visitor was often talked about among the groups
+gathered of an evening, much as they are nowadays, for gossip and poteen
+within the broad-leaved forge doors, through which on dark nights the
+fire still blinks as far across the bog as the amber of the sunset, or
+the rising glow of the golden harvest moon. Even from Felix's first
+report it appeared that the stranger was no ordinary person.
+
+"Won'erful fine discoorse he has out of him, anyway," he told the
+neighbours a few nights after the arrival; "ivery now and agin he'll out
+wid a word as grand like and big as his Riverence at Mass--goodness
+forgive me for sayin' so. Sometimes we've been hardset to tell what he's
+drivin' at. But that's the way it is wid thim words that has a power of
+manin' in thim. They're apt to bother you a bit when you're used to
+spakin plain."
+
+"Belike it's the fever in his head sets him talkin' oddly," said young
+Barney Corcoran. "I mind me brother Joe when he was bad wid it would be
+ravin' wild. Sorra the sinsible word there was out of him for the best
+part of a week."
+
+This way of accounting for his guest's fine language rather affronted
+Felix, and he consequently said, "Musha now, was there not? And how long
+might yourself be under that descripshin of fever?"
+
+"Ah sure, what 'ud we do at all if poor Barney was took that way?" said
+Peter Keogh, "and nobody able to tell was it ravin' he was, or settin'
+up to be talkin' raisonable for any differ they could see."
+
+Barney cleared his throat disconcertedly, and the old man, recalling his
+responsibilities as a host, and perhaps not admiring his sarcasm thus
+elaborated, said conciliatingly, "Och, he'll do right enough if he niver
+raves any worse than Mr. Polymathers. All that ails him is that we want
+to git a bit used to his manner of spakin'."
+
+"Polymathers?" said Peter.
+
+"To be sure, Polymathers. Did you say it any better than I?"
+
+"Well, I nivir heard tell of anybody called that way before. It's a
+quare she-he soundin' sort of name," said Peter.
+
+"Faix, then, there may be plinty quarer in it, we niver heard tell of,
+if that was all," said Felix. "Anyhow, it's his name, and his people's
+afore him. Himself tould me his father was the ouldest of all the
+Polymatherses there was in the counthry he came out of--somewheres down
+south, I think he said--and the head of the whole of thim forby."
+
+"Ay, he did so," said Dan. "Sez you to him, there was a dale of water
+run down hill since the time there was O'Beirnes blacksmiths in this
+part of the counthry; and your father was a one, sez you. And sez he to
+you, he couldn't be any manner of manes purtind to be the aquil to what
+_his_ father was. And sez you to him, what was he? And sez he, it was
+one of the Polymatherses he was, and well known for his larnin' through
+the len'th and breadth of the county Sligo. And a name it was, he sez,
+any man might be proud of ownin'."
+
+"Be jabers, himself has the great consait of it, at all ivents," said
+Peter. "But he might find people could be tellin' him there's Keoghs as
+good as any Polymatherses iver was in it--ivery hair."
+
+The stranger's patronymic having thus been ascertained, it was desirable
+to fix his calling, and, despite his disclaimer of inherited erudition,
+several circumstances bespoke him a schoolmaster, even before the
+question seemed settled by the first act of his convalescence being an
+inquiry into the amount of book-learning which Dan and Nicholas had
+amassed during their sixteen and fourteen years. This was not large,
+though as much as could be expected, considering that in all Lisconnel
+there were not just then, I believe, more than four volumes, one of
+which being merely the index to a non-existent _Encyclopćdia_, can
+scarcely rank as literature. The boys themselves, and their grandfather,
+were deeply interested in the examination, and very anxious that it
+should have a creditable result. For learning and the learned have at
+all times been held in profound respect among us away on our bogland,
+where the devotion to something afar springs perhaps the more abundantly
+because so many things are remote. On this occasion Mr. Polymathers
+opened his most sizable bundle, and it was seen to be filled with books,
+not fewer, doubtless, than a score, in leather bindings, ragged and
+battered, and brownly time-stained all over their margins, as if the
+river of years had for them run no metaphor, but a russet bog-stream.
+They comprised _Homer_, _Virgil_, _Livy_, and other ancients; likewise
+two Latin lexicons, which looked extravagant until you observed how each
+did but supplement the other's deficiencies, and this so imperfectly
+that their owner was still liable to search in vain for words between MO
+and NA.
+
+These, however, were evidently not the most prized portion of Mr.
+Polymathers's library, though he displayed them with some complacency,
+reading out here and there a sonorous "furrin" phrase, at which his
+audience said, "More power," and "Your sowl to glory," and the like. It
+was when he handled the shabbiest of the volumes, with broken backs and
+edges all curling tatters, that his touch grew caressing. The
+lookers-on, contrariwise, thought but poorly of them because they set
+up, seemingly, to be illustrated works, and their pictures, mostly of
+uninteresting round and three-cornered objects, struck Lisconnel art
+critics as very feeble efforts. To be sure Mr. Polymathers called them
+_dygrims_, but that was no help to the overtaxed imagination. Only young
+Nicholas O'Beirne listened intently to the explanation which he gave of
+one of them. Nicholas was a long, thin lad, with melancholy grey eyes
+and a square forehead, whose capacity his grandfather had held in some
+esteem, since it had been discovered, years ago, that "the spalpeen
+could make out an account for four sets of shoes, and half a stone of
+three-inch holdfasts, and a dozen of staples, and two gallon of the
+crathur, and allow for a hundredweight of ould iron, all in his head,
+and right to a farthin'." Now the melancholy eyes darkened and
+brightened with excitement as Mr. Polymathers discoursed of right lines
+and angles and circles, and expounded the mysterious signification of
+certain Ah Bay Says. And he had thenceforward an unweariable pupil in
+Nicholas, companied, albeit with less ardent zeal, and at a slower rate
+of progress, by his elder brother, Dan.
+
+More general interest, however, continued to be taken in the stranger's
+classical attainments. Everybody--the O'Beirnes themselves, their
+neighbours in the cabin-row close by, now long since an untraceable
+ruin, and the people of Lisconnel proper, a couple of miles further
+on--felt uplifted by the residence among them of a man, who they boasted
+would talk Latin to you as soon as look at you. But as we never enjoy
+our own happiness fully until it has been looked at through other men's
+envious eyes, they could not here remain content with simply possessing
+this privilege, or even with dilating upon it to their less favoured
+friends down below and down beyant. They longed to make a parade of it,
+to give a demonstration of it. And the method of doing so which they
+came to consider most desirable was the bringing about of a conversation
+in Latin between Mr. Polymathers and Father Rooney, the Parish Priest.
+For if that took place they could easily imagine his Reverence riding
+home to report in the Town what a wonderful great scholar entirely they
+had stopping above at Lisconnel. Moreover, the conversation itself would
+be a rael fine thing to have the hearing of. Terence Kilfoyle, for
+instance, said that it would be as good as a Play, which, as he had
+never seen one, was to entertain unbounded expectations. And at last,
+after they had wished the wish for some weeks, a prospect of its
+fulfilment came into sight together with Father Rooney's cream-coloured
+pony jogging along through the light of a fiery-zoned July sunset, in
+which Mr. Polymathers was basking by the O'Beirnes' door. In those days
+his Reverence was a youngish man, ruddy, and of a cheerful countenance,
+a substantial load for his sturdy nag, and altogether, in his glossy
+black cloth, a figure very different from their gaunt, sad-visaged,
+shaggily-garbed old guest. He was at the time of Father Rooney's
+approach seated on a two-legged, three-legged stool, propped
+precariously against the ray-rosed cabin wall, and was teaching Dan and
+Nicholas the twelfth proposition of the second book of Euclid. Dan had
+not yet grasped it, but it all lay as clear as a sunbeam athwart
+Nicholas's brain, and he was fidgeting like an impatient horse at the
+slowness of his fellow.
+
+Several of the neighbours chanced to be about, for the forge saw a good
+deal of company in those long empty days before the potato-digging could
+begin. They all drew together into a small crowd, and closed in step by
+step to watch the first meeting between these two notable persons, much
+admiring the deftness with which old O'Beirne secured it by pronouncing
+one of the pony's shoes in need of tightening, and the felicitous
+opening he made by assuring his Reverence that "divil a bit need he be
+mindin' the delay, because Mr. Polymathers there had enough _furrin
+languages_ to keep thim all divarted, if the baste owned as many feet as
+a forty-legs, wid the shoes droppin' off ivery pair of thim. That was to
+say, in coorse, supposin' he got the chance of convarsin' a bit wid
+somebody aquil to answerin' him back iligant, the way there wasn't e'er
+a one of thim could make an offer at doin' no more than thim little
+weevils of chirpin' chuckens."
+
+Yet the interview turned out disappointingly after all. If such a thing
+had not been, of course, exceedingly improbable, one might have fancied
+that each scholar stood in awe of the other's reputation, they steered
+so clear of all recondite subjects; keeping to the merest commonplaces
+about rain and potatoes and turf--which anybody else could have
+discussed quite as knowledgably. In vain, whenever there was a promising
+pause would the bystanders nudge one another, whispering, hopefully,
+"Whist, boys--they'll be sayin' somethin' now." Only the plainest
+English followed, and at last, when Father Rooney rode on, his parting
+joke, which referred to the difficulty his pony would now find in the
+way of becoming a barefooted pilgrim, left for a wonder solemnly
+irresponsive faces behind it.
+
+Michael Ryan said, with a touch of resentment, "Ah, well, one couldn't
+maybe expec' it of thim to be throublin' thimselves talkin' fine for the
+pack of us, as ignorant as dirt, in the middle of th'ould bog."
+
+And his wife said, "'Deed, now, I wouldn't won'er meself if the raison
+was his Riverence 'ud think bad of usin' his Latin words for anythin'
+else on'y prayers and such. It might be somethin' the same as if he went
+and took his grand vistments to go dig pitaties in; and that 'ud be a
+great sin, God knows."
+
+But old Felix, who was, as we have seen, a rather touchy person,
+construed this suggestion into an implied censure on his own wishes in
+the matter, and he said, huffily--
+
+"Sorra the talk of sin I see in it at all, ma'am. 'Tis a dale liker they
+just couldn't get out wid it convanient offhand. The same way that I'd
+aisy enough bate out a shoe on me anvil there, when it's bothered I'd be
+if you axed me to make a one promiscuous here of a suddint on the
+roadside."
+
+Mr. Polymathers himself meanwhile was perhaps dimly conscious that he
+had disappointed hopes, and failed to rise duly to the occasion; and
+this may have been why he slipped indoors, and fetched out a small book
+he had never produced before, bound in a dingy greenish blue, with a
+white paper label.
+
+"D'you know what that is, sir?" he questioned, rhetorically, handing it
+to Felix O'Beirne. "It's the Calendar, let me tell you, of the College
+of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, _juxta_ Dublin. There's a print of
+the Front of the Buildings attached to the fly-leaf. I'm after pickin'
+it up this spring at Moynalone. 'Twas new the year before last, and
+comprises a dale of information relative to terms, examinations, fees,
+and so forth."
+
+"Begor, then, it looks to be a wide house," said Felix, confining
+himself to the picture as a comprehensible point. "It's apt to be an
+oncommon fine place, sir, I should suppose."
+
+"You may say that, me man," said Mr. Polymathers, emphatically. "Not its
+match in the kingdom of Ireland. The home of literature and the haunt
+of science. And it's there I'll be, plase God, next October."
+
+"Musha, and will you be thravellin' that far--to Dublin?" said Felix.
+
+"Ay will I, and would have gone last month on'y for the fever delayin'
+me till after the midsummer entrance. Me savin's amount to somethin'
+over thirty pound, so I may venture on the step, and prisint meself at
+the Michaelmas term. In short," said Mr. Polymathers, re-poising himself
+upon his rickety stool, "I might describe myself as an unmatriculated
+candidate undergraduate of the University of Dublin."
+
+"And what at all now would that be, sir, if I might be axin'?" said
+Felix, humbly, after the awe-stricken pause which followed Mr.
+Polymathers's proclamation of his style and title.
+
+"It's a necessary preliminary," said Mr. Polymathers, "to proceeding to
+the Degree of _Baccalaureatus in Artibus_, or _In Artibus
+Baccalaureatus_--the _ordo verborum_ is, I take it, immaterial, to judge
+by the transposition of initials in the case of ----."
+
+"Faix, but it's the fine Latin you can be discoorsin' now, and his
+Riverence half-ways home," said Felix reproachfully.
+
+Mr. Polymathers, glancing round a circle of deeply impressed faces, felt
+that his prestige was restored, and even began to enjoy a foretaste of
+the triumph, which had been one part of his dream through the long
+laborious years. But he was puzzled how to bring the full grandeur of
+his design clearly before this uninstructed audience, and after
+reflecting for a while in quest of concise yet adequate definitions, he
+launched out into an eloquent description of the ceremonial observed in
+conferring degrees at Dublin University. It may be surmised that many of
+the details were due to his own fondly brooding fancy. For not only did
+the highest learning in the land crowd the Hall in their academic robes,
+but the Lord Lieutenant himself took a prominent part in the
+proceedings, which were enlivened by military music and thunderous
+salutes. Mr. Polymathers nearly toppled off his tricky stool more than
+once without noticing it in his excitement as he rehearsed these
+splendid scenes, declaiming with great unction the formulas long since
+learned by all his heart, especially _Ego, auctoritate mihi concessa_,
+and the rest, until he came to his peroration: "And all this pomp and
+ceremony, mind yous, to the honour and glory of science and fine
+scholarship. It's a grand occasion, lads; it's an object any man might
+be proud to give----" Here he pulled himself up, warned by an unusually
+violent lurch that his theme was running away with him. But having by no
+means worked off his enthusiasm, he expended some of it, as a schoolboy
+might have done, in throwing a small bit of turf at a stately white hen,
+who just then sailed across the dark doorway, like a little frigate
+under the most crowded canvas. She immediately took flight with
+floundering screeches, which drowned what the old man was muttering to
+himself. However, it was only "_Admitto te--admitto te_."
+
+After these revelations Mr. Polymathers was looked up to more than ever,
+as one not only endowed with rare gifts, but destined by their means to
+scale heights of hardly realisable exaltation. "Be all accounts there
+was no knowin' what he mightn't rise to be at Dublin College," the
+neighbours said. They also often remarked that it was "a surprisin'
+thing to see a great scholar like him spendin' his time over taichin'
+thim two young O'Beirnes." If the speaker happened to be afflicted with
+a twinge of envy about those educational advantages, he was apt to say
+"thim two young bosthoons" or "gomerals." But Dan and Nicholas were
+not, in fact, any such thing. Nicholas, indeed, quickly proved himself
+possessed of what Mr. Polymathers called "a downright astonishin'
+facility at the mathematics," far out-stripping Dan, not quite to Dan's
+satisfaction, as he had always enjoyed the pre-eminence conferred by
+superior physical strength and a practical turn of mind. So well pleased
+was the old man with his eager pupil that he would have liked to do his
+teaching, "nothing for reward," but his host's hospitality, and his own
+ambition, would not permit this. Now and then he rather puzzled Nicholas
+by an apologetic tone in answering questions about his University
+career. And once at the end of a lesson he said, as if to himself: "May
+goodness forgive me if I'm takin' what he'd have done better with. But
+sure he's young--he's plenty of chances yet." However, as the time for
+his departure drew on, all his misgivings, if such he had, seemed to
+vanish away, and his thoughts became very apt to journey off blissfully
+to Dublin in the middle of the most interesting problems. Nicholas had
+to wait till they came back.
+
+Mr. Polymathers left Lisconnel on a fine autumn morning, when the air
+was so still that the flashing and twinkling of the many dewdrops seemed
+to make quite a stir in it. The sky was as clear as any one of them, and
+in the golden light the wavering columns of blue smoke rose with curves
+softly transparent. He started with a buoyant step, as well he might,
+since he was setting out on the enterprise into which he had put all the
+spirit of his youth. He felt some regret at parting from his Lisconnel
+friends, but his plans and prospects were naturally very pre-occupying,
+whereas they had the ampler leisure of the left-behind to deplore his
+flitting, which seemed likely enough to be for good. Nearly four years,
+he had explained, must elapse before the crowning height of the B. A.
+Degree could be won, and it was only just possible that he might manage
+to tramp back on a visit meanwhile, during some Long Vacation. This
+doubtful chance was cold comfort for that ardent scholar Nicholas
+O'Beirne, who grieved more than anybody else. Most ruefully did he help
+Dan to carry the candidate undergraduate's library as far as the Town;
+nor could he take more than a downcast pleasure in Mr. Polymathers's
+farewell gift to him of the raggedest _Euclid_. And as he stood
+watching the car out of sight, his eyes were as wistful as if a door
+briefly opened on glimpses of radiant vistas had been inexorably barred
+in his face.
+
+Yet after all Mr. Polymathers's absence was not to be measured by years
+or months. One evening on the threshold of December, Lisconnel was lying
+roofed over by a massy livid-black cloud, which came lumbering up and up
+interminably, and which the weatherwise estimated to contain as much
+snow as would smother the width of the world. The north wind moaned and
+keened dismally under the toil of wafting on this portentous load, and
+its breath was bitingly sharp, so that when the lads came in from the
+forge, their grandfather said, "Ah, Dan, shut over the door, for there's
+a blast sweepin' through it 'ud freeze ten rigiments as stiff as
+staties." We usually take a large view of things at Lisconnel. Dan went
+to carry out this order, but instead of doing so he suddenly shouted:
+"Murdher alive! Here's Mr. Polymathers."
+
+Through the grey gloaming came a Mr. Polymathers, very different from
+what he had been on that brilliant, hopeful morning only a few weeks
+ago, when he had stepped lightly, and held his head up as if he were
+looking a friendly fortune in the face. Now his feet stumbled and
+dragged as he fared slowly against the wind's blustering, with his eyes
+on the ground, and his movements seemingly guided more by the weight of
+the bundle he carried than by his own will. Before he came within even
+loud shouting distance, everybody felt a presentiment of disaster; but
+he had not spoken a word to justify or discredit it by the time he got
+indoors.
+
+"Musha, and so it's yourself, sir," old Felix then repeated, in a
+congratulatory tone. "Ah, but it's a hardy evenin', and it's perished
+you are, sir. Come in be the fire."
+
+"Ay, I'm back," Mr. Polymathers said slowly, after a hesitating pause,
+as if the remark had been interpreted to him by some second person, "I
+was bringin' the books, thinkin' the lad might use them--he's young
+enough. But I'm not come to stop on you," he added, speaking faster,
+"on'y just for this night. Early to-morra I must be off to Ardnacreagh,
+and try for the taichin' there again. 'Twas on'y on account of bringin'
+the books I came this way. I'll be on the road quite early."
+
+His insistence on this point made, somehow, a very melancholy
+impression on Felix; but he replied jovially: "Is it to-morra? Bedad
+then, sir, don't you wish you may slip off on us that soon, and we after
+gettin' a hould of you agin? What fools we are. Not if you was as
+slithery, ivery inch of you, as a wather-eel."
+
+The wraith of a relieved smile at this came over Mr. Polymathers's face;
+still it looked so grey and withered, and his eyes were so sunken, and
+his large, bony hands so shaky, that all with one consent refrained from
+questions which they were agog to ask; and when Mrs. Keogh by and by
+dropped in, and being an inquisitive and not very quick-witted person,
+said, "Saints among us--it's Mr. Polymathers. And how's yourself, sir?
+And are you bringing home the grand Degree?" though they all listened
+eagerly for the reply, they wished she had held her tongue.
+
+"The divil a Degree, ma'am," said Mr. Polymathers, "and niver will."
+
+There was a short silence, and then he turned round on his stool--it was
+the same from which he had made his boast in the summer sunset, but Dan
+had meanwhile mended its broken leg with the handle of a worn-bladed
+spade. "I've given up," he said to them. "I no longer entertain the
+project of becomin' a graduate, or for the matter of that an
+undergraduate of Dublin University; and if I'd done right, I'd niver
+have taken up such an idea. I've put it out of me head. But it's been in
+me mind a great while--a terrible long while."
+
+"Look you here, Mr. Polymathers, sir, are you after gittin' any bad
+thratment from any people up in thim places?" said Felix, who always
+liked better to lay a grievance on some human and possibly breakable
+head than to believe it the work of the vengeance-baffling demon
+bad-luck.
+
+"Not at all, not at all," said Mr. Polymathers, when the question
+reached him. "I've nothin' to complain of. They're very respectable
+people in Dublin, and it's a fine city. But me head's a bit giddy yet
+wid the drivin' they have in the streets, that makes one stupid. I mind
+there was a car tatterin' along, and I crossin' over the College Green,
+had me down on the stones, on'y a dacint lad gript a hould of me, and
+whirled me inside the College gates. There I was before I rightly knew
+anythin' had happened me, and I after spendin' the best part of me life
+gettin' to it. 'Twasn't the way I thought it 'ud be.... But the College
+is as grand as any notion I had of it; on'y since I've seen it, 'tis
+like a drame to me that ever I set fut in it, just a sort of drame....
+Great ancient places the squares are; I walked round the whole of them
+before I found the Hall. A couple of chaps in uniform like came axin' me
+me business, but I tould them fast enough that I was a candidate--ah,
+goodness help me.... And the Hall's a spacious and splendid apartment.
+On'y it was strange, now, to see it full of nothin' but young fellows,
+scarce oulder than the two lads there. I might, sure enough, have known
+the way it 'ud be, if I'd come to considher, but somehow it seemed to
+put me out, as if I'd no call to be there at all. There was one of them
+began pricin' me ould hat, and another of them tripped him up against a
+black marble construction with a pair of angels atop of it, that there
+is on the wall--sure they were just spalpeens. But I'll give you me
+word, when they called me up to the examiner's table, there was a young
+gintleman sittin' at it in his black gown and his cap wid the
+tassel--bound to be one of the College Fellows, and ivery sort of a fine
+scholar--and for all the age there was on him he might ha' been me son
+or me grandson.
+
+"So he handed me over a little black _Virgil_ wid the page opened where
+I was to exhibit me acquaintance wid the text. It was merely a bit of
+an oration of Queen Dido's that I've known ivery line of these forty
+years as well as I know me own name, and better. And what came over me
+is more than I can tell, but the minute I took the book in me hand, it
+seemed to me as if ivery atom of sinse and manin' slipped out of the
+words, or out of me head--I couldn't say which, and I just stood starin'
+at them and starin', till iverythin' else got whirlin' round about me,
+fit to shake the panes out of the big windows, and the pictures off the
+walls.... Belike himself persaived I was flusthered, for, 'Take your
+time,' sez he; and after a while they stood steady enough. But, the Lord
+be good to me--sorra a syllable of the sinse come back. And be that I
+well knew it was all up wid me; and I was thinkin' me father's son had
+no business to be standin' there makin' a show of meself in the middle
+of Trinity College. So the lad in the cap said again, 'Take your time,
+sir, take your time.' But I said to him, 'God help me, sir, I've taken
+very nigh all I'll get, for I declare to you, lad, I'm over seventy
+years of age. But as for your time, sir,' I said, 'I'll be wastin' no
+more of it.' And wid that I put down the book, and out I wint. I mind
+the sun in the square nearly dazzled the eyes out of me fool's head. I
+niver seen it blazin' brighter--and there was a big bell somewhere
+boomin' away, as if they'd set the heart of the world tollin'; it's
+ringin' in me ears yet.... And a couple of days after that I quit out of
+Dublin, and I've been trampin' back to this counthry, takin' me time, as
+he said--there's no hurry now about anythin'. So that was the ind of me
+University Degree."
+
+"I just wish I could git discoorsin' wid that young feller," said old
+Felix, vindictively, "himself and his tassel in his cap."
+
+"Sure, man, 'twas no fault of his," said Mr. Polymathers, "and I can
+live widout a Degree, if that's all. Me betters did before me. To tell
+you the truth, I've thought often enough as I was comin' along now, that
+I dunno how at all I'd have had the face to meet me poor father one of
+these days, and I cocked up with a _Baccalaureatus in Artibus_, and he
+wid not so much as a dacint stone over his grave to commemorate his
+name, that was the most illusthrious Polymath in the county Sligo, wid
+more larnin' in the tip of his ear than ever I got into me ould skull.
+Never a hap'orth of good was I at anythin' except the trifle of
+mathematics, but he was as great at the Classics.... I used to humbug
+meself somewhiles lettin' on I hankered after it because it would ha'
+gratified him maybe to hear of the event. But little I ever done to
+plase him, God forgive me. Let alone goin' and makin' an ould fool of
+meself up at Trinity College.... 'Twas a terrible upset to him when I
+turned again the Priesthood, after he had the money saved up for the
+seminary and all. Words about it we had, and the ind of it was he put it
+all into me brother Ned's little farm. Ned had no more fancy for larnin'
+than the bastes of the field. A trifle of it would ha' come in very
+handy sometimes for buyin' me books; howane'er it was not to be.... And
+the books there--I on'y brought them along to lave wid you for the
+youngest lad--ay, Nicholas. He has a head on his shoulders for the
+mathematics, I can tell you; he might do something yet, if he got his
+chances. They're no use to me now, and I'd as lief be shut of the sight
+of them. And to-morra I'll be off to Ardnacreagh."
+
+So the gaunt old man talked on, groping his way out of hesitating
+pauses, and straying into dreamy meditations, as if he sometimes forgot
+his story, and sometimes its hearers. They did not know what a
+life-wreck it outlined, but they saw and surmised enough to make them
+think of him as "the crathur," and speak to him with more deference
+than if he had returned in a radiant glow of success, symbolised as some
+of them had anticipated, by scarlet robes as splendid, at least, as
+Father Rooney's at High Mass. And Felix O'Beirne took occasion of a
+madly skirling gust to say, "Listen now to that, sir, and don't be
+talkin' wild of thravellin' off to-morra. If I might be sayin' so, you'd
+a dale better stay quiet where you are this minyit. And as for taichin',
+sure it's proud and thankful the two boyos 'ud be for e'er a bit more.
+There's Nicholas mopin' about like an ould hin that's lost her chuckens
+iver since you quit."
+
+Mr. Polymathers did stop quiet--very quiet--but he taught the boys no
+more. In fact, he did nothing except sit all day staring into the fire,
+as if he had lost something in it. Once after Nicholas had sat looking
+very hard at him for a long time with the ragged _Euclid_ ostentatiously
+open at a crux, he seemed to rouse up, and putting out a hand for the
+book, began an explanation. But it died away unfinished in an aimless
+muttering, which both shocked and saddened Nicholas, and the experiment
+was not repeated. Then towards Christmas time all the neighbours were
+saying that Mr. Polymathers was greatly failed to what he had been. And
+Bridget O'Beirne reported that you might as well be argufyin' wid a
+scutty wren to swally down the full of the ducks' dish as persuadin' him
+to take a raisonable bite and sup. Dr. Hamilton from the Dispensary, who
+was consulted on the case, "consaited," Bridget told inquirers, "that he
+might be after gettin' a sort of stroke like unbeknownst;" but her own
+opinion was that "he had, so to spake, lost the knot off his thread, and
+'twould be much if he didn't slip away out of it on them, afore they
+seen e'er another green laif on the bushes."
+
+It was, at any rate, more than happened. One snowy afternoon, when he
+had been busy for some time "scrawmin' a manner of letter," which
+related, he said, to the disposition of his property, Mr. Polymathers
+grew so much worse that Dan and Nicholas ran off for the Doctor and the
+Priest, and before their arrival could possibly be expected, it became
+evident that he could not wait to receive them. Bridget O'Beirne,
+deploring the hap by his bed in the small room off the kitchen, thought
+a few minutes before he went that she heard him murmuring something
+coherent, and she called to little Rosy Corcoran, "Child alive--me
+head's bothered--come in here and listen, can you make out at all what
+he's sayin'?"
+
+Rosy came reluctantly and listened. "I think," she whispered, "it's some
+sort of prayers like what his Riverence sez."
+
+"Ah, then, glory be to God for that itself," said Bridget, "there might
+be a good chance for him after all."
+
+But she had been misinformed. The words Mr. Polymathers was muttering
+over and over to himself were: _Admitto te--admitto te_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+HONORIS CAUSA
+
+
+The evening of the day after Mr. Polymathers died was a very wild
+black-and-white one out of doors all round Lisconnel, yet,
+notwithstanding the flakes in the air and under foot, the O'Beirnes had
+received some company. Not at a wake, however the purpose of their
+assembly was to discuss a serious business matter, upon which old Felix
+O'Beirne wished for friendly counsel. Hence his contemporary, old Paddy
+Ryan, had prodded little round craters in the snow with his thick stick
+all along the good step of bleak road which lay between his house and
+the forge, and with him had come on the same errand Terence Kilfoyle,
+who, although of so much junior standing, was esteemed as a man of
+notably shrewd sense and judgment. But then neither he nor the
+neighbours knew how often he took and gave Bessie Kilfoyle's advice.
+These two were present by express invitation, but another pair of
+guests, the Dooleys, would never have been asked for the sake of their
+opinion, which they were indeed encouraged to keep to themselves, and
+appeared at this domestic crisis merely by virtue of family ties. Old
+Felix had always thought little of his daughter Maggie's mental powers,
+and less ever since her marriage with Peter Dooley, who kept a shop in
+the Town, and could be described as "an ould gombeen man," if one wished
+to regard him from an unfavourable point of view, which his
+father-in-law not uncommonly did. He had been heard to say of Peter that
+"the chap was that smooth-spoken you might think he was after swallyin'
+a one of his own graisy dipts, on'y he'd liefer be chaitin' some poor
+body over the sellin' of it"--a perhaps not inexcusable preference. As
+for Peter, he contemplated humanity with a jovial cynicism, and rather
+enjoyed the society of the old blacksmith, despite the gruff sarcasms
+which sometimes made their womenkind turn the conversation
+apprehensively. _He_ had been heard to say of Felix that "It was aisy
+work runnin' down other people's business, and small blame to th' ould
+man if he had a fancy for a light job now and agin, when he would be
+tired poundin' th' ould iron at a profit you couldn't see to pick up
+widout a strong pair of spectacles." Proximity had brought to the
+consultation Mrs. Carbery and Tim O'Meara from adjacent doors; and they,
+with old ancient Mrs. O'Beirne and her daughter and the two lads, formed
+quite a large party about the fire. The business to be brought before
+them was Mr. Polymathers's Will.
+
+Now, lest it should be thought that unseemly haste was displayed in
+attending to this affair while Mr. Polymathers still lay in the little
+next room, I must explain that for special reasons the nature of the
+funeral arrangements depended upon the result of the conference; and how
+deeply important such a point would be considered at Lisconnel I need
+remind no one who has occasionally been perplexed by our propensity for
+the pinching and scraping which takes toll of a life-long penury, that a
+brief show of pomp may invest the last scene of all. This propensity is
+not seldom misconstrued into the outcome of a mere personal vanity,
+whereas it has its root in the worthier sentiment of veneration for our
+Kind. Ould Pat Murphy, who has subsisted all his life upon an
+insufficiency of pitaties, and inhabited a largish sty, never loses the
+sense that he owes something better to himself in his character of a
+human being, and he takes painful steps to ensure the ultimate discharge
+of the debt. One of these days he who has hitherto come and gone in
+unimposing guise shall be borne, on wheels if possible--but here I
+mention grandeur never even dreamed of up at remote Lisconnel--in
+unwonted state, certain to draw the gaze of every passer-by. But as if
+with a fine touch of courtesy, he so times his assertion of dignity that
+none of his fellows shall thereby be abashed nor envy-bitten. No ragged
+wayfarer shall wish to change places with him as he passes solemnly
+along, nor grudge him the unshared splendour of his sombre equipage; not
+even if it display the crowning glory of woolly black plumes to waggle
+over his head. Accordingly, when Pat has died on his humble bed, which
+is as likely as not just earth tempered with straw, under his rifted
+thatch, through which he may perhaps see the stars glimmer with nothing
+except the smoke-haze and gathering mists between, he is conveyed thence
+with whatever pomp and circumstance his savings permit, and all his
+neighbours feel that the right thing has been done.
+
+It is true that Mr. Polymathers had given no sign of any such sentiment.
+When discreetly sounded on the subject during his last days, he had
+replied: "Ah! man, it's very immaterial," in a tone of indifference as
+unmistakable as the phrase was ambiguous. And from this fact, coupled
+with his written instructions, it might, one would have thought, safely
+have been inferred that he desired no costly magnificence at his
+obsequies. Yet the point was obscured in his late host's mind by a thick
+cloud of doubts and scruples.
+
+Mr. Polymathers had died surprisingly rich, not less than twenty-five
+pounds, seven shillings and threepence having been counted awestrickenly
+out of his leathern pouch. The ground rents of all Lisconnel did not
+reach to such a figure. It had been larger still before his disastrous
+expedition to the University; but it had never undergone any diminution
+so long as he abode under Felix O'Beirne's roof. On the first Saturday
+after his convalescence he had inquired, pouch in hand: "And what might
+be the amount of me pecuniary debt to you, sir?" And old O'Beirne had
+replied: "And you spendin' your time puttin' the heighth of larnin' into
+the two lads' heads! Bedad, sir, it's debt the other way round,
+supposin' there was to be any talk about it." The same little scene,
+dwindled at last into a mere form and ceremony, had taken place on
+every succeeding Saturday. Not that Mr. Polymathers did not feel he had
+grounds for more than merely formal demur. But he was then facing the
+steep hill of his ambition, and had sometimes to stoop as he climbed.
+
+But now, when he had turned back baffled, and all his climbing was done,
+old Felix had no engrossing object to blunt a sense of many scruples
+that must be removed before he himself or his family could with honour
+derive profit from the event; as they would do if Mr. Polymathers's
+instructions were carried out. For by that document, which he had
+finished drawing up only just in time, all his property was left
+unreservedly to Nicholas O'Beirne, with the injunction that as little of
+it as possible might be expended upon "the burying." Of course it was an
+extraordinary thing that such a piece of good fortune should befall,
+such a number of pounds accrue to, anybody at all; but apart from this
+there seemed to be nothing very strange in the bequest. Everybody knew
+that Mr. Polymathers had entertained "a great opinion entirely" of
+Nicholas' abilities. Time and again he had said that the lad would be
+heard of in the world if he got his chance of some good teaching. And he
+once more expressed the same conviction, only at fuller length and in
+finer language, in the composition which had been the last effort of his
+wearied brain. "It would give me," he wrote, "the utmost satisfaction to
+think that the legacy may eventually smooth his path to the attainment
+of those University distinctions which have eluded my own grasp." And
+almost his latest moment of consciousness had been pervaded by a faint
+thrill of pleased pride at the turn of the sentence as he read it over.
+This high style was not, however, maintained throughout, and the purport
+could not be misunderstood. Furthermore, everybody knew that he had said
+he had not a relation belonging to him in this world; and that being so,
+it was natural enough for him to make a promising and favorite pupil his
+heir. At first sight, therefore, no difficulties presented themselves;
+but old Felix slept upon the matter, and by morning grave doubts had
+risen in his mind. The gist of them was that "If they took and grabbed
+the ould gintleman's bit of money, and he after dyin' all his lone up
+among them there, wid ne'er a one of his own folks near him to see he
+had his rights, it might look ugly enough agin them, and set some people
+passin' remarks he'd be long sorry to have made on him, or any of his
+name;" and that for the precluding of such animadversions it might
+behove them to provide "a buryin'" not merely decent but "very
+respectable whatever," and to expend the remainder of Mr. Polymathers's
+personality upon a headstone for his grave, and Masses for his soul. To
+set against these apprehensions were Mr. Polymathers's wishes and
+Nicholas's interests; and the longer the old man balanced them in his
+mind, the more perplexing became their tremulous poise. So at last,
+goaded by the urgent necessity for a prompt decision, he turned to seek
+it among his neighbours. He could not forbear a hope that their voices
+might be convincingly in favour of giving Nicholas his chances; still
+his strongest feeling was that it would be a relief to get the matter
+settled one way or the other.
+
+Very different in its degree of intensity was the interest with which
+his grandson Nicholas looked forward to the issue. The question to be
+decided seemed to him of almost as vital importance as if it were:
+Whether or no the sun should rise again next morning. For him at least,
+it depended upon that whether his world should loom back again in a
+dreary blankness, or waken lit with new and wondrous gleams. Nicholas's
+thirst for knowledge and love of learning were much more essentially
+part and parcel of him than his hands and eyes, and had so far found
+little except dreams and desires to thrive upon. Even before the
+memorable summer evening when the gaunt old man in the curious big hat
+had asked for the night's lodging, which lengthened into a season's
+sojourn, he had often wandered among visions of places where there were
+as many books as anybody could read--a dozen maybe--and some people in
+it with a power of book-learning--as much perhaps as his Reverence or
+the Doctor--only neither priest nor quality, but just neighbours whom he
+could question about anything that came into his head, as he used to
+question his grandfather, and Paddy Ryan, and Terence Kilfoyle, until he
+got tired of being asked, in reply: "Musha good gracious, and who could
+be tellin' you that?" an answer which had repeatedly left him a
+discouraged atom of bewilderment, symbolically environed by our
+wide-spreading bog. Since Mr. Polymathers's visit, these visions had
+grown clearer, but not under any rays of hope. His initiation into the
+elements of mathematics had pointed out the road along which he should
+travel, but had simultaneously revealed all its obstacles,
+insurmountable for him solitary and unequipped. In those days his mind
+was constantly fumbling at some insoluble problem with the sense of
+frustration that one has who gropes vainly in the dark, well knowing how
+a single unattainable match-flare would put what he is seeking into his
+hands. And no brighter prospect seemed to lie before him anywhere in his
+future.
+
+So when he suddenly learned that Mr. Polymathers had left all his
+money--sums and sums--to be spent on "getting schooling for Nicholas
+O'Beirne;" and when the sums and sums were actually counted out on the
+table, he felt as if a door into enchanted regions had majestically
+opened in a blank wall. That night he went to bed in a state of joyous
+excitement, only dashed by some pangs of self-reproach for being unable
+to feel more sorrow at the flickering out of his poor old teacher's dim
+life. He had to frame excuses for himself by recollecting how his
+great-aunt Bridget had said, "Ah, sure the crathur's better off, God
+knows. What else 'ud he do, and the heart of him broke, but quit out of
+it, if he got the chance? Ay, bedad, some people have the quare good
+luck."
+
+And when he got up with his happiness still fresh and strange in the
+morning, there was his grandfather declaring "he didn't know if they'd
+have a right to touch the bit of money at all; it might be no thing to
+go do; schoolin' or no schoolin', he wouldn't be givin' people any call
+to say the O'Beirnes were after playin' a dirty thrick." At this
+Nicholas's experience was like that of a desert traveller who should see
+a mirage of palms and pools grow swiftly before his delighted eyes into
+a substantial oasis, and then anon, or ever he could approach it,
+shimmer back, with all its sheen and shade, into mocking illusion again.
+For thus did it fare with his hopes as his grandfather talked of
+renouncing Mr. Polymathers's bequest. Moreover, the grounds which the
+old man alleged forbade his grandson, lothfully though he listened, to
+utter a word of protest, and even made him half ashamed of his vehement
+longing to do so. Nicholas had been an O'Beirne for but fourteen years,
+yet he had already entered upon his inheritance of family pride. Only he
+could not bring himself to believe that the honour of his house called
+for so prodigious a sacrifice; and he could have urged a dozen arguments
+against it, if some other person had been the legatee. As it was, all
+that delicacy would permit him to do for himself was to give piteously
+inadequate expression to his sentiments in casual remarks about the
+grandeur of getting a bit of learning, and the difficulty of
+understanding some things out of one's own head. Altogether that day was
+the longest and the most anxious that he had ever spent.
+
+Dan also, though his fortunes were not involved to the same extent as
+his younger brother's, was not easy in his mind. All day he had been
+thinking rather badly of himself, and suspecting that other people
+thought worse of him than he deserved, and the reflection was depressing
+and irritating. The news of the legacy certainly had not given him
+unmixed pleasure, as he felt that it ought to have done; but at the same
+time he was aware that he neither grudged nor envied Nicholas his good
+fortune, and that this unamiable frame of mind would nevertheless
+probably be ascribed to him, if he betrayed any dissatisfaction or
+disapproval. The truth was that he could not help feeling some
+mortification at the way in which both Mr. Polymathers and his
+grandfather assumed the forge to be his destiny and portion in life. Dan
+did not by any means despise it: he took an interest in the work, and a
+pride in the fact that farmers sent their horses thither from beyond the
+Town, so well reputed was old Felix O'Beirne's shoeing. But it did not
+follow that he wanted to be a blacksmith all his days. Even if he had
+done so, he was sixteen, and consequently of an age to resent any
+prescribed calling, especially since he knew that the selection here had
+been made as the result of an unfavourable comparison of his abilities
+with those of another person. "Dan is no fool, mind you," Mr.
+Polymathers had said once. "But for intellect you need never name him on
+the same day of the month as Nicholas," a verdict which fell with a
+slight shock upon Dan, accustomed to the precedence given by two years'
+seniority, superior strength, and a more practical turn of mind. What
+was far more serious, however, Dan secretly cherished an ambition of his
+own. It took the form of thinking that it would be a wonderfully fine
+thing if he could ever get to learn the doctoring, and be able to drive
+about on a car like Dr. Hamilton, with a name and a remedy for
+everybody's ailment. A particularly fine thing it seemed to understand
+the construction of bones and joints, a knowledge which would put it in
+his power to prevent people from coming to such grief as, for instance,
+poor Matt Haloran down at Duffclane, who must limp on a crooked leg to
+the end of his days, because the man who pulled in his dislocated ankle
+for him had made a botch of it, through not knowing rightly what he was
+about. Dan had been much impressed, too, by several cases where a few
+drops of brown stuff out of a bottle had put people to sleep when
+various aches and pains had long hindered them from closing an eye, a
+result which the neighbours were occasionally disposed to view with
+mistrust, as rather probably wrought through the agency of "some quare
+ould pishtrogues (charms)," but which to Dan's mind proved the
+possession of a skill as enviable as it was beneficent. Beside it
+hammering out horseshoes appeared a tedious and aimless pursuit, and he
+sometimes thumped away in a very vague dream of one of these days
+finding himself more congenially employed. Now, however, it was
+perfectly clear to him that if Nicholas "took off wid himself to get
+scholarship," his own portion must be to stick to the anvil. For
+otherwise supposing his grandfather got past his work, or anything else
+happened him, there would be nobody left to look after Dan's great-aunt,
+who was not very old, and his great-grandmother, who was such a
+wonderful age entirely that no one could say how much longer she mighn't
+live. Even the wildest of dreams are not quite easy to scare away, and
+it was this chiefly that marred his content with Mr. Polymathers's
+testamentary dispositions. Still, when he heard his grandfather's
+doubts, and saw his brother's downcast looks, he became almost as
+anxious as Nicholas himself that the neighbours might talk away the old
+man's scruples and allow the will to stand.
+
+Thus there were many eager hopes and fears lodged that evening in the
+O'Beirnes' living-room, which was all throbbing with fire-light, as the
+neighbours began to drop in talking out of the dark. People are apt to
+speak loudly when they get their breath after a battle with snowy
+blasts; and the sound of voices came strangely into the stillness close
+by, where there was only a cold glimmer of candle-light, and nobody
+conversing, unless we count old Bridget O'Beirne, who had slipped in to
+repeat a few prayers, and say to herself with a sort of grudging
+wistfulness that everybody else was getting away. Then she came back to
+her world again, and mended the crumbling red-hot bank with sods out of
+her apron, and shovelled up the snow-balls shaken off their visitors'
+clogged brogues, that they might not melt into mud patches on the floor.
+
+To Dan and Nicholas, looking on from opposite corners, it seemed a long
+while before anything to the purpose was said. Everybody had to comment
+upon the snow, and Paddy Ryan's remark was that "if it kep' on at it
+that-a-way, they'd be hard enough set to get through the dhrifts be the
+day of the buryin'." This caused Mrs. Carbery to remember how she "had
+been at a one up in the County Cavan, where the gate into the
+buryin'-ground was all blocked up, so that the whole of them had to lep
+over what would be be rights a ten-fut wall. And if they did, the half
+of them plumped up to their necks in a soft place on the other side, and
+came as near losin' their lives as could be thought. Bedad now, they
+were comical to behould, goodness forgive her for sayin' so, all bawlin'
+and flounderin' about like a flock of sheep stuck in a bog, on'y it was
+a white bog and black sheep, as she minded Tom Ennis, that was a quare
+codger, sayin' at the time." And this again started old O'Beirne upon
+reminiscences of remarkable buryings which had come under his own
+observation.
+
+"Comical it may have been," he said, "but I'll bet you me best brogues
+ne'er a one of yous ever witnessed a quarer buryin' than a one I seen
+down in the south some ould ages ago, when I was a slip of a lad. But
+I'll maybe ha' tould you the story, ma'am--about the flood in the
+Tullaroe River?"
+
+"Was that the time it riz up suddint and dhrownded the crathur that was
+diggin' the grave?" said Mrs. Carbery.
+
+"Sure not at all: that happint up at Lough Gortragh, and this I'm
+talkin' about was in the Tullaroe River, a dale souther of the Lough.
+Outrageous it does be in the wet saisons. So one harvest day, when it
+was flowin' over all before it, there was a walkin' funeral about
+crossin' at the ford. The way of it was, they were after hangin' a lad
+up at the jail. In those days it's very ready they were wid the hangin',
+and in a hurry over it too sometimes. Howane'er the frinds of this lad
+had got lave to be buryin' him dacint after he would be hanged; and me
+poor father, and meself, and plinty of other people were follyin'. Till
+they come to the ford, and when they seen the manner the wather was
+runnin' wild, the bearers had a notion to be turnin' back; but they made
+up their minds, and on they wint. And as sure as they did, one of the
+lads must needs slip his fut, and they right in the middle of the river,
+and down wid the whole lot of thim, like a stook of oats in a gale of
+win'; 'twas twinty wonders e'er a man of thim ever got his feet under
+him agin. Faix, now the yell every sowl let you might ha' heard
+anywheres at all; for some of thim was thinkin' the misfort'nit body was
+apt to be swep' away and mortally dhrowned to the back of bein' hung;
+and some of thim wasn't thinkin' any such a thing. But as for the
+coffin, I'll give you me word if it didn't take and set off wid itself
+floatin' away bobbin' along atop of the wather as light now, as if it
+was a lafe dhropped down from the boughs archin' over our heads--and
+wasn't that cur'ous enough? And as quare as anythin' it was to behould
+the people all peltin' along be the two wet banks of the river as hard
+as they could dhrive, and thrippin' theirselves up over the roots of the
+trees, and slitherin' into the pools, wid the coffin just skimmin' and
+swimmin' away down the sthrame ahead of them, as aisy and plisant as if
+it was a bit of a pookawn. You might ha' sworn there was ne'er a nothin'
+in it, to look at it. And he they were after hangin' a fine big man,
+'ud weigh every ounce of fourteen stone. I tould you it was a quare
+thing. So where it would be sailin' to nobody could say; very belike out
+into the bay below. But sure when it come where the river runs past th'
+ould church, the strong current that was racin' under it just gave a
+sort of lap round wid it, and washed it clane up on the flat stones at
+the gate goin' into the buryin'-ground, and left it lyin' there, same as
+if the lads had set it down off their shoulders. Bedad now it was a very
+lucky thing it so happint there was none of the pólis or red coats
+about, be raison of their gettin' notice the buryin' was somewhere
+else--oncommon lucky."
+
+"It's as quare as the rest of it," said Peter Dooley, who had heard the
+story before, "that nobody among them had had the wit to put a few
+brickbats in it, or some good big lumps of heavy stones. Stones is
+plinty, and chape enough."
+
+"They're things you haven't the sellin' of then, I'll go bail," said old
+Felix. He spoke in resentment of the interruption, but Mr. Dooley took
+the speech as a flattering tribute to his business capacity, and
+acknowledged it with a good-humoured smirk.
+
+So Bridget might have spared herself the uneasiness which made her say
+hurriedly to her brother: "If you was lookin' for Mr. Polymathers's bit
+of writin', Felix, I left it lyin' convanient to you under the plate
+there on the table."
+
+"Oh, ay, bedad, that's what's been botherin' me," said the old man,
+reachin' for it, "I dunno rightly what to say to it. But sure any of
+yous that like can be readin' it, and see what he sez for yourselves."
+
+Reading was not a question simply of liking with all members of the
+company; but everybody could hold the paper and look wise, and if he
+were none the more so afterwards, that may have been only because he
+knew the contents of it beforehand. When it was Peter Dooley's turn he
+examined the signature closely, and said, "But what name's this he's put
+to it? 'John Campion' I see, but divil a sign of any Polymathers."
+
+"Ah, that was another thing was botherin' me, too," said old O'Beirne,
+rather dejectedly, "a little while ago, when Dr. Hamilton was comin' to
+see him. For th' ould gintleman tould him Campion was his name; and it
+appairs Polymathers is some discripshin of thrade, and not rightly
+called to anybody at all. So I was thinkin' he was maybe annoyed wid
+our callin' him out of his name all the while; but he said all that
+ailed it was it was a dale too good for him; and better plased he seemed
+we would keep on wid it. Oh ay, 'John Campion's' right enough."
+
+"I niver heard of any such a thrade as polymatherin'," said his
+son-in-law; "would it be anythin' in the pedlarin' line?"
+
+"Is it pedlarin'?" said old O'Beirne, "and he that took up wid larnin'
+and litherature he couldn't ha' tould you the price of a pinny loaf.
+Faix, man, if I was Maggie I'd just put a good dab of strong glue in
+your place behind the counter down-below, and stick you standing steady
+in it, for buyin' and sellin's all the notion you have in your head here
+or there. Pedlarin', sez he."
+
+"Well, at all events," said Peter Dooley, unperturbed, "he's got
+together a dacint little fortin one way or the other. Maybe he didn't
+come by it any worser; but sure that's no great odds now. And plain
+enough he sez the young chap there's to have it--that's all the one
+thing wid yourself. But, anyhow, I dunno who could aisy conthrive to be
+takin' it off you, and he lavin' no one belongin' to him. You have it
+safe enough. Grab all you can, and keep a hould of it when you've got
+it, sez I. But you're safe enough, no fear."
+
+Nicholas, watching his grandfather's face from his corner, would have
+given ten years of his life to throttle his uncle's reassuring speech
+midway.
+
+"There's no mistake, I should say, about what he was intendin'," said
+Terence Kilfoyle, in whose hands the paper was by this time; "and who'd
+be apt to know better than himself what he had in his mind so long as he
+was right in his head."
+
+"And if he wasn't, it's little likely he'd be to ha' got that written.
+Hard enough work it is, accordin' to what I can see, even when a body
+has all his wits to the fore," said old Paddy Ryan, whose acquaintances
+did as a rule get more out of breath over a letter than over a wrestling
+match or the recapture of an active pig.
+
+"Mad people do be surprisin' cute some whiles, mind you," said Mrs.
+Carbery. "There was a deminted body used to be up at our place--Daft
+Jimmy they called him--and if you axed him the time of day he'd tell you
+to the minyit, exacter than any clock that ever sthruck, and he belike
+not widin a mile of e'er a one."
+
+"It seems a sight of money to be layin' out on larnin'," pursued old
+Paddy; "I dunno where you'd be gettin' the vally of it that-a-way,
+onless he was larnin' everythin' twyste over, same as you put two coats
+of whitewash on a wall if you're after mixin' a drop more than you want.
+You might do it then."
+
+His friends' arguments and illustrations had apparently a depressing
+effect upon old Felix, and he said with impatience, "Weary on it,
+man-alive! Sure there's no doubt about what he was manin', at all at
+all. The question is, have we any call to be takin' him at his word, and
+spendin' it away from aught 'ud do him a benefit--the buryin' and Masses
+and such?"
+
+"That might be a diff'rint thing," said Mrs. Carbery.
+
+"I'd scarce think it," said Terence Kilfoyle, "considherin' he'll say no
+more to make it so. The job's out of his hand, and 'ill stay the way he
+left it."
+
+"He might ha' changed his mind afore now, for anythin' we can tell,"
+said Mrs. Carbery.
+
+"'Deed, then, he might so, the poor man, Heaven be his bed," said Mrs.
+Dooley.
+
+"You could ax the priest about it," Tim O'Meara said diffidently, out of
+the melancholy muteness which it was his habit to maintain.
+
+"That's as much as to say it should go for Masses," said old Felix,
+clutching at any shred of definite opinion, "for it's on'y in the nathur
+of things his Riverence 'ud be recommindin' thim."
+
+But Tim shrank away from the shadow of responsibility, protesting, "Och,
+not at all, not at all. I wasn't as much as sayin' anythin'."
+
+The old man tossed up his chin disgustedly, and meditated gloomily
+during a brief pause.
+
+"There's no denyin'," he said then, "that poor Mr. Polymathers had a
+won'erful great opinion of himself over there." He nodded towards
+Nicholas's corner, and used this periphrasis with a sense that he had
+taken a precaution against perilously arousing the boy's vanity. "Times
+and agin last summer he was sayin' to me the lad 'ud do credit to us yet
+if he had his chances. A pity it 'ud be, he said, if he didn't iver git
+to school, or maybe College itself. And gave him his books and all. But
+sure, I dunno would that make it look any the better for us if we was to
+be grabbin' his bit of money, and we the on'y people he had to see he
+got fairity after he was gone. Ne'er a word have I agin schoolin' and
+College if there would be no doubtin' over the matter; but there's some
+things you can't stand too clear of, like the heels of a kickin' horse.
+It might have a quare, bad apparance, rael mane; and long sorry I'd be
+for that. What 'ud you say, now?"
+
+He looked slowly round the flickering room, but met with no response
+from old or young; all silent, from his mother, asleep in her
+elbow-chair by the hearth, to his grandson Nicholas, very wide awake, in
+a nook beyond her. Then his eyes travelled across to the opposite
+corner, and as they lit there upon his other grandson, he specialised
+his question into, "What 'ud _you_ say, Dan?"
+
+Dan, thus abruptly called upon, was intensely conscious that two eyes
+shining out of the shadow over against him had fixed him with an
+unwavering gaze. And it is hard to say how he would have answered their
+urging if at the same moment Mr. Dooley at his elbow had not been loudly
+whispering to Mrs. Dooley--
+
+"Colleges? Sure that's just talk he has be way of an excuse for keepin'
+it. A great notion he has of spendin' it on Colleges. He knows better,
+bedad."
+
+Mr. Dooley, who was rather like several sorts of rodent animals in the
+face, wore a smile at his own penetration.
+
+"I dunno but it might look ugly," Dan suddenly said.
+
+He was staring straight before him, yet he knew somehow, as if by a
+sixth sense, that the shining eyes opposite ceased their watch with an
+angry flash; and he had scarcely spoken before he would have given
+anything to call back his irrevocable speech.
+
+His grandfather's puzzled will closed on the opinion with a vice-like
+grip, as if at a touch given to a powerful spring. Indecision was with
+him an unwonted mood, from which it was an irresistible relief to
+escape, even at some cost. And nobody who knew him could suppose that
+his mind, once made up, would alter.
+
+"Begorrah, Dan, I believe it's true for you," he said. "'Twould be no
+thing to go do, and divil a bit of me 'ill do it. Whatever's over from
+the buryin' and bit of a grave-stone may go for Masses; sorra a penny of
+it a one of the O'Beirnes 'ill touch."
+
+So Nicholas lost his chances, which seems a pity when one considers how,
+for the sake of bringing them to him, old Mr. Polymathers, dazed and
+enfeebled and hope-bereft, came tramping on that long, long journey, day
+after weary day, under the scowling wintry sky, and against the
+ruffling blasts, back again across the breadth of Ireland. The road was
+all strewn for him with the wreckage of his shattered dream, and the one
+gleam of consolation that lighted him on the way had been the thought
+that his savings might now give a help to the lad up at Lisconnel. This
+had often been in his mind when he set off, shivering in the bleak
+morning, and when he stopped to shift his over-heavy bundle, and when he
+roused himself painfully from the bewildering lethargies that fell upon
+him. But he had reckoned without the pride of the O'Beirnes.
+
+It was a pity, too, that the affair should have led to an estrangement
+between the two brothers, which set in as tacitly as a black frost, for
+neither of them ever said a word to the other about Dan's intervention.
+This silence left him in the thorny grip of misgivings as to the motives
+with which Nicholas might be charging him. That he had done it on
+purpose to spoil Nicholas's chances out of spite was one of these. And
+although Dan knew very well that he had spoken from an altogether
+different impulse, he was conscious of having had feelings which seemed
+to give him a cruelly clear insight into the possible workings of
+Nicholas's mind. "Consaitin' that it was because I was invyin' him,
+that's what he's thinkin' agin me," he said to himself as the days went
+by, and he perceived, or fancied, that Nicholas in his disconsolate
+moping about had no other aim than to keep away from wherever Dan might
+be.
+
+But Dan's unhappiness took an acuter phase in a fortnight or so, when
+Nicholas began to resume his mathematical studies. There lies just
+opposite the O'Beirnes' front door a low turf bank, gently sloping, and
+mostly clothed with short, fine grass, but liable to be cut into brown
+squares, if sods are wanted for roofing a shed, or for spreading a green
+layer of scraws under new thatch. This had been done on a rather large
+scale in the past autumn, and the boys had been in the habit of
+utilising the smooth, bare patches as tablets whereon to trace with
+pointed sticks, or any handy implements borrowed from the forge, the
+figures and diagrams occurring in Mr. Polymathers's scientific lectures.
+Nicholas now, albeit he had buried both teacher and hope, began once
+more to draw his circles and triangles and polygons on the soft mould,
+as it grew damply and darkly through the wearing snow coverlid.
+Sometimes in the excitement of demonstrating involved relations between
+AB's and BC's he would for a while forget his disappointment almost as
+completely as he did the wet-winged winds that had been flapping and
+wheeling about the house ever since the thaw set in. His obliviousness
+could not, however, ensure him against the effects of cold shower-baths,
+and before long his geometrical drawing was done to the accompaniment of
+a hollow-sounding cough, which made Dan remember a time some years ago
+when Nicholas had been so seriously ill with pleurisy that voices had
+said at their door, "Ah, the crathur, he'll scarce last the night. Dr.
+Hamilton has no opinion of him at all. 'Deed, now, his poor
+grandfather's to be pitied, losin' such a fine young lad." And he also
+remembered having occasionally heard his great-aunt say that Nicholas
+took after his poor mother, and would never comb a grey head. Now,
+therefore, the figure of Nicholas sitting out on the bank in a vibrating
+mist of rain, with his feet in a puddle, and his hair flickering in damp
+strands about his thin face, became for Dan an ominous and saddening
+spectacle.
+
+But while he was ruefully contemplating it one day, a happy idea struck
+him. He would get Nicholas some clean white paper to draw his _dygrims_
+on. "And then belike he'd be contint to sit in be the fire, instead of
+to be catchin' his death scrawmin' out there in the mud under teems of
+rain." Grand writing-paper was to be had at Isaac Tarpey's, down in
+Ballybrosna, and Dan at this time happened to be in possession of a
+whole shilling, which he dedicated more than willingly to the purchase.
+
+Isaac Tarpey presided over the Ballybrosna Post-office, which was in
+some respects a singularly complete establishment, as not only was the
+raw material for a letter kept in stock there, but the letter itself
+could, for a consideration, be written on the premises by the postmaster
+in person. It is true that Isaac did not supply more than the barest
+necessaries of scribes, the bread and water, so to speak, of stationery,
+the very plainest pens and paper and ink. He kept his ink in a single
+moderate-sized jar, out of which he measured penn'orths and ha'p'orths
+into the various receptacles brought by customers who came to demand "a
+sup" or "a drain." On these sales his profits were certainly enormous,
+not less than cent. per cent., but then the consumption of that article
+was extremely small in Ballybrosna. It took a long while to reach the
+sediment at the bottom of the jar, and Isaac's letter-writing, done at
+the rate of thruppence a-piece, probably was a more lucrative branch of
+his business, though the correspondence of the Town was not large enough
+to put his services in frequent requisition. Partly on this account, and
+partly because he was by nature a strong conservative, Mr. Tarpey set
+his face sternly against the spread of education. He was distressed by
+the appearance of any symptoms of it among the neighbouring youth, even
+when it took the form of an inquiry for his limp paper and skewer-like
+pens. In fact, the diffusion of penmanship was what he most seriously
+deprecated and discountenanced. "The Lord knows," his main argument ran,
+"the foolery them spalpeens 'ill be gabbin' permiscuis would sicken you,
+widout givin' them the chance to be sittin' down aisy and invintin' it."
+His wife once suggested that "the crathurs might be more sinsible like,
+when they were takin' time to considher themselves." But Isaac said,
+"Pigs may fly."
+
+At the time when Dan came for his paper the office was occupied by Norah
+Fottrell, engaged in dictating a letter to her sweetheart, Stevie Flynn,
+away in Manchester. The composition still looked discouragingly brief,
+despite Isaac's big, flourishing hand, yet Norah's ideas had already
+run so short that she was staring in quest of more up among the cobwebby
+rafters over her head.
+
+"You might say," she said, after a pause, "that I hope he's gettin' his
+health where he is."
+
+"I've said that twyste before," Isaac objected severely.
+
+"Och, murdher, have you?" said Norah, reverting to the rafters with a
+distracted gaze.
+
+"Couldn't you tell him the price your father got for the last baste he
+sould?" said Isaac.
+
+"Bedad, I might so," said Norah; "'twas on'y thirty shillin', but it 'ud
+take up a good bit of room. And look-a, Mr. Tarpey, couldn't we lave the
+rest of the page clane? As like as not the bosthoon wouldn't be
+botherin' his head spellin' out the half of it."
+
+The adoption of this course expedited Norah's love-letter to a happy
+close. But when Dan took her place at the counter Isaac assured him, not
+without satisfaction, that "they were cliver and clane run out of all
+their writin' paper, barrin' it might be a sort of butt-ind of loose
+sheets left litterin' at the bottom of the drawer, and they that thick
+wid dust you could be plantin' pitaties in them, forby gettin' mildewed
+lyin' up in the damp so long."
+
+It was not so much compunction at Dan's disappointed countenance as an
+irresistible hankering after a good bargain that ultimately led the
+postmaster to sweep this uninviting remnant together, and fix upon it
+the price of sixpence. The charge was exorbitant, considering the small
+quantity and damaged state of the goods, yet Dan carried off his little
+packet quite contentedly, announcing that he would step over again for
+another sixpenn'orth next week, when, as Isaac reluctantly admitted, a
+fresh supply of stationery would have arrived.
+
+As Dan left the office he passed an unknown gentleman, tall, with a
+shrewd sallow face, dark, peaked beard, and alert grey eyes, who had
+been leaning against the door while the bargain was struck. The stranger
+was Mr. Alfred B. Willett, of New York, a wealthy engineer, who on his
+way home from Europe had been visiting his friend Dr. Hamilton of
+Ballybrosna. His curiosity now was roused by Dan's evident eagerness to
+acquire materials for the drawing of diagrams, the pursuit striking him
+as so strangely incongruous with the aspect of the brown-faced stalwart
+ragged youth, that he stepped inside when the place was empty to make
+inquiries on the subject. The post-master's information was to the
+effect that "the O'Beirnes above at the forge had always had the name of
+bein' very dacint respectable people up to then, and he'd never before
+seen any of the young ones settin' themselves up to be askin' after such
+things. He hoped it mightn't be a sign that the old man was goin'
+foolish, and lettin' the lads get past his control. But sure enough we
+must all of us put up wid growin' good for nothin' sometime, unless we
+happint to ha' never been worth anythin' to begin wid. And he wished he
+had a penny ped him for every one of that sort he'd met in the coorse of
+his life."
+
+This cynical disquisition was not very enlightening. However next week
+when Dan slipped over again for his second sixpenn'orth, Mr. Willett it
+chanced was there too, having called to report on the excessive
+thickness and other undesirable peculiarities of some ink lately
+supplied to him. It had been, in fact, composed of "the sidimint"
+artfully diluted with a drop of vinegar; but Isaac Tarpey said it was
+"thick wid the stren'th was in it," and set about uncorking his fresh
+jar with an affronted air, when his customer persisted in pointing out
+that its adhesive properties were less valuable in ink than in glue.
+Meanwhile Mr. Willett fell into a conversation with Dan, which ended in
+his engaging the lad to accompany him as guide on a shooting expedition
+next day. The arrangement turned out satisfactorily, and was repeated
+more than once, with the consequence that Dan and the stranger talked
+about many things in the course of several long tramps, until one
+evening the latter, sitting on a stone wall after a steep pull uphill,
+made Dan an offer which caused the most familiar objects to seem unreal,
+because a marvellous dream was coming true among them. For Mr. Willett
+proposed to take Dan home with him, and have him taught whatever he most
+wished to learn. "You're a smart lad, Dan," he said, "and I reckon
+you'll make more of that in the States than in this country."
+
+"Ah! the doctorin'," said Dan, turning as red as the young sorrel
+leaves, and letting his darling wish slip out in his surprise as
+involuntarily as he would have blinked at a flash of lightning. But next
+moment he remembered Nicholas, and fell silent; Nicholas, who had not
+looked him in the face since that snowy evening weeks ago. The dream
+seemed to stop coming true.
+
+"There's no need to make up your mind in a hurry," said Mr. Willett,
+"you can be thinking it over between this and Monday."
+
+Dan did think it over deeply that night and the next day and the day
+after. He thought how fine, if rather fearful, it would be to go on such
+a journey; and what a splendid thing to learn the doctoring business,
+and some day come home again able to cure everybody of anything that
+ailed them. "For out in the States, like enough, they had all manner of
+contrivances the people over here had never taught Dr. Hamilton," whose
+skill was occasionally baffled. He imagined the neighbours' surprise
+when he came driving up on his car; if possible he would be driving a
+little blue-roan mare like Farmer Finucane's Rosemary, with whom he had
+made friends in the course of many shoeings. He thought he would be
+sorry to miss seeing them all for so long; and yet it would certainly be
+very pleasant, in a way, to get to a place where things were a bit
+different sometimes, not like here where when you were getting up in the
+morning you knew what was bound to be happening all day just as well as
+you did when you were going to bed that night. And next he thought that
+such days would be coming to Nicholas, while he himself was away seeing
+and learning "all manner of everything;" and that if he had held his
+tongue that time, maybe Nicholas would have got his chance with Mr.
+Polymathers's money, instead of its all being spent away on nothing. And
+he thought that it wasn't his fault, for what else could he say when he
+was asked all of a minute, except the first thing that came into his
+head? And he wondered how it would be if anything happened to his
+grandfather. Nicholas wasn't over-strong, and too young altogether
+besides. And then he thought again that Mr. Willett was cleverer than
+anybody he had ever seen, and more good-natured; it was a pleasure to go
+about with him; and people were great fools to give up their chances.
+Maybe Nicholas might get another some day. And maybe Mr. Polymathers had
+been mistaken in thinking that he was the one best worth teaching.
+
+All these things Dan thought, and the result of his cogitations was that
+on the Monday he stole a sheaf of Nicholas's most complicated
+cobweb-like diagrams from their hiding-place in the wall, and brought
+them with him when he went by appointment to meet his patron off beyond
+Knockfinny. And when Mr. Willett said to him: "Well, Dan, what about the
+States and the doctoring?" he replied inconsequently by holding out the
+sheets of paper with the explanation: "It's me brother, Nicholas, sir,
+does be doin' them mostly out of his own head."
+
+Mr. Willett looked at them for some minutes with interested
+ejaculations. "Upon my word," he then said, "if these were done out of
+his own head, he must have about as much mathematics located in it by
+nature as a spider."
+
+"Aren't they good for anythin' at all then, sir?" said Dan, not knowing
+exactly what he hoped and feared.
+
+"Good? They're astonishing," said Mr. Willett. He asked some questions
+about Nicholas's age, schooling, and so forth; after which he said: "You
+must take me to see this brother of yours, Dan. I expect he'll have got
+to come right along with us."
+
+But Dan stared round and round the spacious brown-purple floor they were
+standing on, and after a far-off flight of wild fowl, and up at the sky,
+where the clouds travel without let or hindrance, before he answered
+hesitatingly: "The two of us couldn't ever both go, sir. How could we
+be lavin' the forge and all on me ould grandfather? And Nicholas never
+makes any great hand of the work."
+
+"Ah! is that the way the land lies?" said Mr. Willett, as if half
+impatient, and half amused, but not best pleased. He looked hard at Dan,
+and thought he saw how matters stood, "You've no mind to leave the old
+grandfather and the rest of the concern, but you think it would be more
+in the other lad's line."
+
+As a matter of fact Dan was at that particular moment feeling strongly
+how easily he could have reconciled himself to the separation, and how
+entirely it would be the making of him to do so. But he did not gainsay
+Mr. Willett's statement. To himself he said, "He's a right to have his
+chances; and the one of us is bound to stop in it"--a mode of expressing
+his sentiments which showed that he had much need of culture; and aloud:
+"Nicholas always had a powerful wish to be gettin' some larnin'; and I'm
+a fool to him at the geomethry anyway."
+
+The upshot of it all was that when some six weeks later Mr. Alfred B.
+Willett sailed for New York, Nicholas O'Beirne accompanied him, and Dan
+O'Beirne remained at Lisconnel. It was on a gleamful April day that they
+set out, with soft gusts roaming all around, as if they had come from
+very far off, and were eagerly exploring the strange places, and many
+light clouds flitting by swiftly above, as if they had a long journey
+before them, and were in a joyous flurry over it. Dan spent the
+slow-paced hours in the forge, where he hammered loud and long, and
+seldom looked across the threshold. The pleasantest thought in his mind
+was the remembrance of a short conversation which he had had with
+Nicholas while they were tying up Mr. Polymathers's old books at the
+kitchen-door just as the grey chink in the east filled with rose-light,
+and the earliest breeze came over the bog waving the withered grasses.
+Dan had said to Nicholas: "Sure I wouldn't be grudgin' you e'er a bit of
+good luck, lad." And Nicholas had replied: "And never did."
+
+After Nicholas's departure many days bad and good rose on Lisconnel, but
+few of them brought any tidings of the absent. Letters passed now and
+then, laggard and uninstructive as such letters must be, and they grew
+rarer and briefer as time went on. Perhaps a dozen years had gone by,
+when Dan one day received simultaneously an American newspaper and a
+parcel. The newspaper was marked with large blue chalk crosses at a
+paragraph which related how the degree of D.Sc. had been conferred.
+_Honoris Causâ_ upon Mr. Nicholas O'Beirne by the University of
+Sarabraxville. And in the parcel, more astonishing still, was a
+brown-covered book, lettered on the back: _A Treatise on Conic Sections,
+by Nicholas O'Beirne_. By this time Dan had been left alone at the
+forge; but he was courting Mary Ryan, Mick Ryan's daughter, so he
+naturally conveyed to her this remarkable news. It produced a profound
+impression. Old Paddy her grandfather was with difficulty brought to
+realise the fact that "they were after makin' a doctor of young Nicholas
+O'Beirne, him that went out to the States the year before the Famine."
+And when he had got the idea into his head, it seemed to act like a
+swivel-joint, and set him nodding to the tune of: "Well tub-be sure;
+glory be to God; young Nicholas O'Beirne."
+
+"I wish to goodness he'd come over and cure Mick, poor man," said Mick's
+wife. "For he hasn't been worth pickin' up off the road ever since he
+was bad with the fever last year, and he might as well be dhrinkin' so
+much ditch-wather as the ould stuff Dr. Carson's givin' him."
+
+"Ah but it's not the medical doctorin' Nicholas has gone to," said Dan,
+the shadow of a shadow crossing his face, "there'd be diff'rint letters
+for that." And he proceeded to read out the report of the degree
+conferred _honoris causâ_ upon the distinguished young Irishman, Mr.
+Nicholas O'Beirne, whose recent contributions to the study of the higher
+mathematics had roused so much interest in scientific circles.
+
+"Ay, true for you, Dan," said Mary; "you don't hear them callin' Dr.
+Carson an Honory-causy."
+
+Dan's shred of Latin had grown rustier than the oldest iron in his
+stock, but was not yet utterly worn away. "The manin' of that," he
+explained, "would be, _be raison of honour_, and I should suppose,
+they've gave it to him for the sake of what all he's after doin'."
+
+"Bedad then, Dan," said Mrs. Mick, "some one had a right to be givin'
+you an Honory-causy yourself, considherin' the cure you're after makin'
+on Mr. Finucane's ould mare, and everybody of the opinion she'd never
+stand on four feet again to the ages' ind."
+
+"Och blathers, ma'am," Dan said, modestly, "sure anybody wid the sight
+of their eyes might aisy enough ha' seen what ailed the crathur. That
+was no great comether. And look at what Nicholas is after doin'; he's
+wrote a book, no less."
+
+The "Treatise on Conic Sections" created an even stronger sensation than
+the news of the honorary degree, especially among those who had letters
+enough to spell out the familiar name on the title-page. Dan's Mary was
+not one of these scholars, but she found another page to admire, saying
+that the circles "drew in and out of aich other like a lot of
+soap-bubbles, had an oncommon tasty look, and so had all them weeny
+corners, wid the long bames between, the moral of a chain-harrow, you
+couldn't mistake it. Sure it's proud of it anybody might be."
+
+Probably Nicholas was very proud of this first heir of his invention,
+diagrams, and all. Whether it ever had any successors seems doubtful;
+certainly none of them arrived at his old home. But his Treatise is
+still safely stowed away there in a corner of the dresser. Most likely
+it is the only copy of "O'Beirne on Conic Sections" existing in Ireland;
+and who would expect to find it lodged in a smoke-stained cabin on the
+wild bogland between Duffclane and Lisconnel?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+BOYS' WAGES
+
+
+One leaden-roofed morning in the winter after his brother Nicholas had
+gone to the States, young Dan O'Beirne was in rather low spirits, and
+rather out of humour. It was not unnatural that such a mood should
+occasionally overtake him, since he had reached apparently a straight
+and monotonous tract of road, which would have looked interminable to
+the eyes of seventeen had not his household companions been now all
+declining folk, whose presence brought under his constant observation
+the last stages of "a long journey in December gone." Half a century or
+so of smithy work, even with some unlicensed doctoring and illicit
+distilling thrown in, was not by any means the future that he would have
+liked his oracle to predict for him. And though he forecast it
+accurately enough without the intervention of any soothsaying, this no
+more helped him to avoid it than if he had been an old-world tragical
+hero, whose friends were seeking by vain devices to circumvent the
+promulgated decrees of his destiny. Dan, indeed, took no steps of that
+sort. For him, as for most of us, the skirts of circumstance were as the
+meshes of the net in which Fate holds us, and his evil star was an
+object of which it seemed very hard to get a good grip. I have always
+wondered myself how people set about it. At any rate, Dan continued to
+walk under his; that is to say, if it were really bad luck that kept him
+at the forge. Upon this point there might be differences of opinion.
+Terence Kilfoyle, for instance, who dropped in to escape from a
+snow-shower in the course of that morning, would not, evidently, have
+taken such a view. For when Dan said something grumblingly about
+Lisconnel being "a slack sort of a place, where one didn't get much
+chance of doin' anythin' at all;" he replied, "Bedad now, if I'd the
+fine business you and your grandfather have to be puttin' me hand to, I
+wouldn't call the Queen me aunt."
+
+In those times the district around our bogland was more thickly
+inhabited than it is at present, and the blacksmith's jobs were
+proportionately plentier. Nowadays the forge is liable to long spells
+of silence, but Dan, who as young Dan has been superseded, philosophises
+over them, and talks no more about chances. On this occasion his remarks
+were overheard by his grandfather, perhaps because the old man had begun
+to have thoughts of chances which made him sensitive to signs of
+discontent in his assistant. And by and by when Terence had gone, he
+said, "Terence said a very sinsible word; a lad might aisy get a worse
+start in life, ay indeed he might so, if it was twyste as slack. But
+anyhow there's them here that 'ud be hard set to make a shift for
+themselves if the two of us was out of it; and I'm apt to be quittin'
+before Biddy at all events." To which Dan replied, "Why what talk was
+there of quittin'?" and the subject ceased out of the conversation.
+During the subsequent silence Dan thought, among other things, that it
+was "aisy for his grandfather to be talkin';" but in this he made a
+mistake. For old O'Beirne remembered vividly that he had once had his
+own restless ambitions, and his chances, too, of realising them, in
+times when he did more stirring things than merely forge pike-heads.
+Therefore he guessed what lent an unnecessary vehemence to his
+grandson's hammering, and if he could have thought of any consolatory
+remark, he would have made it. But it only occurred to him to say that
+the days would soon be len'thenin' now, anyway; and even to himself this
+seemed cold comfort. Dan replied, "Och, they're plinty long enough," and
+sent a thick swarm of fiery bees flitting up the dark-throated chimney.
+
+That evening when Dan closed the broad-leaved forge doors, he shut
+himself out into a world as black and white as moonlight on turf and
+snow could make it. Though the morning's flutter of snow had left but a
+meagre sprinkling on that great bogland, the moonbeams touching every
+scattered flake, seemed to gather it all up widely in one stark spectral
+gleam. Far away towards the horizon this dulled off into a shadowy zone
+of mist, where the wind was muttering and moaning to itself, dimly heard
+across the hushed floor of the night. Beyond that Dan was aware
+wistfully of regions unknown, with all their possibilities fascinating
+and mysterious. But he had small scope for speculation about what he
+should find when he opened the house door fast by; and in fact he
+discovered everything and everybody just as he could have foretold. The
+fire-lit room was filled with the busy weaving of the web that ruddy
+gleams and russet shadows never got finished, swiftly as they glanced,
+and overhead the black spaces between the rafters gloomed down like
+inlets of a starless sky. There sat his great-grandmother smoking her
+dudeen in her nook by the hearth, and her big cloak--a very little of
+wizened old woman to a great many heavy, dark-blue folds. There, too,
+knitted her grey-haired daughter Bridget, who said, as she did every
+evening, "Well, Dan, so you're come in," and would have not much more to
+say for herself that night except the Rosary. And his grandfather, who
+had come in just before him, was lighting his pipe in the opposite
+chimney-corner. A year ago his brother Nicholas would have thrust a
+head, all eyes and rumpled hair, into a patch of bright flickerings, to
+pore over the tattered arithmetic-book; but by this time his absence had
+become a matter of course. The only at all unusual feature was Joe
+Denny, the blind fiddler, who had called in on his way home and had a
+drop of poteen and a farrel of wholemeal cake. Yet Joe was indeed a
+tolerably common incident, and his jokes altered not. He had begun his
+parting one, which was to the effect that sorra a man in the counthry of
+Connaught could see clearer than himself if the night was dark enough,
+when Dan's arrival interrupted him, and made him declare, taking out his
+fiddle, that 'twould be a poor case if the lad didn't get e'er a tune at
+all. Dan was not much in the humour for tunes, but he said, "Ay, Joe,
+give us a one, man-alive," and Joe struck up with twangle and squeak.
+
+He was playing--
+
+    "Over the hills and far away,
+    Over the hills and beyond the say,
+    Over the hills and a great way off,
+    And the wind it blew--"
+
+when a thudding knock on the door seemed to beat down the shriller
+sounds and stop the sliding bow. Dan went to see who it was, and found
+standing on the threshold a tall, lean old man in a long, ragged coat,
+with a thick, knotted blackthorn in his hand. A few hard-frozen granules
+pattered in at the opened door, which admitted a glimpse of the moon,
+tarnished by a thin drift of scudding cloud.
+
+"God save all here," said the old man, who was a stranger.
+
+"Good-evenin' to you kindly, sir," responded old Felix from his fireside
+corner; "and wudn't you be steppin' widin?"
+
+"I'm on'y axin' me way to the place below there--Ballybrosna beyond
+Duffclane," said the old man; "it's the road I must be steppin', for I'm
+more than a thrifle late."
+
+But he came slowly forward into the room as if lured by the fire, at
+which he looked hungrily. He stooped and limped very much, and when he
+took off his black caubeen, the sharp gleam of his white hair seemed to
+comment coldly on those infirmities.
+
+"I'm widin a mile or so of it, or maybe less, by now, I should suppose,"
+he said.
+
+"Faix, then, it's the long mile," said the fiddler. "Put half a dozen to
+it, and you'll be nearer; and bedad it's aisier work doin' that in your
+head than on your feet. Be the same token I must be leggin' it, or
+they'll consait I'm lost at our place." And he stepped out darkly into
+the veiled moonlight.
+
+"Wirrasthrew and weary on it," the old man said to himself; and then to
+the others, "Is it that far as he says?"
+
+"Ay is it, every inch," said old O'Beirne. "And too long a thramp for
+you altogether, sir, if I might make so free."
+
+"For the matther of that," said the ragged old man, proudly, "I've
+walked the double of it, and more, times and agin, widout so much as
+considherin'. But your road's a bit heavy to-night, wid the snow--and
+could."
+
+"That's the worst of the roads," said the little old woman, peering
+suddenly out of her corner; "the longer you walk them, the longer
+they'll grow on you, till you begin to think there's no ind to them. And
+after that, the best conthrivance is to keep off of them clivir and
+clane, the way I do. Then they're no len'th at all."
+
+"Ah, ma'am, but 'twouldn't be very handy if the young folk took to
+thryin' that plan," the old man said. "_We_'re bound to keep steppin'
+out."
+
+A short silence followed this remark, because the hearers felt uncertain
+whether he meant the pronoun for a jest. To evade the difficulty, old
+O'Beirne bade Dan fetch a mug for a drop of poteen, and meanwhile said
+to the stranger:
+
+"Sit you down, sir, and take a taste of the fire. Where might you be
+thravellin' from this day?"
+
+"I was livin' over at Innislone," said the old man, sitting down on a
+creepy stool.
+
+"Musha, then, you didn't ever come that far all on ind--sure it's miles
+untould."
+
+"'Twas the day afore yisterday I quit. Last night I slep' at Sallinbeg,
+and this mornin' I met a man who loaned me a grand lift in his cart."
+
+"I used to know a man lived at Innislone," said old O'Beirne, "be the
+name of Brian English. He come by here of an odd while after the stuff."
+
+"Ay, bedad, and a very dacint ould crathur he was. Meself's one of the
+Dermodys--young Christie they call me--but ould Christie that was me
+poor father's dead this while back. Thank you kindly, lad," the old man
+said to Dan, who now handed him a little delft mug half full of whisky.
+"Why, you're nigh as long a fellow as meself. Are you good at the
+wrestlin'?"
+
+"Och, I'm no great things whatever," Dan replied with becoming modesty.
+
+"There's not many heavy weights in the parish 'ud care to stand up to
+me," said this young Christie, holding the mug in a gaunt tremulous
+hand. "Faix, it's noways forrard they've been about it since the time I
+come near breakin' Rick Tighe's neck. I've noticed that. Begorrah, now,
+ivery sowl thought I had him massacred," he said, with a transient gleam
+of genuine complacency. "You might have heard tell of it, belike?"
+
+"It 'ud ha' happint before my recollections, sir, maybe," said Dan,
+looking at him perplexedly, "if 'twas apt to ha' been a longish while
+ago."
+
+"'Twasn't long to say," said the old man. He drank the spirits
+lingeringly, in slow sips, and seemed to sit up straighter as he did so.
+Then he set down the empty mug on the table, and said, "_Boys' wages_."
+
+But he had scarcely uttered the words when he perceived that he had
+thought aloud irrelevantly, and made haste to cover the slip. "I'd
+better be gettin' on wid meself," he said, rising, "Thank you, kindly.
+That's an iligant fire you have." He looked at it regretfully, but
+turned resolutely towards the door, still open, and framing the broad
+dim whiteness out away to the bounding curtain of gloom. "It's a grand
+thing," he said defiantly, "to have all the world before you."
+
+The sentiment was not accepted without qualification.
+
+"That depinds," said old O'Beirne. "Somewhiles I question wud you find
+anythin' in it better than a warm corner and a pipe of 'baccy, if you
+thramped the whole of it. And you might happen on a dale worse. What do
+you say, mother?"
+
+She was knocking ashes out of her pipe-bowl against the wall, and nodded
+in assent.
+
+"It's no place for people that can keep shut of it," she said.
+
+"If you've ne'er a chance of gettin' into it," said Dan, "I dunno what
+great good it does you bein' there afore or behind."
+
+"Or if you knew there was nothin' left in it you wanted to be goin'
+after," said his great-aunt, half to herself.
+
+"Well, whatever way you look at it," said the strange old man, "I've a
+notion I've a right to be gettin' somethin' more out of it be now than
+boys' wages. Ay, it's time I was. Boys' wages; the lyin' spalpeen."
+
+"If you axed me, sir," said old O'Beirne, "I'd say 'twas time somebody
+else would be gettin' the wages. Isn't there any childer to be earnin'
+for you? Haven't you e'er a son, that you need be thrampin' the counthry
+that fashion, let alone talkin' about all the world, wild like?"
+
+"I've a son, troth have I, if that was all," said the old man, turning
+away, angrily.
+
+"Then it's that much better off than me you are. The only one I had, he
+took and died on me, himself, and his poor wife a couple of days after
+him--God be good to them--when the lad there wasn't scarce the height of
+that stool, and a less size on his brother, that's away now in the
+States gettin' all manner of a fine edication. Very dacint poor childer
+they always was, too; but it was a bad job."
+
+"He might ha' done worse agin you than that," said Christie Dermody, "be
+the powers he might." He had retreated as far as the door, but now he
+faced round, and stood on the edge of the thin snow, leaning his right
+shoulder against the post, and looking in at the other old man by the
+fire. "He might ha' fooled you for years and years, and made a
+laughin'-stock of you wid everybody about the place--and me wid ne'er a
+thought of any such a thing--he might so, and bad luck to him....
+'Foostherin' about and consaitin' to be doin' a fair day's work, when
+he's the creep of a snail on him, and the stren'th of a rat.' That's
+what I heard Tim Reilly sayin' and I goin' home on the Saturday night.
+But if I come creepin' after him, the young baste, he'd maybe ha' ráison
+to remimber it.... And himself and the wife lettin' on there was nothin'
+like me; and he callin' me to come into his room--I heard him plain
+enough all the while, no fear, but I wudn't be lettin' on. There's
+ne'er a hap'orth ailin' him. Troth he may call till he's choked afore
+iver I'll come next or nigh him. And sendin' the little girl slutherin'
+to say her daddy wanted me. I tould her want might be his master. Sure
+they're all the one pack, and the widest width there is in this world
+I'll be keepin' between them and me. Shut of them I'll be for good and
+all--and I'll make me fortin' yet, and no thanks to him. What talk have
+they of ould men? Boys' wages. Good-night to you all."
+
+To those in the room it seemed as if he dropped away back into the wan
+dusk behind him, and next moment they saw him in motion a few paces
+distant, limping fast, and gesticulating as though he were still
+carrying on his monologue.
+
+"That old crathur's asthray in his mind, I misdoubt," said old O'Beirne,
+"and I wouldn't won'er if he was after gettin' bad thratement among his
+own people."
+
+"Goodness pity him," said his sister Bridget. "It's a cruel perishin'
+night, and snowin' thicker. Where'll he get to at all? And carryin'
+nought but an old stick. We'd better ha' kep' him."
+
+"Sure we couldn't ha' stopped him anyhow," said the blacksmith, "no
+more than one of them flustherin' blasts goin' by. When a body's took up
+wid onraisonable notions, you might as well be hammerin' could iron as
+offerin' to persuade him diff'rint. But he'll maybe turn in at the
+Gallahers'."
+
+They watched him until the dark imprints of his receding steps in the
+thin snow-sheet could no longer be distinguished, and then Dan closed
+the door, shutting out the wide world and the fortune seeker. "Things is
+quare and conthráry," he said to himself.
+
+Some two hours afterwards they were all sitting round the fire still. It
+was nearly nine o'clock, which is late in Lisconnel, but they found it
+hard to detach themselves from the cordial grasp of the warm glow.
+Bridget, however, had put by her needles, and begun to tell her beads,
+when another knock broke in upon them.
+
+"He's come back belike," said old O'Beirne; but when Dan opened the
+door, the person who stood there, though likewise tall and gaunt and
+ragged, had grizzled black hair, and was not more than middle-aged. His
+face was hollow-cheeked and drawn, and his eyes glittered while he
+shivered and panted. The night had grown wilder as the moon sank low,
+and the snow went past the door like rapid wafts of ghostly smoke. This
+newcomer stumbled into the room without ceremony, as if half blinded,
+and said breathlessly--
+
+"Did any of yous be chance see an ould man goin' this road to-day? An
+ould ancient man, somethin' lame; be the name of Christie Dermody?"
+
+"Ay, sure enough, himself was in it not so long ago," said old O'Beirne.
+"If it hadn't been you, 'twas very apt to ha' been him come back."
+
+In the man's face one trouble seemed to be relieved by another at the
+tidings.
+
+"Glory be to goodness, then, that I've heard tell of him at last," he
+said. "But God help the crathur, what's to become of him streelin' about
+this freezin' night? The snow's as dhry as mail-dust. Perished he'll be.
+Och, he's the terrible man to go do such a thing on us. What way did he
+quit? It's me ould father, sir, that's over eighty years of age."
+
+"And is he after strayin' away on you?" said old O'Beirne.
+
+"Follyin' him since yisterday mornin' I am," said the other, "when it's
+in me bed I should be be rights, for I'm that distroyed wid the could
+on me chest I've scare a bit of breath in me body. But sure what matter
+if I can come be the crathur agin. Is it that a-way he went, did you
+notice?"
+
+"You're bound to wait till the flurry of the win's gone by," said old
+O'Beirne, for his visitor pointed out into a shrieking whirl, shrilling
+higher and fiercer. "Sorra a minyit you'll lose, for you couldn't stir a
+step in that or see a stim. Sit you down a while. What was it set him
+rovin'?"
+
+"Did he say anythin' agin us? Anythin' of bein' thrated bad?"
+
+"Well, I wouldn't say he seemed altogether satisfied in himself," said
+old O'Beirne, remembering his suspicions. "Somethin' he said of bein'
+made a fool of, and tould lies to----"
+
+"And gettin' boys' wages," said Dan.
+
+"Ay, ay, wirrasthrew, that was the very notion he had, goodness help us.
+What will we do at all wid him? You see, sir, me father's a won'erful
+proud-minded man; he is that. And a great big man, and as strong as ten
+he was, ontil he got rael ould entirely. So it's cruel bad he thinks of
+not bein' able for everythin' the way he used to be; and he won't let on
+but he is, be no manner of manes he won't. 'Deed no, he sez he's as good
+a man as ever he was in his life."
+
+"Belike now he's of the opinion the sun doesn't dhrop down out of the
+sky of an evenin'," said little old Mrs. O'Beirne, with sarcasm. "What
+does the ould body expec'?"
+
+"I dunno, ma'am, I dunno. Sure it's agin nathur and raison. There's
+meself gettin' as grey as a badger, and noways that supple as I was. But
+me father's a terrible cliver man. You'd niver get the better of an
+argufyment wid him, for he wouldn't listen to a word you'd be sayin'. So
+you see the way of it was, the two of us is workin' this great while on
+Mr. Blake's lan', that's a dacint man enough; and it might be three year
+ago, he sez to me one Saturday night--for be good luck 'twas me and not
+me father he'd mostly be payin'--sez he to me, 'Look it here, Ned, it's
+the last time I'll be givin' man's wages to your father, for bedad an
+infant child 'ud do as much as he any day of the week. So I'll put him
+on boys' wages,' he sez, 'that'ill be three shillin's, and every penny
+as much as he's worth,' sez he. And sure I knew it was the truth he was
+sayin', but 'twould break me father's heart.
+
+"So nought better could I do on'y to make out 'twas he would be gettin'
+the man's wages, and meself the boy's. Diff'rint raisons I conthrived,"
+he said, with some natural pride in the details of his strategy, "but
+mostly I let on 'twas because of me bein' such a fool about the horses
+they couldn't trust me wid any except the ould ones. Anyway me father
+was contint enough; faix, some whiles he seemed a bit set up like,
+considherin' he had the pull over me, and he'd be sayin' what at all 'ud
+we do without him, and I such an omadhawn. Niver a cross word we had
+until last week I got laid up wid this mischancy could and the pain in
+me chest, so sorra a fut could I go to me work; and I well knew the
+whole thing 'ud come out, if he went when I didn't. Bedad I dhramed it
+all the night asleep and awake, till I was fairly moidhered in me head."
+
+"Tub-be sure," said old O'Beirne, "that's the worst of lettin' on. If
+anythin' goes crooked, it's like the bottom bursted out of a sack of
+mail; you're carryin' about nothin' at all before you know what's
+happint you."
+
+"Well, we done the best we could, me wife and me, to dispersuade him off
+of goin' on Saturday. Bad wid the could too, we said he was; but och not
+a fut of him but would go. So Barney McAuliffe was tellin' me wife, when
+the men was payin' in the yard, me father he ups and says to Mr. Blake:
+
+"'Beg pardon, sir, but you're after givin' me no more than me son's
+money, and it's meself was workin' this week, not him.'
+
+"And Mr. Blake sez, just goin' off in a hurry, 'What are you talkin'
+about, man? Whethen now, you don't suppose I've been payin' you full
+wages, that hasn't done a stroke of work worth namin' this half-dozen
+year? That'ill have to contint you till Ned's back agin.'
+
+"And Barney sez my father had ne'er a word out of him, but just went
+home dazed like. And me wife sez when he come in, he sits down on the
+form be the door, and niver opens his lips. So she knew right well what
+ailed him, and she said iverythin' she could think of--how it's
+disthroyed we'd be on'y for him now I was laid up, and the won'erful man
+he was, and this way and that way. But niver a word he heeded, nor near
+the fire he wouldn't come, and had her heart-scalded seein' him sittin'
+there in the draught of the door. And I meself was tired callin' him to
+come in and spake to me, and I lyin' in bed, but next or nigh me he
+niver come, not even for little Maggie that he always thought a hape
+of. And the next mornin' if he wasn't quit out of it early, afore
+anybody knew, in the bitter black frost, and a quare threatinin' of
+snow. So then as soon as I heard tell, I up wid me and come after him.
+Troth, I left the wife frettin' wild, the crathur, thinkin' I'd get me
+death; but what else could I do? And now I must be steppin' on again.
+Och no, thank you, lad, if I took a dhrop of spirits, I'd be choked wid
+coughin'. But you might just set me on the right road."
+
+"I'll go along wid him," said Dan, aside to his grandfather, "and if I
+can bring him, or the both of them, back here, I will. It's my belief
+he's as bad as he can stick together."
+
+So Dan and old Dermody's son went out into the night. A lull in the wind
+had come, and the light of the moon, hung near the horizon's rim,
+flickered out dimly ever and anon as the edge of the drifting mist
+lapped up wave-like and touched her. It was piercingly cold. Ned Dermody
+leaned heavily on Dan as they walked, only till he fetched back his
+breath, he said, but it was slow in coming. They had not gone many
+hundred yards, yet vast tracts of solitude seemed to have folded round
+them, before Dan caught sight of something that somehow startled and
+shocked him--a group of boulders by the road, with a shadow under one of
+them strangely like a human form. A few paces further on he became aware
+that it really was a man--the old man--sitting huddled up under the big
+glimmering stone. Thus far had he carried his forlorn quest after
+Fortune, and mutiny against Fate. His snaggy stick lay at a little
+distance, a black line on the snow, and the sight of that made Dan's
+heart stumble. But Ned Dermody shouted out hoarsely and loud: "Be the
+Lord it's himself," and, as Dan afterwards used to tell, "took a flyin'
+lep at him, as if he'd a mind to ha' lep over the world."
+
+"Musha now, and is it there you would be sittin' to catch your death of
+could?" he began, in a tone of gleeful reproach, shaking the old man by
+the shoulder. "Goodness forgive me for sayin' so, but it's yourself's
+the pernicious ould miscreant. Fine thrampin' over the counthry I've had
+after you--forby givin' us the greatest fright altogether. Sure I give
+you me word the whole of them at home was runnin' in and out of the
+house on Sunday mornin' like so many scared rabbits about a bank. And
+ne'er a man-jack of them, you persaive, had the wit to find out where
+you was off to till meself riz out of me bed to go look. And now,
+man-alive, git up wid yourself and come along, for it's mortal could
+here, and there's tons' weight of snow this instiant minyit ready to
+dhrop down on our heads. Come along. Sure it's niver disthressin'
+yourself you'd be about ould Blake and his wages? Musha sure Norah and
+meself was sayin' on'y on Saturday night that there wasn't many
+stookawns like me had fathers to be bringin' them home shillin's every
+week as regular as the clock, and givin' prisints to the childer, and
+all manner. There's little Maggie frettin' woful to be missin' you out
+of it. Don't be keepin' me standin' on me feet, there's a good man, for
+it's quare and bad I've been, and the doctor was sayin' he couldn't tell
+what ruination mightn't be on me if I didn't mind what I was at. And
+here's the dacint lad waitin' to show us the road. We're just comin'
+along this instant, boyo. Look-a-daddy, 'twas all a mistake, and we'll
+settle it up next week, when we're both workin' agin. Very belike Mr.
+Blake didn't rightly know what he was sayin'. Wake up and come along....
+Daddy darlint, don't you hear what I'm tellin' you? It's raisin' your
+wages they'll be after Lent, I wouldn't won'er, raisin' them a shillin'
+belike--rael grand it'ill be--God Almighty!"
+
+He stood up suddenly and looked towards Dan, but at neither him nor
+anything else. The moon began to shine clearer in a chink between two
+straight leaden bars, and the great white bog seemed to grow wider and
+stiller under the strengthening light. The very wind had forsaken them,
+and gone off keening into the far distance. It seemed to Dan that even a
+flake fluttering down would have been some company, but not a single one
+was in the air. He felt himself seized by a nameless panic, such as had
+not come over him since he was a small child a dozen years ago.
+
+"What's the matter at all?" he said futilely to Ned Dermody, knowing
+well enough.
+
+"Gone he is," said Ned, "the life was vexed out of him among us all.
+He's gone. And it's follyin' him I'd liefer be, on'y for them crathurs
+at home."
+
+But in another moment he came staggering against Dan, and clutched his
+arm, saying wildly: "Ah, lend me a hand--for pity's sake--a hand for a
+minyit. Don't let go of me." And he leant such a heavy dead weight on
+him that all Dan could do was to let it slip down and down as softly as
+might be, until the snowy earth took it from him.
+
+Ned had followed in spite of the crathurs at home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+CON THE QUARE ONE
+
+
+Among the unfamiliar faces that show themselves now and then at
+Lisconnel, some make no second appearance, never coming our way again,
+but passing out of our ken as utterly as if their route lay along a
+tangent, or the branch of an hyperbola, or other such unreverting line.
+We seldom, it is true, get proof positive, as in the case of the
+Dermodys, father and son, that they will no more return. Generally their
+doing so any day may be supposed possible as long as anybody remembers
+to suppose it. But some come back at more or less regular intervals,
+like periodic comets, so that if a certain time elapses without bringing
+one of them, the neighbours say they wonder what's took him at all,
+while some reappear erratically enough to preclude any calculations upon
+the subject. Of this latter class was Con the Quare One, who, after his
+first arrival, on a summer's evening, now more than a quarter of a
+century since, became a rather frequent visitor, usually stopping for a
+few days at least, before he resumed his travels. It was conjectured
+that these were very extensive, though perhaps less so than Mad Bell's.
+But it was even more difficult to obtain a satisfactory report of them
+from him than from her. Mrs. M'Gurk said he was "so took up with his own
+notions, that he mostly knew no better where he'd been, or what he'd
+been doin', than a baste drivin' home from a fair; you might as soon be
+axin' questions of one as the other; though when Con chose to give his
+mind to it, he knew what he was about as well as anybody else. Sure if
+you wanted to know which way he was after comin', as likely as not he'd
+talk about nothin' on'y the sorts of clouds he'd been watchin' goin' by
+over his head; and 'twould take a cliver body to tell from that what
+road he might ha' had under his feet." This incommunicativeness made him
+a disappointing guest sometimes by the firesides, where he was finding a
+night's lodging; though he might eke out his conversation with a little
+twangling on his fiddle, in which the melody would be quite as vague as
+his narratives. As for his own earlier history, he never gave any clear
+account of it, probably having none to give, and the neighbours'
+speculations upon this point were somewhat wide of the mark, which was
+not surprising, as what stray hints he did let fall could be very
+deviously construed. The opinion most commonly received held that he had
+"took and run off from home, and he but a gossoon, be raison of doin'
+some quare bit of mischief, and had a mind yet to be keepin' out of his
+people's way; though, like enough, they weren't throublin' their heads
+about him be now;" a theory which was not entirely in accordance with
+facts.
+
+Con was not, I believe, an especially quare one at his first start in
+life, begun under the thatch of a little whitewashed cottage, dotted
+down among grass-fields beside a clear, brown river, which kept his
+mother busy exhorting him and his half-dozen brethren to not be falling
+in and drowning themselves on her. Her days were haunted by
+apprehensions of that catastrophe, which, however, was not included in
+the plot of her life's drama. Con's chosen bugbear was the bridge which
+bestrode the river close by, and beneath the arch of which he had once
+happened to be while a cart passed overhead. For the lumbering rumble
+had been an appalling experience, which he shuddered to repeat. Yet he
+lacked the moral courage to rouse his elders' derision by an avowal, so
+he followed, and did not let on, whenever their wading and dabbling
+brought them into the hollow-sounding shade. Despite this daily anxiety,
+Con spent his earliest years light-heartedly enough, with no stinting of
+pitaties--none at least that reached the childer--and ample scope for
+sports and pastimes. But when he was still very small, his grandmother,
+lately widowed and on her way to a new abode, stopped a night with her
+married daughter, and begged that she might bring home one of the
+grandchildren with her, "just to take the could edge off her
+lonesomeness," a request which could not well be refused. And Con seemed
+the appropriate person to go, as the old woman considered that "the dark
+head of hair he had on him was the moral of his poor grandfather's afore
+it turned white." Therefore the swiftly running mysteriously murmuring
+river flowed away out of his life, and with it vanished all the faces
+and voices and comradeship that had made up his world.
+
+At first he fretted for them rather persistently, but after a time
+adapted himself to circumstances, and contented himself with the
+grass-bordered, hedge-muffled lane, which had become the scene of his
+adventures, fraternizing with the reserved fawn-coloured goat and
+demonstrative terrier, who alone took an intelligent interest in them.
+For his grandmother was satisfied with the sense of having him "playin'
+around handy," and could not be counted company.
+
+But after nearly a twelvemonth had passed, Con seemed one day to be
+seized with a fresh fit of homesickness. It was a brilliant late summer
+morning, yet to old Mrs. Quin's perplexity, he continued to sit on his
+little stool, with his slice of griddle-cake half-crumbled in his lap,
+and answered her suggestions that he should finish his breakfast, and
+run out to play, by irrelevant requests for his own ould mammy. He
+wanted her cruel bad, he said, and there was nothin' ailed him, and he
+wouldn't like to look for blackberries along the hedge--or to throw
+stones for Bran--or even to be given a whole ha'penny to go buy himself
+a grand sugarstick down at the shop--he only wanted his mammy. Such was
+his attitude and refrain all that day and the next. After which his
+grandmother said to her neighbour, Judy Ahern, that she couldn't tell
+what had come over the child, and he had her fairly distracted
+listening to him.
+
+And Mrs. Ahern said: "Maybe he might be gettin' somethin'; there's a
+terrible dale of sickness about. But he doesn't look very bad to say.
+Arrah now, Con avic, why wouldn't you run out and play a bit this lovely
+mornin'? Wantin' your mammy? Sure that's foolish talk, and she nobody
+can tell how far away this minyit. It's just a notion you have....
+'Deed, ma'am, I dunno, but maybe you'd a right to let him home to her,
+or else he might get frettin' and mopin' himself into the fever. He's a
+poor little crathur; the face of him this instant isn't the width of a
+ha'penny herrin'."
+
+"And he so continted," said Mrs. Quin, "until he took his fantigue. Rael
+quare it is."
+
+"Most things do be quare and ugly these times," said Mrs. Ahern,
+"Goodness help us all. There's poor Mrs. Duff thravellin' off to-morra,
+to go stay wid her brother at Gortnakil. Very belike she'd take him
+along; and he'd be aisy landed home, once he'd got that far."
+
+And on the morrow Con did actually set off with Mrs. Duff, feeling half
+appeased and half compunctious, as people do when they get what they
+have clamoured for; sorry a little to lose sight of Bran, staring
+open-mouthed after him down the lane; and relieved through all by a
+vague sense that he was going whither his heart-strings pulled. If he
+had been a more experienced traveller, he might have noticed some signs
+that things were, as Judy Ahern had said, out of joint. It was
+harvest-time, and the weather was not wet, though dull and chilly, but
+nobody was working in the fields. Nothing seemed to move in them, as
+they lay deserted, except trails of a white mist that drifted low among
+the furrows, where the potato-haulms looked strangely discoloured,
+speckled and blackened, as if a shrivelling flame had run through them
+all, charring and strewing pale ashes. The air was full of a peculiar
+odour, heavy and acrid, the very life-breath of decay. The roads were
+deserted too. For miles nobody would be met, and then a small stationary
+crowd of people would appear, collected it would seem without any more
+purpose than cattle huddled together in a storm, and as dumb as they,
+not giving so much as a "fine mornin'" to the passer-by. Other crowds
+they fell in with now and again, pacing slowly along, and these always
+had a heavy burden carried among them, and sometimes women keening.
+Once the car-horse shied violently at some dark, long thing, that was
+stretched out by the footpath, and Mrs. Duff crossed herself and said,
+"God be good to us," and the driver said without looking off his reins:
+"He's lyin' there since yisterday, and I seen another above about the
+four-roads, and I comin' past this mornin'."
+
+Con did not give much heed to these incidents; but one scene in his
+journey impressed him strongly. It was at the small town where they
+slept the night, and it happened while they waited in the broad main
+street next morning for their car to pick them up, as Mrs. Duff
+travelled by a rather disjointed system of lifts in vehicles that were
+going her road. There were few people about, and Con was intensely
+admiring a gaudy tea-chest in the window of the shop before which they
+stood, when a great roar began to swell up round the corner, with a
+lumbering of wheels heard fitfully through it. Presently a large crowd
+came struggling into sight; a street full of men, women, and children,
+surrounding a blue, red-wheeled cart, piled high with dusty-looking
+white sacks. Half-a-dozen dark-uniformed policemen were trying to haul
+on the horse, and keep between the cart and the crowd, whose shout
+generally sounded like: "Divil a fut its to quit--divil a fut." It was a
+crowd that looked as if it had somehow got more than its due share of
+glittering eyes--in mistake, apparently, for other things.
+
+As the cart came crawling past where Mrs. Duff and Con stood, a furious
+rush so tilted it over that the horse fell, breaking a shaft, and some
+of the topmost sacks tumbled off, dropping with dull thuds, like dead
+bodies, upon the damp cobblestone pavement. Con saw a little cloud of
+white dust rise up over each as it dumped down, and melt away on the
+air, making him wonder to himself: "Is it smokin' hot they are?" But in
+another moment they were hidden for a while by a wild wave of the crowd,
+which threw itself tumultuously upon them. One of the sacks burst,
+spilling the soft flour in flakes, and round it the jostling and
+writhing grew fiercest. The faces that got nearest to it looked hardly
+the whiter for their smears and powdering.
+
+A young woman, all black eyes and elf locks, with a baby wrapped in her
+shawl, crouching low and making a desperate long arm, grasped a covetous
+handful, which spirted away wastefully between her clenched fingers. She
+moistened some of this in a puddle as she knelt, and held the paste to
+her baby's mouth. But its head was drooping wearily aside, and its lips
+did not move when she touched them. "Ait it up, me heart's jewel," she
+said; "ait it up, mother's little bird. 'Deed, then, but you're the
+conthráry little toad. It's breakin' me heart you'll be roarin' when
+I've ne'er a bit to give you, and sleepin' dead, when I've the chance to
+feed you." She was beginning to shake it, but a young man who stood
+behind her put his hand on her shoulder, saying: "Whisht, whisht, you
+crathur, for God's sake. It's done wid wantin' and cryin', and a good
+job for it too, the Lord knows." Then the girl shrieked again and again,
+and the people about her said from one to the other: "It's her child's
+starved on her." And an old man caught up the little body, and held it
+high over his head, shouting, "Boys, boys--look yous at that. There's
+the way Henderson's cartin' off the childer's bit of food to make his
+fine fortin in England." And the crowd shouted back through a surge of
+curses: "Divil a fut will he this day."
+
+A very little old woman seized hold of an outlying sack and tried to
+lift it, a ludicrously impossible feat, at witnessing which a cripple
+leaner than his crutches laughed boisterously, saying, "Och, good luck
+to you, granny. You're makin' a great offer at it entirely. Is it often
+you do be liftin' up the Hill of Howth? More power to your elbow." And
+the crowd yelled with laughter too.
+
+At this moment there was a prodigious clatter of hoofs on the stones,
+and round the corner whirled a squadron of hussars, all in their blue
+and yellow like a flight of macaws, coming to the rescue of Mr.
+Henderson's sacks. But Con saw scarcely more than the first confused
+onset, for somebody snatched him up and hurried him into a dark passage.
+The last sight he had of the fray was of a glossy black horse plunging
+frantically back from a cloud of the flour flung into his face, and
+rearing higher and higher, until he fell over with a terrific scrambling
+crash. Con particularly noticed the white gloves of the rider, and
+thought to himself, "He's been grabbin' the flour too." And the women
+about him said, "Och, murdher, the baste--the man's apt to be kilt!"
+
+When Mrs. Duff and Con emerged again all was quiet in the street--two or
+three women had even stolen back, and were scraping up the white
+patches--and he was driven away on a car for what seemed to him a vast
+length of time. But at last, as he peered listlessly out on glimpses of
+the dreary, strange road caught between the shawled heads of two other
+passengers, his eyes suddenly fell on something delightfully familiar.
+It was a grey ruined mill which stood by the river, not many hundred
+yards from his home. All at once he seemed to be set down in the middle
+of his old life as if he had never left it, only with a charming
+freshness superadded. A delicious feeling came over him as he watched
+the clear, sky-glinting loops unwind themselves in the grass while the
+car jogged along. There were the big stones over the edges of which the
+brown water broke into dancing crests of crystal bubbles when the river
+was full, and the deep pools under the hollow banks where they had seen
+the trout that was the size of a young whale, and the twisted wild
+cherry tree from beneath which the eddies sometimes twirled away bearing
+fleets of frail, snowy petals. And Johnny and Katty and the rest might
+all come into view paddling round any corner. When the car stopped at
+the gap through which you got into the field just behind his cottage, he
+was almost beside himself with joy, as his fellow-travellers, who were
+less elated, lifted him down and handed him his bundle, and bade him
+run straight in to his mother like an iligant child.
+
+He did run down the steep little footpath at the top of his speed, and
+round the corner of the house, and in through the open door. The room
+looked very dusk to him coming in from the mellow afternoon sunshine,
+and the first thing he noticed was that the fire had gone out. The
+hearth was a blackness sprinkled with white ashes, which made him think
+of the flour spilt on the dark ground. Next he saw his mother sitting on
+a stool by the hearth with her head leaned against the wall, and his
+father's old caubeen hanging on its nail above, a very unusual sight at
+that hour. Con rushed at her head-foremost, saying, "Och, mammy darlint,
+I'm come home this long way, and they was fightin' wid all the soldiers
+and spillin' the flour, and his horse rared up on his hind legs till he
+fell off his feet. And where's daddy if he isn't workin'? And musha what
+for is Nannie and Johnny in bed?" He pulled her shawl because she did
+not look round at him, and immediately she dropped down prone on the
+floor as heavily and helplessly as he had seen the white sacks fall. She
+had in truth been dead for hours, but Con ran out screaming that he was
+after killing his mammy, and nothing would persuade him otherwise.
+Vainly the neighbours averred that "the crathur was starvin' herself
+this great while to keep a bit for the childer, let alone her heart
+bein' broke frettin' after her poor husband and little Pat, who were
+took from her wid the fever, both of them the one day." Con's mind was
+shut fast into the dreadful moment when he had pulled her shawl and she
+had fallen down, and therein it abode, sorely afflicted, until a spell
+of brain fever intervening let it loose into a region of vaguer and more
+varied dreams.
+
+And when he had struggled through this illness, nobody well knew how or
+why, he woke up to find his world swept very bare. Father, mother, and
+all his brethren, except little Katty, were vanished out of it, and as
+it came looming back to him thus depeopled, its aspect was immeasurably
+desolate. Nor did his loss end here, for from this time dated the
+springing up among his neighbours of a suspicion that he was not all
+there, a suspicion which developed into an accepted article of belief,
+the more readily, perhaps, because nobody remained for whom such a fact
+would have had a personal bitterness, the old grandmother having slipped
+away out of her lonesomeness before his recovery. It would not be easy
+to explain how it was that Con grew up into that privileged and
+disfranchised person who is spoken of as "a crathur," and whose
+proceedings are more or less exempt from criticism. People often said of
+him that he had plenty of sense _of his own_, and the remark was to some
+extent explanatory, as a certain singularity in his way of viewing
+things even more than an occasional inconsequence and flightiness in his
+sayings and doings tended to establish the reputation for eccentricity
+which followed him closely as a shadow, and set an impalpable barrier
+between himself and his kind. As he advanced in life this was
+strengthened by his increasing fondness for his own society, but he did
+not take to his solitary wanderings until after his sister Katty married
+young Peter Meehan and emigrated to New York. It was suggested to him
+that he should accompany them, but he sat looking meditative for a
+while, and then said, "How far might it be from this to the States?"
+
+"I dunno rightly," said his informant, "but a goodish step it's apt to
+be, for people's better than a couple of weeks sailin' there, I'm
+tould."
+
+Con meditated a little more before he put another question. "Would you
+be widin hearin' out there of the folk talkin' foolish?" he inquired.
+
+"Why, tub-be sure, man, what 'ud hinder you that you wouldn't hear them
+talkin' same as anywheres else?"
+
+"Bedad, then," said Con, "it seems a long way to be thravellin' to a
+counthry as close as that. Sure, if you take out for a stravade over the
+bog here, you'll be throubled wid nothin' the len'th of the day on'y the
+curlew, or maybe a couple of saygulls skirlin'--raisonable enough. I'll
+be apt to stay where I am."
+
+Con, who was a person of many moods, happened to be in an unusually
+cynical one just then; however, he adhered to his resolution, and when
+his sister had gone he adopted a life of long tramps. Somebody had given
+him an old fiddle, and this he carried with him, though chiefly as a
+sort of badge, as his performances were but feeble, and he could turn
+his hand to many other things when he found it necessary to do so. His
+rovings had gone on for several years before they led him to Lisconnel.
+In those days he was a strange, small figure, who wore a coat too large
+for him, and a hat set so far back on his head that its brim made a sort
+of halo to frame his face, which had a curious way of looking fitfully
+young and old, with a shining of violet blue eyes and a puckering of
+fine-drawn wrinkles. A small boy and a little old ancient man would seem
+to change places half a dozen times in the course of a single
+conversation. Even his hair was a puzzle, regarded as an indication of
+age, because its black had become streaked with white in such a fashion
+that its apparent hue varied according to what came uppermost in
+accidents of ruffling and smoothing. A neighbour once said of him that
+he was the living moral of a little ould lepreehawn that they were after
+making a couple of sizes too big by mistake; and my own impression is
+that further opportunities for observing specimens of the race would be
+likely to bear out this statement.
+
+The summer evening on which he was first seen at Lisconnel had followed
+a very fine day. In the heart of its golden afternoon Mrs. O'Driscoll
+trusted her youngest son Terence out on the bog with his brothers and
+sisters and some other children, the eldest of whom, Johanna Harvey, the
+Ryans' orphan niece, was credited with wit enough to keep the party out
+of the holes. They wandered off rather more widely than usual, along the
+foot of the hill, lured on by a sprinkling of dainty white mushrooms,
+which they found, generally with yells, studded here and there. At last
+they sat down on a bank to peel their delicate, pink-quilted buttons,
+all of them except Terence, who was not yet of an age to have acquired a
+taste for mushrooms. He had been carried most of the way, still he had
+toddled further than he was accustomed to do, and his unwonted exertions
+led him to curl himself up behind a sun-smitten rock and fall asleep
+with a quietness which presently brought upon him the fate of out of
+sight out of mind. After a while, however, Johanna did bethink herself
+of him, and was just on the point of wondering aloud where little
+Terence had gone to, when her cousin Thady turned her thoughts into a
+different channel by suddenly saying, "What was there in it before the
+beginnin' of everythin'?"
+
+Thady was a small, anxious-looking child, whose pale and peaky face his
+mother often likened regretfully to a hap'orth of soap after a week's
+washing. He had spent a surprisingly considerable part of his six years
+in metaphysical speculations, and was always disposed to make a personal
+grievance of the difficulties in which they constantly landed him. His
+tone was now rather peremptory as he repeated, "What was there in it
+before the beginnin' of everythin'?"
+
+"Sure, nothin' at all," said his elder brother Peter, to whom the answer
+seemed quite simple and satisfactory. But Johanna looked as if she had
+caught sight of some distant object which provoked hard staring.
+
+"Then what was there before the beginnin' of nothin'?" pursued Thady.
+
+"Dunno," said Peter, indifferently, "unless it was more nothin'."
+
+"Sure not at all; that wouldn't be the way of it," Johanna said,
+dreamily, yet with decision. "If there was nothin' but nothin' in it,
+there'd ha' been apt to not be e'er an anythin' ever. Where'd it ha'
+come from? Don't be tellin' the child lies, Peter. Why, for one thing,"
+she said, her tone sharpening polemically and taking a touch of triumph,
+"there was always God Almighty in it, and the Divil. Maybe that's what
+you call nothin'."
+
+Peter evaded this point, saying, "Well, anyway, those times, if there
+was just the two of them in it, and no harm to be doin', let alone any
+good people to know the differ, it's on'y a quare sort of Divil he'd
+get the chance of bein'. I wouldn't call him anythin' _much_."
+
+"He wouldn't be so very long, you may depind," Johanna pronounced.
+"Musha, sure the Divil couldn't stay contint anywhile at all till he'd
+take to some manner of ould mischief 'ud soon show you the sort of
+crathur he was--it's his nathur. I should suppose the first thing he'd
+go do 'ud be makin' all the sorts of hijjis roarin' great bastes and
+snakes and riptiles that he could think of, and the disolit black wet
+bogs wid the could win' over them fit to cut you in two when you're
+sleepin' out at night," said Johanna, whose ten years of life had
+brought her into some rough places before her adoption by her Aunt
+Lizzie Ryan, "and the workhouses--bad luck to the whole of them--where
+there's rats in the cocoa, and mad people frightenin' you, and the cross
+matrons, and the pólis, and the say to dhrownd the fishin'-boats in, and
+dirty ould naygurs that put dacint people out of their little
+places----"
+
+"If it had been me," said Peter, "I'd ha' been very apt to just hit him
+a crack on the head when I noticed what he was at, and bid him lave thim
+sort of consthructions alone."
+
+"I dunno the rights of it entirely," Johanna admitted, "but it's a
+cruel pity he ever got the chance to be carryin' on the way he's done."
+
+"Ah, sure it can't be helped now at all events," said Peter, who was for
+the time being not inclined to quarrel seriously with the scheme of
+things, as he basked on the warm grassy bank, where the wild bees were
+humming in the thyme, happily remote from the grim House and the hungry
+sea.
+
+"Belike it can't," said Johanna; "but 'twould be real grand if it could.
+Suppose I was out on the hill there some fine evenin', and I not
+thinkin' of anythin' in partic'lar, and all of a suddint I'd see a
+great, big, ugly, black-lookin' baste of a feller, the size of forty,
+skytin' away wid himself along the light of the sky over yonder, where
+the sun was about goin' down, and his shadder the len'th of an awful
+tall tree slippin' streelin' after him, till it was off over the edge of
+the world like, and that same 'ud be just the Divil, that they were
+after bundlin' out of it body and bones, the way he wouldn't get
+meddlin' and makin' and annoyin' people any more. So wid that I'd take a
+race home and be tellin' you all the iligant thing was after happenin'.
+And in the middle of it who'd come landin' in but me father and mother,
+and little Dan. And then, if it isn't the grand cup of tay I'd be
+makin' her, ay begorra would I, and a sugarstick to stir it wid."
+
+Johanna's vision of the millennium was broken in upon querulously by
+Thady. "Sure I know all about God Almighty and the Divil," he said
+comprehensively, "I was on'y axin' what was in it before the beginnin'
+of everythin', and you're not tellin' me that."
+
+"There's a dale of things little spalpeens like you wouldn't be tould
+the rights of at all," said Peter, loftily, being rather annoyed at the
+interruption. He would have liked to hear some further details about the
+felicity to be inaugurated by that exquisite cup of tea. "Go on
+romancin', Han."
+
+But Johanna, who felt that this assumption of superior knowledge was an
+uncandid subterfuge, and yet had not magnanimity enough to disclaim it
+on her own part, remained uneasily silent for a moment, and then only
+said: "Sure it's time we was gettin' home." This they accordingly
+proceeded to do, and had gone most of the distance before it occurred to
+anybody that little Terence O'Driscoll was not with them. Then, after a
+superficial and unproductive search among the scattered stones and
+bushes, they thought it expedient to run back in a fright, and report
+that the child had gone and got lost, unless by any odd chance he'd come
+home along wid himself.
+
+Thus it was that when Terence wakened from his nap, he found himself
+deserted, and thrown completely upon his own resources. As he had not
+been quite three years in amassing these, they were on the whole but
+scanty. In fact, he was helplessly unable to realise a world with
+nothing in it except endlessly swelling up slopes of furzy grass, no
+Molly nor Micky for him to trot after, and to carry him wherever they
+were going, whenever he intimated the desirability of that step by
+abruptly plumping down on the way. So he set off in a great hurry to
+escape from such a wilderness. He still walked with a wobbling stagger,
+and his long frock of whity-brown homespun kept on tripping him up,
+which retarded his progress. But he was not at all long in mentally
+reaching the precincts of a wild panic which rose up and seized him in a
+grip never to be quite forgotten, though only a few desperate minutes
+ensued before he stumped blindly against Con's legs. It was so
+unutterable a relief to have come on somebody who could hear him roar,
+that Terence ceased roaring immediately, and let Con pick him up
+without demur. The appearance of Molly or Micky would, no doubt, have
+been more satisfactory, but this stranger man might serve well enough at
+a pinch to carry him home, which it was inconceivable that anybody of
+such a size could be unable or unwilling to do. As for Con, the
+inference he drew from Terence's dimensions was that his family and
+friends were probably not far to seek; and he recognised the shrewdness
+of the conjecture when he presently espied a shawled figure coming
+swiftly towards him over the edge of a slope, with the amber of the
+sunset glowing behind her, and her long shadow sliding on far below her,
+as if it were in an even greater hurry than herself.
+
+Mrs. O'Driscoll's head was among the golden sunbeams, but her heart had
+gone down to the very bottom of the blackest and deepest hole in the
+bog. For towards that dreadful goal she had seen a small form toddling
+ever since the other children came home alarmingly late with the news
+that Terence had got lost on them, and they couldn't find a bit of him,
+high ways or low ways. She was so overjoyed at her rescue that her
+delighted gratitude cast a sort of glamour around Con, which never
+wholly faded away. Ever after the appearance of his queer figure called
+up in her mind a dim reminiscence of the moment when she had seen it for
+the first time come into view, laden with what she well knew was Terence
+sitting bolt upright in a manner that betokened him to have experienced
+neither drowning nor any other disaster.
+
+As Con put the child into her arms, where it seemed to fit into a niche
+specially designed for it, he said: "Sure now, ma'am, when I seen him
+stumpin' along his lone, and he about the heighth of a sizable boholawn
+(ragweed), sez I to meself there was apt to be somebody lookin' after
+him. For bedad it seems to me mostwhiles the littler a thing is the more
+people there'll be consaitin' they can't get on widout it; and that's
+lucky, belike, or else it might aisy get lost entirely, like a
+threepenny bit rowled away into a crack. But if you come to considher,"
+Con said, hurrying on lest his allusion to the coin should be construed
+as a hint that he thought of payment for his services, "most people's
+lookin' out for somebody, or else somebody's lookin' out for them. It's
+on'y a few odd ones like meself that makes no differ here or there. I
+won'er now is the raison that it's after losin' ourselves we are in a
+manner--I've I've me notions about that. For first I think I dunno if
+anythin's rightly lost that nobody's lookin' to find, and then I think I
+dunno but you might as well say you couldn't find anythin' you weren't
+after losin' and lookin' for, and that's not the truth be no manner of
+manes."
+
+"And you after findin' the child," said Mrs. O'Driscoll.
+
+"Sure not at all, ma'am," said Con, modestly, deprecating not the
+statement but the implied praise. "Small thanks to me for that, when the
+woful bawls of it you might have heard a mile o' ground. You could as
+aisy ha' missed a little clap of thunder, if a one was be chance comin'
+tatterin' along between the furzes, wid the head of it bobbin' up now
+and agin, and makin' all the noise it could conthrive. Troth it's the
+quare bawls _I_ might be lettin' these times afore the rest of them 'ud
+hear me, for if it's lost I am, I'm strayin' a terrible long while;
+they're apt to disremimber they ever owned me. I do be thinkin', ma'am,
+that if you forgit what you've lost, 'tis maybe all the one thing as if
+you'd found it; and after that agin I do be thinkin' maybe 'twould be
+liker losin' it twyste over. It's quare the diff'rint notions there is
+about most things. And a good job too, or else what would you be
+considherin' in your mind, when you was thrampin' around? 'Deed now if
+you couldn't be supposin' they were this way and that way, and argufyin'
+over them wid yourself in your own mind, 'twould be like as if you took
+and swallied down a lump of 'baccy instead of chewin' it, and what sort
+of benefit or plisure 'ud you git out of that?"
+
+This was Con's first bit of philosophising at Lisconnel, and it was not
+his last by many, as the place became one of his favourite resorts. His
+liking for it was perhaps partly due to the fact that its inhabitants
+received him on more equal terms than were generally accorded to him
+elsewhere; and this again may be largely attributed to the influence of
+Mrs. O'Driscoll. For her grateful feelings towards the restorer of
+Terence made her loth to recognise any deficiencies in him, and her
+neighbours, soon perceiving that she seemed vexed if Con was spoken of
+as cracked or crazy or "wantin' a corner," were ready enough to modify
+their language, and even their judgment, in accordance with her view.
+Still it was convenient to distinguish him from another resident Con,
+about whom there were no very striking features. Therefore her little
+Rose having been heard to say that she was "after seein' Con, not Con
+Ryan, but the quare one," they caught up and applied the epithet, which
+in Lisconnel is regarded as a safely colourless term, not likely to hurt
+the most sensitive feelings.
+
+Con, on his part, formed the highest opinion of Mrs. O'Driscoll, and
+often took counsel with her about perplexing points which had presented
+themselves to him in the course of his meditations. In one practical
+matter, however, he showed an obstinacy that did not further her in her
+wish to uphold him on a footing with quite sensible people. This was his
+fancy for adorning the band of his broad-brimmed caubeen with a garnish
+of feathers and flowers. Mrs. O'Driscoll disapproved of the freak,
+rightly judging that it often created irrevocable first impressions, and
+fixed his standing at a glance. In this age and clime the Seven Sages
+could hardly maintain among them a reverend aspect, under the frivolity
+of a single flaunting blossom, much less the gaudy bunches and fantastic
+plumes upon which Con recklessly ventured. So at last, having hinted and
+remonstrated ineffectually, she contrived somehow to find time and stuff
+among her laborious days and scanty stores, and fashioned for him a
+round cloth cap of a severely plain design, which she thought would
+give no scope for any unseemly appendages. Upon being presented with
+this headgear, Con dutifully assumed it, and went about wearing it for a
+day or two in a depressed frame of mind. Then he appeared in the morning
+at the O'Driscolls', cheered, and crested with a remarkably long
+gannet's feather stuck upright in the crown of his cap, through which he
+had bored a hole to admit of the insertion. He was resolved to brazen
+out the matter, so he presently took off his cap, and twirling it round
+with an unconcerned air as he leaned against the door, said to Herself:
+"Well, ma'am, what do you think of that?"
+
+"To tell you just the truth, Con," said Herself, whose countenance had
+fallen as she saw the failure of her little plot, "I was thinkin' it
+looked a dale better before you cocked that ould gazabo on top of it.
+'Deed now it gives you the apparance of a head of cabbage that's
+sproutin' up and goin' to seed. Sure you niver see the other lads
+trapesin' about wid the like on them."
+
+Con, who seemed rather cast down by this criticism, was about to reply,
+when young Ned Keogh took the cap out of his hand and affected to
+examine it closely, saying: "Glory be to goodness, what sort of thing
+is it at all at all? Bedad it's the won'erful conthrivance--ah, tub-be
+sure; _I_ see what it is. He's about growin' a pair of wings for his wit
+to fly away wid. But musha good gracious, he needn't ha' throubled
+himself to be gettin' them that sizable. Somethin' the bigness of a
+hedge-sparrer's, or maybe a weeny white butterfly's, 'ud ha' plinty
+stren'th enough for the job, if that was all they had to do." Ned meant
+no harm, but his witticisms did not fall in with Con's humour, so he
+snatched back the cap and went off affronted, nor did he call at the
+O'Driscolls' again for some weeks.
+
+The next time he came, however, Herself had espied him a bit down the
+road, and was standing at the door to receive him with his discarded
+caubeen in her hand. "You'd be better wearin' it, Con, after all," she
+said, "for the eyes are scorched out of your head under the sun widout
+e'er a scrap of brim." And as Con took it, he observed with glee that
+she had fastened into the band a dove-coloured kittiwake's wing-feather,
+a somewhat cherished possession of her own, which she used to keep over
+her best picture on the wall. Thus did she seek to make amends for the
+speech about the sprouting cabbage-head, which had been weighing
+heavily upon her conscience.
+
+The kittiwake's feather had to weather rain and sunshine for many a year
+in Con the Quare One's old caubeen; but it is now on a room-wall again,
+the Kilfoyles' this time. Con brought it to Mrs. Kilfoyle one autumn
+evening in the year Mrs. O'Driscoll died. It was much longer than usual
+since he had wandered into Lisconnel, illness and one thing and another
+having detained him in the North for the last twelvemonth and more--all
+her blackest days of childless widowhood--so that this was his first
+visit since the departure of his earliest friend.
+
+"Could you be keepin' it somewheres safe for me, ma'am?" he said,
+showing the soft grey feather to Mrs. Kilfoyle, who was sitting by the
+fire with her sons and her future daughter-in-law, and Ody Rafferty's
+aunt, and the Widow M'Gurk. "I'll be wearin' it no more. 'Twas she
+herself stuck it in for me, but sure I knew well enough all the while
+she'd liefer I wouldn't be goin' about wid such things on me head, and
+sorra a bit of me will agin."
+
+"Whethen now but yourself's the quare man, Con," said Ody Rafferty's
+aunt, "to be takin' up wid that notion these times, when ne'er a differ
+it'ill make to her. There might ha' been some sinse in it, if you'd done
+it to plase her, but now you're more than a trifle too late wid that. A
+day after the fair you are. Sure she'll never set eyes on you or your
+old caubeen agin," she said, as if announcing some unthought-of
+discovery of her own, "no matter what ould thrash you might take and
+stick in it. You might be wearin' a young haystack on your head for
+anythin' she could tell."
+
+"That may be or mayn't be," said Con. "But at all evints the next body
+that goes there out of this countryside 'ill be very apt to bring her
+word. Discoorsin' together they'll be of all the news, and as like as
+not he--or it might be she--'ill say to her--'I seen Con the Quare One
+goin' the road a while back, and he wid ne'er a thraneen of anythin' in
+his hat, good or bad; the same way the other boys are; lookin' rael
+dacint and sinsible.' Belike she might be axin' after me herself, and
+that 'ud put it in the other body's head. Yourself it may be, Moggy.
+Faix now, I wouldn't won'er a bit if it was, for there must be a
+terrible great age on you these times. Sure you looked to be an ould,
+ould woman the first day I ever beheld you, and that's better than a
+dozen year ago."
+
+"Troth then there's plinty of oulder ould people than me, let me tell
+you," protested Moggy, who was about ninety, "that you need be settlin'
+I'm goin' anywheres next. Musha cock you up. And your own hair turned as
+white as sheep's wool on a blackthorn bush."
+
+She seemed so much put out by Con's statement and inference that young
+Thady Kilfoyle, always a good-natured lad, sought to soothe her.
+
+"Sure there's no settlin' any such a thing, and for the matter of goin',
+the young people often enough get their turn as fast as anybody else.
+It's meself," he said, "might be sooner than you bringin' news of yous
+all, and Con's ould caubeen, and everythin' else to Heaven the way he
+sez."
+
+"I dunno if you've any call to be talkin' that fashion," said the Widdy
+M'Gurk, disapprovingly, "as if you could be walkin' permisc-yis into
+Heaven widout wid your lave or by your lave. Maybe it isn't there any of
+us'ill be bringin' our news."
+
+"Might you know of e'er a better place then, ma'am?" said Con.
+
+"Heard you ever the like of that?" said Ody Rafferty's aunt, not
+unwillingly scandalised, "I should suppose nobody, unless it was a born
+haythen, 'ud know of any place better than Heaven."
+
+"That's where she is then," said Con, stroking his feather. "For the
+best place ever was is none too good for her, God knows well."
+
+"And thrue for you, man," said the Widdy M'Gurk. "But she's one thing,
+and we're another. It's not settin' ourselves up we should be to have
+the same chances."
+
+"Ah, well, sure maybe we're none of us too outrageous altogether," said
+Mrs. Kilfoyle, looking hopefully round at her company. "And if they can
+put up wid us at all at all, they will. We'll get there yet, plase God.
+And anyway I'll be takin' good care of your feather, Con. Ay will I so;
+same as if it was dropped out of an angel's wing."
+
+"So good-night to you kindly, ma'am," said he. "I'll be steppin' back to
+Laraghmena. I on'y looked in on you to bring you that, and give you news
+of Theresa. And I question will I ever set fut agin in Lisconnel."
+
+He did not, however, leave it quite immediately. A little later, when
+Brian Kilfoyle was escorting Norah Finnegan home, they saw him sitting
+on the bank near the O'Driscolls' roofless cabin. Its mud walls were
+fast crumbling into ruin. Already the little window-square had lost its
+straight outline, and would soon be as shapeless as any hole burrowed in
+a bank. Con sat with his back turned to it until the dusk had muffled up
+everything in dimness, and then he stole an armful of turf-sods from the
+nearest stack, and groped his way in through the deserted door. The
+shadows within were folded so heavily that he could scarcely more than
+guess where the hearth had been. One of Con's peculiarities was a
+strange horror of a fireless hearth. At the sight of its hoarily
+sprinkled blackness he always felt as if he were standing on the verge
+of some frightful revelation; a vague reminiscence, no doubt, from the
+scene of his life's tragedy, all distinct memory of which had been
+blurred away by his illness. Now he piled and crumbled his sods with
+practised skill, and set them alight in well-chosen places. But he
+stayed only for a minute or so, till the little fluttering flames had
+fairly taken a hold, and were sending golden threads running along the
+netted fibres. Then he groped his way out again, and returned to his
+seat on the bank. Presently, as he watched, he saw a red light
+beginning to flicker through window and door, and growing steadier and
+stronger. When it was at its brightest, he got up and turned away.
+"That's the very way it would be shinin'," he said, "and I comin' along
+the road to see Herself and Himself and the childer--God be good to them
+all, wherever they may be. And that's the notion of it I'll keep in me
+mind."
+
+And Con the Quare One came no more to Lisconnel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+MAD BELL
+
+
+Not so very long before the sound of Con the Quare One's fiddle ceased
+to enliven Lisconnel any more, Mad Bell's singing had begun to be heard
+there occasionally, as it has been at intervals ever since she arrived
+with her two housemates, Big Anne and the Dummy, and took up her abode
+in the last of the cabins that you pass on the left hand, going towards
+Sallinbeg. Perhaps Lisconnel should not reckon her among its residents,
+so much of her time is spent on the tramp as an absentee. Still, she
+sometimes has tarried with us for a long while, and she is understood to
+have some property in the house-furniture, so it seems natural to
+consider the place her home.
+
+From the first it appeared obvious to all that the dementedness which
+characterised the little wizened yellow-faced woman was of a much more
+pronounced type than Con the Quare One's. Any attempt to spare people's
+feelings by ignoring the fact would have been very futile, and it was
+therefore lucky that the three new-comers, Mad Bell herself included,
+were quite content to accept the situation. The neighbours were at first
+inclined to commiserate Big Anne, who was pronounced to be "a dacint,
+sinsible, poor woman," for the oddities of her household, the
+incalculable flightiness of Mad Bell, and the impenetrable silence of
+the Dummy. But to their condoling remarks she was wont to reply in
+effect--"Ah sure, ma'am, that's the way I'm used to them, the crathurs.
+Why, if Mad Bell said anythin' over-sinsible, or poor Winnie said
+anythin' at all, it's wond'rin' I'd be what was goin' to happin us
+next." And Big Anne evidently looked upon this as an uncomfortable frame
+of mind. At first, too, they speculated much about the circumstances
+which had brought the curious trio together beneath one thatch, and
+found it especially hard to conjecture how the daft little vagrant had
+come into possession of sundry tables and chairs. All its members,
+however, being incommunicative persons, no satisfactory elucidation of
+these points was arrived at in Lisconnel.
+
+The coalescence of Big Anne's and the Dummy's fortunes is a simple
+history enough. Anne Fannin, while yet a youngish woman, was left alone
+in the world to do for herself in her little wayside cabin. Without a
+dowry to recommend her rough-hewn features and large-boned ungainliness,
+she never had any suitors, and she found it as much as she could
+contrive to make out her single living by means of her "bit of poultry"
+and her pig. Nevertheless, when her nearest neighbours--the
+Golighers--died, leaving their daughter Winnie, "who had niver got her
+speech, the crathur," to live on charity or the rates, what else was a
+body to do except take her in? Anne would have put this question to you
+with a sincere want of resource. So Winnie Goligher transferred to Anne
+Fannin's house, herself and all her worldly goods, which consisted of
+the clothes she had on, and a prayer-book, and a lame duck, and
+thenceforward the two "got along the best way they could."
+
+Mad Bell's history has more complications in it. They began one pleasant
+April day when she was only a slip of a lass, who had taken a little
+place at the Hunts' farm near her home, for the purpose of saving up a
+few pounds against her marriage with Richard McBirney. She had been
+given an unexpected holiday, and was running home across the fresh,
+spring-green grass-fields, thinking to take her people by surprise, when
+she came to a hedge-gap whence you look down into a steep-banked lane.
+And at the foot of the bank Richard McBirney was sitting with his arm
+round her sister Lizzie's waist.
+
+To a dispassionate observer this transference of his attentions might
+have seemed a matter of small moment. Most of their acquaintances, for
+example, were just as well satisfied that he should court Eliza as
+Isabella. But the sight turned all the current of her life awry. For it
+set her off rushing away from it across the same sunny green fields, and
+she never came home again. Nor ever again would she settle down quietly
+anywhere. She had a strong, clear voice and a taste for music, and this
+led her to take to singing ballads about the country at markets and
+fairs. The harder she was thinking about fickle Richard McBirney, the
+louder and shriller she sang. A very few years of such wandering
+shrivelled up her plump "pig-beauty," so that in her little sallow,
+weather-beaten face her own mother would scarcely have recognised pretty
+Isabella Reid. Then, after a long spell of illness in a Union
+infirmary, she began to grow noticeably odder and stranger in her looks
+and ways; until at length the children shouted "Mad Bell" as she passed,
+and that became her recognised style and title.
+
+Such, briefly, had been her experience of life, when one September
+evening she came by chance to Big Anne and the Dummy's door. She had got
+a very bad cold, and felt hardly able to drag herself along between the
+berried hedges, and was so hoarse that she could with difficulty ask for
+the night's lodging, which they granted without demur. Their times had
+been unusually bad of late. In fact, their room was looking several
+sizes larger than they were accustomed to see it, because they had sold
+any articles of furniture for which "e'er a price at all" could be
+obtained. But to whatever accommodation this bareness permitted they
+made Mad Bell kindly welcome, the crathur being sick and crazy, and she
+stayed with them for three or four days. By that time, finding herself
+recovered, she resumed her journey, setting off early in the morning
+with the abruptness and absence of circumlocution which, as a rule,
+distinguished her proceedings. A friendly nod and grimace she made serve
+for announcement of departure and leavetaking all in one. As her
+hostesses watched her out of sight down the road, Big Anne said--
+
+"Well, now, I never seen that quare little body in this counthry before,
+and we're very apt to not set eyes on her agin. God be good to us all,
+but the likes of her is to be pitied. She's worse off than the two of
+us. But bedad, Winnie, if thim hins there don't prisintly take to layin'
+a thrifle, it's in a tight houle we'll be ourselves. I dunno what's
+bewitchin' them. And the sorra an ould stick have we left in it that man
+or mortal 'ud give us the price of a pullet's egg for--and small blame
+to him, unless he was as deminted as herself that's quittin'."
+
+Mad Bell's tramp that day was all along a sequence of lonesome winding
+lanes, where few dwellings were dotted among the green and gold of the
+fields. The bustle of the harvest, its reaping and binding, was over in
+them, and they lay without stir or sound. In some of them the stooks
+were still encamped, but some were smooth stubble, empty, except where a
+flock of turkeys filled it with dark, bunchy shapes. She walked steadily
+on the whole day without any adventure, but when the dew was beginning
+to fall through the twilight she came to a short, shady reach of lane,
+at the end of which stood, in a green nook, a small, prim white cottage
+with two peaked windows and a door to match. That, at least, is how it
+would under ordinary circumstances have presented itself to a passer-by.
+Just then, however, nobody would have noticed anything about it except
+the fact that out of the open door thick coils of woolly black smoke
+were rolling and rolling, stabbed through every now and again by thrusts
+of flame, which even in the lingering daylight gleamed strongly fierce
+and red. The house was evidently on fire. As Mad Bell drew nearer, she
+became aware of a wheaten-coloured terrier standing in front of it; and
+when he saw her he began to bark vehemently. She was used to being
+barked at, though not in this way, for howls were interspersed, and it
+was clearly meant not for a menace but an appeal. No other live creature
+was visible about the place, until she had come quite close to the
+surging door, when a small gossoon jumped up out of the ditch on the
+opposite side of the road and rushed across to her.
+
+"What 'ill I do at all, then?" he said, whimperingly, catching hold of
+her shawl. "If them childer's burnt up widin there, Mr. Wogan 'ill be
+in a fine way. It's for killin' the whole of us he'll be. And it wasn't
+me set it afire. Sorra the match was I meddlin' wid, I could swear it. I
+wasn't out of it any time, gettin' a few ripe berries to pacify them
+childer, agin they would be wakin' and roarin', and when I come back,
+there it is all a smother of smoke. Divil a thing else was I doin' on'y
+mindin' them childer, and not meddlin' wid the matches, and goin' after
+a couple of blackberries. And Mr. Wogan himself's away to
+Ballymacartrican wid his boxes in the ass-cart. And all of them goin' to
+quit out of it to-morra, if it wasn't for them childer bein' burnt up
+inside--or maybe it's smothered they are. It's as unhandy as anythin'.
+It went afire of itself. And he'll be ragin'."
+
+He bawled all this louder and louder in competition with the clamour of
+the dog, who kept on jumping up at each alternately, and evidently
+considered his remarks better entitled to a hearing. But Mad Bell merely
+replied, "Whisht gabbin', and hould that," thrusting, as she spoke, her
+little handkerchief bundle into his arms. And thereupon, making a sudden
+dive, she vanished among the flame-sheathing smoke.
+
+Scarcely had she disappeared when an empty donkey-cart came round the
+turn of the lane, led by a rather dejected-looking middle-aged man,
+whose countenance, nevertheless, had for some time back been gradually
+clearing up at every wind of the way that brought him nearer to this
+particular point of view. But as he caught sight of the black smoke
+drifting and rolling, his aspect of reasonable melancholy changed to one
+of a despair that could not have been wilder if the reek of hell-mouth
+had blown into his face. He dropped the bridle, and hurled himself down
+the road like the distracted body that he well might be. For a
+twelvemonth ago he had lost his wife and both his elder children in one
+week, and his pair of two-year-old twins were now all that stood between
+himself and world-wide desolation. At the front door his frantic rush
+was met and baffled by a choking puff, which sent him fleeing round in
+hopes that entrance might be more possible through the back; and on the
+way he came face to face with the wrathful visages of his son and
+daughter, whom Mad Bell was carrying in the disregardful manner that
+betides a cumbrous load snatched up in a mortal hurry. She had escaped
+by the back door.
+
+If the most radiant of guardian angels, in snowy plumes and golden
+tresses, had restored his children to him with a befitting speech, poor
+Matthew Wogan could not well have been more joyfully relieved from his
+terror than he was when this odd little yellow-faced woman, with a red
+handkerchief wisped round her head, and a singed grimness generally
+pervading her, handed over to him Minnie and Tom, casually remarking,
+"Bedad, it's the big heavy lumps they are." Minnie and Tom both were
+crying and coughing loudly, because the smoke had got into their eyes
+and throats, which they resented; and when their father returned with
+them to the front of the house, this noise was swelled by the gleeful
+yap-yapping of the terrier and the voices of a few other people who had
+appeared upon the scene--a matronly looking woman and two or three
+sun-burnt harvestmen. From Mrs. Massey's observations it could be
+gathered that she had been minding the Wogan twins by deputy, and
+further that she entertained the gloomiest views about the mental and
+moral qualities of her son little Larry, who replied to her
+animadversions with over-reaching protestations about matches and
+theories of spontaneous combustion. While they wrangled in the
+background, the young men inspected the conflagration, which proved to
+be less extensive than it looked, though undoubtedly serious enough to
+have soon put the sleeping children past waking, if rescue had not come.
+A heap of blankets and other bedding, that smouldered and blazed near
+the front door, was the source of the most stiffling smoke; and when it
+had been subdued by many buckets of water, everybody began to drag what
+bits of the furniture they could out of harm's way. There was not much,
+because, as Wogan explained, he had sent "the marrow of it" to his
+sister at Ballymacartrican; and the legs of the largest table were
+charred so badly that it collapsed with a crash "the instiant minyit it
+set its four feet on the ground," as Mrs. Massey said. However, there
+were two smaller ones not much the worse, and three or four chairs, and
+a couple of stools, and some pots and pans, and a small clothes-horse,
+and a wagging clock, whose round white face glimmered through the dusk
+like a fallen moon as it lay flat on the grass. All these things made a
+little crowd on the plot of sward by the door.
+
+"And what will you be doin' wid them now?" said Mrs. Massey. "There's
+my place below you'd be welcome to stand them in as long as you plase.
+'Deed would you, sir. The dear knows I'm not throubled wid too many
+sticks of furnitur'. That's a very handy-sized washin'-tub Larry's after
+carryin' out for you. I was noticin' to-day ours has a lake in it this
+long while back that dhrips over everythin'. I must get himself to thry
+mend it."
+
+"That's a _lovely_ table," suddenly said Mad Bell, who had hitherto made
+no remarks. "A rael grand one it is," she repeated, in a wistful sort of
+way, smoothing the leaf fondly with her hand.
+
+"And very welcome you'd be to have it in a prisint, ma'am, if you've
+e'er a fancy for it; ay, or for the matter of that to the whole lot of
+them altogether," said Matthew Wogan, who, with his arms full of the
+smoky twins, felt a weight of gratitude which he would gladly have
+expressed in deeds. "Little vally there is on them--it's a small thing
+after what you're after doin' for us. I wouldn't like to be payin' away
+me bit of money from the childer, or else--But if I auctioned them
+things off the way I was intindin' it's on'y a thrifle of a few
+shillin's they'd be bringin' me. Welcome you are to them, ma'am."
+
+"Sure what use at all 'ud such a thing be to the likes of her?" put in
+Mrs. Massey. "It's on'y annoyed you'd be, woman, wid tables and chairs.
+And she thrampin' about, you may depind, wid ne'er a place to be
+bringin' them to, if she had them twyste over, let alone any way of
+movin' them. It's very convanient we are, just round the turn of the
+road."
+
+"She might take the little cart and the ould ass along," said Matthew
+Wogan, looking at his equipage, which was straying towards them
+intermittently as the beast grazed the green border of the lane.
+"They're no use to me now. Then there'd be nothin' delayin' her that she
+couldn't be cleanin' out of it wid them right away--You needn't throuble
+yourself to be liftin' the little stool, Mrs. Massey. What wid fire and
+water, that'll be no place to sleep in," he said, pointing to the still
+smoking door. "The Mahonys 'ud take us in for to-night, and to-morra
+early we're off to me sister's and next day to Queenstown. 'Twill be a
+grand thing for the childer to be settled near their uncle Tom, that's
+doin' right well in New Jersey, in case anythin' happint me. So I'd as
+lief be shut of all that collection, supposin' they'd be any benefit to
+this crathur."
+
+"Saints bless us, but you're givin' away all before you, Mr. Wogan,"
+said Mrs. Massey, with a discomfited laugh.
+
+"Have you e'er a house you could be puttin' them in?" one of the
+harvestmen asked of Mad Bell.
+
+"Ay, bedad," she said. And with that she picked up a chair, and dumped
+it down into the cart, which had come to a halt at the door.
+
+This promptitude on her part seemed to settle the question. Without more
+ado the rest of the salvage was loaded in, all except the handy-sized
+washing-tub, which by means of an adroitly taken up position Mrs. Massey
+contrived to have overlooked and left behind, when Mad Bell drove away
+with her newly acquired property.
+
+On through the gloaming she drove, till the white dust flakes gathered
+up by the wheels grew damp and fragrant with dew, and till the moonlight
+was glimmering among the golden sheaves silverly, and till live embers
+were fanned out of the ashes low in the east. The small hours had a
+frosty chill, and old Ned's short steps were leisurely, and his halts
+for refreshment frequent; still Mad Bell continued to sit with serene
+patience. She was retracing her route of the day before, but at so much
+slower a rate of progress that the sun had been up for more than an hour
+when she stopped in front of Big Anne and the Dummy's little house. They
+were disturbed at their breakfast by the sound of the arrival, and when
+they came to the door, saw their visitor in the act of depositing a
+second chair upon the ground beside the cart.
+
+"Whethen now and is it yourself back agin?" said Big Anne. "And what at
+all have you got there?"
+
+"Inside they're goin'," said Mad Bell, pointing to the cart-load with an
+elated air. "It's a dale handier to have some chairs and tables."
+
+This was a fact which Big Anne might well have admitted, considering
+that she had just been squatting on her heels to eat her plate of
+stirabout. However, she only continued her perplexed catechism: "Where
+at all was you after bringin' them things from, and who might be ownin'
+them?"
+
+"Out of a house burnin' down," said Mad Bell.
+
+"Och between us and harm. What house is it then? And how did it get
+burnin'?"
+
+"Sure it's aisy enough settin' a house on fire," said Mad Bell with a
+grin, which to Big Anne who at this time was not familiar with her
+manners, looked rather sinisterly significant. "Flarin' up rael strong,"
+she said, pushing towards her, as if in confirmation of the statement,
+the little wooden clothes-horse, whose rails were blackened and charred.
+
+"Aisy it may be," Big Anne said, looking aghast at it, "but dreadful
+divilment it is to do such a thing, wid the misfort'nit people very apt
+to lose their lives, let alone everythin' else."
+
+"There was nobody in it on'y the couple of fat little childer," said Mad
+Bell.
+
+"The saints be among us all, woman," said Big Anne, "what sort of talk
+have you? It's not streelin' about the counthry you are, wid them ould
+sticks of furnitur', and lavin' the little childer in the house blazin'
+up? The Lord pity the crathurs, what 'ud become of them if they was left
+thataway? Burnt to cinders be now very belike."
+
+"Stufficated," said Mad Bell, with a complacent nod.
+
+Big Anne and the Dummy stared at one another in great horror. The Dummy
+could express her feelings only by crossing herself and gasping; but
+Big Anne spoke volubly: "May God forgive me for openin' me lips to the
+likes of you. Och but you're the unnatural wicked woman to go do such a
+thing, if you was twyste as cracked and crazy itself. Git along out of
+this, yourself and your ould cart, afore the pólis comes after you. Och
+the misfort'nit little crathurs. And don't be offerin' to darken our
+doors agin wid the ojis sight of you."
+
+"Gimme a hand wid liftin' in them two tables," said Mad Bell. Whereupon
+Big Anne whisked away from her, and banged the door in her face.
+
+Mad Bell, however, did not appear to be discouraged by this reception.
+She finished unloading the cart of all except the tables, which she
+found unwieldy single-handed. Then she unharnessed old Neddy, and went
+and seated herself on the low wall beside the house. She was seemingly
+quite content with the situation. But to the two women indoors it was a
+dreadful experience. Their minds were firmly persuaded that the daft
+little woman had designedly set fire to some dwelling, and made off with
+what household gear she could lay hands on, leaving the hapless children
+to perish amid the flames. It shocked and enraged them that their
+premises should be infested by the presence of such a criminal, and that
+her ill-gotten goods and chattels should be brought to their very
+threshold, not to speak of her outrageous proposal to harbour them under
+their roof. Big Anne declared that wid the legs of them chairs and
+tables glimpsing through the door, as if they were on'y turned out to be
+airin' a bit, she and the Dummy seemed as good as a pair of murderers.
+
+Every now and then they went to the door and peered out, and the
+incendiary always greeted them with cheerful nods. On these occasions
+Big Anne sometimes said: "Oh, very well, me good woman. Just you sit
+brazenin' there till the patrol comes round this way, and then if I
+don't give you in charge as sure as the sun's shinin' crooked over our
+heads.--Begone out of that, and take them things out of litterin' about
+our place." Or she would remark loudly to her companion: "Just stop a
+minyit, Winnie, till I sling me ould shawl over me head, and run down to
+the barracks. It's not very long they'll be puttin' her out of it, and
+bundlin' her into jail, instead of to be sittin' there, wid ne'er a
+spark of shame in her, annoyin' dacint people." But neither mode of
+address produced any effect. The morning sunbeams still slanted down on
+the small pile of furniture, and old Neddy went on munching the blades
+off which they were drying the dew, and Mad Bell continued to sit upon
+the wall, as if placidly waiting for events.
+
+Such was the posture of affairs until towards noon, when an outside-car
+came trotting quickly down the lane. On one side of it sat a
+black-whiskered man in his best clothes, with each hand tightly grasping
+a small, fat, wrigglesome child. And the three were Matthew, Tom, and
+Minnie Wogan. On catching sight of Mad Bell, he made the driver pull up.
+
+"Well, ma'am," he called to her, "so you're after gettin' home. Bedad
+it's the fine long step you've took th'ould donkey; one while he'd be
+doin' it. And you're about gettin' in the few things? Very welcome she
+is to the whole of them," he continued to Big Anne, who had now emerged.
+"And begorrah nobody else had a better right to any trifle might be
+saved out of it. She'll ha' tould you, ma'am, the way the place was set
+on fire on me last night--some little divil of a spalpeen playin' wid
+matches it seems. But anyhow, there it was in blazes, and me galloppin'
+home like a deminted cow, consaitin' these two imps of the mischief here
+would be smotherin' inside it. And, troth, if herself over there hadn't
+them fetched out safe into the yard, when it was as much as your life
+was worth to put your head in at the door, for the stiflin' of the
+smoke. I dunno how she conthrived it. Maybe the crathur isn't altogether
+over sinsible," he said in a confidential tone; "but if she'd had all
+the wit ever was thought of, she couldn't ha' done better be the
+childer. So it's kindly welcome she is to the bits of furniture, and the
+ould baste. And dhrivin' on we must be. Good mornin' to yous all."
+
+Mad Bell listened to this praise with the same equanimity as to Big
+Anne's threats and reproaches. But when the car had trotted on, she came
+up to her, saying just as before, "Gimme a hand wid liftin' in thim
+tables;" and Matthew Wogan, jogging down the long lane, may have caught
+the last glimpse of one of them as it vanished in at the doorway.
+
+Thus it was that Mad Bell came to be domiciled with Big Anne and the
+Dummy in the pauses between her wanderings. The arrangement seemed
+equitable in view of her substantial contribution to the plenishing of
+the house. The donkey-cart, likewise, was found very serviceable,
+enabling them to turn a penny occasionally by fetching and carrying. And
+the coalition worked well upon the whole. But after a few years of such
+prosperity that they were seldom without a bit of food in the house, and
+sometimes had bacon on Sunday, things took a turn for the worse. Old Ned
+died under the burden of his many years, and a sort of murrain among the
+fowl cut off several promising pullets in the heyday of their youth.
+Then arose difficulties about "rint," while their landlord, who was new
+to the property, had a natural zeal for sweeping it clear of encumbering
+tenants. And the end of it was that the three women transferred
+themselves to Lisconnel, where they became not the least respected of
+its inhabitants.
+
+But these particulars about their antecedents were never learned by the
+neighbours there; and the joint ownership of the furniture still
+presents itself as one of our unsolved problems. Another of them was
+propounded somewhat later, when Mad Bell returned from an unusually long
+ramble, during which she had crossed the Liffey by the spacious
+O'Connell Bridge, and had heard the boom of the big College bell, and
+with her wizened-lemon face had half-scared the smallest-sized children
+in villages round about Dublin. For she was wearing an elaborately
+fantastic piece of headgear, which moved everybody's curiosity so
+strongly that it cannot have been for want of wondering if we failed to
+find out how she had come thereby. Strangely incongruous it did
+undoubtedly look; yet the stages by which it had descended from its
+stand in the milliner's show-room and alighted upon the head of the
+little wandering-witted tramp, were much fewer than might have been
+supposed probable.
+
+One blustery March morning when Mrs. M'Bean was on her way along by the
+low sea-wall to buy a bit of bacon at Donnelly's shop in Kilclone, the
+east wind did her the shrewd turn of whisking off her hat and dropping
+it into the water. It was a most shabby old black straw, rusty and
+battered, and torn, yet Mrs. M'Bean, a labourer's wife, who had nothing
+at all handsome about her, seemed to think it worth a serious risk. For
+she mounted on the broad wall-top, and thence made so unwary a snatch
+that she overbalanced herself and splashed headlong into the heaving
+high-tide, where she would very soon have perished beneath the cold
+olive-gray swell, had not the brothers Denny, fishing for bass hard by,
+noticed the perilous accident, and pulled timely to the rescue.
+
+When they disembarked her, gasping and dripping, at the nearest
+landing-place, she was understood to say, "Sure me heart's broke," a
+remark which Police-sergeant Young, who formed one of the group gathered
+by the disaster, considered sufficient grounds for marching her off to
+the handiest J. P. on a charge of attempted suicide. Mrs. M'Bean
+vehemently repelled the accusation. She explained that she had said her
+heart was broke only "because she had lost her ould hat, and every
+thread of a rag on her had been dhrenched and ruinated with the salt
+water. How could she go for to do such a sin as destroy herself, she
+urged, and she wid a houseful of little childer waitin' for her at home,
+the crathurs?" Her arguments proved convincing, and the charge was
+summarily dismissed, not without strictures upon Sergeant Young's
+excessive zeal, by which he, recking nothing of Talleyrand's maxim, felt
+himself puzzled and aggrieved.
+
+The incident, however, brought some more agreeable consequences to Mrs.
+M'Bean, as the J. P.'s ladies, commiserating her half-drowned plight,
+sent her that same evening a goodly bundle of cast-off clothes, over
+which her eyes grew gleefully bright in her careworn face. At one of the
+articles included they widened with almost awe. This was an enormous hat
+made of white fluffy felt, with vast contorted brims, and great blue
+velvet rosettes and streamers. Its fabric was very stout and
+substantial, and withal quite new, for its original owner had speedily
+found it so stiff and heavy that to wear it gave her a headache and a
+crick in her neck. Mrs. M'Bean, for her part, could not entertain the
+idea of carrying anything so sumptuous upon her grizzled head; and when
+she tried it on her eldest daughter, it totally extinguished and nearly
+smothered the child. So she stowed it away in a corner, where it
+remained unseen for several weeks.
+
+But next month, on the afternoon of Easter Day, Mrs. M'Bean had two
+visitors over from Ballyhoy: Annie Cassidy, elderly and rather grim,
+with her young friend Nelly Walsh.
+
+"Nelly's bound to be havin' bad luck this year of her life," Annie
+observed in the course of conversation, "for not a new stitch has she
+put on her to-day, and it Easter. That's an unlucky thing, accordin' to
+the sayin'."
+
+"Ne'er a bit am I afraid of me luck," averred Nelly, cheerful and
+threadbare, not to say ragged. But Mrs. M'Bean was pricked by a sudden
+thought up the ladder to the little attic aloft, whence she creaked down
+again, bringing with her the great white hat. "There, Nelly," she said,
+"just clap that on your head, and then nobody can pass the remark that
+you didn't get the wear of somethin' new, any way."
+
+Nelly took the hat, which struck her nearly dumb with admiration, but as
+she tried to catch a glimpse of it in the shred of looking-glass on the
+wall, her delighted expression waxed so eloquent that Mrs. M'Bean was
+impelled to say: "You're to keep it, girl alive, if you've e'er a fancy
+for it. Sure it's fitter for you than the likes of me, that 'ud look a
+quare old scarecrow if I offered to go about in such a thing." She had
+not at first intended this generosity, her worldly goods being so few
+that she could not lightly part with even a very unpromising possession.
+
+Nelly, on her side, could hardly believe in her high fortune, when,
+after some polite demur, she found herself carrying off the splendid
+hat. To wear it on an ordinary walk would have seemed profane, so she
+held it under her old shawl all the way home to her cabin on the shore
+at the foot of the Black Banks, a good step beyond Ballyhoy. But when
+she reached the door, she could not forbear the pleasure of making her
+entrance in the glory of her new adornment. Her reception was altogether
+disappointing. For her mother's and grandmother's voices rose up shrill
+and shriller, demanding what at all hijjis gazabo she'd got on her.
+Billy, her eldest brother, said: "Musha, she's put a pair of blinkers on
+her like an ould horse;" and Larry, his junior, remarked with terse
+candour, "Och, the fright." More mortifying still, Joe Tierney, her
+sweetheart, who had called to conclude arrangements about the morrow's
+holiday, said in a disgusted tone: "Tare and ages! I hope to goodness,
+Nelly, you're not intindin' to make that show of yourself at the circus
+to-morra. Bedad, I niver seen such a conthrivance; you might as well be
+walkin' alongside some sort of deminted musharoon." This rather aptly
+described the effect of the huge white brim upon Nelly, who was small
+and short of stature; but it hurt her feelings badly.
+
+The only upholder of the hat was Annie Cassidy, who is fond of
+controverting the opinions of other people, and who despises men. She
+said: "Don't be lettin' them put you out of consait with it, Nelly; it
+suits you lovely. Sure if anyone doesn't think your app'arance is good
+enough for them, you needn't throuble them wid your company. Circuses,
+to my mind, is thrash--to be watchin' folks figurandyin' on a pack of
+ould horses' backs. There's a lot of us goin' over to-morra to Rathbeg,
+where they've merry-go-rounds you can ride in yourself, and all manner,
+if you'd just step down to the Junction station and come along wid us on
+the early train."
+
+"'Deed then I might," said Nelly; not that she had the least intention
+of doing any such thing, but because, being somewhat of a belle, she was
+unaccustomed to uncomplimentary criticisms and much affronted by them.
+Furthermore, for the same reason, she escorted Annie home, and stayed so
+long talking, that Joe before she returned had to go off about his
+milking, which annoyed him a good deal.
+
+However, he had quite forgotten his vexation next morning, as he hurried
+through his early tasks with a day's pleasuring before him. He worked at
+the Kellys', whose land is bounded north and south by the Junction lane
+and the sea; and as he walked about the fresh April fields he was in
+view of Howth, dark pansy-purple against the eastern amber, confronting
+the sweep of the Dublin mountains, outlined in wild hyacinth-coloured
+mist, across the dancing silver of the bay. The calves had been fed so
+expeditiously that Joe found he could spare time to stop at the starred
+bank under the hedge and pick a bunch of primroses, some of which
+Nelly's mother would proudly keep in a jam-pot on the window-stool,
+while Nelly herself might like to wear a few at the circus, brightening
+up her brown-striped shawl.
+
+But when he was compressing a thick sheaf of the cool soft stalks in one
+hard hand, he chanced to look up, and saw what thrilled him with dismay.
+Bobbing along over the jagged edge of the wall, a short way down the
+lane went a gleaming white object, which he at once recognised as
+Nelly's new hat. He ran aghast to look through the gate, and despite
+intercepting road-curves and obstructive hedges, the hat it unmistakably
+was, making for the Junction station. So Nelly, intending a serious
+quarrel, had thrown him over and joined the Rathbeg party. A pleasure,
+hoarded in anticipation for many a month, shrivelled into dead leaves
+suddenly like fairy gold, as he perceived how certainly this must be the
+case.
+
+His first angry impulse was a resort to Haskin's Public at Portbrendan,
+where he might spend his spoilt holiday taking drinks and making bets in
+the society of some cronies. What hindered him from immediately acting
+upon it was a compunctious forecast of the concern which would prevail
+in his family, if he absented himself contrary to expectation. "There's
+me mother's never aisy," he reflected, "unless she's persuadin' herself
+some of us are kilt on her." This made him resolve to postpone
+Portbrendan till after breakfast, and he turned lothfully homewards. As
+he passed along the Kellys' yard-wall, he relieved his feelings by
+tossing his nosegay over it at the place where he heard the grunting of
+their pigs, who on that occasion fared almost as delicately as Marvel's
+rose-lined fawn.
+
+It was early still when he reached his cabin, one in the Walshes' row;
+and he sat down listlessly on a bank, to wait for nothing in particular.
+Presently Mrs. Walsh, senior, came by with a twinkling can of water.
+"Och, there you are, Joe," she said: "Nelly's been lookin' out for you
+this good while."
+
+"Whethen it's quare lookin' out she had," said Joe, "and she took off
+wid herself to ould Annie Cassidy--bad manners to her for her
+interfarin'."
+
+"What's the lad talkin' about at all?" said Mrs. Walsh, standing amazed;
+"Nelly's widin there this instiant of time, readyin' herself up."
+
+"Maybe you'll tell me," said Joe, "that I didn't see her streelin' down
+the Junction lane afore I was lavin' Kellys'."
+
+"And maybe _you_'ll tell _me_," said Nelly's grandmother, "that she
+wasn't just now callin' to me they were wantin' wather. It's a fine bawl
+she'd ha' had to let out of her, if I was to be hearin' her, and she up
+beyond Kellys'."
+
+"There she was anyway," Joe said, doggedly. "Wouldn't I know that dad
+fetched-lookin' ould new caubeen she's stuck on her a mile o' ground?"
+
+"You great gomeral," said Mrs. Walsh. "If that's all you might aisy
+enough ha' seen the big hat goin' the road--but have you the notion it's
+growin' on Nelly's head? Why, you omadhawn, you hadn't quit ten minyits
+last night, and Nelly was just after gettin' back, when who should come
+by but poor Mad Bell. Och now the raggedy objick the crathur was, wid
+nothin' over her misfort'nit head but an ould wisp as full of houles as
+a fishin'-net. So little Larry sez, jokin' like, 'Look here, Nelly,'
+sez he, 'you'd a right to be lettin' Mad Bell have a loan of your grand
+nappy hat to keep the sun out of her eyes.' But belike Nelly'd took a
+turn agin the thing wid the way they'd all been makin' fun of it; for
+sez she, 'Will you have it, Bell?' sez she, houldin' it out to her. And
+if she did, Mad Bell grabbed it in her two hands--it's not often she'll
+have a word for anybody--and no more talk about it, but cocked it on,
+and tied it firm under her chin wid the sthramers, as tasty as you
+plase. Musha good gracious, to see the len'th she drew the bow out on
+aich side of her bit of a yeller face, and the nod she gave her ould
+head when she'd got it done. So that's what's gone wid the hat. Goodness
+guide us, if she wasn't the poor crazy-witted body she is, 'twould be a
+sin to let her go makin' such a show of herself; but sure no one 'ud
+think to mind anythin' the likes of the crathur might have on her, the
+saints may pity her. Ay, bedad, them kind of quare consthructions do be
+fit for nothin' unless Quality and mad people," old Mrs. Walsh
+continued, without malice, soliloquising, as Joe had caught up the can,
+and was hurrying it with prodigal splashes towards his sweetheart's
+door.
+
+The circus, with its flaring lights and whirl of tinselled prancing
+marvels, was so rapturous an experience to Nelly that she had not a
+regret for her discarded hat, which at this time was moving on beneath a
+soft dappled sky, between greening hedges, westward along quiet roads
+and lanes. It found shelter for the night under the ley of a tall
+hayrick near Santry, thus ending the first stage of Mad Bell's tramp
+home to the wide brown bogland of Lisconnel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+A FLITTING
+
+
+Among the latest of the strangers that have visited Lisconnel were some
+who came at a time when the neighbours stood rather in need of
+distraction. For the summer following Mrs. Kilfoyle's death was, between
+one thing and another, a drearyish season with us. That little old woman
+had left a great gap; and then there were many long spells of gloomy bad
+weather, which seemed to beat people's troubles down upon them as the
+damp drove the turf-reck back through their smoke-holes into the dark
+rooms, where they could scarcely see how dense the blue haze was
+growing. Stacey Doyne's marriage also had removed something young and
+pleasant, and at times, when the thatch dripped without and within,
+neighbours were apt to talk about her in tones of commiseration, and
+say, "Sure, her poor mother's lost entirely." So that towards autumn
+the diversion of some new residents' arrival happened opportunely
+enough. It was made possible by the fact that Big Anne had given up her
+holding and entered into partnership with the widow M'Gurk, thus leaving
+her late abode empty for another tenant, who appeared much sooner than
+any one might have anticipated from the aspect of the cabin.
+
+Except as a fresh topic of conversation, however, the strangers gave
+small promise of proving an acquisition to the community. Lisconnel did
+not like their appearance by any means, and further acquaintance failed
+to modify unfavourable first impressions. These were mainly received in
+the course of the day after their arrival, which took place on a night
+too black for anything beyond a shadowy counting of heads, and a
+perception that the bulk of the new-comers' household stuff had jogged
+up on one donkey, and must therefore be small. A portion of Big Anne's
+furniture had remained behind her in the cabin, owing to certain arrears
+of rent. Her heart was scalded, she said, wid the prices she'd only get
+for her early chuckens, and they the weight of the world, if you'd feel
+them in your hand; and poor Mad Bell, that 'ud mostly bring home a few
+odd shillin's wid her, was away since afore last Christmas, and might
+never show her face there agin, the crathur; and the poor Dummy gone,
+that was great at the knittin' if she got the chance--a bit of narration
+which would look funny enough in anybody's rental. Mrs. Quigley, who
+went to the door with the offer of a seed of fire, found it shut, and a
+voice inside called, "as onmannerly as you plase," "No, we've got
+matches;" whereupon another voice, further in the interior, quavered,
+"Thank'ee kindly, ma'am." So she departed little wiser than she had
+come. But daylight showed that the party consisted of an old man, and
+his son, and his son's wife, and her sister, and three small children,
+besides some cochin-china fowl, and a black cat with vividly green eyes.
+This much was apparent on the surface. Also that the old man was frail,
+bent, shrivelled, and civil spoken, that the son was "a big soft gomeral
+of a fellow," that both the women were sandily flaxen-haired, with
+broad, flat cheeks and light eyes, and that two of the children
+resembled them, while the third--a girl a trifle older--was a
+dark-haired, disconsolate-looking little thing, "wid her face," Mrs.
+Brian said, "not the width of the palm of your hand, and the eyes of
+her sunk in her head." As for the fowl, there could be no doubt that
+their "onnathural, long, fluffety legs were fit to make a body's flesh
+creep," and the cat looked "as like an ould divil as anythin' you ever
+witnessed, sittin' blinkin' atop of the turf-stack."
+
+Other less self-evident facts came out by degrees--more slowly than
+might have been expected, as the strangers were generally close and
+chary of speech. They came from the north, where their affairs had not
+prospered--in fact, they had been "sold up and put out of it," as the
+young man divulged one day to Brian Kilfoyle. They were a somewhat
+intricately connected family, by the name, predominantly, of Patman. The
+sister-in-law was Tishy M'Crum, which seemed simple enough, but the two
+light-haired boys were Greens, Mrs. Patman having been a widow, while
+the little girl was the child of a wife whom Tom Patman had already
+buried; for though he looked full young to have embarked upon matrimony
+at all, this was his second venture. "And it's a quare comether she must
+ha' been after puttin' on him," quoth Mrs. Quigley, "afore he took up
+wid herself, that's as ugly as if she was bespoke, and half a dozen year
+oulder than the young bosthoon, if she's a minyit." It is true that at
+the time when Mrs. Quigley expressed this unflattering opinion she and
+her neighbours had been exasperated by an impolite speech of Mrs.
+Patman, who had said loudly in their hearing, "Well, for sartin if I'd
+had a notion of the blamed little dog-hole he was bringin' us into,
+sorra the sole of a fut 'ud I ha' set inside it;" and had then proceeded
+to congratulate herself upon having prudently left "all her dacint bits
+of furniture up above at her mother's, so that she needn't be bothered
+wid cartin' them away out of a place that didn't look to have had ever
+e'er a thing in it worth the throuble of movin', not if it stood there
+until it dropped to pieces wid dirt." Mrs. Quigley rejoined (to Judy
+Ryan) that "it would be a great pity if any people sted in a place that
+wasn't good enough for them, supposin' all the while they was used to
+anythin' a thraneen better--maybe they might, in coorse, and maybe they
+mightn't. It was won'erful to hear the talk some folks had, and they wid
+every ould stick they owned an aisy loadin' for Reilly's little ass."
+But Judy Ryan, with a flight of sarcastic fancy, hoped that Mrs. Patman
+and her family "were about goin' on a visit prisintly to the Lady
+Lifftinant, because it was much if they'd find any place else where
+there'd be grandeur accordin' to their high-up notions."
+
+Skirmishes such as this, however, were a symptom rather than a cause of
+the Patmans' unpopularity. That sprang from several roots. For one
+thing, both the women had harsh, scolding voices, and it was even
+chances that if you passed within earshot of their cabin you would hear
+them giving tongue. Their objurgations were, as a rule, addressed to the
+young man or the old, the latter of whom soon grew into an object of
+local compassion as "a harmless, dacint, poor crathur," while his son
+came in for the frank-eyed looking-down-upon which is the portion of an
+able-bodied man, shrew-ridden through sheer supineness and
+"polthroonery." But what Lisconnel often said that it "thought badder
+of" was the stepmotherly treatment which seemed to be the lot of the
+little girl Katty. Of course the situation was one which, under the
+circumstances, would have made people believe in such a state of things
+upon the slenderest evidence. Still, even to unprejudiced eyes, it was
+clear that Katty's rags were raggeder than those of her small
+step-brothers, and that she crept about with the mien of a creature
+which has conceived reasonable doubts respecting the reception it is
+likely to meet in society. When the autumn weather began to grow wintry,
+little Katty Patman, "perishin' about out there in the freezin' win',"
+became a spectacle which was viewed with indignant sympathy from dark
+doorways whence she received many an invitation to step in and be
+warmin' herself. Her hostesses opined that she was fairly starved just
+for a taste of the fire, and didn't believe she was ever let next or
+nigh it in her own place. Often, too, the consideration that she had no
+more flesh on her bones than a March chucken led to the bestowal of a
+steaming potato or a piece of griddle-bread; but the result of this was
+sometimes unsatisfactory to the giver, Katty being apt to dart away with
+her refreshments, which she might presently be seen sharing among Bobby
+and Stevie, for whom she entertained a strong and apparently
+unreciprocated regard.
+
+"I wouldn't go for to be sayin' anythin' to set her agin them," Mrs.
+Brian Kilfoyle remarked on some such occasion. "But, goodness forgive
+me! I've no likin' for them two little brats. I'd misthrust them."
+
+"Ah, sure they've no sinse," said Biddy Ryan. "Where'd they git it? And
+the biggest of them, I'd suppose, under four year ould."
+
+"Sinse!" said Mrs. Quigley. "Bedad, then, if sinse was all that ailed
+them, the pair of them is as 'cute as a couple of young foxes. I mind
+on'y a day or so after they'd been in it, I met the laste one on the
+road, and I comin' home wid be chance a sugarstick in me basket. So,
+just to be makin' friends like, I gave it a bit for itself, and a bit
+for the other that I seen comin' along. Well, now, ma'am, if it had took
+and ate up the both of the bits, I'd ha' thought ne'er a pin's point of
+harm--'twould ha' been nathural enough to the size of it. But I give you
+me word, when it seen it couldn't get the two of them swallied down
+afore its brother come by, what did it go do but clap the one of them
+into a crevice in the wall, and cover it under a blackberry laif. And
+wid that down it squats, and begins sayin', 'Creely-crawly
+snail--where's the creely-crawly snail I'm after huntin' out of its
+houle?'--lettin' on to be lookin' for somethin' creepin' in the grass.
+And a while after it come slinkin' back, when it thought nobody was
+mindin', to poke the bit out of the wall where I was gatherin'
+dandelions under the bank. So while it was fumblin' about, missin' the
+right crevice, sez I, poppin' up, thinkin' to shame it, 'Maybe the
+crawly snail's after aitin' it on you,' sez I. 'Och, yis; I seen it,'
+sez the spalpeen, as brazen as brass. 'Gimme 'noder bit instid.' There's
+a schemin' young rapscallion for you!"
+
+"They're too like their mother altogether to plase me," said Judy Ryan.
+"The corners of their eyes do be as sharp as if they were cut out wid a
+pair of scissors. Not that I'd mind if they'd e'er a sthrake of
+good-nathur in them; but I misdoubt they have. The little girl, now, is
+as diff'rint as day and night."
+
+"If _she_ takes after her father, she's a right to want the wit
+powerful, misfort'nit little imp," said Mrs. Brian. "For if he isn't a
+great stupid gomeral and an ass, just get me one. Why, if he was worth
+the dust blowin' along the road, he'd purvint of his own child bein' put
+upon."
+
+"Och, they have him _frighted_," said Mrs. Quigley, with scornful
+emphasis. "They won't let him take an atom of notice of her, they're
+that jealous. Sure, if he gets talkin' to her outside the house there,
+one of them 'ill let a bawl and send him off to be carryin' in turf or
+wather. I've seen it times and agin."
+
+"If he'd take and sling it about their ears some fine day he'd be doin'
+right, and it might larn them to behave themselves," said Judy.
+
+"But the ould man would disgust you," pursued Mrs. Quigley, "wid the
+romancin' he has out of him about his son Tom. You'd suppose, to listen
+to him, that the omadhawn's aquil never stepped. He'll deive you wid it
+till you're fairly bothered. Troth, he thinks the young fellow's doin'
+somethin' out of the way if he just walks down the street, and expec's
+everybody to stand watchin' him goin' along. It's surprisin' the foolery
+there does be in people."
+
+"Och, murdher, women alive!" said Ody Rafferty, whose pipe went out at
+this moment, "there's no contintin' yous at all. It's too cute they are,
+and too foolish they are. Musha, very belike they're not so much off the
+common if you'd a thrifle more exparience of them; there's nothin' to
+match that for evenin' people. Bedad, now, there's some people _I_ know
+so well that I can scarce tell the one from the other."
+
+Lisconnel, however, generally declined to fall in with Ody's
+philosophical views, and the Patmans, whether suspected of excessive
+cuteness or folly, remained persistently unpopular. There was only one
+exception to this rule. The widow M'Gurk has a certain fibre of
+perversity in her which sometimes twists itself round unlikely objects,
+for no apparent reason save that they are left clear by her neighbours,
+and this peculiarity renders her prone upon occasion to undertake the
+part of Devil's Advocate. When, therefore, she had once delivered
+herself of the opinion that the newcomers were "very dacint folks," she
+did not feel called upon to abandon it because it stood alone. As
+grounds for it she commonly alleged that they were "rael hard-workin'
+and industhrious," which was obviously true enough, since Mrs. Patman
+and her sister might constantly be seen tilling their little field with
+an energy far beyond the capacity of its late tenant. Her neighbours'
+unimpressed rejoinder, "Well, and supposin' they are itself?" did not in
+the least disconcert the widdy, nor yet their absence of enthusiasm when
+she stated that it was "a sight to behould Tishy M'Crum diggin' over a
+bit of ground; she'd lift as much on her spade as any two strong men."
+As for little Katty, "she'd never seen anybody doin' anythin' agin the
+child; it might happen by nature to be one of those little _crowls_ of
+childer that 'ud always look hungry-like and pinin', the crathurs, if
+you were able to keep feedin' them wid the best as long as the sun was
+in the sky." In short, something more than talk was usually needed to
+put the widow M'Gurk out of conceit with any notion she had taken up.
+Perhaps the comparative aloofness of her hillside cabin helped to
+maintain the Patmans at their original high level in her estimation. At
+any rate they had not sunk from it by the time that they had been nearly
+three months in Lisconnel, and when Mrs. Patman and her sister were on
+terms of the very glummest civility with all the other women in the
+place. Even towards the widow M'Gurk they were tolerant rather than
+expansive. She said "they had done right enough to not be leppin' down
+people's throaths."
+
+One morning not long after Christmas, the widow, being bound on an
+errand down below, called in at the Patmans' with a view to possible
+commissions. Meal was wanted, and, while Tishy M'Crum stitched up a rent
+in the bag, Mrs. M'Gurk noticed where little Katty, who had been "took
+bad wid a could these three days," rustled uncomfortably among wisps of
+rushes and rags in an obscure corner. Fever made her bold and
+self-assertive, for she was wishing nothing less than that her daddy
+would get her an orange--"An or'nge wid yeller peel round it"--Katty
+laid stress upon this point--"like the one her mammy got her a long time
+ago. And daddy'd be a good daddy and get her another now. And she'd keep
+a bit for Bobby and Stevie and all of them--a big yeller or'nge."
+Katty's eyes blazed with excitement as she reiterated these extravagant
+desires.
+
+"She's got an oncommon fancy for a one," said her daddy, looking
+wistfully from the child to his wife.
+
+"They have them down below," suggested the widow, "pence apiece."
+
+Mrs. Patman's hand was slipping towards her pocket. "If it was just for
+wunst," she had begun, when Tishy tweaked her sleeve viciously and
+interpolated a rapid whisper, "It wont _be_; there'll be no ind to it if
+you begin humourin' them," so the sentence was badly dislocated. "She'll
+do a dale better widout any such thrash," Mrs. Patman concluded, and
+walked off to throw sods on the fire.
+
+Just then the widow became aware that old Joe Patman was grimacing at
+her from a corner fast by in a way that might have startled her had she
+not been familiar with such modes of beckoning. But when she obeyed his
+summons, what she saw did astound her outright, for Joe was stooping low
+over a leathern pouch which he had drawn from a wall-cranny, and which
+seemed to contain marvellous depths of silver money, with here and there
+a golden gleam among it, as he warily stirred it up, circling a hurried
+forefinger. She had only the briefest glimpse ere he shoved back the
+pouch and thrust a sixpence into her hand, muttering, "Git her the
+orange--don't be lettin' on for your life."
+
+As she turned away with a reassuring nod, she perceived that Tishy
+M'Crum was standing unexpectedly near, and looking towards them over the
+top of the meal-bag. Tishy was bitting off a loose end of thread, which
+gave her a determined and ferocious expression, but whether she could
+have seen anything or not the widow felt uncertain. She thought not.
+
+About ten days after this Mrs. M'Gurk was roused at a very early hour by
+a thumping on her door. When she opened it she found some difficulty in
+recognising her visitor, as the dawn had scarcely done more than dim a
+few stars far away in the east, which is an ineffective form of
+illumination. "Whethen, now, Joe Patman, is it yourself?" she said,
+peeringly. "And what's brought you out at all afore you can see a step
+or a stim? Is the little girl took worse?" For Katty's illness still
+continued, and had grown rather serious.
+
+"Sure, no," said the old man; "Katty's just pretty middlin'. But it's
+waitin' I've been the len'th of the mornin', till 'twould turn broad
+daylight, before I'd be disturbin' of you, ma'am, to tell you the quare
+sort of a joke they're after playin' on me down yonder."
+
+"Saints above, man, what talk have you of jokin' at this hour of the day
+or night?" said Mrs. M'Gurk, feeling the unseasonableness acutely as a
+bitter gust came swooping up the slope and indiscriminatingly ruffled
+the rime-dusted grass-tufts and her own grizzled locks.
+
+"Och, bejabbers, it's a great joke they have agin me whatever," said old
+Patman, who was shivering much, with cold partly, and partly perhaps
+with amusement. "You see the way of it was, last night, no great while
+after we'd all gone asleep, I woke up suddint, like as if wid the crake
+of a door or somethin', but, whatever it might be, 'twas slipped beyond
+me hearin' afore I'd got a hould of me sinses rightly. So I listened a
+goodish bit, and somehow everythin' seemed unnathural quiet, till I
+heard Katty fidgettin', and I went over to see would she take a dhrink
+of wather. The Lord presarve us and keep us, ma'am, if all the rest of
+them hadn't quit--quit out of it they have, and left us cliver and
+clane."
+
+"Ah, now, don't be romancin' man," said the widow, remonstrantly. "What
+in the name of the nation 'ud bewitch any people to go rovin' out of
+their house in the middle of the black night, wid the frost thick on the
+ground?"
+
+"Quit they are," said the old man. "Tom's gone, and the wife, and every
+man-jack of them. They've took the couple of chuckens I noticed Tishy
+killin' of yisterday. Begorrah, I believe they've took Tib the cat, for
+ne'er a sign of it I see about the place, that would mostly be sittin'
+cocked up atop of the dresser. Goodness guide us, sorra a sowl there is
+in the house but the two of us, me and the child, and she's rael bad.
+It's a quare ould joke."
+
+"It 'ud be the joke of a set of ravin' mad people," said the widow.
+
+"But the best of it is," he went on, "do you mind, ma'am"--he looked
+round him suspiciously and lowered his voice--"the leather pouch you
+might ha' seen wid me the other day?"
+
+"Whoo!" said Mrs. M'Gurk, "are they after takin' that on you? Sure, man,
+I thought you had it unbeknownst."
+
+"Aye, it's took," old Patman said, "but how she grabbed it I dunno,
+onless, I was thinkin', be any chance you mentioned somethin' about it?"
+
+"Divil a bit of me did," the widow averred, with truth, which her hearer
+accepted. "And how much might you have had in it at all?"
+
+"Troth, I couldn't be tellin' you," he said; "I never thought to count
+it. 'Tis just for a pleasure to meself I keep it. This long while back
+I've put ne'er a penny in it, but when we used to be livin' up at
+Portnafoyle I'd slip in the odd shillin's now and agin, and sometimes
+I'd think 'twould be handy for buryin' me, and other times I'd think I'd
+give it to Tom as soon as I'd gathered a thrifle more, on'y some way the
+thought of partin' wid it 'ud seem to go agin me, and since poor Tom
+made a match with Martha M'Crum 'tis worse agin me it goes. 'Tis that
+good-for-nought weasel of a slieveen Tishy's after conthrivin' it on me,
+I well know, and bad luck to her," quoth the old man, with a sudden
+spasm of resentment. "Tom 'ud never play such a thrick--I mane it wasn't
+he invinted the joke; he doesn't throuble himself wid much jokin'; he's
+too sinsible, and steady, and perspicuous, and oncommon set on me and
+the child, all the while. There's no better son in Ireland. Och, but the
+rest of them mane no harm wid it; they're just schemin' to dhrop in
+prisintly and be risin' a laugh on me."
+
+Steps which were promptly taken to verify old Joe Patman's strange story
+proved it to be correct in every particular. The only fresh fact which
+investigations brought to light was the presence of a five-shilling
+piece lying on the dresser, where Joe had overlooked it in the early
+dusk. All the other inmates, chuckens and cat included, had disappeared,
+and with them most of the few movables, the old man and the sick child
+being left as forlorn fixtures. Lisconnel at large was neither slow nor
+circumlocutory in forming and expressing its opinion as touching the
+nature of the joke, a firm belief in which old Joe resolutely opposed to
+his troubles as they thickened around him. For no tidings came from the
+absentees, nor were any heard of them, while Katty's fever ran so high
+that it seemed likely her grandfather would be at small further charges
+on her account--a prospect which, however financially sound for a
+capitalist of five shillings or under, none the less filled his soul
+with grief. Then, one night, when Katty was at her worst, a great gale
+came rushing and roaring across the bog, and when the day broke it
+discovered the Patmans' brown thatch-slope interrupted by a gaping
+crevasse, over which a quick-plashing rain-sheet quivered.
+
+The widow M'Gurk had less spare room than heretofore at her disposal now
+that she harboured a co-tenant, with a slight accession of tables and
+chairs. Yet she made out a dry corner for the child and her grandfather,
+who accepted these quarters in preference to any others, because the
+widow, whatever may have been her private views, was prevented by a
+mixture of contrariness and magnanimity from joining in the general
+denunciation of her former allies, compromising as were the
+circumstances under which they had elected to take their departure. In
+her society, therefore, he was not obliged to overhear trenchant
+criticisms upon his Tom's behaviour, and could dilate, at least
+uncontradicted, upon those gifts and graces in the young man, which
+recent events had certainly placed in some need of exposition.
+
+Other disquieting voices there were, however, which he could not dodge,
+and they spoke louder every day. For his five shillings were melting,
+dwindling--had vanished; and Lisconnel, with the best will in the world,
+could ill brook a burden of two incapables more laid upon its winter
+penury. No word on the subject had reached the old man's outer ears; but
+as Katty struggled slowly and fractiously towards convalescence, it
+became clearer in his mind that unless something happened, she must,
+when well enough to be moved, seek change of air away at the big House.
+Perhaps this prospect was now more constantly before him than even the
+thought of Tom's filial virtues, as he sat drearily on the bank by the
+widow M'Gurk's door. He might often be seen to shake his head
+despondently, and then he was probably saying to himself: "Belike he
+thought bad of me, keepin' the bit of money unbeknownst."
+
+By that time he had abandoned the joke theory, and fixed his hopes upon
+the arrival of a letter to explain the mysterious nocturnal flitting,
+and say whither they had betaken themselves after passing through
+Duffclane, the furthest point to which the detective forces of the
+district had tracked the party. Young Dan O'Beirne, whose work brought
+him daily up from down below to the forge a long way on the road toward
+Lisconnel, had safely promised to convey this letter so far whenever it
+came; and on many a day the neighbours nodded commiseratingly to one
+another as they saw "the ould crathur, goodness may pity him, settin'
+off wid himself" in quest of it. The prompt January dusk would have
+already fallen before he struggled up the Knockawn, to be greeted by the
+widow in the tone of marked congratulation which our friends sometimes
+adopt when all reason for it is conspicuously absent: "Well, man alive,
+there wouldn't be ere a letter in it this day anyway."
+
+"Och tub-be sure, not at all," he would answer cheerfully, "I wouldn't
+look to there bein' e'er a one sooner than to-morra. I hadn't the notion
+of expectin' a letter whatever. 'Twas just for the enjoyment of the bit
+of a walk I went."
+
+"Why tub-be sure it was. But be comin' in, man, for you're fit to dhrop,
+and be gettin' your ould brogues dhried. Och man, you're dhrownded
+entirely; 'tis a mighty soft evenin' it's turnin' out."
+
+"And here's Katty lookin' out for you this great while," Big Anne would
+say, "she's finely this evenin', glory be to goodness."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+A RETURN.
+
+
+Affairs were much in this posture, when the widow M'Gurk was one day
+perplexed by the occurrence of two small incidents. In the first place,
+as she was starting on an expedition to the Town she saw at a little
+distance something run across the road which looked uncommonly like the
+Patmans' black cat Tib. Lisconnel owns no other cats for which she might
+have mistaken it; still, as she was puzzled to think how the creature
+should have hidden itself away for more than a fortnight, she concluded
+that she had been deceived by some fluttering bird or glancing shadow.
+In the next place, she happened in the Town upon one Larry Donnelly, who
+in the course of conversation remarked: "So you've that young Patman
+back wid yous agin. What took him to be leggin' off wid himself that
+way?"
+
+"And what put that in your head at all?" said the widow. "Light nor
+sight we've seen of him, or a one of them, or likely to. It's off out of
+the counthry he is belike, and he after robbin' his ould father, that's
+niver done talkin' foolish about him, and lavin' his innicent child to
+go starvin' into the Union--bad luck to him." She found a free
+expression of her sentiments rather refreshing after the restrictions
+under which she was placed at home.
+
+"Well now," said Donnelly, "I'd ha' bet me best brogues I seen that chap
+a couple of nights ago streelin' along the road down about our place;
+but 'twas darkish enough, and I might aisy be mistook."
+
+The widow pondered much over this statement on her homeward way, but had
+the forbearance to say nothing about it. She was still undecided whether
+or no she would communicate it to anybody, when, next morning, on her
+way for a can of water, she saw the black cat, unmistakable this time,
+run across the road, and, as on the day before, make off over the bog
+towards the little river. Widow M'Gurk stood staring after it for a few
+minutes, and came to a resolution. Then she looked about her, and was
+aware of Andy Sheridan's head leaning against his doorpost. Of Andy her
+opinion was, as we have seen, rather low, but she could descry no other
+person available for her purpose, so she called to him: "Andy, lad, I'm
+goin' after me two pullets that's strayed on me; come and be givin' me a
+hand." Andy lounged over to her goodnaturedly, and they turned into the
+bog, where Ody Rafferty presently joined them. The widow thought her
+fowl might be among the broken ground, where the stream runs at the back
+of the Knockawn, and the three went in that direction. It was a mild
+soft grey morning, and they met with neither stir nor sound, till they
+came abruptly upon a grassy hollow, shut in by furzy banks, and fronted
+by the running water, and then the widow, who alone had been expecting
+the unexpected, uttered a suppressed screech, and said: "Och, boys dear,
+goodness gracious guide us!"
+
+What they saw was the figure of a man in a long great-coat, "crooched
+all of a hape" under the bank. Near him were ranged in a row half a
+dozen oranges, strikin' up a wonderful golden glow. A small grimy scrap
+of paper was spread out near them, covered with several piles of
+shillings and pennies, and a silver thimble. Beside these Tib the black
+cat sat severely tucked up, apparently dissatisfied, and irked by the
+situation. At the widow's exclamation the man raised his head, and was
+seen to be Tom Patman, looking haggard and dazed, and as hollow-eyed as
+little Katty herself. Widow M'Gurk and Ody and Andy stood in a line
+facing him.
+
+"Whethen now, Tom Patman," said Ody, "and what might _you_ be doin' wid
+yourself?"
+
+"I'm sittin' here," said Tom.
+
+"Och musha, tell us somethin' we don't know then. Sittin' there you are,
+sure enough, but what the mischief are you after, might I politefully
+ax? or what you mane _by_ it at all at all?"
+
+"I'm sittin' here," said Tom again, "and starvin' I am; and sittin' and
+starvin' I'll be morebetoken till the ind of me ould life. Sure what
+else 'ud I be doin', and meself to thank for it, wid niver a sowl left
+belongin' me in the mortal world, nor a place to be goin' to?"
+
+"Well tub-be sure," said Mrs. M'Gurk, "if that talk doesn't bate all
+that iver I heard! And himself after trapesin' off as permisc-yis as an
+ould hin that won't sit on her eggs, and lavin' his own flesh and blood
+behind him as if they were the dust on the road. And then he ups and
+gives chat about niver a sowl bein' left him."
+
+"'Twas Tishy--bad cess to her," said Tom. "Och, but it's the
+mischievious ould divil-skins is Tishy M'Crum, and it's herself stirred
+up Martha, that wouldn't be too bad altogether if she'd be let alone,
+till the two of them had me torminted wid tellin' me th' ould man had
+pots of money he'd niver spend as long as he had us to be livin' on; and
+that we'd all do a dale better if some of us slipped away aisy widout
+risin' a row, and left him for a bit, while we'd be sellin' Martha's
+things, and seein' about gettin' into a dacint little place, instid of
+the whole of us to be starvin' alive up at Lisconnel, that's nothin'
+more than a bog bewitched; and he after lettin' us be sold up, they
+said, and all the while ownin' mints of money, so that we'd no call to
+be overly partic'lar about lavin' him to make a shift along wid the
+child, if 'twas a convanience; on'y he'd be risin' a quare whillabaloo,
+if he knew we were goin' off anywheres. Troth, I couldn't tell you all
+the gabbin' they had day and night--and showin' me the place he kep' his
+bag hidden in, and this way and that way. Och bedad themselves 'ud
+persuade the hair on your head it grew wrong side out, if they'd a mind
+to it."
+
+"They might so," said Ody, "supposin' I was great gomeral enough to be
+mindin' a word they'd say, or the likes of them." In his subsequent
+reports of the interview, Ody always alleged that he had replied: "Aye,
+very belike, supposin' it grew on the head of an ass," which was
+certainly neater. But Ody Rafferty's repartees, like those of other
+people, are occasionally belated in this way.
+
+"So the ind of it was," Tom went on, "nothin' else 'ud suit them except
+gettin' all readied up for us to be slinkin' out in the evenin' late.
+Faith, I'd twenty minds in me heart agin quittin' little Katty, and she
+that bad. Howane'er they swore black and white that me father'd be
+spendin' all manner of money on her when he got us out of it, and we
+were to be writin' for them to come after us as soon as we were settled,
+and iverythin' agreeable--so I went along. But if I did, ma'am, sure
+when they'd got the bits of furniture sold, the on'y notion they had was
+to be settin' off to make fortins in the States, and ne'er a word about
+Katty and th' ould man. Och they had me disthracted; outrageous they
+were; and that ould thief of the world, Tishy, allowin' me sorra a
+penny, so as I mightn't ha' been bound to stop wheriver they was. But
+one day they thought they had me asleep in the room-corner, and the two
+of them was colloguin' away at the table, so all of suddint Tishy whips
+out me poor father's bag, that I knew the look of right well, when he
+used to keep his 'baccy in it, and down she slaps it, and it jinglin'
+wid money. 'What's that for you?' sez she, and: 'The laws bless us,' sez
+Martha, 'is it after takin' that you are? And what's to become of them
+crathurs up at Lisconnel?' 'Och blathers,' sez Tishy, 'you needn't be
+lettin' on you didn't well know all this while I had it. Sure th'ould
+one might ha' plinty more hidden away on us. Anyway, I left them
+somethin' to get along wid,' sez she."
+
+"The five shillin's," said the widow. "Och but that one's a caution."
+
+"Rael hard-workin' and industhrious she is," observed Andy.
+
+Tom resumed his narrative: "'Them two'll do as well inside as out,' sez
+Tishy. 'I'll just be countin' the bit of silver,' sez she. But bedad I
+was fairly past me patience, and up I leps, and I grabbed a hould of the
+little bag. Och it's a quare fright I gave them that time, and they not
+thinkin' I was mindin', rael terrified they were," said Tom, sitting up
+more erect, and recalling this rare experience with evident complacency.
+"And 'Lave that, you omadhawn,' sez Tishy, wid the look of a divil on
+her,' what foolery are you at now?' 'You thievin' miscreant,' sez I to
+her, 'it's shankin' off to the pólis I'll be, and layin' a heavy charge
+agin you for robbin' and stealin', and you after lavin' the innicent
+child there and th' ould man to starve widout a penny to their names,'
+sez I. 'Faugh!' sez she, 'for that matter the fever's liker to have took
+her off agin now wid no throuble to be starvin', and maybe a good job
+too for iverybody.' And 'Be this and be that,' sez I, 'if I thought
+there was e'er a fear of it, 'tis wringin' your ugly neck round I'd be
+this instiant.' 'Let go of that bag,' sez she, sweepin' up some of the
+shillin's that was spilt. 'The pólis,' sez I, 'and a heavy charge, if
+there's another word out of your hijjis head.' 'I vow and declare,' sez
+Martha, 'I believe 'twould be the chapest thing we could do wid him, to
+let him take it and go. Sure he'd be divil a ha'porth more use for an
+immigrant than the ould cat there I was ape enough to bring along to
+pacify the childer.' So then Tishy gave some more impidence, but the
+last ind of it was we come to an agreement that I'd take the note and
+the silver, and they'd keep what bits of gould was in it, and they'd go
+off wid themselves wheriver they plased at all, and I'd thramp straight
+back here to be lookin' after the child and th' ould man. Ay, bedad, we
+settled it up civil enough. And afore I went Martha handed me out th'
+ould thimble, and bid me bring it to Katty. ''Twas her mother's,' sez
+she, 'I was keepin' for her; and thick it is wid houles be the same
+token; but don't say I'd be robbin' it off her.' And they tould me to
+take Tib along, or else they'd be lavin' her to run wild; so I put her
+in the basket. Begorrah, I believe Bobby had a notion to be comin' wid
+me and the cat, for he was lettin' sorrowful bawls the last thing I
+heard of him.
+
+"So away I come wid the best of me haste; och I knocked the quare
+walkin' out of meself entirely. And I stopped at the last big place I
+was passin' to get Katty the oranges. And I was thrampin' it all the
+night after, till just when there was a sthrake of the mornin' over the
+bog, I come into Lisconnel. But och wirra wirra--the roof's off of the
+house--och the look of the black houle wid the rafters stickin' thro'
+it, and ne'er a breath of smoke, till me heart was sick watchin' to see
+might there be an odd one; and the door clap-clappin'. Sure be that I
+well knew the child was dead, and me father quit out of it, or maybe
+buried himself, and I after lavin' them dyin' and starvin'. So for
+'fraid somebody'd be comin' out and tellin' me, off I run away into the
+bog, till I was treadin' here in the could wather. And then I tumbled
+th' ould cat out of the basket, that was scrawmin' and yowlin' disp'rit,
+and I took and slung the basket into the sthrame--there's the handle
+among them rushes--and down I sat under the bank. I dunno how many
+nights and days it is at all--but here I'll stop; niver a fut I'll stir
+to be lookin' for bite or sup, or lettin' on I'm in it--and anybody may
+take the bit of money and welcome; I'd as lief be pickin' up the dirt on
+the road--for I'll just give me life a chance to ind out of the world's
+misery and disolation."
+
+"Now, may goodness forgive you," said the widow M'Gurk, "it's a poor
+case to want the wit. Troth, and yourself's the quare ould
+child-desertin', mane-spirited, aisy-frighted slieveen of a young
+bosthoon; but what sort of a conthrivance is it you have on you at all
+at all be way of a head that you couldn't have the sinse to considher
+the roof blowin' off a body's house 'ud be raison enough for them to be
+quittin' out of it, and no signs of dyin' in the matter? D'you think the
+win' was apt to be waitin' till there happened to be nobody widin, afore
+it got scatterin' the thatch? God help us all, you've little to do to be
+squattin' there talkin' about disolations and miseries, wid the two of
+them this instiant minyit sittin' be the fire up at my place, and sorra
+a hand's turn ailin' them, forby Katty's a thrifle conthráry now and
+agin, thro' not bein' entirely strong yet."
+
+"And bedad at that hearin'," reports of the occurrence used to proceed
+from this point, "the lep he gathered himself up wid, and the rate he
+legged it off--musha, he was over the hill while we were pickin' up his
+things for him. And as for th' ould cat that he tripped over, it rowled
+three perch of ground before it got a hould of its four feet."
+
+"Sure we were sittin' there as quite as could be consaived"--the
+conclusion of this precipitate rush was thus recounted--"when all of a
+suddint we couldn't tell what come bouncin' in at the door, as if it had
+been shot out of the inds of the earth, and had us all jumpin' up and
+screechin', till we seen it was on'y Tom Patman, and he in such a takin'
+you might suppose he thought somethin' 'ud swally up ould Joe and the
+child on him before he could get at them."
+
+Lisconnel's opinion was divided as to whether Tom would actually have
+stayed and starved in his hiding-place had he not been discovered. Mrs.
+M'Gurk thought it likely enough. "The cat goin' back and for'ards that
+way," she said, "gave her an idee there was somethin' amiss in it, and
+that was why she took Andy along. 'Deed and she got a quare turn when
+first she spied the chap croochin' under the bank--she couldn't tell but
+he might ha' been a corp."
+
+Brian Kilfoyle's view was: "Divil a much! Sure if he'd had e'er a notion
+to be doin' anythin' agin himself, there was plinty of deep bog-houles
+handy for him to sling himself into, and have done wid it." Whereupon
+Mrs. Sheridan crossed herself and said deprecatingly: "Ah, sure, belike
+the crathur wouldn't have the wickedness in him to go do such a thing."
+Her husband didn't know but he might. "Them soft sort of fellers 'ud
+sometimes stick to anythin' they took into their heads, the same as a
+dab of morthar agin a wall." And Ody Rafferty supposed the fact of the
+matter was, "that if be any odd chance they got a notion of their own,
+they mistook it for somebody else's."
+
+On one point, however, the neighbours, Mrs. M'Gurk not excepted, were
+practically unanimous, the utter flagitiousness, namely, of Tishy
+M'Crum. There was a tendency to begrudge her the trivial merit of having
+voluntarily left behind her the five-shilling piece. For this marred
+that perfect symmetry of iniquity which is so pleasant to the eye when
+displayed by people of whom we "have no opinion." Only Mrs. Brian said
+it was a mercy she had that much good nature in her itself. But even she
+added that the fewer of them kind of folks she saw comin' about the
+place, the better she'd be pleased, and she hoped they'd got shut of
+them for good and all.
+
+This aspiration seemed the more likely to be fulfilled, when within a
+week or so the Patmans heard from the family of Tom's first wife, who
+held out prospects of work for himself, and a home for Katty and his
+father--a proposal which was gladly accepted. Their departure left as
+the single trace of their sojourn in Lisconnel, Tib the cat, which
+remained behind, a somewhat unwelcome bequest to the widow M'Gurk.
+Indeed, I fear the creature became a source of some annoyance to her,
+because Andy Sheridan contracted a habit of addressing it by the name of
+Tishy, and bestowing upon it the same laudatory epithets with which the
+widow had been wont to justify her admiration for the energetic sisters.
+
+It was on a hushed February morning that the Patmans finally departed.
+The smell of spring was in the air, and filmy silvery mist had begun to
+float off the dark bogland in vanishing wreaths, soft and dim as the
+frail sloe-blossom, already stolen out over the writhen black branches
+up on the ridge. A jewel had been left in the heart of every groundling
+trefoil and clover-leaf, and the long rays that twinkled to them were
+still just tinged with rose. Here and there a flake of gold seemed to
+have lit upon the clump of sombre green furze-bushes, by which
+neighbours in a small knot stood watching the three generations of
+Patmans dwindle away down the road with its narrow dewy grass-border,
+threading the vast sweep of sky-rimmed brown. Father and son walked,
+while little Katty bobbed along, balanced in a swaying donkey-pannier.
+The widow M'Gurk, who felt a good deal of concern about the destiny of
+her late lodgers, hoped "they were goin' to dacint people, for there
+wasn't as much sinse among the three of them as you'd put on a fourpenny
+bit." And Mrs. Quigley thought "'twould be hard to say which the young
+man or ould one was the foolishest; for the blathers ould Joe talked
+about Tom, and the gaby Tom made of himself over the child, now that he
+had his own way wid her, was past belief."
+
+"And I can tell you," said Ody Rafferty, "there's folks goin' about that
+you'll want all the wits you iver had, and maybe a thrifle tacked on, to
+get the better of rightly."
+
+"Augh, I question will they iver do any great things, goodness help
+them," said Mrs. Sheridan. "'Twill be much if he keeps them outside the
+House."
+
+"Well, anyway," said Biddy Ryan, "I'd liefer be in their coats, for
+fortin or no fortin, than like them two ugly-tempered women, settin' off
+to the dear knows where, after robbin' and plunderin' all before them."
+
+"Thrue for you, then, Biddy," said Mrs. Brian, turning away from her
+wide outlook, "we're none so badly off, when we're stoppin' where we
+are, instid of streelin' about wid the notion of such black villinies
+in our minds. For sure enough," she said, as she faced round towards the
+grey-peaked end-walls, and smoke-plumed thatch of Lisconnel, "the
+world's a quare place to get thravellin' thro', take it as you will."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+GOOD LUCK
+
+
+Although Laraghmena is no great distance from Lisconnel as the crow
+flies, but little intercourse takes place between the two hamlets. For
+the crow's flight would be over a rugged mountain ridge, sinking into a
+trackless expanse of bog, which often spreads rough and wet walking
+before wayfarers who have to experience it at closer quarters than those
+who merely throw down a flapping shadow as they pass. And round by the
+road is a good long tramp, not to be lightly undertaken. So it does not
+happen half a dozen times in the year, perhaps, that anybody comes from
+thence to Lisconnel, and our visits thither are fewer still. The
+neighbours say that the people up there do be very poor entirely, and
+are wont to use a commiserating tone when speaking of them. But their
+knowledge of the locality and its inhabitants is by no means intimate,
+and would be even less so, were it not that Theresa Joyce and her
+brother Mick, the remnant of Mrs. Kilfoyle's family, are now living
+there, which makes a connecting link.
+
+Laraghmena is scattered rather wildly over the slopes of a grey mountain
+that shoulders the sea at the point where its foam comes nearest to
+Lisconnel. Some of the cabins stand so low along the shore that the
+shingle knocks clatteringly at their doors when the tide is full and
+rough; and other some are perched so high up on the hillside that they
+constantly disappear from view behind a curtain of the pale mists which
+haunt its summit, creeping to and fro. When one of these little white
+dwellings, with its field-fleck beside it, emerges from the clouds, you
+feel as if the slightly improbable had happened, since at such a height
+you would have expected nothing but the appropriate rocks and swampy
+patches. There was once a French princess who would no doubt have
+wondered why on earth any people should choose to live and farm in such
+unchancy places. Rather than that she would have ploughed herself up a
+little bit of the rich green land which spreads in broad tracts round
+about, with sometimes sheep nibbling over it, and here and there a few
+deer. But the views of this young lady are represented as having been so
+far in advance of her age that she seems hardly possible as an
+historical personage, and withdraws into the myth-mists. To that region
+certainly belongs the ancient chronicle in which we read how the Irish
+Nemedians, revolting against the intolerable deal of cream and butter
+and wheaten meal exacted from them by their oppressors, the Fomorians,
+those ferocious African pirates, emigrated to Hellas, in hope of better
+things, but were at last driven back home to escape the heavier yoke of
+the Athenians, who compelled them to: "Dig clay in the valleys, and
+carry it in leathern bags to the top of the highest mountains, and the
+most craggy rocks, in order to form a soil upon those barren places, and
+make them fruitful, and able to bear corn." That history should repeat
+itself is, of course, to be recognised as merely a commonplace fact; but
+a myth reproducing itself in the shape of events happening visibly
+before our eyes, is a rarer phenomenon. And it seems to be occurring
+whenever a string of Laraghmenians come plodding up their winding
+mountain-path under the burden of heavy creels filled with earth, or
+oftener with slippery brown sea-wrack and leathery weed. For it is in
+this way that whatever scanty foothold their starveling crops may find,
+has been fashioned and maintained in the stony little fields. Year by
+year, as the blustery days of late autumn darken into winter, the
+steep-ledged path is wetted all along with sea-water, and bestrewn with
+dark trails and tough tawny pods out of the dripping creels, until it
+grows as sharply ocean-odorous as the beach, while the many bare feet
+are continually toiling slowly up and quickly pattering down it. Yet
+their efforts are rewarded by only meagre and stunted growths; so
+intractable is the material upon which they are expended. Micky Joyce
+has been heard to declare, as he took a despondent bird's-eye view of
+his holding, that "you might as well be thryin' to raise crops in the
+crevices of the stone walls."
+
+However, as we were just now shown, these dwellers at Laraghmena have
+another resource to fall back upon. In fact, they have nothing less than
+the wide sea as a supplement to their bit of land. The queer small boats
+hauled up on the strand, and the dark-brown net festooning the rafters,
+betoken that, as does also the bit of salt-fish hung against the wall,
+pallid and juiceless, a shadowy, wraith-like looking viand. But the
+bounty of the sea has limits; it does not yield up its stores for
+nothing, but takes as well as gives. And it helps itself sometimes on a
+liberal scale. Some years ago, for instance, it took poor Thady Joyce
+and several of his companions, who had gone off in a couple of luggers
+after the herrings. The event is remembered with awe at Laraghmena,
+because in that wild March gloaming Con the Quare One had met Thady
+himself face to face stepping up the winding path, and had given him
+good evening, and asked him how he had got all dripping wet, just at the
+very time when the unlucky lad must have been lying drowned miles and
+miles from there, among the surges of Galway Bay. Other such toll has
+often been levied since then; for the curraghs and pookawns in which
+Laraghmena goes to sea are frail craft to cope with the billows come
+rolling, maybe, from the fogbanks of Newfoundland, and blasts that have
+cooled their breath among hills of ice before they sweep across the
+Atlantic. Now and then a boat comes to grief even on the short voyage
+made for the purpose of cutting wrack from the shelves of the black-reef
+that lies a bit off the shore. So, on the whole, the inhabitants of
+Laraghmena may be considered to pay dearly for their supplies of fish
+and seaweed; and we at Lisconnel, though we live beyond reach of such
+things, and have few substitutes for them, are not far wrong in speaking
+of the people up there as "rael poor entirely."
+
+Yet they themselves would not by any means have it supposed that they
+"think bad," as they call it, of their fortunes and habitation. On the
+contrary, whatever their private opinion may be, they are disposed to
+uphold the merits of the place in public, and to prove themselves sudden
+and quick in resentment of any outsiders' disparaging criticism. The
+most deadly insult that can be offered to a Laraghmenian as such, is an
+allusion to the libellous report which has somehow become current to the
+effect that his Riverence at Drumroe, the nearest parish, always sends
+over a special messenger on Saturday night to remind them of the
+morrow's Mass; the innuendo being that Laraghmena's out-of-the-way
+situation, and general want of culture, preclude its inhabitants from
+knowing the day of the week. This is why an innocent-seeming remark such
+as, "Well, boys, it's Tuesday this mornin'," has been known to set
+blackthorns whirling wildly.
+
+Something of the sort occurred at Sallenmore fair, one day in last
+September, when Matt Doyne and Andy Sheridan from Lisconnel fell in with
+their acquaintances, Larry Sullivan and Felix Morrough, from Laraghmena.
+After they had fought as long as seemed good to them, they exchanged
+what news they had. The most important piece was that Larry and Felix
+were presently setting off to the States. They were rather urgent in
+advising the other two lads to join their party; but Andy said that
+everything would go to sticks at home if he was out of it, and Matt
+averred that his mother would be of the opinion she was lost and kilt
+entirely, if he so much as mentioned any such an idea. "And herself wid
+your brother Terence at home to be keepin' her company," objected Felix.
+"Sure there's me mother wid ne'er another crathur in the world, you may
+say, but meself, and she's never done this last six months persuadin' me
+to go along."
+
+"Then it's the quare woman she must be, bedad," said Matt, "unless it's
+yourself's the quare bosthoon on her entirely, and maybe that's liker;"
+a rejoinder which brought on a renewal of hostilities.
+
+Just at this time a spell of fine weather, very bright and serene, had
+been brooding over Lisconnel. It was the early spring of autumn, when
+leaves and berries here and there were taking a blossom-like vividness;
+the frost-touched brier-sprays seemed to have found and dipped in the
+same red that had dyed the young buds and shoots of April. The air was
+so still that the seeded dandelions stood day after day with their fairy
+globes unbereft of a single downy dart, like little puffs of vapour
+among the grasses. A soft mist rounded off all the bogland, holding in a
+drowse the sunbeams that steeped it, and letting them waken to their
+full golden glory at the very heart of noon. But one morning the haze
+began to thicken and darken on the horizon, as if wafts of murky smoke
+were blown through it, and towards evening massy shapes of black clouds
+came slowly lifting themselves up, some with outlines curved like bosky
+clumps of wood, some ruggedly ledged and angled like a drift of begrimed
+icebergs. By sunset the far west was all a sullen gloom veined with
+lurid, tawny streaks, and mottled with deeper stains. Old Peter
+Sheridan, who is reputed to have "a great eye for the weather," turned
+it forebodingly upon the prospect, and said the sky was "the moral for
+all the world of the back of an ould brindled bull, and he'd never
+known any good come of that manner of apparance."
+
+And true for him. Before sunrise next morning Lisconnel was roused by
+the réveille of a crashing thunder-peal, which preluded a violent storm.
+It is seldom that one booms and rattles so loudly over our bogland, or
+glares with so fierce a flame. Brian Kilfoyle, taking a rapid
+observation through his door, said, "Be the powers of smoke, I never
+seen the aquil of that. You might think they was after whitewashin' the
+whole place wid blindin' fire. Here's out of it, sez I." And he
+retreated blinking to his dark corner. At the height of it, even Andy
+Sheridan, who is probably our freest thinker, felt secretly relieved to
+know that his stepmother and his sisters were saying their prayers. The
+arrangement seemed to give him a sense of security without claiming any
+concessions from his superior strength of mind. But in the end the
+perilous clouds rolled away growling and gleaming towards the mountains
+and the sea, leaving only one victim behind--the Quigley's little goat,
+who had been struck dead by a lightning flash, to the sorrow of her
+owners, and the awe of all Lisconnel in contemplation of the black and
+white body stretched out still on her wide grazing-ground.
+
+The storm, however, seemed to have broken up the fair weather, and the
+days that followed it were blustery and rainy. On the next of them Larry
+Sullivan and Felix Morrough were seen passing through Lisconnel,
+evidently equipped for a journey. Larry, who had parted from no near
+friends, was apparently in good spirits; but Felix looked so much cast
+down that his contemporaries refrained from any references to the days
+of the week, and the pair went on their way unmolested amongst the
+lengthening shadows. They reported the storm to have been terrific
+altogether up at Laraghmena. The Widdy Bourke's thatch was set in a
+blaze, "and it was a livin' miracle that the whole of them wasn't
+frizzled up like a pan of fryin' herrin's."
+
+It may have been ten days or so after this that a good many of the
+neighbours had dropped in one evening at Mrs. Doyne's. She had been
+ailing of late, and old Dan O'Beirne had stepped up from the forge to
+prescribe for her, and cheer her with accounts of how finely young Dan
+and her daughter Stacey were getting on at their place down below in
+Duffclane. The rest of the party had assembled merely for company and
+conversation. It included members of nearly all our families--Kilfoyles
+and Quigleys and Ryans and Raffertys and the Widdy M'Gurk and Big Anne.
+Presently Judy Ryan, who was looking out of the door, had an
+announcement to make.
+
+"Whethen now, and who might yous be when you're at home? There's two
+women comin' along the road from Sallinbeg ways, I dunno the looks of at
+all, I should say; but the rain's mistin' thick between me and them.
+Carryin' bundles they are. If they're not any of the Tinkers we're right
+enough. One of them's a little ould body, and the other's a good size
+bigger. Strangers they are. Och, mercy on me, have I eyes in me head at
+all? How strange she is! Sure it's Theresa Joyce herself. But we haven't
+seen her this great while, and who she has along wid her I couldn't be
+tellin' you. A feeble sort of crathur she looks to be, accordin' to the
+way she's foostherin' along."
+
+When these two travellers arrived at the Doynes' door, nobody failed to
+recognise Theresa Joyce, notwithstanding the estrangement of a long
+absence; and she hastened to introduce her unknown companion, who kept a
+tight clutch on her arm, as if afraid to let go, and looked at nobody's
+face, but seemed to listen from one to the other. She was, it appeared,
+the widow Morrough from Laraghmena, who had been struck blind by the
+lightning in the great storm Friday was a week--the sight of her eyes
+clean destroyed with one flash as she was throwing a bit of food to the
+fowl at her door. And the last child she had belonging to her set off
+the next morning to the States. And now she herself was going into the
+Union down at Moynalone, for what else could she be doing, that couldn't
+see her hand before her face? So Theresa was bringing her down, and they
+thought they might have got as far as Duffclane against night; but the
+creature wasn't well used yet to walking in the dark, so they were slow
+coming, and they'd hardly do it.
+
+Such was the outline of Mrs. Morrough's history up to date, and its
+rehearsal had at once the effect of arousing a sympathetic bustle about
+her, which did not subside until she sat a wet and wayworn guest, in the
+most comfortable hearth-corner, and had been provided with a cup of the
+tea that Mrs. Doyne had made herself in her character of an invalid. She
+now sat on one side of the blind woman, and stirred her tea for her, and
+on the other Dan O'Beirne shook his head in regretful confirmation of
+the opinion pronounced by the Drumroe doctor, which was reported to be
+that mortal man couldn't do her a thraneen of good. Meanwhile Theresa
+Joyce, who was likewise bedrenched and weary, found a seat in the
+opposite corner, where her nearest neighbours were Ody Rafferty, and her
+niece-in-law, Mrs. Brian Kilfoyle, with her daughter Rose.
+
+"Well, Theresa, it's the long while since you've stepped over to see
+us," Ody said, starting the conversation, "and it's the soft evenin'
+you've chose to be comin'. Your shawl's dhreeped. Take it off, and I'll
+give it a shake above the fire. Bedad, Theresa, the two of us has been
+wearin' the dusty male-bags on our heads since the time I seen you
+first. As black as a sloe you was; but now it's liker the blossom it's
+turned."
+
+"And time for it," said Theresa. "Sure I'm over sivinty year of age now,
+any way, every day of it--and the long days there was among them, God
+knows."
+
+"But wid all that, ne'er a one of them was long enough for you to be
+findin' a man to your mind in it," said Ody. "And I declare to goodness
+I dunno but maybe it's the very sinsible woman you were for that same.
+Sure meself was a great while afore ever I thought of axin' Biddy, and
+for anythin' I can tell I might ha' done better if I'd held me tongue a
+bit longer and then said nothin', as the sayin' is. I was ould enough to
+know me own mind any way. But, musha, for that matter, Rose there 'ill
+prisintly be settin' up to think she's ould enough to know hers, and
+it's twinty chances if she has as much wit as you."
+
+"And why would she," said Theresa, "or anybody be wishin' it to her? Oh,
+let that alone. There's a dale of diff'rint sorts of wit, and no raison
+why one of them shouldn't be as good as another. Look at her
+grandmother, me sister Bessy, it's plinty of paice and comfort she had
+wid her marryin'."
+
+This was quite true, as although she had been rather early widowed, and
+her only daughter had married an emigrant, her son and his wife had
+taken such care of her, and made so much of her, that the neighbours had
+never thought of calling her the widdy, a title reserved for a woman
+left struggling alone; and she had remained Mrs. Kilfoyle to the end of
+her days.
+
+"And look at the poor crathur there, what she's come to," said Ody,
+instancing the tragical figure of the widow Morrough.
+
+"Ah, the saints may pity her," said Theresa. "But the likes of such bad
+luck happins few people married or single, thank God."
+
+"It's a quare unnathural young villin her son must be," said Mrs. Brian,
+"to skyte off and lave her that-a-way. Sorra the bit he can be good
+for."
+
+"'Deed, now, Norah woman, that's the very notion is disthressin' me,"
+said Theresa, "for I dunno but it's after usin' him ill, I am. You see
+the way of it was the poor sowl--poor Mrs. Morrough--had the great dread
+of the say upon her, be raison of her husband and her father gettin'
+dhrowned at the fishin', so she'd always the fear in her mind of the
+same thing happ'nin' her couple of boys. Howane'er, the eldest of them
+went off to California a good few years back, and was doin' pretty
+middlin' well out there the last she heard of him, but that's a long
+while ago now; about gettin' married he was. But Felix, the lad she had
+at home wid her until the other day, often enough he was bound to be on
+the wather, after the fish and the sayweed, if he was to get his livin'
+at all. And disthracted she was seem' him goin' out in their ould boat,
+that's laiks enough in her to sink the biggest ship ever set sail, and
+herself wid scarce the width to hould a sizable flounder. Sez I to Felix
+one wild evenin', when we was argufyin' wid him, that sure the little
+loadin' he could be puttin' in her 'ud never be worth losin' his life
+for. But sez he to me, the bit of food they'd put in their mouths was
+littler agin, and yet they might be losin' their lives for want of it.
+And ne'er a word had I to say to that. But one night last winter he was
+as nearly lost as anythin' in a squall, and after that his mother would
+be tormintin' herself worse than she was before. So she set her heart
+entirely on gettin' him to take off to the States, and be out of the way
+of fishin' and dhrowndin'. She'd ha' gone wid him herself, on'y they
+said she was too ould, and spoilin' his chances she'd be. A long while
+it was before he'd hear any talk of it. The whole summer she was
+persuadin' him; but at last he made up his mind he would. 'Twas no
+notion of his own to be lavin' her, I'll say that for him."
+
+"Whethen now, but that was as curious a plan as ever I heard tell of for
+keepin' a person from dhrowndin'," said Ody; "to be sendin' him off over
+the rowlin' says, sailin' goodness can tell you how many hunderds and
+tousands of miles. What was she dhramin' of at all at all to go do such
+a thing?"
+
+"Ah, but sure it's a diff'rint sort of sailin'," said Theresa. "Why,
+they say one of them big stamers 'ud carry a couple of our little boats
+along wid her, and you'd scarce notice she had them on board. Terrible
+safe they must be if they're that size."
+
+"And morebetoken," said Mrs. Brian, "there's such a sight of ships
+comin' and goin' between this and the States, wouldn't you think that
+agin now they'd ha' got a kind of track line, crossin' over, as if it
+was a manner of road they was follyin' that nothin's apt to happen them
+on, and not sthrayin' about permisc-yis in the storms?"
+
+"_Thrack?_" said Ody, shrilly. "Bedad, then, its the quare thrack, and
+the quare places it brings them into. D'you know that, for one thing,
+they go slap through the Bay of Bisky?"'
+
+"And is that an ugly bay?" said Mrs. Brian.
+
+"You may call it that. I wouldn't be sayin' so to herself over there,"
+said Ody, with much careful mystery. "For it might be on'y discouragin'
+the crathur worse than she is already. But it's the place where the
+Seven Oceans of the World meet. Ay, indeed, ma'am--but don't be lettin'
+on to her. I was spakin' to a man who had a brother went through it, and
+he said the ragin' and tearin' of them all flowin' together 'ud terrify
+the sinses out of King Solomon. They had the great big stamer he was in
+whirlin' round and round and round, the same as if it was a float on one
+of its own paddlewheels, he couldn't tell how many days and nights.
+Thracks, how are you. It's a very ready one there is in it to the bottom
+of the say."
+
+"Still a good few people gets through it safe enough," said Theresa,
+"ay, and comes back through it of an odd while."
+
+"But how many's lost in it that you never hear tell of?" said Ody. "And
+besides that, the man I was talkin' to tould me his brother was never
+right in his head after the tossin' he got. It's a poor case to be
+landin' ravin' mad in a sthrange counthry, supposin' you get there
+itself. But me own notion is that if people's well off, they've a right
+to stop where they are, and if they're misfort'nit, they've a chance any
+way of better bad luck stayin' at home."
+
+Ody stated his own notion authoritatively, and Theresa looked depressed
+by the dilemma in which it seemed to place the emigrant.
+
+"'Deed, now, maybe it's a bad turn I'm after doin' the two of them," she
+said; "but poor Mrs. Morrough, many a time she sez to me it 'ud be the
+greatest comfort to her at all to get quit of the fear she was in
+continyal wheniver he went out wid the ould boat. Sure she might be a
+bit lonesome, she'd say, but after all what great company was he to her
+when half the time she would be drowndin' him under the rowl of the say,
+like his poor father and grandfather? And wid the most he could do it's
+hard set he was to make what 'ud keep him. So she'd planned she'd be
+able to conthrive well enough wid her hins and her spriggin' work, till
+Felix could be sendin' her over a thrifle. A very cliver woman she was
+at the spriggin'; the handkercher corners she'd work was rael iligant.
+Pence a-piece she got for them, and I've known her finish a dozen in
+three days.
+
+"Och, but I got a turn on the Friday mornin' when I stepped down to her
+place to see what way they were after the storm, and there she was
+sittin' crouched up in a corner, and screechin' to me to know who was
+comin' in, and I standin' before her eyes in the middle of a sun-bame.
+And 'Glory be to God,' sez she, 'that it's yourself, for you'll have the
+sinse to give me a hand wid endeavourin' to keep the knowledge of what's
+after happenin' me from Felix, the way he won't be purvinted of goin'
+to-morra. Sorra a fut would he if he knew aught ailed me; and then sure
+he might stay at home for good and all; and dhrownded he'll be, and
+meself'ill go deminted.' And sure I thought it was maybe no thing to be
+doin', and so I said to her. But it seemed the heart of her was to be
+broke altogether if anythin' 'ud hinder him gettin' out of it. And then
+I was mindin' the father and grandfather of him, the way they went, and
+me brother, poor Thady, and I couldn't tell but I might ha' raison to
+think bad of biddin' him stay; and if he did, sure perhaps he couldn't
+be keepin' her at all, and she so helpless; it's better able he might be
+to help her out in the States. And sorry I'd ha' been to disappoint the
+crathur of the first wish she'd took a thought of sittin' in the dark of
+her misfortin. So the ind of it was I settled I'd stop wid her for that
+day, and thry could we let on there was nothin' amiss when Felix come
+in, that was out somewhere since early in the mornin' before the storm
+began.
+
+"But 'deed now it was the quare conthrivin' we had after he'd come home.
+And where'd he been but off down to Drumroe gettin' her an iligant big
+taypot for a keepsake? So the sorra a stim of it, in coorse, could she
+see; and I done me best biddin' her look at the grand gilt handle, and
+the wrathe of pink roses on it, and she'd say the same thing after me;
+but sure its noways very aisy to fall into an admiration of a taypot
+you've never set eyes on; and I misdoubt the poor lad thought she wasn't
+so much plased with it as he expected. And then he'd be walkin' in and
+out, and axin' for this and that he was to put in his bundle; and she
+could on'y be tellin' him where to look for them, instid of readyin'
+them up for him herself. And the pair of socks she'd promised him she
+couldn't get to finish--rael fretted she was wid it all. Howsome'er one
+way or the other we made a shift, till poor Felix went off in the grey
+of the mornin' wid ne'er a notion of anythin'. Sez he to her: 'You'll be
+seem' me steppin' in agin one of these days;' and sez she: 'Ay will
+I--as sure as I'll see the sun shinin';' so he consaited she was well
+enough contint--but the two of them was thinkin' diff'rint things.
+
+"Ne'er a word of it we said to anybody before Felix was gone, or else
+somebody 'ud ha' been safe to ha' tould him, for there's plinty of
+people couldn't be goin' about widout tellin' everythin' they hear any
+more than a wasp could fly widout buzzin' its wings. And then we got the
+docther to her, but he couldn't do e'er a hand's turn. Sure what could
+anybody do agin the lightnin', that's a sort of miracle, you may say,
+unless it was wid another one?"
+
+"And I dunno has people any call to be settin' themselves up to thry do
+them," said Mrs. Brian. "We'd better lave the like to Them that
+understands the nathur of such things."
+
+"Ah, I should suppose we'd a right to be thryin' whativer we get the
+chance to," said Theresa, "and that's little enough, the Lord knows.
+Plinty of things there is kep' up out of the raich of our meddlin' wid
+them."
+
+"Ay bedad, or else it's the quare regulatin' we'd be givin' them now and
+agin--we would so," said Ody, regretfully. "Och, but there's an odd few
+good jobs I'd give more than a thrifle to be puttin' me hand to this
+minyit if I could get a hould of them."
+
+"And that's the way it is, I'm afeared, wid the lightnin'-blindin',"
+said Theresa. "Howane'er, up at Laraghmena we'd ha' done the best we
+could for her, if she'd ha' been contint to ha' sted there; we'd ha'
+conthrived among us all to keep her well enough. But not a bit of her
+would for all we could do or say. She wouldn't be a burden on the
+neighbours she said. You see she's proud in her mind, the crathur,
+that's what it is, goodness help her."
+
+"And when a body has that sort of a notion," said Ody, "you might as
+aisy crack an egg ind-ways as get it out of their head."
+
+"So that's the way of it," said Theresa. "But if you could be tellin' me
+whether it's wrong I done or right, you know more than meself. Felix 'ud
+be for killin' me if he knew, that's sartin, and small blame to him I
+was thinkin' part of the while comin' along. For bad work there's apt to
+ha' been, sure enough, in anythin' that inds in landin' a body in the
+Union."
+
+The blind woman in her corner across the hearth seemed to have caught
+the last word, for she abruptly said, "Ay, ay, it's there I'm goin', and
+the first of the Morroughs iver wint on the rates, or the Conroys
+aither. But I'm not takin' their name along wid me; troth no; sorra the
+Ellen Morrough 'ill they find in it."
+
+"Sure not at all, woman dear," said Theresa. "Why, Mrs. Doyne, it's
+great work the two of us had this day comin' along the road, plannin' a
+fine name for Mrs. Morrough to have in the Union', for she sez it's none
+any dacint poor people own she'll be bringin' into it. So we've settled
+she's to be Mrs. Skeffington Yelverton. That's an iligant soundin' one,
+isn't it, ma'am?"
+
+Everybody expressed admiration, and a forlorn glimmer of complacency at
+the arrangement passed over even the sorrowful countenance of Mrs.
+Skeffington Yelverton herself, as she sat in her ragged old wisp of a
+shawl. She was holding under it her grand new delft teapot, whose
+beauties she should never see; though by this time much fingering had
+made her familiar with the outlines of its raised pink-rose wreath. Then
+Theresa Joyce said, "We ought to be steppin' on wid ourselves, if we're
+to get to Duffclane before dark. The evenin's took up a bit. I see the
+sky there turnin' like goulden glass agin the windy-pane." But the
+neighbours protested against their setting forward again; and it was
+agreed that they should sleep the night at the Kilfoyles'.
+
+When this point had been decided, Mrs. Morrough said, "Would that be
+the say--the rustlin' I hear outside there?"
+
+Upon this people looked ruefully at her and at each other, as if the
+question had given them a glimpse into the darkness in which she was
+sitting.
+
+"Ah, no, ma'am," said Mrs. Doyne, "that's on'y the sedge-laves in the
+win' round the big pool just back of the house. Few days of the year
+there is, summer or winter, but they'll be shoosh-sooin' that way. A
+dhrary sort of noise it is to my mind. I do be tired listenin' to it in
+the night sometimes."
+
+"Sure there's ne'er a dhrop of say-wather nearer us, ma'am, than the
+place you're after quittin' out of," said Judy Ryan, "it's the quare
+whillaloo it 'ud have to be risin' before we'd hear it that far."
+
+"Well, well," said the blind woman, "yous are the very lucky people, I'm
+thinkin', all of yous, that see the shinin' of the sun, and live beyond
+the sound of the say."
+
+Her remark was followed by a short silence, during which her hearers
+were, perhaps, questing for consolatory rejoinders rather than
+congratulating themselves upon their own luckiness. It was Big Anne who
+broke the pause, saying, with the best intentions, "Ah, sure, ma'am
+dear, plase God, _you_ won't be so, and _we_ won't be so;" a sentiment
+which apparently did not meet with the approval of Ody Rafferty, as he
+frowned bushily at her and said in a testy undertone, "Musha, good
+gracious, woman, what talk have you out of you at all?"
+
+Just at this moment sounds, the nature of which could not easily be
+mistaken, rose up close by--shouts and laughter and thumps and trampling
+of feet. People who ran quickly to the door were in time to see a knot
+of youths fall confusedly out of the house over the way--the
+Quigleys'--obviously, to judge by their subsequent proceedings, for the
+purpose of continuing a scuffle with ampler elbow room. But it was only
+for a very brief space that their wrestling and skirmishing among the
+puddles held anybody's attention. That was speedily diverted to the far
+more extraordinary and astonishing behaviour of their visitor, Mrs.
+Morrough. For she suddenly sprang up off her chair, exclaiming, "Saints
+above--it's Paddy--that's Paddy's voice--him that I haven't set eyes on
+for nine year next Easter--and there's Felix yellin' too! The both of
+them's come back, glory be to God!" And so saying out of the house she
+ran, and across the road as straight as a dart, she who not an hour
+before had been led gropingly in, and would have put her foot among the
+glowing hearth-sods, if her guides had not pulled her away.
+
+The neighbours could at first look on in only mute amazement, but in any
+case the two boys and she were for some time so intricately entangled
+that any attempt to elicit any explanation would have been futile. When
+at last questions and answers were possible, no very lucid account of
+the matter was forthcoming. To the many voices that demanded: "Is it
+seein' you are, woman alive? Is it seein' you are?" all Mrs. Morrough
+could answer was: "Ay, bedad am I, and as well as iver I done in me
+life--praise be to goodness. Sure I dunno what way it was, but me sight
+came back to me all of a flash, the same as it went, just the very
+minyit I was hearin' the lads shoutin'. Och, Paddy, avic, but you're the
+grand man grown; and Felix, och now, to be seein' you agin, and
+everythin' else as clear as clear. It's meself's the lucky woman this
+day--glory be to God and Mary."
+
+In short, the marvellous restoration of her sight is to this day a
+miracle, very freshly in remembrance at Lisconnel and Laraghmena, where
+the inhabitants know little about paralysed optic nerves, and might
+perhaps continue to wonder none the less even if they knew more. Beside
+it the unexpected reappearance of the two young Morroughs seemed almost
+a commonplace incident, though Paddy's fine new suit and gold
+watch-chain were, indeed, very exceptional things at Lisconnel. His
+story ran that he had prospered highly of late out in California, having
+made enough to set him up grandly on a good bit of land in the old
+country, and give Felix a fair start, and keep the old mother in comfort
+all the rest of her life. With which objects in view they had landed at
+Queenstown, he and his wife, a girl belonging to very respectable,
+decent people in the county Wicklow. "So next mornin', walkin' along the
+Quay, who should I see but me gintleman there, and another chap along
+with him, and both of them lookin' as wild as if they'd been caught. And
+says I to Sally, 'You bet, that's Felix from our place at home;' and
+right I was, and just slick in time to stop him goin' on board." Paddy
+had then left his wife with her family in Wicklow, where he had seen a
+promising farm; and he and Felix were now on their way to fetch their
+mother thither.
+
+"And it's in the quare consternation you'd ha' been," said Theresa
+Joyce, "if you'd landed up at Laraghmena, and found her quit out of it
+the way she was."
+
+"And that would ha' happint us," said Felix, "if it hadn't been for
+young Dan Ryan in there just now passin' the remark that we couldn't
+expec' Father Martin to be sendin' us notices all the way to the County
+Cork, and supposin' I'd very belike missed the right day for the stamer
+be raison of it. For if we hadn't got fightin' and tumblin' out of the
+house, you might aisy ha' gone along wid yourselves, and niver known we
+were in the place at all. 'Twas great luck entirely."
+
+Fortune, in truth, had seemingly taken Mrs. Morrough and her affairs
+into the highest favour. Even the luck-insurance of a trivial loss was
+not wanting to her, as in her hasty exit she had dropped her new teapot,
+which broke into many pieces on Mrs. Doyne's floor. So that, as has been
+said, she never beheld it in its beauty. But the very skies had cleared
+above her head, swept by a waft of wind that scattered the clouds faster
+and further than a drift of withered leaves, and the sinking sun
+broadened in splendour before the eyes that had lost sight of him
+through ten interminable days. The wet stones on the road glistened like
+jewels, and the shallowest pools between them held unfathomed deeps of
+blue, when the Morroughs set off for Laraghmena, where they intended to
+sleep the night, and bid their friends farewell. "And if it's themselves
+won't be in the fine astonishment when they set eyes upon you, woman
+dear!" said Theresa Joyce, "for if you'd been twenty year away
+thravellin' the world crooked and straight, you couldn't ha' come back a
+diff'rinter crathur from what you were, and we settin' out this woeful
+mornin'. Little notion you had what was comin' to you, and it all the
+while runnin' up your road, so to spake, like the sun racin' the shadows
+on a windy day. 'Deed now, I'd be goin' along wid you to hear what
+they'll say to it, but I'm ould you see, and ivery step I've thramped I
+have the feel of in ivery bone of me body; so I'll stop this night up at
+Brian's."
+
+"And bedad, ma'am, it's well off you are, if you've the feel of nothin'
+worse in them," said the querulous voice of old Peter Sheridan, whose
+acquaintances describe him as being "terrible gathered up with the
+rheumatism this great while," so great, in fact, that everybody except
+himself has by this time become accustomed to his condition.
+
+For the most part, however, they were rather pleased faces that watched
+the three strangers out of sight, the last long beams from the sunset
+making blink the eyes of nearly all Lisconnel. The west dispread its
+fiery golden bloom wider every moment as the swelling scarlet disc
+wheeled lower, burning with orbed flame a hollow path through the
+kindled haze. One laggard cloud, a great, soft nest of snow, drifted
+into the heart of it, and out of it again, flushed and glistering, and
+sailed on, a radiant shape, to meet and eclipse the misty white
+ghost-moon, faint and dim in the east. Far away over the level bog the
+light was stealing about in streams like water spilt on a floor.
+
+"Well now, I declare," said Mrs. Brian, "it does one's heart good to see
+a bit of luck like that happenin' to a body."
+
+"Ay, does it," said Judy Ryan, "the crathur to be gettin' back her sight
+just in the right minyit of time to see her son comin' home to her. Sure
+now one might take a plisure in plannin' such a thing, if one had the
+managin' of them."
+
+"Ah, dear, but I wish somebody 'ud be conthrivin' a bit of good luck for
+us then," said Mrs. Quigley.
+
+"Maybe there's plinty more where that's comin' from," suggested Brian
+Kilfoyle, hopefully.
+
+"It's apt to stay there, then," quoth Mrs. Quigley, "for any signs I can
+see."
+
+"Ay, ma'am, that's me own notion," said Peter Sheridan, bitterly; "I'm
+thinkin' we'll have to be goin' there, wheriver it is, and lookin' after
+it for ourselves, if it's good luck we're a-wantin'."
+
+"And I dunno what better we could be doin'," said Theresa Joyce, "than
+goin' where it is, when we get the chance. Ah, there's the last of the
+sun," she said, as a quivering red shaft shot up suddenly, and trembled
+away into nothing on the air. "Ay, for sure, he goes down a great way
+off out on the bog; the crathur 'ud ha' been plased to see it. 'Deed no,
+I dunno anythin' better we could be doin' than goin' after our good
+luck."
+
+So all through that gathering twilight Mrs. Morrough and her two sons
+were journeying away with their high fortune to Laraghmena. They were
+still on the road long after the clear moon had filled the air with
+shimmering silver, and sent their shadows stretching darkly far over the
+frosted grass. But Lisconnel had gone to seek, for the time being, its
+good luck in the land of dreams.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+This book contains inconsistent use of "'ill" contracted with the
+previous word.  See Page 29: "The lads 'ill be" and Page 87: "the
+Union'ill be shut."  These have been left as in the original.
+
+There are also some inconsistent spellings in the dialect that have been
+left alone. For instance, iligant and illigant.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Strangers at Lisconnel, by Barlow Jane
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Strangers at Lisconnel, by Barlow Jane
+
+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: Strangers at Lisconnel
+
+Author: Barlow Jane
+
+Release Date: July 31, 2006 [EBook #18957]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRANGERS AT LISCONNEL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Melissa Er-Raqabi, Ted Garvin and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>STRANGERS AT LISCONNEL</h1>
+
+<h2><i>A SECOND SERIES OF IRISH IDYLLS</i></h2>
+
+<h4 class="padtop">BY</h4>
+
+<h2>JANE BARLOW</h2>
+
+<p style="font-weight: bold; margin-top: 3em;" class="center">NEW YORK<br />
+DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY<br />
+1895<br />
+<br /><br />
+<i>Copyright, 1895</i>,<br />
+by<br />
+<span class="smcap">Dodd, Mead and Company.</span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="center">TO<br />
+<br />
+M. L. B.<br />
+<br />
+Is fada m&eacute; beo do dhiaigh.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<table summary="contents" style="width: 50%; padding: 1em;"><tbody>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2" class="center">CHAPTER I.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">OUT OF THE WAY</td>                           <td class="tar"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+
+<td colspan="2" class="center">CHAPTER II.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">JERRY DUNNE'S BASKET</td>                    <td class="tar"><a href="#Page_14">14</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+
+<td colspan="2" class="center">CHAPTER III.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">MRS. KILFOYLE'S CLOAK</td>                   <td class="tar"><a href="#Page_31">31</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+
+<td colspan="2" class="center">CHAPTER IV.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">A GOOD TURN</td>                             <td class="tar"><a href="#Page_53">53</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+
+<td colspan="2" class="center">CHAPTER V.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">FORECASTS</td>                               <td class="tar"><a href="#Page_80">80</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+
+<td colspan="2" class="center">CHAPTER VI.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">A FAIRING</td>                              <td class="tar"><a href="#Page_112">112</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+
+<td colspan="2" class="center">CHAPTER VII.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">MR. POLYMATHERS</td>                        <td class="tar"><a href="#Page_139">139</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+
+<td colspan="2" class="center">CHAPTER VIII.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">HONORIS CAUSA</td>                          <td class="tar"><a href="#Page_168">168</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+
+<td colspan="2" class="center">CHAPTER IX.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">BOYS' WAGES</td>                            <td class="tar"><a href="#Page_211">211</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+
+<td colspan="2" class="center">CHAPTER X.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">CON THE QUARE ONE</td>                      <td class="tar"><a href="#Page_235">235</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+
+<td colspan="2" class="center">CHAPTER XI.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">MAD BELL</td>                               <td class="tar"><a href="#Page_271">271</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+
+<td colspan="2" class="center">CHAPTER XII.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">A FLITTING</td>                             <td class="tar"><a href="#Page_303">303</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+
+<td colspan="2" class="center">CHAPTER XIII.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">A RETURN</td>                               <td class="tar"><a href="#Page_324">324</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+
+<td colspan="2" class="center">CHAPTER XIV.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tl">GOOD LUCK</td>                             <td class="tar"><a href="#Page_340">340</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody></table>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>OUT OF THE WAY</h3>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To Lisconnel, our very small hamlet in the middle of a wide bogland, the
+days that break over the dim blue hill-line, faint and far off, seldom
+bring a stranger's face; but then they seldom take a familiar one away,
+beyond reach, at any rate of return before nightfall. In fact, there are
+few places amid this mortal change to which we may come back after any
+reasonable interval with more confidence of finding things just as we
+left them, due allowance being made for the inevitable fingering of
+Time. We shall find some old people who have aged under it, and some
+who, as certain philosophers would hold, have grown younger again. The
+latter may be seen just beginning, perhaps, to sit up stiff on a woman's
+arm, or starting for a trial crawl over mother earth; and of them we
+remark that there is another little Ryan or Quigley; while the former<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>
+stay sunning themselves so inertly, or totter about so shakily, that we
+notice at once how much old Sheridan, or the Widow Joyce, has failed
+since last year. These babies and grandparents often associate a good
+deal with one another at the stage when the old body is still capable of
+"keepin' an eye on the child," and the child still resorts to all fours
+if it wants to get up its highest speed. But this companionship does not
+last long in any given case. Very soon the expanding and the contracting
+sphere cease to touch closely. On the one hand, the world widens into
+more spacious tracts for nimbler and bolder ranging over with all manner
+of remarkable things growing and living upon it, to be gathered and
+captured, or at least sought and chased, among pools, and hillocks and
+swampy places. On the other, it shrinks to within the limits of a few
+dwindling furlongs and perches, traversed ever more feebly, until at
+length even the nearest stone, on which the warm rays can be basked in,
+seems to have moved too far off, and the flicker-haunted nook by the
+hearth-fire becomes the end of the whole day's journey.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the generations, as they succeed one another, wave-like preserve a
+well-marked rhythm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> in their coming and going&mdash;play, work, rest&mdash;not to
+be interrupted by anything less peremptory than death or disablement.
+This wag-by-the-wall swings and swings its bobbed pendulum without
+pause, but one swing is much like the other, and their background never
+varies. Little Pat out stravading of a fine morning on the great
+brown-wigged bog, and, it may be hoped, enjoying himself thoroughly, is
+taking the same first steps in life as young Pat his father, now busy
+cutting turf-sods, and old Pat, his grandfather, idly watching them
+burn, with a pipe, if in luck, to keep alight. And the Lisconnel folk,
+therefore, because the changes wrought by human agency come to them in
+unimposing forms, are strongly impressed by the vast natural
+vicissitudes of things which rule their destinies. The melting of season
+into season, and year into year, the leaf-like withering and drifting
+away of the old from among the fresh springing growths, are ever before
+their eyes, and the contemplation steeps them in a sense of the
+transitoriness of things good and bad. Even the black soil they tread on
+may next year flutter up into a vanishing blue column through a
+smoke-hole in somebody's thatch. They carry this sense with a light and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>
+heavy heart. In like manner they make the very most of all unusual
+events. They find materials for half-an-hour's talk in the passage by
+their doors of one of those rarely coming strangers, who do appear from
+time to time, as frequently, indeed, as anybody would expect, having
+surveyed the thoroughfare that links us with humanity. For if we follow
+it southward, where, like the unvanishing wake of some vessel, it
+streaks the level plain, that is lonely as a wide water, but stiller, we
+pass by Dan O'Beirne's forge, now neighbourless, and through humble
+Duffclane, and on to Ballybrosna, our Town; but we must go many a mile
+further to reach anything upon which you would bestow that title. Or, if
+we turn northward, we only find it seaming another ample fold of
+bogland, outspread far and far beyond Lisconnel before a grey hill-range
+begins to rise in slow undulations, crested with furze and broom. Here
+we smell turf-smoke again, and see a cabin-row that is Sallinbeg, and
+hence the road strikes north-westward in among the mountains, where a
+few mottled-faced sheep peer down over it from their smooth green walks,
+but do not care to trust their black velvet legs upon it. And then, by
+the time that the air has become sea-scented<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>, the road climbs to the
+top of a hill, and stops there abruptly, as if it had been travelling
+all the while merely to look at the view. The truth is that the funds
+for its construction would go no further, and, in consequence, wayfarers
+coming along by the shore still have to tread out a path for themselves
+across a gap of moorland, if they are bound for Lisconnel.</p>
+
+<p>You may perceive, therefore, that Lisconnel lies out of the way, on the
+route to no places of importance, and as its own ten or a dozen little
+houses are, I fear, collectively altogether insignificant, it has small
+reason to expect many visitors. The Widow M'Gurk said one day that you
+might as well be living at the bottom of the boghole for any company you
+got the chance of seeing; but this was an exaggeration. She was vexed
+when she made the remark, because Mrs. Dooley, old Dan O'Beirne's
+married daughter, then staying at the forge, had promised to come and
+inspect a pair of marketable chickens, in anticipation of which Mrs.
+M'Gurk had wetted a cup of tea and used up her last handful of wholemeal
+for a cake, that Mrs. Dooley, who was in rather affluent circumstances,
+might not think them "too poorly off altogether." But, after all, the
+hours had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> slipped blankly by, and nobody had arrived. So the widow had
+ruefully put her teapot to sit on the hob until himself came in&mdash;for,
+properly speaking, she was at this time not yet a widow&mdash;and had stepped
+down her tussocky slope with her double disappointment to Mrs. Kilfoyle.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Kilfoyle was knitting at her door and not looking out over the bog,
+where the flushed light of the sunset drowsed on the black sod in an
+almost tangible fire-film. Against it the poppies stood up dark and
+opaque, but the large white daisies had caught the wraith of the glow on
+their glimmering discs. She had been thinking how not so long ago her
+son Thady used to come whistling home to her across the bog when the
+shadows stretched their longest. The sunset still came punctually every
+evening, but had grown wonderfully lonesome since the kick of a
+cross-tempered cart-horse had silenced his whistling and stopped his
+home-coming for ever. Thady's whistling had been indifferent, considered
+as music, yet it had sounded pleasant in her ears, and Mrs. M'Gurk's
+trouble seemed to her not very serious. However, she replied to her
+complaint: "Ah, sure, woman dear, like enough she might be here
+to-morra."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And if she is, she'll be very apt to not get e'er a chuck or a chucken
+off of me&mdash;not the feather of a one," said Mrs. M'Gurk, resentfully,
+"plenty of other things I have to do besides wastin' me time waitin' for
+people that don't know their own minds from one minyit to the next, and
+makin' a fool of meself star-gazin' along the road, and ne'er a fut
+stirrin' on it no more than if it was desolit wildernesses."</p>
+
+<p>She would not for the world have alluded to her expenditure of more
+material resources, and accordingly had to explain her vexation by
+putting a fictitious value upon her time, which, in reality, was just
+then drearily superabundant.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure," suggested Mrs. Kilfoyle, "the poor woman maybe was kep' at home
+some way, and she wid ivery intintion to be comin'. I declare, now,
+you'd whiles think things knew what you was manin' in your mind, and riz
+themselves up agin it a' purpose to prevint you, they happen that
+conthr&aacute;ry."</p>
+
+<p>As Mrs. M'Gurk's experience did not dispose her to gainsay this
+proposition, and she was nevertheless disinclined to be mollified by it,
+she likewise had recourse to generalities, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"'Deed then it's welcome anybody is to stop<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> away if they're wishful,
+hindered or no. Long sorry I'd be to have people disthressin' themselves
+streelin' after <i>me</i>." And she added, rather inconsistently, the remark
+already mentioned: "But the likes of this place I never witnessed. You
+might as well be livin' at the bottom of the blackest ould boghoule
+there, for e'er a chance you have to be seein' a bit of company."</p>
+
+<p>"And it's yourself 'ud make the fine sizeable waterask, ma'am," a
+high-pitched voice said suddenly from within doors, causing Mrs. M'Gurk
+to start and peer into the dark opening behind her, somewhat taken aback
+at finding that she had had an unsuspected audience, which is always
+more or less of a shock. The first object she descried through the hazy
+dusk was the figure of the old woman known to Lisconnel as Ody
+Rafferty's aunt, but in fact so related to his father, sitting with her
+short black dudeen by the delicate pink and white embers, for the
+evening was warm and the fire low. Ody himself was leaning against the
+wall, critically examining Brian Kilfoyle's blackthorn, and forming a
+poor opinion of it with considerable satisfaction. Not that he bore
+Brian any ill-will, but because this is his method of attaining to
+contentment with his own possessions.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Whethen now and is it yourself that's in it, Ody Rafferty?" said Mrs.
+M'Gurk, as she recognised him. "And what talk have you out of you about
+waterasks? You're the great man, bedad."</p>
+
+<p>"Me aunt's lookin' in on Mrs. Kilfoyle, ma'am," said Ody, "be raison of
+Brian bein' off to the Town. And right enough you and me knows what's
+took him there; and so does Norah Finegan. Och, good luck to the pair of
+thim."</p>
+
+<p>"Coortin'," said his aunt, who preferred to put things briefly and
+clearly. "But I was tellin' Mrs. Kilfoyle to not be frettin', for sure
+God is good, and they'll be apt to keep her in it all's one."</p>
+
+<p>"Goodness may pity you, woman," said Mrs. M'Gurk. "Brian 'ud as lief
+take and bring home a she <i>hyenna</i>, and it ravin' mad, as anybody 'ud
+look crooked at his mother, I very well know."</p>
+
+<p>"Norah's a rael dacint little slip of a girl," Mrs. Kilfoyle said
+tranquilly, considering that her son's character needed no certificate.
+But the old woman only grunted doubtfully, and said: "Och, is she?" For
+she had been a superfluous aunt so long that she found it hard to
+believe in anything better than toleration.</p>
+
+<p>"Talkin' of company," said Ody, to change the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> subject&mdash;which his aunt's
+remarks often disposed people to do&mdash;"Mad Bell's just after shankin'
+back wid herself; she's below colloguin' wid Big Anne. It's a fine long
+tramp she's took this time; so if she was in the humour she'd a right to
+ha' plinty to be tellin' us."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now, I'm glad the crathur's home," said Mrs. Kilfoyle. "It's
+lonesome in a manner to think of the little ould bein' rovin' about the
+world like a wisp of hay gathered up on the win'; for all, tubbe sure,
+it's her own fancy starts her off."</p>
+
+<p>"I won'er where to she wint this time," said Mrs. M'Gurk.</p>
+
+<p>"You might as well," said Ody, "be won'erin' where a one of thim
+saygulls goes, when it gives a flourish of its ould flippers and away
+wid itself head foremost&mdash;barrin', in coorse, that Mad Bell's bound to
+keep on the dhry land at all ivents. But from Sallinbeg ways she come
+this evenin', singin' 'Garry Owen' most powerful&mdash;I know that much."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, then she might be chance ha' been as far as Laraghmena, and ha'
+seen a sight of me brother Mick and Theresa," Mrs. Kilfoyle said, with
+wistful interest. For at Lisconnel we still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> look not a little to the
+reports brought by stray travellers for news of absent friends, much as
+we did before the days of penny posts and mail trains. And our
+geographical lore is vague enough to impede us but slightly in our hopes
+of obtaining information from any quarter. Only the probability seems to
+be increased if the newcomer arrives from the direction in which our
+friend departed.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure she might so," said Ody. "But niver a tell she'll tell onless she
+happens to take the notion in the quare ould head of her. It's just be
+the road of humouring her now and agin, and piecin' her odd stories
+together, you git e'er a discovery, so to spake, of the places she's
+after bein' in."</p>
+
+<p>The scenes of Mad Bell's wanderings did indeed reveal themselves to her
+neighbours confusedly and dispersedly in her fitful and capricious
+narrative, like glimpses of a landscape caught through a shifting mist.
+As this sometimes distorts the objects that loom within it, so Mad
+Bell's statements were occasionally misleading. Once, for example, she
+threw the Quigley family into most distracted concern by her accounts of
+the terrific "shootin' and murdherin' and massacreein'" she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> had seen in
+progress down away at Glasgannon, where Joe Quigley had taken service
+with a strong farmer; these disturbances being in reality nothing more
+than a muster of the county militia.</p>
+
+<p>"But I can tell you how she thravelled a good step of the way home," Ody
+now continued, "for she tould me herself. The Tinkers gave her a lift in
+their ould cart. Somewheres beyant Rosbride she met wid them; glory be
+to goodness 'twasn't any nearer here they were, the ould thieves of sin.
+Howane'er, <i>Mrs. M'Gurk</i> belike 'ud be wishful to see thim comin' along.
+Fine company they'd be for anybody begorrah. Troth, it's the quare ugly
+boghoule she'd find the aquil of thim at the bottom of."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. M'Gurk, however, said protestingly, "Och, wirrasthrew, man, don't
+be talkin' of the Tinkers. They'd a right to not be let set fut widin
+tin mile of any dacint place. Thim or the likes of any such rogues."</p>
+
+<p>And Mrs. Kilfoyle said, "I'd liefer than a great deal they kep' out of
+it. Ne'er a one of the lot of them I ever beheld but had the eyes
+rowlin' in his head wid villiny. And the childer, goodness help them, do
+be worse than the grown people."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And Ody Rafferty's aunt said, "Bad cess to the whole of them."</p>
+
+<p>For in Lisconnel nobody has a good word to say of the Tinkers.</p>
+
+<p>The tribe and their many delinquencies have even supplied us with a bit
+of the proverbial philosophy in which not a little of our local history
+is epitomised. The saying, "As pat as thievin' to a tinker" is probably
+quoted among us as frequently as any other, except, perhaps, one which
+refers to Jerry Dunne's basket. This latter had its origin in a certain
+event, not like the former in the long-accumulating observation of
+habits and propensities, and to explain it therefore is to write a
+chapter of our chronicles. Moreover, the event in question is otherwise
+not unimportant from a sociological point of view, because it is very
+likely to have been the first morning call ever made at Lisconnel.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>JERRY DUNNE'S BASKET</h3>
+
+
+<p>So it is worth while to tell the reason why people at Lisconnel
+sometimes respond with irony to a question: "What have I got? Sure, all
+that Jerry Dunne had in his basket." The saying is of respectable
+antiquity, for it originated while Bessy Joyce, who died a year or so
+back, at "a great ould age entirely," was still but a slip of a girl. In
+those days her mother used often to say regretfully that she didn't know
+when she was well off, like Rody O'Rourke's pigs, quoting a proverb of
+obscurer antecedents. When she did so she was generally thinking of the
+fine little farm in the county Clare, which they had not long since
+exchanged for the poor tiny holding away in the heart of the black bog;
+and of how, among the green fields, and thriving beasts, and other good
+things of Clonmena, she had allowed her content to be marred by such a
+detail as her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> Bessy's refusal to favour the suit of Jerry Dunne.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Joyce eagerly desired a brilliant alliance for Bessy, who was
+rather an important daughter, being the only grown-up girl, and a very
+pretty one, among a troop of younger brethren; so it seemed contrary
+enough that she wouldn't look the same side of the road as young Jerry,
+who was farming prosperously on his own account, and whose family were
+old friends and neighbours, and real respectable people, including a
+first cousin nothing less than a parish priest. Yet Bessy ran away and
+hid herself in as ingeniously unlikely places as a strayed calf whenever
+she heard of his approach, and if brought by chance into his society
+became most discouragingly deaf and dumb.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that at the time I speak of Bessy's prospects fully entitled
+her to as opulent a match, and no one apparently foresaw how speedily
+they would be overcast by her father's improvidence. But Andy Joyce had
+an ill-advised predilection for seeing things what he called "dacint and
+proper" about him, and it led him into several imprudent acts. For
+instance, he built some highly superior sheds in the bawn, to the
+bettering, no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> doubt, of his cattle's condition, but very little to his
+own purpose, which he would indeed have served more advantageously by
+spending the money they cost him at Moriarty's shebeen. Nor was he left
+without due warning of the consequences likely to result from such
+courses. The abrupt raising of his rent by fifty per cent, was a broad
+hint which most men would have taken; and it did keep Andy quiet,
+ruefully, for a season or two. Then, however, having again saved up a
+trifle, he could not resist the temptation to drain the swampy corner of
+the farthest river-field, which was as kind a bit of land as you could
+wish, only for the water lying on it, and in which he afterwards raised
+himself a remarkably fine crop of white oats. The sight of them "done
+his heart good," he said, exultantly, nothing recking that it was the
+last touch of farmer's pride he would ever feel. Yet on the next
+quarter-day the Joyces received notice to quit, and their landlord
+determined to keep the vacated holding in his own hands; those new sheds
+were just the thing for his young stock. Andy, in fact, had done his
+best to improve himself off the face of the earth, and he should
+therefore have been thankful to retain a foothold, even in a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+loose-jointed, rush-roofed cabin away at stony Lisconnel. Whether
+thankful or no, there, at any rate, he presently found himself
+established with all his family, and the meagre remnant of his hastily
+sold-off gear, and the black doors of the "house" seeming to loom ahead
+whenever he looked into the murky future.</p>
+
+<p>The first weeks and months of their new adversity passed slowly and
+heavily for the transplanted household, more especially for Andy and his
+wife, who had outgrown a love of paddling in bogholes, and had acquired
+a habit of wondering "what at all 'ud become of the childer, the
+crathurs." One shrill-blasted March morning Andy trudged off to the fair
+down below at Duffclane&mdash;not that he had any business to transact there,
+unless we reckon as such a desire to gain a respite from regretful
+boredom. He but partially succeeded in doing this, and returned at dusk
+so fagged and dispirited that he had not energy to relate his scraps of
+news until he was half through his plate of stirabout. Then he observed
+"I seen a couple of boys from home in it."</p>
+
+<p>"Whethen now, to think of that," said Mrs. Joyce with mournful interest,
+"which of them was it?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"The one of them was Terence Kilfoyle," said Andy.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Joyce's interest flagged, for young Kilfoyle was merely a
+good-looking lad with the name of being rather wild. "Ah sure <i>he</i> might
+as well be in one place as another," she said indifferently. "Bessy,
+honey, as you're done, just throw the scraps to the white hin where
+she's sittin'."</p>
+
+<p>"He sez he's thinkin' to settle hereabouts," said Andy; "I tould him
+he'd a right to go thry his fortin somewhere outlandish, but he didn't
+seem to fancy the idee, and small blame to him. A man's bound to get his
+heart broke one way or the other anywheres, as far as I can see. I met
+Jerry Dunne too."</p>
+
+<p>"Och and did you indeed?" said Mrs. Joyce, kindling into eagerness
+again.</p>
+
+<p>Jerry had been absent from Clonmena at the time of their flitting, and
+they had heard nothing of him since; but she still cherished a flicker
+of hope in his connection, which the tidings of his appearance in the
+neighbourhood fanned and fed.</p>
+
+<p>"And he's quit out of it himself," Andy continued, "for the ould uncle
+of his he's been stoppin' wid this while back at Duffclane's after dyin'
+and lavin' him a fine farm and a hantle of money, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> I dunno what all
+besides. So it's there he's goin' to live, and he's gave up the ould
+place at Clonmena, as well he may, and no loss to him on it, for he sez
+himself he niver spent a pinny over it beyont what he'd be druv to, if
+he wanted to get e'er a crop out of it at all, and keep things together
+in any fashion: he wasn't such a fool." Andy hesitated, as if on the
+brink of a painful theme, and resumed with an effort: "He's bought
+Magpie and the two two-year-olds off of Peter Martin. Chape enough he
+got them, too, though he had to give ten shillin's a head more for them
+than Martin ped me."</p>
+
+<p>"Mavrone, but some people have the luck," said Mrs. Joyce.</p>
+
+<p>"And Jerry bid me tell you," said Andy, the memory of his lost cattle
+still saddening his tone, "that he might be steppin' up here to see you
+to-morra or next day."</p>
+
+<p>At this Mrs. Joyce's face suddenly brightened, as if she had been
+summoned to share Jerry Dunne's good luck. She felt almost as if that
+had actually happened. For his visit could surely signify nothing else
+than that he meant to continue his suit; and under the circumstances,
+Bessy's misliking was a piece of folly not to be taken into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> account.
+Besides that, the girl, she thought, looked quite heartened up by the
+news. So she replied to her husband: "'Deed then, he'll be very
+welcome," and the sparkle was in her eyes all the rest of the evening.</p>
+
+<p>On the morrow, which was a bright morning with a far-off pale blue sky,
+Mrs. Joyce hurried over her readying-up, that she might be prepared for
+her possible visitor. She put on her best clothes, and as her wardrobe
+had not yet fallen to a level with her fortune, she was able to array
+herself in a strong steel-grey mohair gown, a black silk apron with
+three rows of velvet ribbon on it besides the binding, a fine small
+woollen shawl of very brilliant scarlet and black plaid, with a pinkish
+cornelian brooch to pin it at the throat, all surmounted by a snowy
+high-caul cap, in those days not yet out of date at Lisconnel, where
+fashions lag somewhat. She noticed, well-pleased, Bessy's willingness to
+fall in with the suggestion that she should re-arrange her hair and
+change her gown after the morning's work was done; and the inference
+drawn grew stronger, when, for the first time since their troubles, the
+girl began to sing "Moll Dhuv in Glanna" while she coiled up her long
+tresses.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All that forenoon Mrs. Joyce had happy dreams about the mending of the
+family fortunes, which would be effected by Bessy's marriage with Jerry
+Dunne. When her neighbour, Mrs. Ryan, looked in, she could not forbear
+mentioning the expected call, and was further elated because Mrs. Ryan
+at once remarked: "Sure, 'twill be Bessy he's after," though she
+herself, of course, disclaimed the idea, saying: "Och musha, ma'am, not
+at all." The Ryans were tenants who had also been put out of Clonmena,
+and they occupied a cabin adjoining the Joyces', these two dwellings,
+backed by the slopes of the Knockawn, forming the nucleus of Lisconnel.</p>
+
+<p>About noon, Paddy, the eldest boy, approached at a hand gallop,
+bestriding a donkey which belonged to the gang of men who were still
+working on the unfinished road. As soon as the beast reached the
+open-work stone wall of the potato-field it resolutely scraped its rider
+off, a thing it had been vainly wishing to do all along the fenceless
+track. Paddy, however, alighted unconcerned among the clattering stones,
+and ran on with his tidings. These were to the effect that he was "after
+seein' Jerry Dunne shankin' up from Duffclane ways, a goodish bit below
+the indin' of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> road, and he wid a great big basket carryin', fit to
+hould a young turf-stack."</p>
+
+<p>The intelligence created an agreeable excitement, which was undoubtedly
+heightened by the fact of the basket. "Very belike," said Mrs. Ryan,
+"he's bringin' somethin' to you, or it might be Bessy." And while Mrs.
+Joyce rejoined deprecatingly: "Ah sure, woman alive, what would the poor
+lad be troublin' himself to bring us all this way?" she was really
+answering her own question with a dozen flattering conjectures. The
+basket must certainly contain <i>something</i>, and there were so few by any
+means probable things that would not at this pinch have come acceptably
+to the Joyces' household, where the heavy pitaty sack grew light with
+such alarming rapidity, and the little hoard of corn dwindled, and the
+childer's appetites seemed to wax larger day by day. She had not quite
+made up her mind, when Jerry arrived, whether she would wish for a bit
+of bacon&mdash;poor Andy missed an odd taste of it so bad&mdash;or for another
+couple of hens, which would be uncommonly useful now that her own few
+had all left off laying.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ryan having discreetly withdrawn, Mrs. Joyce stood alone in her
+dark doorway to receive her guest, and, through all her flutter of hope,
+she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> felt a bitter twinge of housewifely chagrin at being discovered in
+such miserable quarters. The black earth flooring at her threshold
+gritted hatefully under her feet, and the gusts whistling through the
+many chinks of her rough walls seemed to skirl derisively. She was
+nevertheless resolved to put the best possible face upon the situation.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Mrs. Joyce, ma'am, and how's yourself this long while?" said
+Jerry Dunne, coming up. "Bedad I'm glad to see you so finely, and it's
+an iligant place you've got up here."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, it's not too bad whatever," said Mrs. Joyce, "on'y 'twas a great
+upset on us turnin' out of the ould house at home. Himself had a right
+to ha' left things the way he found them, and then it mightn't iver ha'
+happened him. But sure, poor man, he niver thought he'd be ruinatin' us
+wid his conthrivances. It's God's will. Be steppin' inside to the fire,
+Jerry lad; there's a thin feel yet in the win'."</p>
+
+<p>Jerry, stepping inside, deposited his basket, which did not appear to be
+very heavy, rather disregardfully by him on the floor. Mrs. Joyce would
+not allow herself to glance in its direction. It struck her that the
+young man seemed awkward<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> and flustered, and she considered this a
+favourable symptom.</p>
+
+<p>"And what way's Mr. Joyce?" said Jerry. "He was lookin' grand whin I
+seen him yisterday."</p>
+
+<p>"'Deed, he gits his health middlin' well enough, glory be to goodness,"
+she said; "somewhiles he'll be frettin' a bit, thinkin' of diff'rent
+things, and when I tell him he'd better lave botherin' his head wid
+them, he sez he might as aisy bid a blast of win' to not be blowin'
+through a houle. Och, Andy's a quare man. He's out and about now
+somewheres on the farm."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Joyce put a spaciousness into her tone wholly disproportionate to
+their screed of tussocks and boulders; and then paused, hoping that the
+next inquiry might relate to Bessy.</p>
+
+<p>But what young Jerry said was, "You've got a great run, anyway, for the
+fowls."</p>
+
+<p>The irrelevance of the remark disappointed Mrs. Joyce, and she replied a
+little tartly: "A great run you may call it, for begorrah our hearts is
+broke huntin' after the crathurs, and they strayin' off wid themselves
+over the width of the bog there, till you've as much chance of catchin'
+them as the sparks flyin' up the chimney."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"That's unhandy, now," said Jerry. He sat for some moments reflectively
+ruffling up his flaxen hair with both hands, and then he said, "Have you
+the big white hin yit that you got from me a while ago?"</p>
+
+<p>"We have so bedad," said Mrs. Joyce, not loth to enlarge upon this
+subject. "Sure we made a shift to bring a few of the best chickens we
+had along wid us, and sorry we'd ha' been to lose her, and she a
+won'erful layer, and after you a-givin' her to us in a prisint that
+way."</p>
+
+<p>"There was some talk that time," said Jerry, "about me and Bessy."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, true for you, there was," said Mrs. Joyce, in eager assent, "plinty
+of talk." She would have added more, but he was evidently in a hurry to
+speak again.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, there's none now," he said. "Things is diff'rent altogether. If
+I'd ha' known, I'd ha' kep' the hin. The fact of the matter is I'm about
+gettin' married to Sally Coghlan, that's me poor uncle's wife's niece.
+He's after leavin' her what he had saved up. She's a fine figure of a
+girl as iver you saw, and as good as gould, and the bit of lan' and the
+bit of money had a right to go the one way. So I was thinkin', Mrs.
+Joyce, I might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> as well be takin' home the ould him wid me&mdash;things bein'
+diff'rent now, and no talk of Bessy. Sally has a great wish for a white
+hin, and we've ne'er a one of that sort at our place. I've brought a wad
+of hay in the basket meself, for 'fraid yous might be short of it up
+here." Jerry gave a kick to the basket, which betrayed the flimsy nature
+of its contents by rolling over with a wobble on its side.</p>
+
+<p>At this critical moment Mrs. Joyce's pride rallied loyally to the rescue
+of her dignity and self-respect, proving as effectual as the ice-film
+which keeps the bleakest pool unruffled by the wildest storm wing. With
+the knell of all her hope clanging harshly in her ears, she smiled
+serenely, and said gaily: "Ay bedad, himself was tellin' us somethin'
+about it last night. Sure, I'm rael glad to hear tell of your good luck,
+and I wish you joy of it. And will you be gettin' married agin
+Shrovetide? Och, that's grand. But the white hin now&mdash;the on'y thing is
+the crathur's been sittin' on a clutch of eggs since Monday week. So
+what are we to do at all?"</p>
+
+<p>"There's hapes of room for the whole of them in the basket, for that
+matter," Jerry suggested promptly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Ah, sure, it's distroyed they'd be, jogglin' along, and the crathur
+herself 'ud go distracted entirely; sorra a bit of good you'd get of
+her. But look here, Mr. Dunne, I've got another out there as like her as
+if the both of them had come out of the one egg, and you could be takin'
+that instid. It's a lucky thing I didn't set her to sit the way I was
+intendin'; on'y I niver could get a clutch gathered for her, be raison
+of the lads aitin' up the eggs on me. Sure, I can't keep them from the
+little bosthoons when they be hungry."</p>
+
+<p>"'Twould be all the same thing to me, in coorse, supposin' she was
+equally so good," Jerry admitted with caution.</p>
+
+<p>"Ivery feather she is," said Mrs. Joyce. "I seen her runnin' about there
+just this minute; you can be lookin' at her yourself."</p>
+
+<p>She went towards the door as she spoke, and was somewhat taken aback to
+perceive her husband leaning against the wall close outside. How much of
+the discussion he might have heard, she could not tell. The white hen
+also appeared within easy reach, daintily resplendent under the sunshine
+on a background of black turf. And Mrs. Ryan, standing darkly framed in
+her doorway, was very certain to be an interested observer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> of events.
+For the moment Mrs. Joyce's uppermost anxiety was to avoid any betrayal
+of discomfiture, and she accordingly said in a loud and cheerful tone:</p>
+
+<p>"Och, and are you there, Andy? Jerry Dunne's wishful for the loan of a
+clockin' hin, so I'm about catchin' him the young white one to take home
+wid him."</p>
+
+<p>But, to her intense disgust, Jerry, who had followed her with his
+basket, said remonstrantly: "Whethen now, Mrs. Joyce, the way I
+understand the matter there's no talk in it of borryin' at all. I'm on'y
+takin' her back instid of the ould one, and I question would any
+raisonable body stand me out I don't own her be rights. It's an unjust
+thing to be spakin' of loans."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Joyce was so dumbfounded by this rebuff that she could only hide
+her confusion by displaying an exaggerated activity in the capture of
+the hen.</p>
+
+<p>Her husband, however, said blandly, "Och, don't make yourself onaisy,
+man. Loan or no loan, you needn't be under any apperhinsion we'll be
+comin' after her wid a basket. Divil a much. Stir yourself, Kitty, and
+be clappin' her in under the lid. He's in a hurry to get home to his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+sweetheart wid the iligant prisint he's after pickin' up for her. Ay,
+that's right, woman alive; give a tie to the bit of string, and then
+there's nothin' to be delayin' him."</p>
+
+<p>After this everybody said good-bye with much politeness and affability,
+though withal a certain air of despatch, as if they were conscious of
+handling rather perishable goods. And when Jerry was beyond earshot,
+Andy, looking after him, remarked, "I niver liked a bone in that
+fellow's skin. Himself and his ould basket. The lads 'ill be prisintly
+comin' in to their dinners."</p>
+
+<p>"D'you know where Bessy is?" said Mrs. Joyce, her heart sinking still
+lower at the thought of the disappointment, which she had presumably
+been helping to prepare for her daughter.</p>
+
+<p>"When I seen her a while back, she was out there wid the childer,
+discoorsin' to Terence Kilfoyle," Andy said contentedly.</p>
+
+<p>"Musha, good gracious, Terence Kilfoyle, and what's <i>he</i> come after?"
+she said in a bitter tone.</p>
+
+<p>"He stepped up wid a couple of pounds of fresh butter and a dozen of
+eggs. He said he minded Bessy havin' a fancy for duck-eggs, and he
+thought we mightn't happen to have e'er a one up here. She seemed as
+pleased as anythin'.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> But if you ax <i>me</i>, Kitty," he said with a
+twinkle, "I've a notion he's come after somethin' more than our ould
+hin."</p>
+
+<p>"He's a great young rogue," said Mrs. Joyce. Yet there was an accent of
+relief in her voice, and on her face a reflection of her husband's
+smile.</p>
+
+<p>And Jerry Dunne's basket still occupies its niche in the stores of our
+proverbial philosophy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>MRS. KILFOYLE'S CLOAK</h3>
+
+
+<p>The opprobrious proverb already mentioned is not the only permanent mark
+of unpopularity that the Tinkers have earned for themselves at
+Lisconnel. Their very name has become a term of reproach among us, so
+that "an ould tinker" is recognised as an appropriate epithet for any
+troublesome beast or disagreeable neighbour. If they were not
+case-hardened by long experience, they would surely be mortified
+sometimes at the reception with which they meet almost wherever they go.
+The approach of the two queer vehicles in which they now generally
+travel is watched by displeased eyes all over our countryside, and they
+are so to speak lighted on their way by the gleam of suspicious or
+resentful glances. And it must be admitted that their evil reputation
+has not been bestowed upon them gratuitously. According to Ody Rafferty,
+"The like of such a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> clanjamfry of thievin' drunken miscreants, you
+wouldn't aisy get together, if you had a spring-trap set for them at the
+Ould Fellow's front door for a month of Sundays. And if himself didn't
+do a hard day's work the time he was consthructin' them, he niver done
+one in his life, and that's a fac'." But Ody is apt to be particularly
+severe in his strictures upon the Tinkers, because he feels an
+aggravated form of rivalry existing between him and them. For the
+wiliness which is understood to be Ody's forte also pre-eminently
+characterises many of the Tinkers' nefarious proceedings, and this makes
+it seem to him that they not only set their wits against his, but throw
+discredit upon his favourite quality by the glaring moral defects which
+they exhibit in conjunction with it. One's pleasure in being described
+admiringly as "the ould boyo that's in it," is much diminished when one
+hears the same thing said bitterly of some slieveen who has filched a
+poor body's meal bag, or run off with a lone widdy woman's fowl.</p>
+
+<p>Still, although the Tinkers' name has become a by-word among us through
+a long series of petty offences rather than any one flagrant crime,
+there is a notable misdeed on record against them,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> which has never been
+forgotten in the lapse of many years. It was perpetrated soon after the
+death of Mrs. Kilfoyle's mother, the Widow Joyce, an event which is but
+dimly recollected now at Lisconnel, as nearly half a century has gone
+by. She did not very long survive her husband, and he had left his roots
+behind in his little place at Clonmena, where, as we know, he had farmed
+not wisely, but too well, and had been put out of it for his pains to
+expend his energy upon our oozy black sods and stark-white boulders. But
+instead he moped about fretting for his fair green fields and few
+proudly-cherished beasts&mdash;especially the little old Kerry cow. And at
+his funeral the neighbours said: "Ah bedad, poor man, God help him, he
+niver held up his head agin from that good day to this."</p>
+
+<p>When Mrs. Joyce felt that it behoved her to settle her affairs, she
+found that the most important possession she had to dispose of was her
+large cloak. She had acquired it at the prosperous time of her marriage,
+and it was a very superior specimen of its kind, its dark-blue cloth
+being superfine, and its ample capes and capacious hood being
+double-lined and quilted, and stitched in a way which I cannot pretend
+to describe, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> which made it a most substantial and handsome garment.
+If Mrs. Joyce had been left entirely to her own choice in the matter, I
+think she would have bequeathed it to her younger daughter Theresa,
+notwithstanding that custom clearly designated Bessy Kilfoyle, the
+eldest of the family, as the heiress. For she said to herself that poor
+Bessy had her husband and childer to consowl her, any way, but little
+Theresa, the crathur, had ne'er such a thing at all, and wouldn't have,
+not she, God love her. "And the back of me hand to some I could name."
+It seemed to her that to leave the child the cloak would be almost like
+keeping a warm wing spread over her in the cold wide world; and there
+was no fear that Bessy would take it amiss.</p>
+
+<p>But Theresa herself protested strongly against such a disposition,
+urging for one thing that sure she'd be lost in it entirely if ever she
+put it on, a not unfounded objection, as Theresa was several sizes
+smaller than Bessy, and even she fell far short of her mother in stature
+and portliness. Theresa also said confidently with a sinking heart: "But
+sure, anyhow, mother jewel, what matter about it? 'Twill be all gone to
+houles and flitters and thraneens, and so it will, plase goodness,
+afore<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> there's any talk of anybody else wearin' it except your own ould
+self." And she expressed much the same conviction one day to her
+next-door neighbour, old Biddy Ryan, to whom she had run in for the loan
+of a sup of sour milk, which Mrs. Joyce fancied. To Biddy's sincere
+regret she could offer Theresa barely a skimpy noggin of milk, and only
+a meagre shred of encouragement; and by way of eking out the latter with
+its sorry substitute consolation, she said as she tilted the jug
+perpendicularly to extract its last drop:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sure, me dear, I do be sayin' me prayers for her every sun goes
+over our heads that she might be left wid you this great while yet;
+'deed I do so. But ah, acushla, if we could be keepin' people
+that-a-way, would there be e'er a funeral iver goin' black on the road
+at all at all? I'm thinkin' there's scarce a one livin', and he as ould
+and foolish and little-good-for as you plase, but some crathur'ill be
+grudgin' him to his grave, that's himself may be all the while wishin'
+he was in it. Or, morebetoken, how can we tell what quare ugly misfortin
+thim that's took is took out of the road of, that we should be as good
+as biddin' thim stay till it comes to ruinate them? So it's prayin' away
+I am, honey," said old Biddy,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> whom Theresa could not help hating heart
+sickly. "But like enough the Lord might know better than to be mindin' a
+word I say."</p>
+
+<p>And it seemed that He did; at any way the day soon came when the heavy
+blue cloak passed into Mrs. Kilfoyle's possession.</p>
+
+<p>At that time it was clear, still autumn weather, with just a sprinkle of
+frost, white on the wayside grass, like the wraith of belated moonlight,
+when the sun rose, and shimmering into rainbow stars by noon. But about
+a month later the winter swooped suddenly on Lisconnel: with wild winds
+and cold rain that made crystal-silver streaks down the purple of the
+great mountain-heads peering in over our bogland.</p>
+
+<p>So one perishing Saturday Mrs. Kilfoyle made up her mind that she would
+wear her warm legacy on the bleak walk to Mass next morning, and
+reaching it down from where it was stowed away among the rafters wrapped
+in an old sack, she shook it respectfully out of its straight-creased
+folds. As she did so she noticed that the binding of the hood had ripped
+in one place, and that the lining was fraying out, a mishap which should
+be promptly remedied before it spread any further. She was not a very
+expert needlewoman, and she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> thought she had better run over the way to
+consult Mrs. O'Driscoll, then a young matron, esteemed the handiest and
+most helpful person in Lisconnel.</p>
+
+<p>"It's the nathur of her to be settin' things straight wherever she
+goes," Mrs. Kilfoyle said to herself as she stood in her doorway waiting
+for the rain to clear off, and looking across the road to the sodden
+roof which sheltered her neighbour's head. It has long been lying low,
+vanquished by a trouble which even she could not set to rights, and some
+of the older people say that things have gone a little crookeder in
+Lisconnel ever since.</p>
+
+<p>The shower was a vicious one, with the sting of sleet and hail in its
+drops, pelted about by gusts that ruffled up the puddles into ripples,
+all set on end, like the feathers of a frightened hen. The hens
+themselves stood disconsolately sheltering under the bank, mostly on one
+leg, as if they preferred to keep up the slightest possible connection
+with such a very damp and disagreeable earth. You could not see far in
+any direction for the fluttering sheets of mist, and a stranger who had
+been coming along the road from Duffclane, stepped out of them abruptly
+quite close, to Mrs. Kilfoyle's door, before she knew that there was
+anybody<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> near. He was a tall, elderly man, gaunt and grizzled, very
+ragged, and so miserable-looking that Mrs. Kilfoyle could have felt
+nothing but compassion for him had he not carried over his shoulder a
+bunch of shiny cans, which was to her mind as satisfactory a passport as
+a ticket-of-leave. For although these were yet rather early days at
+Lisconnel, the Tinkers had already begun to establish their reputation.
+So when he stopped in front of her and said: "Good-day, ma'am," she only
+replied distantly, "It's a hardy mornin'," and hoped he would move on.
+But he said: "It's cruel could, ma'am," and continued to stand looking
+at her with wide and woful eyes, in which she conjectured&mdash;erroneously
+as it happened&mdash;hunger for warmth or food. Under these circumstances
+what could be done by a woman who was conscious of owning a
+redly-glowing hearth with a big black pot, fairly well filled, clucking
+and bobbing upon it? To possess such wealth as this, and think seriously
+of withholding a share from anybody who urges the incontestable claim of
+wanting it, is a mood altogether foreign to Lisconnel, where the
+responsibilities of property are, no doubt, very imperfectly understood.
+Accordingly Mrs. Kilfoyle said to the tattered tramp:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> "Ah, thin, step
+inside and have a couple of hot pitaties." And when he accepted the
+invitation without much alacrity, as if he had something else on his
+mind, she picked for him out of the steam two of the biggest potatoes,
+whose earth-coloured skins, cracking, showed a fair flouriness within;
+and she shook a little heap of salt, the only relish she had, on to the
+chipped white plate as she handed it to him, saying, "Sit you down be
+the fire there, and git a taste of the heat."</p>
+
+<p>Then she lifted her old shawl over her head, and ran out to see where at
+all Brian and Thady were gettin' their deaths on her under the pours of
+rain; and as she passed the Keoghs' adjacent door&mdash;which was afterwards
+the Sheridan's, whence their Larry departed so reluctantly&mdash;young Mrs.
+Keogh called her to come in and look at "the child," who being a new and
+unique possession was liable to develop alarmingly strange symptoms, and
+had now "woke up wid his head that hot, you might as well put your hand
+on the hob of the grate." Mrs. Kilfoyle stayed only long enough to
+suggest, as a possible remedy, a drop of two-milk whey. "But ah sure,
+woman dear, where at all 'ud we come by that, wid the crathur of a goat
+scarce wettin' the bottom of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> pan?" and to draw reassuring omens
+from the avidity with which the invalid grabbed at a sugared crust. In
+fact, she was less than five minutes out of her house; but when she
+returned to it, she found it empty. First she noted with a moderate
+thrill of surprise that her visitor had gone away leaving his potatoes
+untouched, and next, with a rough shock of dismay, that her cloak no
+longer lay on the window seat where she had left it. From that moment
+she never felt any real doubts about what had befallen her, though for
+some time she kept on trying to conjure them up, and searched wildly
+round and round and round her little room, like a distracted bee strayed
+into a hollow furze-bush, before she sped over to Mrs. O'Driscoll with
+the news of her loss.</p>
+
+<p>It spread rapidly through Lisconnel, and brought the neighbours together
+exclaiming and condoling, though not in great force, as there was a fair
+going on down beyant, which nearly all the men and some of the women had
+attended. This was accounted cruel unlucky, as it left the place without
+any one able-bodied and active enough to go in pursuit of the thief. A
+prompt start might have overtaken him, especially as he was said to be
+"a thrifle lame-futted," though Mrs. M'Gurk,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> who had seen him come down
+the hill, opined that "'twasn't the sort of lameness 'ud hinder the
+miscreant of steppin' out, on'y a quare manner of flourish he had in a
+one of his knees, as if he was gatherin' himself up to make an offer at
+a grasshopper's lep, and then thinkin' better of it."</p>
+
+<p>Little Thady Kilfoyle reported that he had met the strange man a bit
+down the road, "leggin' it along at a great rate, wid a black rowl of
+somethin' under his arm that he looked to be crumplin' up as small as he
+could"&mdash;the word "crumpling" went acutely to Mrs. Kilfoyle's heart&mdash;and
+some long-sighted people declared that they could still catch glimpses
+of a receding figure through the hovering fog on the way towards
+Sallinbeg.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd think he'd be beyant seein' afore now," said Mrs. Kilfoyle, who
+stood in the rain, the disconsolate centre of the group about her door;
+all women and children except old Johnny Keogh, who was so bothered and
+deaf, that he grasped new situations slowly and feebly, and had now an
+impression of somebody's house being on fire. "He must ha' took off wid
+himself the instiant me back was turned, for ne'er a crumb had he
+touched of the pitaties."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Maybe he'd that much shame in him," said Mrs. O'Driscoll.</p>
+
+<p>"They'd a right to ha' choked him, troth and they had," said Ody
+Rafferty's aunt.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it chokin'?" said young Mrs. M'Gurk, bitterly. "Sure the bigger
+thief a body is the more he'll thrive on whatever he gits&mdash;you might
+think villiny was as good as butter to people's pitaties&mdash;you might so.
+Shame how are you? Liker he'd ate all he could swally in the last place
+he got the chance of layin' his hands on anythin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Och, woman alive, but it's the fool you were to let him out of your
+sight," said Ody Rafferty's aunt. "If it had been me, I'd niver ha' took
+me eyes off him, for the look of him on'y goin' by made me flesh creep
+upon me bones."</p>
+
+<p>"'Deed was I," said Mrs. Kilfoyle, sorrowfully, "a fine fool. And vexed
+she'd be, real vexed, if she guessed the way it was gone on us, for the
+dear knows what dirty ould rapscallions 'ill get the wearin' of it now.
+Rael vexed she'd be."</p>
+
+<p>This speculation was more saddening than the actual loss of the cloak,
+though that bereft her wardrobe of far and away its most valuable
+property, which should have descended as an heirloom to her little
+Katty, who, however, being at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> present but three months old, lay
+sleeping happily unaware of the cloud that had come over her prospects.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish to goodness a couple of the lads 'ud step home wid themselves
+this minit of time," said Mrs. M'Gurk. "They'd come up wid him yet, and
+take it off of him ready enough. And smash his ugly head for him if he
+would be givin' them any impidence."</p>
+
+<p>"Aye, and 'twould be a rael charity&mdash;the mane baste&mdash;or sling him in one
+of the boghoules," said the elder Mrs. Keogh, a mild-looking little old
+woman. "I'd liefer than nine nine-pennies see thim comin' along. But I'm
+afeard it's early for thim yet."</p>
+
+<p>Everybody's eyes turned, as she spoke, towards the ridge of the
+Knockawn, though with no particular expectation of seeing what they
+wished upon it. But, behold, just at that moment three figures, blurred
+among the grey rain-mists, looming into view.</p>
+
+<p>"Be the powers," said Mrs. M'Gurk, jubilantly, "it's Ody Rafferty
+himself. To your sowls! Now you've a great good chance, ma'am, to be
+gettin' it back. He's the boy 'ill leg it over all before him"&mdash;for in
+those days Ody was lithe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> and limber&mdash;"and it's hard-set the thievin'
+Turk 'ill be to get the better of him at a racin' match&mdash;Hi&mdash;Och." She
+had begun to hail him with a call eager and shrill, which broke off in a
+strangled croak, like a young cock's unsuccessful effort. "Och, murdher,
+murdher, murdher," she said to the bystanders, in a disgusted undertone.
+"I'll give you me misfort'nit word thim other two is the p&oacute;lis."</p>
+
+<p>Now it might seem on the face of things that the arrival of those two
+active and stalwart civil servants would have been welcomed as happening
+just in the nick of time; yet it argues an alien ignorance to suppose
+such a view of the matter by any means possible. The men in invisible
+green tunics belonged completely to the category of pitaty-blights,
+rint-warnin's, fevers, and the like devastators of life, that dog a man
+more or less all through it, but close in on him, a pitiful quarry, when
+the bad seasons come and the childer and the old crathurs are starvin'
+wid the hunger, and his own heart is broke; therefore to accept
+assistance from them in their official capacity would have been a
+proceeding most reprehensibly unnatural. To put a private quarrel or
+injury into the hands of the peelers were a disloyal making<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> of terms
+with the public foe; a condoning of great permanent wrongs for the sake
+of a trivial temporary convenience. Lisconnel has never been skilled in
+the profitable and ignoble art of utilising its enemies. Not that
+anybody was more than vaguely conscious of these sentiments, much less
+attempted to express them in set terms. When a policeman appeared there
+in an inquiring mood, what people said among themselves was: "Musha cock
+him up. I hope he'll get his health till I would be tellin' him," or
+words to that effect; while in reply to his questions they made
+statements superficially so clear and simple, and essentially so
+bewilderingly involved, that the longest experience could do little more
+for a constable than teach him the futility of wasting his time in
+attempts to disentangle them.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it was that when Mrs. Kilfoyle saw who Ody's companions were, she
+bade a regretful adieu to her hopes of recovering her stolen property.
+For how could she set him on the Tinker's felonious track without
+apprising them likewise? You might as well try to huroosh one chicken
+off a rafter and not scare the couple that were huddled beside it. The
+impossibility became more obvious presently as the constables striding
+quickly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> down to where the group of women stood in the rain and wind
+with fluttering shawls and flapping cap-borders, said briskly, "Good-day
+to you all. Did any of yous happen to see e'er a one of them tinkerin'
+people goin' by here this mornin'?"</p>
+
+<p>It was a moment of strong temptation to everybody, but especially to
+Mrs. Kilfoyle, who had in her mind that vivid picture of her precious
+cloak receding from her along the wet road, recklessly wisped up in the
+grasp of as thankless a thievin' black-hearted slieveen as ever stepped,
+and not yet, perhaps, utterly out of reach, though every fleeting
+instant carried it nearer to that hopeless point. However, she and her
+neighbours stood the test unshaken. Mrs. Ryan rolled her eyes
+deliberatively, and said to Mrs. M'Gurk, "The saints bless us, was it
+yisterday or the day before, me dear, you said you seen a couple of them
+below near ould O'Beirne's?"</p>
+
+<p>And Mrs. M'Gurk replied, "Ah, sure, not at all, ma'am, glory be to
+goodness. I couldn't ha' tould you such a thing, for I wasn't next or
+nigh the place. Would it ha' been Ody Rafferty's aunt? She was below
+there fetchin' up a bag of male, and bedad she came home that dhreeped,
+the crathur, you might ha' thought she'd been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> after fishin' it up out
+of the botthom of one of thim boghoules."</p>
+
+<p>And Mrs. Kilfoyle heroically hustled her Thady into the house as she saw
+him on the brink of beginning loudly to relate his encounter with the
+strange man, and desired him to whisht and stay where he was in a manner
+so sternly repressive that he actually remained there as if he had been
+a pebble dropped into a pool, and not, as usual, a cork to bob up again
+immediately.</p>
+
+<p>Then Mrs. M'Gurk made a bold stroke, designed to shake off the hampering
+presence of the professionals, and enable Ody's amateur services to be
+utilised while there was yet time.</p>
+
+<p>"I declare," she said, "now that I think of it, I seen a feller crossin'
+the ridge along there a while ago, like as if he was comin' from
+Sallinbeg ways, and accordin' to the apparence of him I wouldn't won'er
+if he <i>was</i> a one of thim tinker crathurs&mdash;carryin' a big clump of cans
+he was, at any rate&mdash;I noticed the shine of thim. And he couldn't ha'
+got any great way yet to spake of, supposin' there was anybody lookin'
+to folly after him."</p>
+
+<p>But Constable Black crushed her hopes as he replied, "Ah, it's nobody
+comin' <i>from</i> Sallinbeg that we've anything to say to. There's after
+bein'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> a robbery last night down below at Jerry Dunne's&mdash;a shawl as good
+as new took, that his wife's ragin' over frantic, along wid a sight of
+fowl and other things. And the Tinkers that was settled this long while
+in the boreen at the back of his haggard is quit out of it afore
+daylight this mornin', every rogue of them. So we'd have more than a
+notion where the property's went to if we could tell the road they've
+took. We thought like enough some of them might ha' come this way."</p>
+
+<p>Now Mr. Jerry Dunne was not a popular person in Lisconnel, where he has
+even become, as we have seen, proverbial for what we call "ould
+naygurliness." So there was a general tendency to say, "The divil's cure
+to him," and listen complacently to any details their visitors could
+impart. For in his private capacity a policeman, provided that he be
+otherwise "a dacint lad," which, to do him justice, is commonly the
+case, may join, with a few unobtrusive restrictions, in our neighbourly
+gossips; the rule, in fact, being&mdash;Free admission except on business.</p>
+
+<p>Only Mrs. Kilfoyle was so much cast down by her misfortune that she
+could not raise herself to the level of an interest in the affairs of
+her thrifty<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> suitor, and the babble of voices relating and commenting
+sounded as meaningless as the patter of the drops which jumped like
+little fishes in the large puddle at their feet. It had spread
+considerably before Constable Black said to his comrade&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Daly, we'd better be steppin' home wid ourselves as wise as we
+come, as the man said when he'd axed his road of the ould black horse in
+the dark lane. There's no good goin' further, for the whole gang of
+them's scattered over the counthry agin now like a seedin' thistle in a
+high win'."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay bedad," said Constable Daly, "and be the same token, this win' ud
+skin a tanned elephant. It's on'y bogged and drenched we'd git. Look at
+what's comin' up over there. That rain's snow on the hills, every could
+drop of it; I seen Ben Bawn this mornin' as white as the top of a
+musharoon, and it's thickenin' wid sleet here this minute, and so it
+is."</p>
+
+<p>The landscape did indeed frown upon further explorations. In quarters
+where the rain had abated it seemed as if the mists had curdled on the
+breath of the bitter air, and they lay floating in long white bars and
+reefs low on the track of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> their own shadow, which threw down upon the
+sombre bogland deeper stains of gloom. Here and there one caught on the
+crest of some grey-bouldered knoll, and was teazed into fleecy threads
+that trailed melting instead of tangling. But towards the north the
+horizon was all blank, with one vast, smooth slant of slate colour, like
+a pent-house roof, which had a sliding motion onwards.</p>
+
+<p>Ody Rafferty pointed to it and said, "Troth, it's teemin' powerful this
+instiant up there in the mountains. 'Twill be much if you land home
+afore it's atop of you; for 'twould be the most I could do myself."</p>
+
+<p>And as the constables departed hastily, most people forgot the stolen
+cloak for a while to wonder whether their friends would escape being
+entirely drownded on the way back from the fair.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Kilfoyle, however, still stood in deep dejection at her door, and
+said, "Och, but she was the great fool to go let the likes of him set
+fut widin her house."</p>
+
+<p>To console her Mrs. O'Driscoll said, "Ah, sure, sorra a fool were you,
+woman dear; how would you know the villiny of him? And if you'd turned
+the man away widout givin' him e'er a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> bit, it's bad you'd be thinkin'
+of it all the day after."</p>
+
+<p>And to improve the occasion for her juniors, old Mrs. Keogh added, "Ay,
+and morebetoken you'd ha' been committin' a sin."</p>
+
+<p>But Mrs. Kilfoyle replied with much candour, "'Deed, then, I'd a dale
+liefer be after committin' a sin, or a dozen sins, than to have me poor
+mother's good cloak thieved away on me, and walkin' wild about the
+world."</p>
+
+<p>As it happened the fate of Mrs. Kilfoyle's cloak was very different from
+her forecast. But I do not think that a knowledge of it would have been
+consolatory to her by any means. If she had heard of it, she would
+probably have said, "The cross of Christ upon us. God be good to the
+misfort'nit crathur." For she was not of at all an implacable temper,
+and would, under the circumstances, have condoned even the injury that
+obliged her to appear at Mass with a flannel petticoat over her head
+until the end of her days. Yet she did hold the Tinkers in a perhaps
+somewhat too unqualified reprobation. For there are tinkers and tinkers.
+Some of them, indeed, are stout and sturdy thieves, veritable birds of
+prey, whose rapacity is continually questing for plunder<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>. But some of
+them have merely the magpies' and jackdaws' thievish propensity for
+picking up what lies temptingly in their way. And some few are so honest
+that they pass by as harmlessly as a wedge of high-flying wild duck. And
+I have heard it said that to places like Lisconnel their pickings and
+stealings have at worst never been so serious a matter as those of
+another flock, finer of feather, but not less predacious in their
+habits, who roosted, for the most part, a long way off, and made their
+collections by deputy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>A GOOD TURN</h3>
+
+
+<p>Along the road to Sallinbeg little seemed to be abroad besides foul
+weather, but there was a great deal of that. The gusts that came
+flapping wide-winged over the bog met the wayfarer with a furious hurtle
+and grapple, as if for want of better sport they had concentrated all
+their forces upon his sole repulse; and the drops they dashed into his
+blinded eyes and against his benumbed hands were as icy as they could be
+without ceasing to be wet. Their combined assaults were calculated
+feelingly to persuade a man of his uninfluential position in the scheme
+of things&mdash;his voice in this matter was so tyrannically howled down&mdash;or,
+if of less philosophic mind, to bring home to him the special
+disadvantages of going half-starved and clad in threadbare tatters. This
+was the plight of Thady Quinlan as, leaving Lisconnel, soon lapt out of
+sight behind him amid the grey<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> web of the rain-mists, he tramped
+haltingly away, with Mrs. Kilfoyle's cloak bundled under his arm, and
+the dread of pursuit on his mind, and in his heart a great remorse, the
+object of which you are perhaps guessing wrongly. But he had also a hope
+and a purpose, and is therefore not wholly to be pitied, although the
+one did wane until the other looked impossible, as mile after mile
+unrolled its drenched and dreary length without bringing him apparently
+nearer to his goal.</p>
+
+<p>All the while, however, he was slowly gaining upon a traveller, who had
+taken the same road a few hours earlier, hopelessly and aimlessly, and
+even more inadequately equipped than he. It was his sister Judy Quinlan,
+from whom he had parted on the worst of terms about three o'clock that
+morning. The fact is that the Tinkers' raid upon Jerry Dunne's premises,
+although carried out with unusual success, had led, not at all
+unusually, to complications when it was time to divide the spoil. Over
+Mrs. Dunne's second-best shawl it was that the difficulty arose. Mrs.
+Dunne, despite her husband's thrifty turn, owned many shawls, few of
+them inferior enough to be worn at all frequently, and she had pinned on
+this one three times only during the half-dozen years of her
+proprietresship<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>. So it was certainly bitter bad luck that she should by
+chance have worn it to Confession on Friday, and got it soaked coming
+home, and hung it up in the passage by the back door to dry slowly,
+"instead of to be all cockled into gathers wid the heat of the fire
+blazin' on it, you stookawn," as she explained with exasperation to
+Ellen Roe, her servant-girl, who had officiously suggested the kitchen
+hearth. For this precaution proved tragically self-defeating, and put
+its object into the very hands of Thady Quinlan and Joe Smith, when,
+under cover of the wild, wet night, they forced the feeble lock, and
+made a clean sweep of all portable property that lay within easy reach.
+The shawl formed the most valuable prize. It was very admirable, indeed,
+being of a dappled fawn colour, with an arabesque border of shaded
+chocolate and amber; but in the eyes of its new owners its greatest
+charm was its weight and thickness. Judy Quinlan declared, pinching a
+fold fondly between a finger and thumb, that just the feel of it done
+your heart good. Her own shawl was really only a ragged cotton
+table-cover, and had, as she often remarked, "no more warmth in it than
+an ould dish-clout." I should observe, to make the situation clear, that
+the Tinkers' confraternity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> at this time consisted of Thady Quinlan and
+his sister Judy, and their married sister Maggie Smith, with her
+husband, and his brother, and his father, and three or four children.
+Hence it is obvious that in any dispute which might arise between Judy
+and Maggie, the latter was likely to have numbers preponderantly upon
+her side. And this was what now actually took place, the place being the
+driest end of the un-roofed cabin in Dunne's boreen, where the Tinkers
+had for some time past made their camp.</p>
+
+<p>The screed of thatch still adhering to the wall sheltered their fire of
+purloined sods, and it burned steadily and strongly between the blasts
+which made its red flame duck and sweel, and sent the white ash-flakes
+fluttering. So there was light enough to show how covetous gleams from
+the sisters' eyes flashed together on the shawl, of which each held a
+corner. And no great wisdom was needed to forecast a storm. Mrs. Smith's
+shawl was undeniably better than Judy's by many degrees but she had not
+the magnanimity to consider this, even so far as to propose that Judy
+should at any rate enjoy the reversion of her own. On the contrary, she
+had rapidly planned its division between her two little ragged girls.
+Judy,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> for her part, had set her heart desperately upon the acquisition,
+and she deemed it her best policy to say in a tone studiously
+matter-of-course:</p>
+
+<p>"Faix, now, it's glad enough I'll be to get shut of this ould wad that's
+on me. Every breath of win' goes thro' it as ready as if it was a
+crevice in a wall, fit to freeze you into mortar."</p>
+
+<p>A very vain device, for her sister promptly rejoined with a sarcastic
+laugh and a tightened grip: "Musha moyah, how bad you are entirely.
+Don't you wish you may?" which intimated plainly that the shawl was not
+to be had uncontested.</p>
+
+<p>At this crisis Judy had fully expected to be backed up by Thady; but he
+naturally taking a more dispassionate view of the matter, recognised
+with reluctance the futility of pitting himself singly against three
+opponents, two of them better men than he, who was "no great things at
+all, let alone havin' one knee quare." Therefore he turned his back upon
+the controversy, and feigned unconsciousness of it, instead of bouncing
+up and saying with appropriate action, "And I'd like to know who at
+all's got a better right to it than herself has?"</p>
+
+<p>His defection aggrieved her so bitterly, that the fiercest of her wrath
+turned upon him; and after a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> wrangle wherein all the parties concerned
+had made liberal use of those "aculeate and proper" words against which
+the wary Bacon warns his quarrelling readers, she flounced away into the
+darkness of the small hours of the stormy December morning, loudly
+avowing her determination never to see a sight of the ugly, dirty,
+mane-spirited poltroon, or open her lips to him as long as she had an
+eye or a tongue in her head. Jeering laughter followed her exit on a
+skirl of sleet-fledged wind.</p>
+
+<p>She seethed over her anger for many a long mile, to such fierceness was
+its flame fed by disappointment and more potent jealousy. For had not
+Thady, the only person she cared much about in all the world, turned
+against her and sided with Maggie, "who was always a greedy grabbin'
+little toad ever since she stood the height of a creepy stool?" It was
+an hour or so before daybreak when she sat down to rest under an immense
+bulging boulder that loomed dimly on her beside the road a little way
+beyond Lisconnel. Then she began to look backwards and forwards. Far
+back to the time when her father kept a little shop in Bantry, before he
+was stone broke one bad year and took to carrying the remnant of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+stock-in-trade about in a basket as a higgler, which eventually led
+other members of his family to wander, less reputably, for their
+livelihoods. She remembered that even in those days Thady was always her
+ally, and had lamed himself for life by a fall on the road when running
+to rescue her from the Hutchinsons' wicked mastiff, who had knocked her
+down near their gate, and was standing over her with a growl and a grin
+of which she still sometimes dreamed. And again she remembered how once
+she had been laid up for a long while with the fever, and had crept out
+of the Union infirmary to find that her relations, supposing her dead,
+had all "tuk off wid thimselves to the States," and was keening like one
+demented over her desertion outside McNeight's public, when what should
+come familiarly round the corner but Thady himself, who had stopped
+behind, foregoing his assisted passage, because the divil a fut of him
+would stir out of it so long as there might be e'er a chance at all of
+Judy coming back. Whereupon it recurred vividly to her mind how she had
+just called him, among other things, "a great dirty, good-for-nothin'
+hulk of a poltroon," and had expressed a hope that she might never again
+see sign nor sight of any such a hijjis baste hobblin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> anywheres on her
+road; to which he had rejoined that she might go to blazes and welcome
+for anythin' <i>he</i> had to say agin it, and that bedad a crosser-tempered
+ould weasel of a wizened-up ould witch wouldn't be apt to land there in
+a hurry. At last, being very tired, she escaped for a while from these
+fluctuations of wrath and ruth into a nook of sleep, but the bitter cold
+routed her out of it soon after sunrise, and she took the road again,
+cramped and numbed, in the teeth of the gusty showers that were still
+stalking over the bogland.</p>
+
+<p>As she went, the hills beyond Sallinbeg rose up frowning before her
+through rifts in the cold white fleece trailed and knotted about their
+front of harsh purple gloom, on which the streaks and patches of ravines
+and fences and fields, with here and there a cabin gleaming, began by
+degrees to be traced dimly as if a fragment of the countryside were
+reflected on a dark thunder-cloud. But she was now thinking more about
+her journey's end than about anything she saw on the way thither&mdash;the
+bleak many-windowed workhouse at Moynalone that she well knew must be
+presently her fate. Since she had thrown herself on her own resources,
+three ha'pence was all she could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> command for ransom from the durance
+into which self-preservation assuredly would not forbear to betray her.
+Experience gave a dreary definiteness to anticipation. Once again she
+would morning by morning awaken in the grim whitewashed ward to all the
+old hardness and roughness of existence with a tyrannous restraint and
+monotony superadded. She said to herself, it is true, that she might as
+well be in one place as another, since she would not have Thady to go
+along with anymore&mdash;the black-hearted, thievin' miscreant&mdash;and if she
+had as much wit in her as an ould water-rat, she'd just creep away into
+some dry ditch, and be done with the whole of it. Still, as she did come
+short of that wisdom, the alternative continued to lie across her path,
+a murky shadow, which she could by no means evade nor disperse.</p>
+
+<p>The invisible sun was low when Judy came to a place where the road
+forks, sending one branch to creep across the level bogland towards
+Sallinbeg, and one to climb up among the first tilted slopes of the
+mountains. Here the Rosbride river comes jostling its way down a rocky
+ravine spanned at the mouth by a bridge, past which the swift, brown
+stream darts along in a more spacious and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> smoother channel, bound for
+Rosbride Bay. Judy stood for a while and looked down over the parapet at
+the swirls of creamy foam that swept under the arch. Then she took out
+of her pocket a battered-looking heel of a loaf, and began to munch it.
+But before she had half finished it, she tossed the crust away into the
+river, being too heartsick to go on eating once the rage of hunger was
+subdued. She wished sincerely that she dared fling herself after it, but
+she was far too much cowed by cold and weariness to muster the courage
+for such a resolve. Perhaps there was not under Irish skies that
+December day, a more miserable woman than Judy Quinlan as she stood all
+alone in the world on Rosbride bridge, while a black mountain rampart
+lifted itself slowly against the shrouded west, and the dusk thickened
+on the long, shelterless road, whence eager blasts whistled a summons to
+her, nearer and nearer, till they fluttered her rags, and keened about
+her ears, and chilled her to the bone.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly something heavy and soft seemed to grasp her by the shoulders,
+and thence fall around her in long, wide folds, covering her from head
+to foot, much as if a small tent had been blown down on her. Of course
+she screamed shrilly, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> almost in the same breath she saw that Thady
+was at her elbow. He had for some little time been stalking her warily,
+with the great coat expanded ready to throw over her, and having done
+so, was now holding it on with a rough hug. The joy with which he had at
+last caught sight of the forlorn, bedraggled figure had overflowed
+irrepressibly into this joke, and its successful accomplishment put the
+finishing touch to his happiness. As for Judy, if the sun had leaped up
+again in a fiery flurry, till the hills and the plain and the river were
+all flooded with flushed light, gleaming and glowing, it would have but
+dimly symbolised the transfiguration of her world. In the twinkling of
+an eye her stark despair was changed into rapturous relief, a miracle
+which just at first made the marvellous cloak seem almost a matter of
+course. Any good thing might naturally be expected to befall her since
+Thady was not estranged and lost to her after all. "Whethen now, and is
+it yourself come streelin' along?" she said. "You tuk your time, bedad.
+I'm here this half-hour."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure, I stopped till I would get a thrifle of things together," said
+Thady. "And what d'you call that for an ould flitterjig?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's not too bad," said Judy, stroking down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> the cape with caressing
+fingers. "A grand weight there's in it, to be sure. But where at all did
+you come by it? You're not after gettin' it off of thim thievin'
+rapscallions of Smiths, anyway?"</p>
+
+<p>"Thim or the likes of thim&mdash;sure not at all," said Thady, loftily.
+"'Twas in a house away down below there at Lisconnel. A young woman bid
+me step in to ait a pitaty, and, tellin' you the truth, I'd no fancy to
+be delayin', for I'd a mistrust in me mind that the p&oacute;lis was follyin'.
+The notion I had was to ax her had she seen you goin' by, on'y I wasn't
+wishful to be lettin' on I was anythin' to you, in case they come along.
+So I thought she might be chance pass the remark herself. But out she
+ran, and the first thing I noticed was this consarn lyin' convanient to
+me hand in the windy. And wid that I whipped it up and made off. For
+anythin' I could tell, I might ha' met me fine gintleman full tilt at
+the door; and begorrah, it's as heavy to carry as a pair of fat geese.
+Howane'er, I knew it's distressed you were entirely for the want of such
+a thing, and bejabers, you've got it now."</p>
+
+<p>"Troth have I," said Judy, delightedly groping her way about her new
+garment. "Rael dacint it was of you to be bringin' it to me, for
+perished<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> and lost I did be, and that's no lie. Och but it's the grand
+one. Look at the hood there is to it. Sure it's as good as a little
+house of your own. You might be out under buckets of wet in it, and
+ne'er a tint you'd git whatever."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, or, for that matter, takin' a rowl through the river there, and
+sorra the harm it 'ud do you wid that on," said Thady, with pride. "But
+we'd better be quittin' out o' this," he added, with a shrug and a
+shiver, "for the win's tarrible, and there's a shower comin' up on us
+yonder as thick as thatch. I was thinkin' you'd maybe had thrampin'
+enough for this day. 'Twill be as dark prisintly as the inside of a cow,
+and we'd see daylight agin before we come to Moynalone. So we might put
+the night over under th'ould bridge. There's a good dry strip along the
+one side of it, and the way the rain's dhrivin' we'd git a grand
+shelter."</p>
+
+<p>Judy readily agreed, and they descended the little stony footpath which
+led down to the river. Beneath the arch, where Thady's booted steps
+reverberated hollowly, they found, as he had said, a broadish strip of
+dry ground, for the bridge had allowed the stream ample measure in its
+stride. The little platform was bordered by a scattering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> of stones and
+boulders, amongst which the shallow water gurgled. It seemed to Thady
+and Judy that their quarters would be very tolerable; but they soon made
+a discovery which promised luxury indeed. This was a dead branch, which
+lay at one end of the arch, having evidently been floated down the
+current, and perhaps hauled out of the water by some thrifty body, who,
+however, had made no further use of it. Long ago that must have been,
+for it was dried and bleached till it glimmered through the dusk like an
+intricate white skeleton. Better fuel no one could desire. Thady made
+for it at once with knife and matchbox, and in a few minutes crackling
+flames were crunching up the twigs and gnawing at a log. The red light
+washed flickering over the wet walls, and was caught on the glancing of
+the water as it fled by, rapid and dark. Blue smoke trailed up lazily
+against the frame of the arch, blurring gleams of tossed foam as it
+melted out into the mist.</p>
+
+<p>But a fire naturally suggested food, and Judy said ruefully, after
+feeling in her empty pocket: "It's starved wid the hunger you'll be,
+Thady, and the sorra a taste of anythin' have I in the world. 'Deed now,
+if I'd on'y known the way it 'ud be, and I passin' thim houses below in
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> boreen a while ago! I seen where there was a big cake of
+griddle-bread coolin' itself, laned agin the windy-ledge, and man nor
+mortal near it. I might ha' raiched it down as aisy as puttin' me fut to
+the ground. But sure I was that knocked about wid one thing and another,
+I thought I wouldn't be bothered wid it, so I just left it where it was,
+I did so&mdash;may God forgive me," she said, with unfeigned contrition.</p>
+
+<p>Thady, however, did not seem to share in her regrets. He was lifting his
+cluster of cans off his shoulders, and extracting from one of them a
+bundle tied up in a red handkerchief. "Is it starved you'd have us?" he
+said as he untied the first corner. "Starved! How are you?" And he
+continued to repeat: "Is it starvin' she said?" while he was undoing the
+several knots. When they were all unfastened, the handkerchief was seen
+to hold a number of eggs and a fair supply of broken bread. Thady might
+well scout the possibility of famishing. "That's somethin' like," he
+said, as he saw Judy surveying his stores, "and I've a shillin'
+somewheres besides."</p>
+
+<p>"Glory be!" said Judy, looking as if she could scarcely realise a world
+with which they were so much beforehand.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And we'll be givin' them a boil in a one of the little saucepans," said
+Thady. "Raw eggs do be ugly could brashes, and we've plinty of wather
+handy&mdash;lashins and lavins of dhrink runnin' on tap there, so to spake."</p>
+
+<p>Supper was accordingly prepared on these simple lines with much success.
+They boiled many eggs and ate them, using their scraps of bread for
+plates&mdash;an expedient not unknown at far earlier banquets&mdash;and they
+scooped up water to drink out of the palms of their hands&mdash;also in an
+old-fashioned manner. But when they had finished Thady gave a
+comparatively modern touch to the entertainment by lighting his pipe. He
+occupied the nearest place to the fire, in consideration for the
+scarecrow-like raggedness of his garments, which now began to weigh upon
+Judy's mind amid the comfort of her magnificent wrap.</p>
+
+<p>"Froze stiff you'll be in thim ould tatters, man alive," she said
+despondently. "Sure, you might as well be slingin' yourself round wid
+the ould wisps of spiders' webs up over your head for any substance
+there is in thim. I won'er, now, could I conthrive to reive the top-cape
+off of this. 'Twould be as good that way as a cloak apiece for the two
+of us."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Thady, however, said decidedly: "Blathers, not <i>at all</i>. Is it
+destroyin' it you'd be after? I'm plinty warm enough." And he rolled the
+big red handkerchief which had held the eggs into many folds about his
+neck, tucking it down under his coat-collar all round. "There was a
+surprisin' hate in it," he said.</p>
+
+<p>By this time the dusk far and near had gloomed into darkness&mdash;the black
+beetle had scared away the grey moth. As Thady and Judy sat with their
+backs to the curving wall, they caught only fitful glimpses of the
+opposite one when any long-fronded flickers of the fire-light waved
+across and touched it. More often they fell short, and made quivering
+circles shine where they struck the broken water in the mid-stream.
+Without, beyond either arch, nothing was distinguishable except glimmers
+of white foam shaken and tossing. On the left, looking up the river, it
+seemed as if many spectral hands, borne nearer and nearer, came waving
+and beckoning out of the night, to pass by and away down the river,
+still beckoning and waving, carried further and further, on into the
+night again. Every now and then a waft of the wind sighed in on them
+along with the river, puffing about the flame and smoke, and blowing
+ice-cold<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> in their faces. When it had passed Thady always inquired: "Is
+it warm at all, Jude?" and she always answered, drawing "its" folds
+together with ostentatious satisfaction: "Och scaldin'."</p>
+
+<p>But between whiles there was little conversation to interrupt the
+monologue of the river, which seemed to find itself many voices under
+the bridge. The one unceasing rustle of the main stream was frayed along
+its margin into a myriad finer noises of murmuring and plashing, as the
+massed foliage on a bough dwindles at its edges into more delicate
+traceries of distinct sprays and leaves. Round some stones the water
+whispered mysteriously, coiling in and out of gurgling recesses, and
+against others it broke with a clear chiming tinkle as if elfin anvils
+rang; here it droned on with a bee's hum soft and steady, and here it
+chuckled and chirped, bubbling up in sudden little rapids and cascades.
+At Judy's feet was a thin flat stone, which rested loosely on the top of
+another, and flap-flapped, bobbing up and down as the ripple rose and
+fell. Sitting idle in the firelight, warmed and fed to unwonted
+contentment, Judy watched it half drowsily for a while. Presently she
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"That's the very way the lid of our ould kettle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> would be goin' at home
+when it was on the boil, and me poor mother 'ud bid us keep an eye on
+it&mdash;like enough to keep us out of divilmint. Och, but that was a cosy
+little room of a could night. D'you mind it, Thady?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, sure," said Thady, "but it's one while ago."</p>
+
+<p>"It is that. A matter of thirty year and more, anyway, since we owned
+the little shop. Sure now I remimber the day they shut it up, and put us
+out of it, as plain as if it was on'y this mornin'. Grand we that was
+childer thought it, because of somebody givin' us the ind of an ould jar
+of sweets out of the windy to pacify us. Bedad the fightin' we had over
+it was fit to ha' raised the town. But I grabbed meself a biggish lump
+of peppermint twist, and would be slinkin' behind me mother to finish
+it, and she talkin' at the door to ould Mrs. McClenaghan, and I heard
+her sayin' her heart was broke. So I got wond'rin' to myself if the
+raison was maybe that we'd ate it all on her. Och, but it's the quare
+foolishness people does be remimberin'!"</p>
+
+<p>"Belike the raison of that is because it's as plinty as anythin' else
+wid thim," said Thady, cynically, "or maybe a trifle plintier."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Sure we was on'y brats thim times," said Judy, apologetically. "For
+anythin' we could tell we might as well be streelin' about under the
+width of the sky like a string of wild duck, as stoppin' at home wid a
+roof over our misfort'nit heads. Ould Mrs. McClenaghan next door had a
+cloak the same pattern as this," Judy continued, selecting her memories
+with better judgment. "But 'twas all tatters at the bottom, not worth a
+bawbee to mine."</p>
+
+<p>And Thady said with interest: "Had she now?"</p>
+
+<p>"And as for me ould shawl," Judy went on, "it's been a scandal and a
+caution this last three or four year; droppin' in bits it is, and small
+blame to it. I wish I'd a penny for every mile I've tramped in it. Do
+you remimber the joke me mother had about it's bein' a conthr&aacute;ry thing
+that people thravellin' 'ud always begin a mile at the wrong ind? She'd
+be talkin' that way to hearten up me father; but as often as not he'd
+on'y let a roar at her to whisht, he was that discouraged. 'Twas a great
+wish he had, poor man, to git her back settled in a little place of her
+own before he was took. But 'twas in the big barracks of a Union at
+Monaghan&mdash;&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's all one to the two of thim now anyway," said Thady, finding
+that Judy's reminiscences of their family history did not tend to
+enliven his meditations over his pipe.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah sure, everythin' will be all one to the whole of us, plase God, one
+of these days," said Judy, who in her present mood could not easily have
+realised the keen contentions and scorching jealousies of the night
+before; "and when we get done with the thrampin', 'twill make little
+enough differ whether it's one mile we wint or twinty hunderd. On'y I'd
+liefer than a good dale thim two had had better luck wid it all. Cruel
+put about they were many a time, and wantin' the bit to keep the life in
+thim, and it just fretted out of thim in the ind I'm thinkin'. The
+thought of it comes agin a body when one's sittin' warm and snug," Judy
+said, gazing remorsefully round her shadowy, gusty lodging, and then
+into the flames, lighting up a bare earth-patch, and down at the dark
+folds that fell about her as she crouched on it. She seemed sunk into a
+reverie. But after a while she looked up and said without apparent
+relevance: "Heaven be her bed this night, the cratur. Thady, you
+heathen, we'd a right to be sayin' the Rosary before we git too stupid<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+altogether. The eyes of you are droppin' into your head wid sleep this
+minnit."</p>
+
+<p>"And me just after lightin' me pipe," remonstrated Thady.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah thin, hurry up and finish it," said Judy, betraying by this
+injunction an invincible ignorance touching a man's sentiments towards
+his last screw of tobacco, "or else I'll be off sound. It's the fine
+warmth makes me sleepy. Sure wid this on me sorra a breath of could gits
+next or nigh me to be keepin' me awake."</p>
+
+<p>"Och thin, wait till it's out," said Thady.</p>
+
+<p>"I will so," said Judy. "Sling another stick on the fire, lad, the way
+you won't be perished sittin' there in thim woful ould rags. I've plinty
+of prayers I might be sayin' till you're ready."</p>
+
+<p>But in a little while, Thady, lingering over his pipe, became aware,
+somewhat to his relief, that she had gone fast asleep, muffled up to the
+chin in her cloak, with her head leaning back against the stone wall. He
+sat and looked at her for some moments with an expression partly
+complacent and partly compunctious. "Bedad now the crathur was bein'
+perished alive before I brought that to her," he said to himself. "Very
+apt she was to be gettin' her death. 'Twas great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> luck I had entirely to
+pick it up. It's the hard life the likes of her has whatever thrampin'
+around. Ay, glory be to God, 'twas the best good turn iver I done her."</p>
+
+<p>Just at the time when Thady the Tinker was making these reflections
+while the firelight flickered and the waters fleeted under Rosbride
+bridge, some mile or so higher up the stream, where the long mountain
+slopes are folded closer and steeper about it, a great turmoil had
+arisen in a deep hollow among walls of the bare rock. Down one face of
+these, a huge glistering slab, the river had for certain thousands of
+years been taking a foamy leap; but to-night it happened that the rains,
+beating for many days on the mountains, had eaten away the clay setting
+which cemented a ponderous lump of rock into a niche immediately over
+the fall, and the mass had now crashed down into the channel on the very
+verge, blocking all the waterway. This, however, was a door hard to keep
+shut, when every affluent rill and runnel out on the broad mountain
+shoulders went darting swift and white, so that every minute swelled the
+forces gathering pent in the barred passage. As the bridled torrent
+seethed and climbed, hissing, behind that barrier, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> great stone
+tottered and swayed, and before the first foam-crest could overpeer it,
+yielded to the weight of waters leaned against it, and rocks and flood,
+thunderously roaring, rushed down together.</p>
+
+<p>The sound of it, dulled into a moan, came through Rosbride bridge, and
+Thady, who had grown very drowsy, thought to himself that the wind was
+getting up, and that they couldn't have done better than stop where they
+were, instead of to be setting off tramping on such a dirty wild night.
+God knew where they might have got to.</p>
+
+<p>The flood that broke away, with wave tumbled over wave, out of the
+whirling pool, had not far to race down its stony stairs before it
+reached a place with a turbulent floor, where the white mouths of other
+two streams foamed into it through rock-rifts, loud-throated on either
+hand. Thenceforward the water which had threaded the large boulders in
+heavy strands coiled like monstrous braids of snaky locks, rose up and
+drew together above their tallest heads into a single obliterating fold,
+as it slid on smoothly with only now and then a quiver puckering its
+surface, as if it had rolled over some live creature<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> that writhed. Its
+mounded solidity made its rapid motion look strange and terrible. Where
+circles of thin froth swam round on it slowly, it was as black and white
+as a bit of the bog in a snowstorm or under a drift of summer daisies.
+At the turn of the ravine's last winding above the bridge, it plucked
+away as it passed a small company of fir-trees, that long had dropped
+their cones and needles into the river from a coign of vantage on a
+jutting crag, and a minute after, anybody who had looked up from beneath
+the arch would have seen the glimmering points of foam extinguished like
+lights, further and nearer, lost amid the shadowy onsweeping of
+something that set all the darkness astir as if it were one vast wing
+unfurling. And then for a moment, in the narrow space lit by the fading
+fire, he would have known that he was cut off from the world by chaos,
+which poised towards him a formless surging front, and stooped and fell.
+But as it happened nobody was keeping a watch there.</p>
+
+<p>What wakened Thady was the clang of his cluster of tinware, which the
+wave dashed against the wall behind him. But before he knew this, it had
+gathered him up and swung him across<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> with it over to the other side of
+the arch. There he caught hold of a twisted ivy-tod and a bough of
+mountain-ash, whence he dropped on the bank, and crawled up it out of
+reach, commenting in forcible language upon the occurrence, by which he
+was still astoundedly bewildered.</p>
+
+<p>Judy, who was aroused in like manner, had her chance too. For a branch
+of the same tree crooked a friendly arm towards her as she was borne
+past, and she would have grasped it only that the weight of her heavy
+cloth cloak dragged her down. So that instead of returning to dry land
+for many a long day's tramp, she went out to sea in company with sundry
+wrenched-off boughs, and mats of heather, and bundles of withered
+bracken, and other such waifs and strays, none of which were ever again
+heard tidings of any more than they were inquired after in the lonely
+places they had left. Only for some stormy days the wrecked and sodden
+banks of the Rosbride river were haunted by a forlorn-looking object of
+a lame tramp, who sought vainly what his despair hoped to find. As he
+roamed about in it, he had just one spell of consolation, which he was
+often muttering over to himself. It was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> something he called, "The best
+turn, anyway, I iver done the crathur in her life. Little enough, God
+knows, little enough, but the best good turn."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>FORECASTS</h3>
+
+
+<p>When Mrs. Joyce used in her last days to predict regretfully that her
+youngest daughter would never marry, she said a bold word, for at this
+time still Theresa's years fell short of twenty, and she was generally
+recognised as the prettiest girl to be seen at Mass in the small, ugly
+chapel down beyant near Ballybrosna. Some people, it is true, said that
+she was "just a fairy of a crathur, and too little for anythin'," and
+she was, no doubt, diminutive in size. Nor had she any brilliancy of
+colouring to make amends in a humming-bird's fashion for the
+insignificance of her proportions, resembling rather, with her dark eyes
+and hair, one of those filmy white blossoms which look the paler and
+frailer for their knots of ebon stamens, or the delicate moth who shows
+fine black pencillings among his pearly down. Still, nobody denied that
+she had "an uncommon purty<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> face of her own," and the neighbours,
+moreover, always found her "plisant and frindly and gay enough," when
+they found her at all. But they remarked among themselves that one
+seldom seen e'er a sight of Therasa Joyce these times anywheres about.
+They supposed she was took up wid lookin' after her mother, who wasn't
+gettin' her health over well this good while back. I think myself that
+Theresa's invisibility could be only in part accounted for thus, as the
+explanation does not cover the fact that to slip the wrong side of the
+dyke, or turn aside among screening hillocks and hollows when she
+noticed the approach of her acquaintances, was the course she always
+adopted if she could achieve it without hurting anybody's feelings.
+Theresa much disliked doing this, as a rule, though she broke it on one
+occasion in a way that surprised and puzzled those who knew her best.</p>
+
+<p>But whether Mrs. Joyce forecast the future rightly or wrongly, she had
+certainly an erroneous impression on her mind when, as often happened,
+she wound up her disconsolate musings by saying resentfully, "And the
+back of me hand to some I could name." If she had proceeded to do so,
+she would probably have mentioned persons who had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> done nothing to bring
+about the result she was deploring, and she never thought of connecting
+it with the events which had accompanied Ody Rafferty's flitting from
+the Three Mile Farm more than a twelvemonth before Denis O'Meara came to
+the place.</p>
+
+<p>Until Ody took up his abode at Lisconnel he had always lived with his
+father, who farmed a remote bit of land out towards Lough Glenglas. It
+was a holding which had been wrested from the grip of a surrounding bog
+by earlier generations of Raffertys, who were a strenuous race; but in
+Ody's father's time their energies had taken a turn not conducive to
+reclamation, or even to the maintenance of what was already won. All
+Ody's many elder brethren&mdash;sisters there were none&mdash;had run wild, and
+ended by running it so far afield that the narrow, whitewashed house,
+lonesome and bleak, saw them no more. Its mistress also died, failing,
+perhaps, other means of exit&mdash;running wild being in her case
+impracticable&mdash;and finding life impossibly dreary without Ned, the
+least-good-for of her sons; and the household was thus reduced to old
+Michael Rafferty, and his aunt, and little Ody. These domestic changes,
+in conjunction with other untoward chances, sadly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> hindered farming
+operations, and nature made prompt use of the pause. Season by season
+the patch of tilled ground seemed to shrink at the wish of the greedy
+black land that girdled it about. The outlying fields grew first garish
+with golden ragweed and scarlet poppies, and then dull green again with
+the brown-knotted rushes and sombre sedge, and all other marish growths,
+until the re-annexation was complete, and they once more were
+homogeneous part and parcel of the conquering bog. Old Michael used to
+trudge heavily round his dwindling territories, which were haunted by
+memories of better days. There had been a time when they had actually
+"kep' a pair of plough-horses." I believe that he would have fretted his
+heart out much sooner than he did if it had not been for Ody, his only
+remaining son, "whose aquils," his aunt Moggy sometimes remarked rather
+bitterly, "he consaited you wouldn't find plintier in the world than an
+apple sittin' on a sloe-bush." As the boy grew up the old man's pride
+and pleasure in him were tempered by apprehensions lest he should "take
+off wid himself like the other lads." However, Ody never did this nor
+anything worse than wax somewhat over-confident and self-opiniated; and
+a year<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> or so before his father's death he became associated with Felix
+O'Beirne in the management of an illicit still off away in the bog,
+which gave him an object in life, and had a sobering and settling effect
+upon him.</p>
+
+<p>He was not more than twenty when his father suddenly died one early
+spring morning, and he found himself left responsible for a few acres
+well cropped with weeds, and sundry arrears of rent to be extracted from
+their produce. Whereupon he resolved to abandon the struggle, and set up
+on a less ambitious footing in one of the cabins at Lisconnel. So he got
+ready for the move by selling off his little bit of live stock, all
+except Rory, the old black pony, who had a very large head and a white
+face like a grotesque mask, and with whom he would not have parted on
+the most tempting terms. As for his great-aunt Moggy, when she heard of
+this arrangement, she resigned herself to her fate, which was obviously
+the Union away at Moynalone. What else should become of her, since she
+was past field-work, and nobody could expect Ody now to be bothered with
+keeping her idle, and he with scarce a penny to his name after settling
+with Mr. Nugent. "Ody," she reflected, "didn't mind a thraneen what way<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+he had things in the house, and didn't care to be keepin' fowls, so what
+good 'ud he get out of her at all?" Moggy was a dull and rather
+cross-tempered old person, who had grown up in souring shade, and never
+had a life of her own to live, nor yet a faculty for slipping smoothly
+into other people's. Her slight intercourse with Ody had hitherto
+chiefly consisted of quarrels. In fact, only the day before his father's
+death, they had fallen out abusively about the broiling of some bacon,
+and this seemed to make her destination all the more inevitable.
+Therefore Moggy likewise set about her few dismal preparations,
+oppressed by a stunned sense that the black hour she had been dreading
+most of her life was now just going to strike.</p>
+
+<p>On the morning of the day Ody was to flit she held a sort of carouse at
+her solitary breakfast over the remnant of a pound of tea which she had
+saved after the wake. Tea was ten prices fifty years ago, and a very
+rare luxury at the Three Mile Farm. As she poured it strong and black
+out of the badly broken teapot, the whole one being packed up, she
+thought that was the last time she'd ever have the chance again in this
+world to be wetting herself a cup of tea, and she thickened it
+recklessly with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> lumps of damp brown sugar, and swung it round in her
+cracked saucer to cool, and tried hard to enjoy it. She was still
+lingering over it when Ody came into the kitchen, which caused her, poor
+soul, instinctively to thrust away the betraying teapot out of sight on
+the black hob.</p>
+
+<p>"What way was you intindin' to go, then, aunt?" said Ody.</p>
+
+<p>"To Moynalone?" she said, turning to face her future with a deep sinking
+of heart. "Sure, I suppose it's trampin' over I'll be."</p>
+
+<p>"And I won'er how long you think to be doin' it," said Ody&mdash;"a matter of
+ten mile?"</p>
+
+<p>"Where's the hurry at all, supposin'?" said his aunt, desperately.</p>
+
+<p>"Blathers!" said Ody, "there's room in the cart waitin' ready. You'd be
+better bundlin' yourself into it than to be sittin' here all the mornin'
+delayin' us."</p>
+
+<p>"'Deed, then, beggars drive as chape as they walk," she said, "and I
+might as well be gettin' the lift as far as you can take me."</p>
+
+<p>The old white-faced pony preferred to pace slowly on the long bog-road,
+and, as Ody always respected his whims, the journey barely ended with
+the March daylight. The old, sad-visaged woman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> sat all the while under
+her muffling shawl in silent apathy undisturbed, and as during the
+latter stages of the drive a blinking drowsiness co-operated with her
+want of interest in the scenes through which she jogged, she naturally
+looked around her in bewilderment when roused by the jerk of the
+stopping cart. She expected to find herself in the streets of Moynalone,
+drawn up, probably, at the door of the big Union workhouse. But, instead
+of its long rows of casements staring down blankly on her, she saw only
+the one mole's-eye window of a tiny whitewashed cabin peering at her
+from beneath its thatched eaves, and all about it the great lonely bog
+spreading away with never a trace of any town.</p>
+
+<p>"Och, wirrasthrew, man, what are you after doin' on me?" she said,
+beginning to bewail herself querulously. "Sure you haven't brought me to
+any place at all. Every hour of the black night it'ill be afore ever
+I'll get there now, and the Union'ill be shut, and what's to become of
+me then I dunno. You'd a right to ha' tould me&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Blathers!" said her nephew, "git down out of that wid your yawpin'.
+D'you want the folk here to think you're a sackful of ould hins? And go
+in and be seein' after a bit of fire; it's late enough<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> to be sure. What
+fool's talk have you about the Union, and bad luck to it? You'll find
+the things for the supper in the inside of the ould churn. Union,
+moyah!"</p>
+
+<p>And old Moggy, alighting with cramped limbs, entered her home at
+Lisconnel, feeling blissfully as if she had been <i>unpacked</i> out of a
+most horrible nightmare.</p>
+
+<p>Ody was probably actuated by several unassorted motives in dealing thus
+with his superfluous old great-aunt. Pride and pity and perversity and
+generosity&mdash;all had, no doubt, some influence upon his conduct, while
+long use and wont had unawares given her the same sort of hold upon his
+affections that was possessed in a much higher degree by Rory, the pony,
+whose humours were of course easier to put up with than human foibles.
+But the old woman measured his magnanimity by the immensity of the
+benefit which it had conferred upon her, and with a strong revulsion of
+feeling she formed an opinion of his virtues and talents as exalted
+quite as that which she had often secretly jibed at in his father.
+Accordingly she sang his praises unweariedly among their new neighbours,
+and, as Ody was vain enough not to dislike the echoes which reached him,
+he soon began to look<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> upon her with more complacency, so that they
+agreed much better than heretofore. She found no small solace, too,
+after her long cronyless isolation up at the Three Mile Farm, in the
+company of Mrs. Joyce, and Mrs. Keogh, and the other Lisconnel dames. In
+short, a kind of Indian summer of content seemed to be setting in for
+her. Moggy's mind, however, was of the self-tormenting type, and soon
+devised means of marring it. They took the form of apprehensions that
+Ody would presently get married, and that thereupon "the wife would put
+her out of it." If she had only known, Ody was at this time, as for many
+years ensuing, far too much taken up with himself, and Rory, and "the
+little consarn away in the bog," to entertain any such project; but as
+it was she felt that the event, with all its direful consequences,
+perpetually hung over her, and might at any moment bring her new
+prosperity to a miserable end. Her impending great-niece-in-law was a
+vaguely appalling spectre, who threatened to take the roof from over her
+head, and the bit out of her mouth, and turn her adrift to founder
+hopelessly on the workhouse doorsteps. But it was not until more than a
+year after their settlement at Lisconnel that she endued her bogey with
+one definite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> form, by making up her mind that Ody "was thinkin' of
+Theresa Joyce."</p>
+
+<p>Her reason was that she had one fine evening seen him carrying Theresa's
+water-pail for her down the hill, an ordinary act of courtesy enough,
+but the sight of which suddenly darkened the world before her foolish
+old eyes more dismally than if the golden fleece of the summer sunset
+had been smothered under the blackest pall ever woven in cloud-looms.
+"Fine colloguin' they're havin' together," she said to herself as she
+watched them and their long shadows down the slope, "and he sloppin' the
+half of it over the edge instead of mindin' what he's doin'. It's
+throwin' me out on the side of the road she'll be." In reality Theresa
+was wondering why there would be, a quare black sidimint like, in the
+water on some days and not on others; and Ody was explaining the
+phenomenon confidently and erroneously on an extemporised theory of his
+own. But to old Moggy's fears it seemed quite possible that they might
+be fixing the wedding-day. For Theresa Joyce herself she had no manner
+of misliking at all, considering her to be "a very dacint plisant-spoken
+little girl," but Mrs. Ody Rafferty seemed none the less certain to
+evict her without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> remorse. And Ody's aunt retired to rest that night in
+a despondent mood.</p>
+
+<p>It was just about this time that Denis O'Meara came to stay at Lisconnel
+on sick leave. The O'Mearas lived in one of the three cabins which used
+to stand near the O'Beirne's forge, but which the great Famine and Fever
+year left tenantless for ever after. Their household consisted of the
+two infirm old people with their melancholy middle-aged son Tim, and
+their sickly grandson, little Joe Egan, who was Denis's cousin. Now
+Denis had been wounded in a battle somewhere out in India, and had been
+promoted sergeant&mdash;"and he but a young boyo so to spake"&mdash;and owned four
+medals, and stood six foot three in his stockings, and was as fine a
+figure of a man as you could wish to see, let alone his gorgeous scarlet
+uniform, which was a sight to behold; so if he was not a hero, get me
+one, as we say in Lisconnel. But Lisconnel was quite satisfied with him
+in that worshipful character, and found it very easy to adopt the
+appropriate attitude towards him. For Denis was good-natured and
+cheerful and never conceited at all, nor vain when there was anything
+more to the purpose for him to be; qualities which have an irresistible
+fascination in distinguished<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> personages and make their followers' duty
+a pleasure. It was wonderful how his sojourn enlivened everybody, even
+his mournful little old grandmother, whose gratification expressed
+itself chiefly in regrets that his poor father and mother had not lived
+to see the illigant man he'd grown. When she said this to the younger
+matrons of Lisconnel, they thought that the crathurs' fate was
+commiserable indeed, and earnestly hoped that they themselves would be
+spared, plase God, to witness the splendid careers that lay before their
+own Denises at present playing among the puddles. But the older ones had
+to content themselves with the knowledge that if they had only just so
+happened to get the same chances, their own lads would have done the
+very same things; a fact which seemed to give them a sort of
+hypothetical proprietorship in Denis's glory. His presence brightened up
+society as a tall poppy brightens up all a sombre potato-plot, and his
+conversation brought strange lands and extraordinary events within one
+remove&mdash;a single pair of eyes and ears&mdash;of everybody's experience. For
+many years after "the summer we had Denis O'Meara up here" made a vivid
+time-mark in our annals; and I fancy that the stories of some of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> his
+exploits, with their outlines looming large through a mythical
+mistiness, still float in our atmosphere. There is at least one legend
+relating how a soldier out in the East cut off a mad elephant's head at
+a stroke of his sabre, with the hero of which Denis O'Meara could
+probably be identified. Altogether he was so exceptionally brilliant a
+figure both in himself and in his fortunes, that the interest which he
+excited had no element of envy in it, as might have been the case had
+emulation seemed less utterly beyond everybody's reach.</p>
+
+<p>Next to his cousin, Joe Egan, a stunted, starved-looking sprissawn of a
+lad, perhaps the most appreciative of his admirers was big Hugh
+McInerney, whom people were apt to call an omadhawn. He also was,
+comparatively speaking, a stranger at Lisconnel, having come there only
+that spring to give John O'Driscoll a hand with the building of his mud
+cabin, after which he stayed about doing what odd jobs offered at that
+slack season of the year. Now and then he tramped on distillery business
+for Felix O'Beirne, and generally acquitted himself in a manner which
+appeared worthy of contempt to young Ody Rafferty, who was his companion
+on these expeditions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>. Ody expressed his opinion in unqualified terms,
+saying, "Sure it 'ud disgust you to see him moonin' along like an ould
+donkey strayed out of a fair." But his senior partner, rather to his
+annoyance, persisted in replying, "But, mind you, the chap's no fool."
+He had nobody belonging to him at Ballybrosna, whence he came, and some
+people said that he had been a workhouse child.</p>
+
+<p>At the time of Denis O'Meara's arrival, he was darning the widow Joyce's
+thatch for her, and "not killin' himself ever the job," as people said,
+when they reckoned how many days he had been visible crawling about on
+the top of her little house, a conspicuous position in which he looked,
+Mrs. Con Ryan remarked, "a quarer great gawk than he did on dry lan'."
+He was occupied thus on the first afternoon that Denis walked up there
+with some of the other lads, and while they talked to Mrs. Joyce and
+Theresa underneath, the thatcher took a leisurely and critical survey of
+the scarlet and golden newcomer, from his wonderfully polished boots to
+his sleek dark head and fierce moustache. The verdict he pronounced to
+himself with unfeigned satisfaction was, "Grandeur's no name for him."
+Hugh himself, of large<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> and lumbering frame, had a shag of reddish
+flaxen hair, which made thatch-like eaves above his small, light-blue
+eyes and high burnt-brick-coloured cheek-bones. He wore whitey-brown
+rags. After the rest had gone on and in, he slithered down to the ground
+and told Theresa, who was still standing by the door, that she didn't
+look the size of a bit of a lady-bird beside the soldier fellow. If
+anybody else had made this personal remark, Theresa might have been a
+little hurt by it, as she wished herself of more imposing stature; but
+sure nobody minded poor Hugh McInerney; at any rate she said, "Aye, he's
+a terrible big man, isn't he? Apt to knock the head off himself he'd be
+if he was offerin' to come in at our door."</p>
+
+<p>However, on the very next day Denis contrived to accomplish that feat
+without any such accident when he called in at the Joyces' to ask was
+his grandmother there&mdash;which she was not, nor indeed likely to be.
+Failing to find the old woman, he postponed his quest for the present
+and stayed talking to Theresa, who, as it happened, was at home; and
+then he stopped again outside to help Hugh McInerney by handing him up
+some rolls of green-sodded scraws and slippery bundles of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> rushes. His
+long reach made him serviceable here, though his left arm was still
+partially disabled by the sabre-cut that had invalided him. The gleam of
+the red coat at the Joyces' door had apparently as fascinating an effect
+upon Lisconnel as if the place had been inhabited by a population that
+bellowed and gobbled its greetings instead of saying, "How's yourself,
+lad?" and "It's a grand day, thank God," as it came sauntering up
+dispersedly from various quarters. Before many minutes had passed quite
+a numerous group were collected, for in these long midsummer days there
+is little to be done up here except save the turf, a business which fine
+weather makes short work of. In the weeks before the potato-digging,
+employment becomes as scarce as the pitaties themselves, and the hours
+hang limp and flaccid between the meals which punctuate them with a
+plateful of coarse-grained gruel. Therefore to Christy Sheridan and
+Terence Kilfoyle, with half a dozen of their neighbours, the sight of
+their distinguished visitor was an oasis in a very arid desert, and they
+made towards it thirstily.</p>
+
+<p>By and by the group drifted away from the road before the Joyces' house
+into the rough<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> sward behind it; rather literally drifted, as the cause
+of the move was the wind, a strong soft west wind which had been blowing
+over the bog all the morning in great wide gusts. They seemed to lean
+hard against whatever they met, and made standing still an effort, and
+devastated conversation by carrying off important fragments of it
+uncaught, no matter how loudly one bawled. But the big boulders and
+furze-clumps strewn about in a slight depression close by offered seats
+and shelter opportunely; so amongst them presently appeared Denis
+O'Meara's scarlet tunic, and Theresa Joyce's brown-striped shawl, and
+Mrs. Ryan's white-frilled flapping cap, which she said was bein'
+fluttered to destruction off her ould head, and Hugh McInerney's
+many-rifted caubeen, for he declared that until the flurry of the blast
+went down a bit you might as well be lettin' on to thatch the sails
+whirlin' of a win'mill. And the rest of the company following suit might
+be described in terms of their attire as for the most part sad-coloured
+and dilapidated. It was just such a gathering as may be sitting to sun
+themselves at Lisconnel this day&mdash;if it happens to be a fine summer
+one&mdash;but with a touch of brilliance, both for eye and ear, added by the
+young soldier's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> presence. They had, however, but fitful gleams to bask
+in, for the sky was all feathered over with little silver-white plumes,
+which the wind kept ruffling by so fast that the light flickered in and
+out continually, as if it had come through a canopy of large slowly
+waving leaves. Still, they gossiped beneath it with much satisfaction,
+and catechised Denis about his adventures, and told him all the news of
+the countryside; and there seemed to be no particular reason why they
+should not go on doing so indefinitely. What in the end broke up the
+assembly was a slight mishap that befell Theresa Joyce.</p>
+
+<p>It cannot be denied that Theresa was rather vain about her long black
+hair, which she had only of late begun to put up in thick silken coils.
+Her mother said you had to take your two hands to a one of them, like as
+if you were twisting a big <i>suggawn</i> (hay-rope); and they looked almost
+too heavy for her small head, no matter how closely they were wound
+about it. A rippling wave, moreover, ran through these tresses, which
+were exceedingly soft and fine; so her vanity was perhaps excusable. At
+any rate, it led her to fashion herself a small knot of cherry-coloured
+ribbon made of a bit that had trimmed the sleeve<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> of her mother's purple
+merino gown. It was a <i>very</i> small knot, because most of the bit had got
+mildewed lying up, before Theresa grew to concern herself about such
+things. But it looked as bright in her hair as a ruddy berry on a dark
+foliaged creeper, and she wore it with a pleasure, which was destined to
+be brief. For as she sat knitting with the quietly creeping fingers of
+an expert in that art, a vagrant gust maliciously whisked off her little
+gawd, and tossing it contumeliously on the ground, as if it were not
+worth carrying, began to puff it along, skimming over the heather and
+tussocks. Denis O'Meara all but rescued it for her, only that Hugh
+McInerney&mdash;the omadhawn&mdash;starting forward at the same time, blundered up
+against him, and tumbled with him into a furze-bush. And before they
+picked themselves up, the cherry-coloured knot had met its fate in the
+shape of the Ryans' black and white kid. She was tethered close by, and
+had been apparently absorbed in scratching her forehead with her left
+hind foot in a way that said much for the limberness of her youthful
+joints. But as the bit of ribbon flirted past her she made a rapid
+snatch, and swallowed it at a gulp. Mrs. Ryan stood dismayed at possible
+serious consequences<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> to the kid, and Theresa at the certain loss of her
+scrap of finery; and everybody else was saying to Hugh McInerney: "Och,
+you great omadhawn, why couldn't you keep yourself aisy? He had it safe
+enough on'y for you gettin' under his feet"&mdash;everybody, that is, except
+Denis O'Meara, who said: "Sure now the both of us wasn't mindin' rightly
+where we was chargin' to; and the raison of that belike was the nayther
+of us thinkin' so much of what we was runnin' after, as of who we was
+runnin' for&mdash;and small blame to us bedad."</p>
+
+<p>But Hugh's self-esteem was not restored by the good-natured excuse. He
+said: "Truth it is, I'd a right to ha' sted quiet. For the on'y notion I
+had was puttin' meself for'ard to be gettin' a hould of it before any of
+the others." And he walked off crestfallen to resume his perch on the
+thatch.</p>
+
+<p>As for Theresa, she ignored Denis's pretty speech, and said 'deed now
+she remembered her mother had bid her step up and see what way Ody
+Rafferty's aunt was that morning. And she, too, withdrew from the group
+to make this visit of inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>As she passed on her way under the place<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> where Hugh was thatching, he
+dropped a small handful of rushes on her head to call her attention, and
+when she looked up she saw his red-brick-hued face in a wild
+tow-coloured halo peering down at her from over the eaves. "I am sorry I
+lost it on you," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, no matter about it; and it wasn't your fau't more than another's,"
+said Theresa.</p>
+
+<p>"You'd ha' had it now," said Hugh, "if it wasn't for the little goat
+gettin' the chance to ait it while himself was tumblin' over me. But I'd
+as lief have your hair the way it is now. It is the blackest ever I
+seen. One might think you'd gathered it out of the middles of them red
+poppies there. Stick a couple of them in it, if you want anythin'; but
+to my mind it's better widout. On'y if you've the fancy to be tyin' the
+bit of red string through it, I'm sorry it was ate."</p>
+
+<p>Hugh's head drew back, and disappeared from her view; but next moment
+she heard him say mournfully: "What am I after doin'? Puttin' me fut
+that far down a houle it's caught fast between a couple of rafters.
+Firrm it is, begorrah. If I don't mind what I'm at, it's pullin' the
+half of their house down, and wranchin' me ankle I'll be before I free
+meself." And she saw him struggling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> cautiously on the roof all the
+while she was ascending the slope to Ody Rafferty's door, within which
+his aunt was at present a prisoner.</p>
+
+<p>A reluctant and repining one she was, having been seized with a bad
+attack of lumbago at a time when she felt particularly anxious to keep a
+vigilant eye upon what occurred in her neighbourhood, instead of being
+left dependent upon hearsay for a knowledge of anything happening
+outside her four draughty walls. Many a care-infested hour she fretted
+away between them. For how could she tell with what insidious steps the
+calamity to ensue from Ody's courtship of Theresa Joyce might all the
+while be stealing on her? She dared not confide her fears to any
+neighbour, nor would she have put much faith in the report of
+observation unwhetted thereby; and she lived in daily dread of hearing
+the news announced as no mere conjecture or rumour, but a very hard
+fact. As the days wore on the idea took possession of her more and more
+completely, but she could only wreak her helpless ill-humour by doing
+foolish and futile things, such as dilating to Ody upon the imprudence
+of getting married, and the undesirable qualities of black-looking slips
+of colleens&mdash;a simple and ingenious expedient for putting him out of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>
+conceit with all and any of them; while she assumed towards Theresa a
+demeanor so glum and repellent that the girl could not attribute it
+entirely to the irritability caused by rheumatic twinges, and from one
+of her charitably intentioned visits returned with a disconcerted
+expression, and a resolve, which she kept, to pay no more. But in fact
+Ody was during these weeks even more than usually engrossed by the
+affairs of the inobtrusive little manufactory, which he and Felix
+O'Beirne superintended away in a retired part of the bog; and not they
+alone, but Lisconnel collectively, had been going through some
+excitement on this account. This was occasioned by the livelier interest
+which the police had recently manifested in that branch of home
+industry, stimulated by admonitions from their authorities to the effect
+that the hunting down of illicit stills, and confiscation of the
+produce, might with advantage be carried on more energetically. Hence
+had resulted several appearances in Lisconnel of the constabulary from
+Ballybrosna and other stations, and when these occurred Ody was in his
+element of wiles and stratagems. More than once he enjoyed the moment of
+their visitors' departure on a wild-goose chase, "consaitin' they've got
+us be the hind leg<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> this time for sartin;" and long did he chuckle over
+the evening when they came and "sat discoorsin' as plisint and aisy as a
+rabbit in its houle," by a hearth where there was "enough of the stuff
+to float the lot of them lyin' widin six inches of their shiny brogues."
+It was, however, thought expedient to guard against a repetition of this
+perilous entertainment, and the contraband crocks were transferred to a
+still more secluded hiding-place in the queer tiny sod-and-stone shanty
+with Hugh McInerney, who had displayed unexpected strategical ability
+and presence of mind under late emergencies, now knocked up for himself
+in a hollow behind the hill. So old Moggy's fears might have been better
+employed. Then about this time, too, a thrill was caused by the
+mysterious horseman, who visited the O'Beirnes' forge one night, and got
+old Felix to break open for him an immensely strong, small iron box
+which he carried. The same box being found next morning lying empty in
+the little Lisconnel stream, beside which the horse, "a grand big roan,"
+was quietly grazing, while his rider was nowhere, nor was ever after
+anywhere, to be seen; an incident which gave scope for infinite
+speculation at Lisconnel.</p>
+
+<p>All these things happened before Ody's aunt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> got about again. By that
+time it was well on in August, and the season having been hot and dry,
+Lisconnel's oat-patches were already reflecting as if in a mirror,
+tarnished somewhat and rusted, the broad golden blaze that had looked
+down on them so steadily, and people had begun to think about reaping.
+The Ryans' field, indeed, was so ripe by the day of Ballybrosna Big
+Fair, that Paddy Ryan commissioned Hugh McInerney to bring him back a
+reaping-hook from it. Hugh was going to attend it on business of his
+own, and Ody Rafferty had some bulkier commissions to execute in behalf
+of his neighbours. But he encountered some difficulties in getting under
+way, due to the inopportune devices of old Rory, whom he proposed to
+bring with him. Ody had been careful not to put on his best clothes
+until he had caught the beast, because, as he remarked, "He well knew
+the crathur 'ud be off wid himself hidin' in the unhandiest place the
+divil 'ud put in his mind, if he noticed e'er a dacint stitch on him."
+Yet despite this precaution, when his master went to look for him after
+breakfast, no black pony was in sight.</p>
+
+<p>"And he that'll be foosterin' everywhere under your feet other whiles,
+he's that fond of company,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> said Ody's aunt, who hobbled out of doors
+for the first time to assist in the search. "Belike he's seen you
+rubbin' up your brogues, and be raison of that he's took off wid
+himself. Bedad, now the big ould head of him is as full of desate as it
+can hould."</p>
+
+<p>"He's a notorious schemer, God forgive him," Ody said, rather sadly, for
+it went against the grain with him to admit defects in Rory.</p>
+
+<p>But his scheming bade fair to prove successful, as Ody after long
+hunting stood baffled at the door, with his expedition seemingly
+frustrated, when Hugh McInerney passing by reported that he "was after
+seein' the baste lanin' gathered up close agin the back of the big stone
+above there, wid a continted grin on the ould gob of him that 'ud
+frighten you wid the villiny was in it." Whereupon the two young men
+went to dislodge him from his fool's paradise, and the three started
+together without further delay.</p>
+
+<p>Till a short way down the road they met old Felix O'Beirne, and with him
+Denis O'Meara, at whose heels followed Joe Egan, ragged and small, his
+habit being to dog his splendid cousin so persistently that old Mrs.
+Byers next door said she wondered "the young chap didn't of an odd<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>
+while take him be the two shoulders and sling him over the dyke."</p>
+
+<p>"So you're off to the fair," said old O'Beirne. "And is it sellin' the
+pony you'd be at last? Sure, now, he'll be the pick of the market,
+that's sartin."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, they'll niver give me me price for him, the naygurs," said Ody.</p>
+
+<p>"Our Captin-Commandin' here had a right to take him off of you for a
+throoper," said old O'Beirne, "and, faix, there wouldn't be his aquil in
+the len'th and breadth of the army. What 'ud you offer for him, lad?
+Look at the size of the head he has on him, and the onnathural white
+face of him that's fit to scare a rigimint before it, if there was
+nothin' else."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it broke bankrupt you'd have me then?" said Denis, "settin' up to be
+buyin' meself mounts of that expinsive discripshin?"</p>
+
+<p>"Musha, good gracious, man, promise him the first thruppinny-bit you
+meet floatin' down the river on a grindstone, and you'll be buyin' every
+hair in his tail," said the old man. "But come along and don't be
+delayin' thim. They're goin' after fairin's for their sweethearts, the
+way you'd be yourself if you worn't too great a naygur. Or,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> maybe,
+there isn't anythin' good enough for her to be had in Ballybrosna&mdash;is
+that the raison of it?"</p>
+
+<p>Little Joe was beginning to say in a resentful shout: "Naygur
+yourself&mdash;he and I are goin' to get&mdash;&mdash;" But Denis pulled him on
+jocularly by the collar, and the parties went their several ways.</p>
+
+<p>Ody then said: "Sweethearts is it? He's the quare ould man for talkin'.
+Glory be to the great goodness, I'm throubled wid ne'er a one. 'Here's
+out of it,' sez I. 'Onnathural,' sez he, musha cock him up, and himself
+shoein' ould garrons all the days of his life. Hi along, Rory, jewel!"</p>
+
+<p>But Hugh said, meditatively, and more than half to himself, which was
+rather a habit of his: "Well, now, for the matter of the fairin', it's
+just the best len'th of ribbon I can get thim to give me for a shillin'.
+Yella it's to be. I wasn't long aither plannin' a way to find out the
+colour she'd like. Sure, I gave her a bunch of flowers wid poppies in
+it, and daisies, and furze-blossom, and foxglove, and forgit-me-not, and
+midowsweet, and sez I to her, which of thim was the finest coloured.
+And, sez she, the furze-blossom was, be raison of it bein' the bright
+gould all over, that the others<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> had mostly only a spark of somewheres
+inside. So it's to be yella. Tellin' you the truth, I'd liefer she
+wouldn't be wearin' e'er such a thing at all, anyways not in her hair,
+that's a sight purtier just in the big black twists. But, sure, it's the
+fancy she has, and morebetoken, I think bad of me lettin' the little
+goat swally the weeny bit she had on her. Ay bedad, I'd a right to be
+bringin' it to her; and, at all evints, I'd be doin' a foolish thing to
+come home widout it, and me not gettin' the bit of fat bacon these six
+weeks next Saturday to make up the price. I won'er now what len'th
+they'd give you for one shillin'?"</p>
+
+<p>But Ody, who had not been listening, only said, oracularly: "Och! that's
+accordin'," which did not materially assist Hugh's speculations.</p>
+
+<p>Yellow ribbons were not plentiful at Ballybrosna fair, and Hugh
+McInerney had to ask for them vainly at several stalls before he came to
+an old-clothes cart, where the proprietress, being hot and cross, took
+him aback by replying: "And who ever heard tell of sellin' ribbons be
+the len'th, you quare-lookin' stookawn?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure it's meself couldn't say but you might; I niver had any call to be
+buyin' such a thing before. But a bit that one shillin' 'ud be the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+price of is what I'm wishful to be gettin', if it was yella&mdash;and beggin'
+your pardon, ma'am," Hugh answered with a glib meekness, which mollified
+the old woman as much as his not undesigned mention of his shilling.</p>
+
+<p>So she said, "'Deed, now, I believe I've a splindid yella bit
+somewheres, a trifle creased in the folds, that I could make you a
+prisint of for a shillin'." And she rummaged, and unrolled before him
+interminable coils of vivid dandelion-hued ribbon. "The grand colour of
+it couldn't be bet," she said, "in Ireland. You could see it a mile off,
+and you wouldn't get the match of it in Dublin under half-a-crown. If
+she wouldn't be plased wid that, you've got an odd one to satisfy."</p>
+
+<p>Ody with Rory came by as she was wrapping it up in paper, and Hugh,
+pointing to his purchase with a melancholy air, said, in an aggrieved
+tone: "It's a <i>terrible</i> quantity they're about givin' me&mdash;yards and
+yards&mdash;enough to rope round a haystack; and it's an ojis colour. Troth,
+now, if she takes the notion to be stickin' the whole of it on top of
+the little black head of her, it's an objec' she'll make of herself, she
+will so. It's a pity. I'd liefer there hadn't been the half of it."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What for then are you gettin' more than enough of whatever it is?" Ody
+asked not unreasonably. "Supposin' you wanted any such thrash at all at
+all."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, sure, I settled in me own mind to be spendin' me shillin' on it,
+and that's the way it is," Hugh said resignedly. "Maybe she'll have more
+wit, the bit of a crathur; she might never put it on. So now I've on'y
+to see after Paddy Ryan's rapin'-hook, and then I'm done. And is it
+carryin' them two bags all the way home you'd be? Sure there's plinty of
+room for them on the baste."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, is there?" said Ody. "But the fac' is Rory's in none too good a
+temper this minyit, goodness help him, and he'll be apt to thravel more
+contint, the crathur, if he sees he's not the on'y body wid a loadin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Rax me over the one of them," said Hugh, "I've nought barrin' the bit
+of ribbon, and the rapin'-hook 'ill be nothin' to me at all."</p>
+
+<p>And in this way they plodded back to Lisconnel.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>A FAIRING</h3>
+
+
+<p>Up at Lisconnel, meanwhile, as the idle hours loitered by, Ody
+Rafferty's aunt grew tired of her solitary housekeeping, and late in the
+afternoon she made her way down as far as the Joyces'. Here a number of
+the neighbours were sitting about in almost the same place where Theresa
+had sustained the loss of her cherry-coloured knot. But to-day there
+were no rough breezes stirring to bring about such disasters by their
+unmannerly pranks. The sun-steeped air was so still that the thick
+bushes stood as steady as the boulders, and even the rushes nodded
+slightly and stiffly. As the old woman hobbled down the slope she saw
+Denis O'Meara's scarlet uniform gleaming martially against a background
+of dark broom and hoary rock. Its wearer was, however, very peacefully
+employed in pulling the silky floss off the heads of the bog-cotton,
+which lay in a great heap<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> before him on a flat-topped boulder, with a
+big bunch of many-hued wild flowers beside it. Theresa Joyce, who sat
+opposite to him, was pulling bog-cotton too, though less diligently, for
+it might have been noticed that she often looked off her work, and
+towards the scrap of road that lay within her ken. Joe Egan was at his
+cousin's elbow, and a few other lads and lasses made a rough circle. But
+old Mrs. Joyce, and old Mrs. Ryan, and old Paddy Ryan, and old Felix
+O'Beirne had established themselves on a low grassy bank at a little
+distance. It was kept so closely cropped by the Ryans' goat that its
+dandelions grew dwarfed and stalkless, and were set flat in the fine
+sward like mock suns. All this day the real sun had shone on it so
+strongly that the air was aromatic with the odour of its dim-blossomed
+herbs, and to touch it was like laying your hand on the warm side of
+some sleek-coated beast. Old Paddy said you might think you were sitting
+on the back of an ould cow, but his wife rejoined that "you'd have to go
+far enough from Lisconnel, worse luck, before you'd get the chance of
+doin' such a thing." And she shook her head over the reflection so
+regretfully that a matter-of-fact person might have inferred her to have
+been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> formerly much in the habit of enjoying seats on the backs of cows.</p>
+
+<p>These elders, from where they sat, commanded a comprehensive view of the
+crops of Lisconnel, its potatoes and oats, green and gold, meshed in
+their grey stone fences, and flecked with obstructive boulders and
+laboured cairns. In the middle of the Ryans' neighbouring field there is
+a block of quartzite, as big as a small turf-stack, which gleamed
+exceedingly white from amongst the deep muffling greenery of the
+potato-plants. Mrs. Joyce had been praising their thriving aspect to old
+Paddy, who, however, was disposed to express a gloomy view of them.</p>
+
+<p>"It's too rank they're growin' altogether," he said; "ne'er a big crop
+you'll get under that heigth of haulms. 'Heavy thatchin' and light
+liftin',' as the sayin' is."</p>
+
+<p>To Felix O'Beirne the smooth leafy surface recalled a far-off incident
+of the War, when the dense foliage of a certain potato-field had
+permitted the execution of a curious military man&oelig;uvre. It was one of
+old O'Beirne's favourite stories, and he often related it at full
+length, but to-day it was cut short by the arrival of Ody Rafferty's
+aunt, whom Mrs. Joyce and Mrs. Ryan<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> were prompt to greet, making room
+for her between them on the bank with an alacrity which somehow conveyed
+an impression of uneasiness lest she should establish herself elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>Presently she said: "And what at all is Theresa busy wid over
+yonder&mdash;and young O'Meara? Is it bogberries they're after pullin'?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Joyce said: "No, ma'am, it isn't bogberries;" and left further
+explanations to Mrs. Ryan, with the air of one who refrains from
+self-glorification, but counts upon its being done for her, more
+gracefully, by deputy.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure wasn't he out on the bog the len'th of the day, since early this
+mornin', he and little Joe, gadrin' her the bog-cotton?" said Mrs. Ryan.
+"The full of a pitaty-creel he brought her. They have it there in a
+hape."</p>
+
+<p>"'Twas because he heard her sayin' last night she wished she had a good
+bit of it to stuff the pillow she's makin' me," put in Mrs. Joyce. "Off
+he went after it the first thing this mornin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Whethen now, is that the way of the win'?" said Ody Rafferty's aunt,
+with a pleased smile, striking out unfamiliar paths among her wrinkles.
+"Troth, but I'm rael glad to hear it. Bedad, it's a grand thing for
+little Theresa."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"He's a very dacint poor lad," Mrs. Joyce said, looking over with pride
+at the handsome young sergeant, and thinking that Ody Rafferty's aunt
+must have some good nature in her after all, since she was so evidently
+glad of their good luck.</p>
+
+<p>"'Deed but there's not a finer young man in the kingdom of Connaught
+this day," said Mrs. Ryan, who could, of course, be frankly laudatory.
+"And wid everybody's good word, high and low, and drawin' grand pay, and
+the colonel in his rigimint ready to do a turn for him any time, and a
+rael steady kind-hearted lad to the back of that. But sure he's after as
+nice a little girl as he'd ha' found anywheres, wid all his thravellin',
+and as good as gould. He'll be very apt to be spakin' out to her
+prisintly, for it's gettin' near his lave's ind, and what for would they
+be waitin'? But to my mind it's as good as made up after what he's done
+to-day."</p>
+
+<p>In a little while after this Ody Rafferty's aunt slipped away, and set
+off hobbling along the road towards Duffclane. She wanted to intercept
+her grand-nephew on his way home and tell him this news. For all day she
+had been haunted by an apprehension that Ody meant to return with a
+fairing for Theresa, the presentation of which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> might bring about a
+crisis in his courtship very disastrous from her own point of view. Old
+Moggy surveyed her world rather steadily at all times from that
+particular outlook, finding in her solitary superfluousness little to
+deflect her gaze. The disappointment which, on her own theory, these
+tidings would bring to Ody did not do so now, and she put her best foot
+foremost, animated by the pleasure of telling some new thing, one,
+moreover, that threw a reassuring light upon her situation. With even
+her amended opinion of the lad she could hardly imagine that he would
+have a chance against magnificent Denis O'Meara, whom nobody would have
+ever expected to look for a wife in poor little Lisconnel&mdash;but you never
+could tell, and she felt that it still behoved her to be on her guard
+against all possible perils. Therefore she at present thought it
+expedient to waylay Ody, and let him know that if he had any notion of
+Theresa Joyce, he was a day after the fair.</p>
+
+<p>Hobbling on bent and breathless, wrapped in her rusty black shawl, with
+her shadow flitting far out over the level bog amid the slanted beams,
+she looked a not inappropriate messenger of woe, symbolically impotent
+and insignificant; a little dark speck in the wide westering light; a
+feeble<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> stir of life creeping on the verge of a vast silent solitude;
+and full, withal, of baseless fears and futile plots, concerning the
+withered shred of existence that remained to her. She was just in the
+nick of time, she said to herself, when she saw the trio presently
+coming over the top of the hill. Ody was pointing out conciliatingly to
+the morose Rory how they'd be at home now nearly in the time he'd be
+waggin' his tail; and Hugh McInerney was resolving that he would go on
+straight to his own place, and defer the presentation of the ugly yellow
+ribbon until to-morrow. All three were hot and fagged and dusty.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, lad, and what's the best good news wid you?" Ody's aunt said to
+him, as they met.</p>
+
+<p>"Little enough," said Ody.</p>
+
+<p>"And you comin' out of a fair?" she said. "Bedad now, we make a better
+offer at it ourselves up here for the matter of news."</p>
+
+<p>"What's that at all?" said Ody.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure amn't I just after hearin' tell of a grand weddin' there's goin'
+to be prisintly?" said his aunt, "and that doesn't happen every day of
+the year."</p>
+
+<p>"Och, a weddin'," said Ody. "I was thinkin' maybe there was somethin'
+quare at our little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> place beyant yonder. But as long as it's nothin'
+worser than weddin's you're hearin' tell of, I'm contint, if you
+listened the two ears off your head."</p>
+
+<p>"It's Denis O'Meara and Theresa Joyce has made a match of it," said his
+aunt, conscious that she was slightly overstating facts; "settled up it
+is on'y this evenin'. And the weddin's bound to be before his lave's
+out&mdash;so there's for you."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure good luck to the both of thim," said Ody, "Theresa Joyce is a
+plisant little bein', I'll say that for her, and divil a bit of harm
+there is in O'Meara aither. A fine chap he is for a sodger; not that
+they're any great things as far as I can see&mdash;just p&oacute;lis a thrifle
+smartened up."</p>
+
+<p>Ody's thoughts were for the moment running on the police, a couple of
+whom he had lately espied at a short distance coming across the bog.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if you wanted to see the two of thim," said his aunt, raising her
+voice as he began to drive Rory on, "there they are, just at the back of
+her place, sortin' the stuff he's after gettin' her on the bog. He
+brought her the full of the pitaty-creel. Her mother's as plased over it
+as anythin', and sot up too, aye is she bedad."</p>
+
+<p>The old woman was for the time being almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> as much disappointed as
+relieved by the equanimity with which Ody had received her tidings; yet
+if she had but known, they had not failed to produce a strong sensation.
+Only she never thought of considering how they might affect that quare
+big gawk Hugh McInerney. What did occur to her in his connection as he
+begun to trudge alongside her after the pony, was that "he was as ugly
+as if he had been bespoke." For Hugh's long tramp under the sultry sun
+had scorched him a deeper and more uniform red brick than usual, and his
+shock of tow-coloured hair jutting from beneath an unnoticeable round
+cap, looked more than ever like thatch over his blinking blue eyes. When
+they had gone a few yards in silence he suddenly said musingly&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I dunno why he wouldn't have as good a right to be bringin' her
+anythin' she had a fancy for off the bog in a pitaty-creel, as me to be
+buyin' her len'ths of hijis-coloured ribbons to make a show of herself
+wid. But all the same, I'd as lief he'd let it alone. For some raison or
+other I've the wish in me mind I was slingin' the whole of it into one
+of thim bog-houles out there&mdash;and that 'ud be no thing to go do on
+her.... And that was a quare story the ould woman had about thim<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>
+gettin' married. Somebody was apt to be makin' a fool of her. Who was it
+would be tellin' her I won'er?"</p>
+
+<p>But old Moggy partly overheard and said: "Thim that knew what they was
+talkin' about, supposin' it's any affair of yours."</p>
+
+<p>So he did the rest of his meditating inaudibly. He said to himself that
+he was steppin' home straight&mdash;continuing the while to walk in quite the
+opposite direction&mdash;and that he wouldn't be goin' to the Joyces' place
+to-night at all; what 'ud bring him there, and it gettin' so late? But
+of course he went there, as surely as a swimming bubble goes over the
+cataract's smooth lip, or a fascinated little bird down the snake's
+throat.</p>
+
+<p>For the sensation which he had begun to experience, and which was a
+strong one, and strange to him, was nothing less than jealousy. He was
+jealous of that pitaty-creel.</p>
+
+<p>When he came to the place Ody's aunt had told of, he found a group of
+young Joyces and Ryans and others gathered among the boulders and bushes
+in a circle of which the heap of bog-cotton formed the centre; and a
+glance having showed him that it included Denis and Theresa, he sat down
+facing them, and said to himself:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"If I'd known, now, it was bog-cotton she was wantin', I could ha' been
+gadrin' her plinty last night after I come home. There's a gran' big
+moon these times, wid lashin's and lavin's of light to be gettin' thim
+kind of glimmerin' things by. I seen a black place below between the
+sthrame of wather and the roadside all waved over white wid it, like as
+if it was a fall of snow thryin' could it flutter off away wid itself
+agin out of the world. I'd have got her enough to fill a six-fut sack.
+What for didn't the crathur tell me?"</p>
+
+<p>Pursuing these and other such reflections Hugh's attention, which at all
+times had a long tether, strayed far afield. He did not hear Denis
+O'Meara inquire of him twice whether Ody Rafferty had got his fine price
+for the old pony; not yet Peter Ryan rejoin after an interval that he
+supposed it was such a big one, anyway, Hugh McInerney couldn't get it
+out of his mouth&mdash;that was sizable enough. No doubt it was this symptom
+of absentmindedness that emboldened Thady Joyce to set about twitching
+out of Hugh's pocket the flimsy paper parcel seen protruding from it, a
+feat which he achieved undetected, while his surrounding accomplices
+nudged one another and whispered: "Och he has it now&mdash;whoo-oo he'll do
+it."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Thady conveyed what he had filched to Molly and Nelly Ryan, who
+manipulated it for some time amid much giggling; and then Nelly, with
+dexterous audacity pinned their handiwork on to the cap of her neighbour
+Denis O'Meara, who sat all unawares. Thus it came to pass that when Hugh
+was at last roused to a vague sense of tittering all round him, which
+reached him much as the clacking chirp of sparrows gets meaninglessly
+into our frayed morning dreams, and looking up out of his reverie,
+stared about him for an explanation, the first thing his eyes lit on was
+Denis's smart cap surmounted by a mass of gaudy yellow ribbon in immense
+bows and loops and streamers, flapping and waggling absurdly at every
+movement made by their unsuspecting wearer. And the spectacle caught his
+breath, and dazzled his sight with a sudden scorching blast of wrath.
+For it seemed to him that Denis was not making merely a mock of him and
+his fairing, which he thought intrinsically of small amount, but through
+it of Theresa herself and her foolish little fancies. And there sat
+Theresa looking on, with a quick pink flush, and shining eyes, and a
+quiver about her mouth. The next moment Hugh had hurled at the bedizened
+cap what he happened to be holding in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> his hand. And this was Paddy
+Ryan's new reaping-hook.</p>
+
+<p>Thereupon followed a terrible confusion and clamour, which seemed to
+fill at a sweep all the spacious drowsy light of the sunsetting. For the
+missile had gone surely to its mark, and had not simply knocked off
+Denis's cap, but made a shocking gash in his temple, so that there were
+only too sufficient reasons for the rising shrieks of "Holy Virgin, he's
+murdhered&mdash;he's kilt!" Amid all the turmoil, with Denis fallen on the
+ground, and Hugh standing staring, and everybody else rushing through
+other like crows in a storm, one person alone appeared to act with a
+definite purpose, and that was little Joe Egan. The event had made him
+like one possessed with rage and despair. To Joe, weakly and timorous
+and not over-wise, his valiant, handsome, good-natured soldier cousin
+had come as the most splendid apparition that had shined upon him in the
+dim course of his fifteen years; and he had spent the past three months
+in adoring it very devoutly. So that now to see him laid low suddenly in
+this savage fashion was a sight that might well cause a burning thirst
+for vengeance upon the miscreant who had dealt the stroke. Joe generally
+had to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> get his revenges wreaked by deputy; and now, as he darted away,
+his intention was to find the p&oacute;lis somewhere, and bring them to take up
+"that great bastely murdherin' divil, Hugh McInerney," and if by any
+means possible get him hung. He attained his object sooner than might
+have been expected, as not far down the road a pair of constables were
+run into by a small tatterdemalion figure, who, choking and stammering
+and writhing in an ague fit of fury, proceeded to inform them that "Big
+Hugh McInerney was just after murdherin' Denis O'Meara up above
+there&mdash;takin' the head off him wid a rapin'-hook," and, further, that
+"if they looked in the dirty thief's little place at the fut of the
+hill, they'd find that every other stone in the walls of it was nothin'
+else but a crock of poteen."</p>
+
+<p>This was the cause of the police's prompt arrival on the scene, where
+nobody resented Joe's action. Denis's injury, though so grave, happily
+did not seem to be mortal, in fact, on this occasion young Dan O'Beirne,
+albeit scarcely more than a spalpeen, displayed a handiness and resource
+about bandaging and other remedies, which foreshadowed his future
+reputation throughout the district for knowledgableness in surgery and
+medicine. Hugh McInerney was, of course, at once arrested, without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> any
+resistance on his part, or any sympathy from the indignant neighbours.
+He appeared to be what old Will Sheridan termed, "fallen into a serious
+consternation," and was heard to make only one remark. It was when
+people were saying that Theresa Joyce had took a wakeness, and her
+brothers had carried her indoors. "Och, the crathur," he said, "and it
+might aisy have hit her, very aisy. Miself's the quare divil."</p>
+
+<p>Once the police and their prisoner had gone, Denis having been brought
+into the Ryans' house, a deep and melancholy hush settled down upon
+Lisconnel, as if a murky wing had flapped out its brief flare of
+excitement. The whole thing had happened so quickly that the rich light
+from the west was still bronzing the edges of the flat-ledged furze
+boughs, and rosing their white stems, when the little hollow behind the
+Joyces' house rested quiet and deserted, with no traces left of the
+company lately there assembled, except a litter of silky white
+bog-cotton tufts, soon to be swept away by the breeze, and the unchancy
+yellow ribbon, which had been torn out of Denis's cap, and lay coiling
+among the rough grass, whence, as the dusk thickened, it glinted like
+the wraith of a lost sunbeam or a ray from an evil star.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But that night fell very dark, with a moon so closely veiled that the
+flaggers and bulrushes waving their swords and spears fast by, dwindled
+into mere rustlings and murmurs&mdash;the air was full of them. At the
+dimmest hour anybody who had stolen out of a neighbouring door, and
+passed between the faintly glimmering white boulders, as if in search of
+something lost there, might have seemed only one of the whispering
+shadows. And these might have begun so say, "Sorra aught can I do at
+all, at all. And ne'er a soul is there to spake a word&mdash;all of thim agin
+him, and it no fau't of his, when he would be torminted that way. They'd
+no call to go play such a thrick on him, and he didn't mane it a'
+purpose, I very well know; but the other chap was intindin' to annoy
+him, sittin' there wid a great ugly grin on his face. I wish he'd never
+come next or nigh Lisconnel." But be that as it may, when the next
+morning's light twinkled among the dewy blades, the yellow ribbon had
+disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>After this the days seemed to drag heavily at Lisconnel, where a dulness
+and flatness had come over society. Dr. Hamilton had carried off Denis
+O'Meara to Ballybrosna, and there was nothing to fill up the blank he
+left except speculations about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> his chances of recovery, and censures
+upon Hugh McInerney, monotonously unanimous. In his favour, indeed, no
+one seemingly had a word to say. People declared that "they'd never have
+thought he'd take and do such a thing, for though he might ha' been a
+quare sort of bosthoon, he was always dacint and paiceable." But
+cancelled praise is the bitterest of blame; and they added that "it was
+rael outrageous of him to go do murdher on the likes of Denis O'Meara,
+and no credit to Lisconnel for it to be happenin' him there. Iligant
+char&aacute;cters it 'ud be givin' them if he wint back to the rigimint wid his
+eyes slashed out of his head, as much as to say he hadn't a fair chance
+among us unless he'd come wid his side-arms."</p>
+
+<p>The neighbours were of opinion, too, that "it was no wonder little
+Theresa Joyce had got a bit moped and quiet, after her sweetheart bein'
+as good as destroyed before her eyes, and it hard to say if she'd ever
+see a sight of him again."</p>
+
+<p>"It was a misfort'nit thing," Mrs. Con Ryan remarked one day, when the
+subject was under discussion, "that young O'Meara hadn't actually spoke
+out before it happint thim. 'Twould ha' made her a dale aisier in her
+mind now, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> wouldn't won'er. Because the way the matter stands, he
+might take up wid some diff'rint notion, and just be off wid himself
+like a cloud blown out of the sky, and she couldn't be sayin' a word, if
+she was ever so sure of what he was intindin'."</p>
+
+<p>Young Mrs. Keogh, to whom she made the observation, refused to entertain
+this view, and replied, "Sorra a fear is there of that. It was aisy to
+see he'd ha' gone to the Well of the World's End after her, let alone
+steppin' up from the Town, if he's spared to get his health. Ay, he'll
+be comin' back for her one of these fine days, sure enough, plase God."</p>
+
+<p>But the fulfilment of her confident prediction looked several degrees
+more doubtful in the light of one of the two pieces of news which Mrs.
+Carbery, accompanied by her daughter Rose, conveyed to the Joyces' on a
+bright September morning a short while after. Her son had come home with
+it from the Town too late the night before. One of them was that Hugh
+McInerney, who had been awaiting the assizes in Moynalone Jail, had died
+of the fever there on last Friday. There was nothing very surprising in
+this event, as Hugh's open-air life could have but ill acclimatised<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> him
+to the atmosphere of the unclean little jail; and it was not likely to
+be very deeply deplored at Lisconnel, where he had not been known long,
+nor, as we have seen, much to his advantage.</p>
+
+<p>As Mrs. Carbery sat in the three-cornered arm-chair, with the sun-dazzle
+off a burnished mug on the dresser shimmering into her eyes, and making
+her blink quaintly, she said, with rather severe solemnity, that "she
+hoped the young fellow had had time to repint of his sins, or else it
+was very apt to be a bad look-out for him, and he after comin' widin a
+shavin' of takin' another man's life no time at all ago, so to
+spake&mdash;ne'er a chance but it would be clear in everybody's
+recollection."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Joyce, however, said: "Ah, sure maybe the crathur wasn't intindin'
+any such great harm all the while, God be good to him. And, anyway,
+where he's gone he'll find plinty ready to be spakin' up for him, and
+puttin' the best face they can on the matter."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay will he," said old Biddy Ryan, who was calling too, "and bedad it's
+one great differ there is, be all accounts, between that place and this.
+For here if a misfort'nit body does aught amiss, the first notion the
+rest of us have, God forgive us,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> is to be axin' what worser he was
+manin', like as if it was some manner of riddle, that there's bound to
+be an answer to, if one could find it."</p>
+
+<p>"'Deed, and I dunno if they haven't very far to look, ma'am," said Mrs.
+Carbery, with dignity, "when a chap does his endeavours to take the head
+off another man wid a rapin'-hook, ma'am."</p>
+
+<p>"And <i>I</i> dunno, ma'am, for that matter," said old Biddy, also with
+dignity, "if it's any such a great dale better to have one's mind took
+up wid invintin' other people's bad intintions than if it was wid one's
+own."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, well! I wouldn't be thinkin' too bad of poor Hugh McInerney, at all
+events," said Mrs. Joyce. "'Twas maybe a sort of accident, for he seemed
+a dacint crathur afore that. Och now, to think it's on'y a few odd weeks
+since he was creepin' about over our heads up there, mendin' th' ould
+thatch! You'd whiles hear him hummin' away, talkin' to himself like some
+sort of big bee&mdash;and in his grave to-day! But isn't it a lucky thing
+that he's lavin' nobody belongin' to him to be breakin' their hearts
+frettin' after him? Theresa, child dear, you've ne'er a stim of light to
+be workin' in, sittin' there in the corner."</p>
+
+<p>But Theresa said she had light enough to blind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> her, and was only
+winding a skein, and could see better to do that in the dark. So Mrs.
+Carbery passed on to her second piece of news, which, though less
+tragical than the first, was not likely to sound very cheerfully in the
+ears of some among her audience. It ran that her son Ned was "after
+seein' Denis O'Meara down beyant, and that he was doin' finely, next
+door to himself again: and that the people in the Town did be sayin' he
+was coortin' Mary Anne Neligan, the people's daughter that he was
+lodgin' wid&mdash;a terrible fortin she was said to have&mdash;and that he'd be
+very apt to be takin' her along wid him prisintly when his lave was up."
+Mrs. Carbery supposed they were none of them ever likely to see him
+again up at Lisconnel. And the rest of the neighbours, having heard her
+tale, supposed so likewise, and said among themselves that Theresa Joyce
+was to be pitied.</p>
+
+<p>Yet not many days after this, while the early autumn weather was still
+soft-aired and mellow-lighted over our blue-misted bogland, where the
+leaves and berries were brightening, and even the little frosty-grey
+cups on the lichened boulders getting a scarlet thread at the rim, on
+one clear, dew-dashed morning, who but Denis O'Meara<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> himself should
+come stepping into Lisconnel? The neighbours who saw him go by were glad
+to notice that he looked as well as ever he did in his life, and he
+greeted them all blithely though briefly, eluding every attempt to
+entangle him in conversation, and making very straight for the Widow
+Joyce's house, which was by these same observers considered to betoken a
+healthy frame of mind.</p>
+
+<p>Only Mrs. Joyce and Mrs. Kilfoyle were in the little brown room when he
+arrived, but they gave him a cordial welcome, and he took a seat from
+which he could keep a watch on the door while they talked about
+different things. One of these, naturally, was the melancholy end of
+Denis's assailant&mdash;poor Hugh McInerney&mdash;and Mrs. Joyce said it was
+little enough they'd have thought a while ago that it would be Denis
+who'd come back. "But indeed," she said, "if anythin' had took you, we'd
+ha' been in no hurry ever to set eyes on the other unlucky bosthoon."</p>
+
+<p>Denis said: "Faith, ma'am, I'd give six months' pay the thing had never
+happint. Divil a bit of harm I believe there was in poor McInerney; and
+I spoke to Dr. Hamilton to spake to Mr. Nugent and the other magistrates
+for him; but they said, after what me cousin Joe let out about the
+poteen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> at his place, the p&oacute;lis would be wishful to keep him convanient
+to thim for a while; and to be sure, they kep' him too long altogether.
+I know, ma'am, young Rafferty and the rest had his shanty pulled down
+before the p&oacute;lis come up next day; but they thought they'd git somethin'
+out of him. The little jackass ought to ha' held his tongue. It was a
+pity, bedad. Hard lines it is on a man to be losin' his life, you may
+say, along wid his temper, just be raison of a bit of a joke."</p>
+
+<p>Still as he looked out into the sunshine he could not help thinking that
+he would have had a greater loss of his life than poor Hugh McInerney,
+who, it was evident, would always have met with a cold reception from
+everybody at the Joyces'. Then he said to Mrs. Joyce: "And how's
+Theresa, ma'am?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Joyce was in the middle of replying that she was grandly, and had
+just run over to Mrs. Keogh on a message, when Theresa herself came in.</p>
+
+<p>Denis jumped up quickly, saying: "Ah, Theresa, it's a great while since
+I've seen you."</p>
+
+<p>But Theresa only lifted her head without turning it, and walked straight
+on as if nobody had accosted her.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Arrah, now, Theresa darlint, don't you see Denis O'Meara?" said her
+mother, puzzled and rather dismayed.</p>
+
+<p>And then Theresa did turn and look at him. "Yis, I see him," she
+said&mdash;and, indeed, she might as easily have overlooked the red flame in
+a lantern as the tall scarlet lancer in her mother's little
+misty-cornered room. "I see him," she said, "and I hate the sight of
+him." And thereupon she turned again, and walked out of the door,
+leaving a dead silence behind her.</p>
+
+<p>This was one of the very few harsh sayings that Theresa Joyce has
+uttered in the course of her long life, and it came like a shock upon
+her hearers.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Joyce at last said blankly: "What at all has took the child?"</p>
+
+<p>And Bessie Kilfoyle said to Denis, who stood dumbfounded: "But indeed
+now, you may be sure there's not a many up here, at any rate, who do
+that."</p>
+
+<p>But he replied: "If <i>she</i> does, it's many enough for me, Mrs. Kilfoyle.
+And I won't stop here to be drivin' her out of the house. So I'll say
+good-bye to yous kindly, for I'll be off now to Dublin to-morra or next
+day."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And in coorse," Mrs. Joyce remarked ruefully, after he had departed,
+retreading his steps through the bright fresh morning with so
+crestfallen a mien that all the neighbours knew things had not run
+smoothly, "you couldn't raisonably expec' him to stay here to be hated
+the sight of. And indeed, what wid one thing and another, it's none too
+good thratement the poor lad's got up at Lisconnel, more's the pity."</p>
+
+<p>Theresa herself never had any explanation to offer of "why she would be
+that cross wid poor Denis O'Meara." Her mother accounted for it by pique
+at the Carberys' ill-timed gossip about his imaginary courtship of Mary
+Anne Neligan; and Mrs. Kilfoyle was for a while inclined to the same
+opinion, until one day by chance she espied in the little old tin box
+which contained Theresa's treasures, a roll of bright yellow ribbon
+wrapped up very carefully; and thenceforward she silently ceased to hope
+that things might all come right yet, if Denis O'Meara came back again
+on leave.</p>
+
+<p>So, although Mrs. Joyce may have drawn wrong inferences, the results
+were much as she had foreseen. Theresa never married, and when her
+mother died she went to live with her brother<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> Mick at Laraghmena, where
+she is living still, notwithstanding that it is so long since all this
+happened&mdash;since the fine summer when Denis O'Meara was at Lisconnel, and
+Hugh McInerney, who luckily left nobody to be breaking their hearts
+fretting after him, died in Moynalone Jail.</p>
+
+<p>The yellow ribbon lies safely in her box, and with it a grimy bit of
+paper, brought to her one day by a trusty hand, to which Hugh found out
+a way of committing it "before he was took bad entirely." Theresa
+herself has never deciphered its wild scrawls, being an unlettered
+person, but its bearer read it over to her until she knew it by heart
+every word. "For your own self the yella ribin is," the letter ran, "but
+don't be wearin' it unless you like it. And I'm sorry the man got hit;
+but I do be dhramin' most nights that it's you I'm after rapin' the
+little black head off of; and I'd liefer lose me life than think I'd be
+after hurtin' a hair of it. But the Divil was busy wid me that evenin'.
+And I'm very apt never to get the chance to set fut again out on the big
+bog. It 'ud do me heart good to see the sun goin' down in it a great way
+off, for this is a quare small place. It's a long while. But sure, to
+the end of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> all the days of me life," it said to her, like an echo
+beaten back from the walls of the great abysm, "it's of yourself I'll be
+thinkin' off away in contintmint at Lisconnel."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>MR. POLYMATHERS</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was to an accidental circumstance that Lisconnel owed the prolonged
+sojourn there of perhaps the most distinguished scholar who has ever
+visited us. For when he arrived at O'Beirne's forge one misty June
+evening, the night's lodging only was all he asked or desired. But in
+those times, now some fifty years since, we had "a terrible dale of
+sickness about in the country," and next morning the stranger was down
+with the fever, which, although so mild a case that even Bridget
+O'Beirne never gave him over more than twice in the same day, brought
+his journey perforce to a halt. At the beginning he was very loth to
+believe that he must relinquish his intention of reaching Dublin by a
+certain date&mdash;the first Monday in July; however, having once recognised
+the impossibility of doing so, he showed no haste to quit his quarters,
+and his stay with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> O'Beirnes lengthened into months as the summer
+slipped away. At this time the forge was owned by Felix O'Beirne,
+blacksmith, shebeener, and ex-whiteboy, and with him lived his orphan
+grandsons, Daniel and Nicholas, his very old, ancient mother, who still
+drew enjoyment in whiffs through the stem of her black dudeen, and his
+elderly sister, Bridget, who had taken little pleasure in anything since
+the redcoats shot her sweetheart in the War. The missing third
+generation was represented occasionally when Mrs. Dooley, Felix's
+married daughter, came on a visit. It was conjectured among them that
+"the fancy the ould gintleman had for larnin' all manner to young
+Nicholas continted him to stop." And this may have had something to do
+with it, though less, probably, than the vaguer fact that he from the
+first "took kindly" to the O'Beirnes, and they to him. His appearance
+puzzled them a little. He was of a massive, large-boned frame, such as
+nature seems to design for rough uses; but, as Felix remarked, "you
+could aisy tell be ivery finger and thumb on him that hard work wasn't
+the handle he'd took a hould of the world by." He wore a very long, grey
+frieze coat, and a chimney-pot hat so old and tall that it looked as if
+it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> must have grown slowly to its great height. When he took it off he
+uncovered a shock of soft white hair, like the wig of a seeded
+groundsel, about a face which was furrowed and wrinkled ruggedly enough,
+in a different pattern somehow from what is commonly seen at Lisconnel,
+where sun and wind have a large share in the process. His baggage
+consisted of two bundles, very unequal in size and weight. The contents
+of the smaller one were mainly a shirt and three socks, knotted loosely
+in a blue cotton handkerchief; the other was done up carefully in
+sacking, and he liked to have it under his eye.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the O'Beirnes' visitor was often talked about among the groups
+gathered of an evening, much as they are nowadays, for gossip and poteen
+within the broad-leaved forge doors, through which on dark nights the
+fire still blinks as far across the bog as the amber of the sunset, or
+the rising glow of the golden harvest moon. Even from Felix's first
+report it appeared that the stranger was no ordinary person.</p>
+
+<p>"Won'erful fine discoorse he has out of him, anyway," he told the
+neighbours a few nights after the arrival; "ivery now and agin he'll out
+wid a word as grand like and big as his Riverence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> at Mass&mdash;goodness
+forgive me for sayin' so. Sometimes we've been hardset to tell what he's
+drivin' at. But that's the way it is wid thim words that has a power of
+manin' in thim. They're apt to bother you a bit when you're used to
+spakin plain."</p>
+
+<p>"Belike it's the fever in his head sets him talkin' oddly," said young
+Barney Corcoran. "I mind me brother Joe when he was bad wid it would be
+ravin' wild. Sorra the sinsible word there was out of him for the best
+part of a week."</p>
+
+<p>This way of accounting for his guest's fine language rather affronted
+Felix, and he consequently said, "Musha now, was there not? And how long
+might yourself be under that descripshin of fever?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah sure, what 'ud we do at all if poor Barney was took that way?" said
+Peter Keogh, "and nobody able to tell was it ravin' he was, or settin'
+up to be talkin' raisonable for any differ they could see."</p>
+
+<p>Barney cleared his throat disconcertedly, and the old man, recalling his
+responsibilities as a host, and perhaps not admiring his sarcasm thus
+elaborated, said conciliatingly, "Och, he'll do right enough if he niver
+raves any worse than Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> Polymathers. All that ails him is that we want
+to git a bit used to his manner of spakin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Polymathers?" said Peter.</p>
+
+<p>"To be sure, Polymathers. Did you say it any better than I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I nivir heard tell of anybody called that way before. It's a
+quare she-he soundin' sort of name," said Peter.</p>
+
+<p>"Faix, then, there may be plinty quarer in it, we niver heard tell of,
+if that was all," said Felix. "Anyhow, it's his name, and his people's
+afore him. Himself tould me his father was the ouldest of all the
+Polymatherses there was in the counthry he came out of&mdash;somewheres down
+south, I think he said&mdash;and the head of the whole of thim forby."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, he did so," said Dan. "Sez you to him, there was a dale of water
+run down hill since the time there was O'Beirnes blacksmiths in this
+part of the counthry; and your father was a one, sez you. And sez he to
+you, he couldn't be any manner of manes purtind to be the aquil to what
+<i>his</i> father was. And sez you to him, what was he? And sez he, it was
+one of the Polymatherses he was, and well known for his larnin' through
+the len'th and breadth of the county Sligo. And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> a name it was, he sez,
+any man might be proud of ownin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Be jabers, himself has the great consait of it, at all ivents," said
+Peter. "But he might find people could be tellin' him there's Keoghs as
+good as any Polymatherses iver was in it&mdash;ivery hair."</p>
+
+<p>The stranger's patronymic having thus been ascertained, it was desirable
+to fix his calling, and, despite his disclaimer of inherited erudition,
+several circumstances bespoke him a schoolmaster, even before the
+question seemed settled by the first act of his convalescence being an
+inquiry into the amount of book-learning which Dan and Nicholas had
+amassed during their sixteen and fourteen years. This was not large,
+though as much as could be expected, considering that in all Lisconnel
+there were not just then, I believe, more than four volumes, one of
+which being merely the index to a non-existent <i>Encyclop&aelig;dia</i>, can
+scarcely rank as literature. The boys themselves, and their grandfather,
+were deeply interested in the examination, and very anxious that it
+should have a creditable result. For learning and the learned have at
+all times been held in profound respect among us away on our bogland<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>,
+where the devotion to something afar springs perhaps the more abundantly
+because so many things are remote. On this occasion Mr. Polymathers
+opened his most sizable bundle, and it was seen to be filled with books,
+not fewer, doubtless, than a score, in leather bindings, ragged and
+battered, and brownly time-stained all over their margins, as if the
+river of years had for them run no metaphor, but a russet bog-stream.
+They comprised <i>Homer</i>, <i>Virgil</i>, <i>Livy</i>, and other ancients; likewise
+two Latin lexicons, which looked extravagant until you observed how each
+did but supplement the other's deficiencies, and this so imperfectly
+that their owner was still liable to search in vain for words between <span class="smcap">Mo</span>
+and <span class="smcap">Na</span>.</p>
+
+<p>These, however, were evidently not the most prized portion of Mr.
+Polymathers's library, though he displayed them with some complacency,
+reading out here and there a sonorous "furrin" phrase, at which his
+audience said, "More power," and "Your sowl to glory," and the like. It
+was when he handled the shabbiest of the volumes, with broken backs and
+edges all curling tatters, that his touch grew caressing. The
+lookers-on, contrariwise, thought but poorly of them because they set
+up, seemingly, to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> illustrated works, and their pictures, mostly of
+uninteresting round and three-cornered objects, struck Lisconnel art
+critics as very feeble efforts. To be sure Mr. Polymathers called them
+<i>dygrims</i>, but that was no help to the overtaxed imagination. Only young
+Nicholas O'Beirne listened intently to the explanation which he gave of
+one of them. Nicholas was a long, thin lad, with melancholy grey eyes
+and a square forehead, whose capacity his grandfather had held in some
+esteem, since it had been discovered, years ago, that "the spalpeen
+could make out an account for four sets of shoes, and half a stone of
+three-inch holdfasts, and a dozen of staples, and two gallon of the
+crathur, and allow for a hundredweight of ould iron, all in his head,
+and right to a farthin'." Now the melancholy eyes darkened and
+brightened with excitement as Mr. Polymathers discoursed of right lines
+and angles and circles, and expounded the mysterious signification of
+certain Ah Bay Says. And he had thenceforward an unweariable pupil in
+Nicholas, companied, albeit with less ardent zeal, and at a slower rate
+of progress, by his elder brother, Dan.</p>
+
+<p>More general interest, however, continued to be taken in the stranger's
+classical attainments.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> Everybody&mdash;the O'Beirnes themselves, their
+neighbours in the cabin-row close by, now long since an untraceable
+ruin, and the people of Lisconnel proper, a couple of miles further
+on&mdash;felt uplifted by the residence among them of a man, who they boasted
+would talk Latin to you as soon as look at you. But as we never enjoy
+our own happiness fully until it has been looked at through other men's
+envious eyes, they could not here remain content with simply possessing
+this privilege, or even with dilating upon it to their less favoured
+friends down below and down beyant. They longed to make a parade of it,
+to give a demonstration of it. And the method of doing so which they
+came to consider most desirable was the bringing about of a conversation
+in Latin between Mr. Polymathers and Father Rooney, the Parish Priest.
+For if that took place they could easily imagine his Reverence riding
+home to report in the Town what a wonderful great scholar entirely they
+had stopping above at Lisconnel. Moreover, the conversation itself would
+be a rael fine thing to have the hearing of. Terence Kilfoyle, for
+instance, said that it would be as good as a Play, which, as he had
+never seen one, was to entertain unbounded expectations.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> And at last,
+after they had wished the wish for some weeks, a prospect of its
+fulfilment came into sight together with Father Rooney's cream-coloured
+pony jogging along through the light of a fiery-zoned July sunset, in
+which Mr. Polymathers was basking by the O'Beirnes' door. In those days
+his Reverence was a youngish man, ruddy, and of a cheerful countenance,
+a substantial load for his sturdy nag, and altogether, in his glossy
+black cloth, a figure very different from their gaunt, sad-visaged,
+shaggily-garbed old guest. He was at the time of Father Rooney's
+approach seated on a two-legged, three-legged stool, propped
+precariously against the ray-rosed cabin wall, and was teaching Dan and
+Nicholas the twelfth proposition of the second book of Euclid. Dan had
+not yet grasped it, but it all lay as clear as a sunbeam athwart
+Nicholas's brain, and he was fidgeting like an impatient horse at the
+slowness of his fellow.</p>
+
+<p>Several of the neighbours chanced to be about, for the forge saw a good
+deal of company in those long empty days before the potato-digging could
+begin. They all drew together into a small crowd, and closed in step by
+step to watch the first meeting between these two notable persons,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> much
+admiring the deftness with which old O'Beirne secured it by pronouncing
+one of the pony's shoes in need of tightening, and the felicitous
+opening he made by assuring his Reverence that "divil a bit need he be
+mindin' the delay, because Mr. Polymathers there had enough <i>furrin
+languages</i> to keep thim all divarted, if the baste owned as many feet as
+a forty-legs, wid the shoes droppin' off ivery pair of thim. That was to
+say, in coorse, supposin' he got the chance of convarsin' a bit wid
+somebody aquil to answerin' him back iligant, the way there wasn't e'er
+a one of thim could make an offer at doin' no more than thim little
+weevils of chirpin' chuckens."</p>
+
+<p>Yet the interview turned out disappointingly after all. If such a thing
+had not been, of course, exceedingly improbable, one might have fancied
+that each scholar stood in awe of the other's reputation, they steered
+so clear of all recondite subjects; keeping to the merest commonplaces
+about rain and potatoes and turf&mdash;which anybody else could have
+discussed quite as knowledgably. In vain, whenever there was a promising
+pause would the bystanders nudge one another, whispering, hopefully,
+"Whist, boys&mdash;they'll be sayin' somethin' now." Only the plainest
+English followed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>, and at last, when Father Rooney rode on, his parting
+joke, which referred to the difficulty his pony would now find in the
+way of becoming a barefooted pilgrim, left for a wonder solemnly
+irresponsive faces behind it.</p>
+
+<p>Michael Ryan said, with a touch of resentment, "Ah, well, one couldn't
+maybe expec' it of thim to be throublin' thimselves talkin' fine for the
+pack of us, as ignorant as dirt, in the middle of th'ould bog."</p>
+
+<p>And his wife said, "'Deed, now, I wouldn't won'er meself if the raison
+was his Riverence 'ud think bad of usin' his Latin words for anythin'
+else on'y prayers and such. It might be somethin' the same as if he went
+and took his grand vistments to go dig pitaties in; and that 'ud be a
+great sin, God knows."</p>
+
+<p>But old Felix, who was, as we have seen, a rather touchy person,
+construed this suggestion into an implied censure on his own wishes in
+the matter, and he said, huffily&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Sorra the talk of sin I see in it at all, ma'am. 'Tis a dale liker they
+just couldn't get out wid it convanient offhand. The same way that I'd
+aisy enough bate out a shoe on me anvil there, when it's bothered I'd be
+if you axed me to make a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> one promiscuous here of a suddint on the
+roadside."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Polymathers himself meanwhile was perhaps dimly conscious that he
+had disappointed hopes, and failed to rise duly to the occasion; and
+this may have been why he slipped indoors, and fetched out a small book
+he had never produced before, bound in a dingy greenish blue, with a
+white paper label.</p>
+
+<p>"D'you know what that is, sir?" he questioned, rhetorically, handing it
+to Felix O'Beirne. "It's the Calendar, let me tell you, of the College
+of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, <i>juxta</i> Dublin. There's a print of
+the Front of the Buildings attached to the fly-leaf. I'm after pickin'
+it up this spring at Moynalone. 'Twas new the year before last, and
+comprises a dale of information relative to terms, examinations, fees,
+and so forth."</p>
+
+<p>"Begor, then, it looks to be a wide house," said Felix, confining
+himself to the picture as a comprehensible point. "It's apt to be an
+oncommon fine place, sir, I should suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"You may say that, me man," said Mr. Polymathers, emphatically. "Not its
+match in the kingdom of Ireland. The home of literature and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> the haunt
+of science. And it's there I'll be, plase God, next October."</p>
+
+<p>"Musha, and will you be thravellin' that far&mdash;to Dublin?" said Felix.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay will I, and would have gone last month on'y for the fever delayin'
+me till after the midsummer entrance. Me savin's amount to somethin'
+over thirty pound, so I may venture on the step, and prisint meself at
+the Michaelmas term. In short," said Mr. Polymathers, re-poising himself
+upon his rickety stool, "I might describe myself as an unmatriculated
+candidate undergraduate of the University of Dublin."</p>
+
+<p>"And what at all now would that be, sir, if I might be axin'?" said
+Felix, humbly, after the awe-stricken pause which followed Mr.
+Polymathers's proclamation of his style and title.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a necessary preliminary," said Mr. Polymathers, "to proceeding to
+the Degree of <i>Baccalaureatus in Artibus</i>, or <i>In Artibus
+Baccalaureatus</i>&mdash;the <i>ordo verborum</i> is, I take it, immaterial, to judge
+by the transposition of initials in the case of &mdash;&mdash;."</p>
+
+<p>"Faix, but it's the fine Latin you can be discoorsin' now, and his
+Riverence half-ways home," said Felix reproachfully.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Polymathers, glancing round a circle of deeply impressed faces, felt
+that his prestige was restored, and even began to enjoy a foretaste of
+the triumph, which had been one part of his dream through the long
+laborious years. But he was puzzled how to bring the full grandeur of
+his design clearly before this uninstructed audience, and after
+reflecting for a while in quest of concise yet adequate definitions, he
+launched out into an eloquent description of the ceremonial observed in
+conferring degrees at Dublin University. It may be surmised that many of
+the details were due to his own fondly brooding fancy. For not only did
+the highest learning in the land crowd the Hall in their academic robes,
+but the Lord Lieutenant himself took a prominent part in the
+proceedings, which were enlivened by military music and thunderous
+salutes. Mr. Polymathers nearly toppled off his tricky stool more than
+once without noticing it in his excitement as he rehearsed these
+splendid scenes, declaiming with great unction the formulas long since
+learned by all his heart, especially <i>Ego, auctoritate mihi concessa</i>,
+and the rest, until he came to his peroration: "And all this pomp and
+ceremony, mind yous, to the honour and glory of science and fine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+scholarship. It's a grand occasion, lads; it's an object any man might
+be proud to give&mdash;&mdash;" Here he pulled himself up, warned by an unusually
+violent lurch that his theme was running away with him. But having by no
+means worked off his enthusiasm, he expended some of it, as a schoolboy
+might have done, in throwing a small bit of turf at a stately white hen,
+who just then sailed across the dark doorway, like a little frigate
+under the most crowded canvas. She immediately took flight with
+floundering screeches, which drowned what the old man was muttering to
+himself. However, it was only "<i>Admitto te&mdash;admitto te</i>."</p>
+
+<p>After these revelations Mr. Polymathers was looked up to more than ever,
+as one not only endowed with rare gifts, but destined by their means to
+scale heights of hardly realisable exaltation. "Be all accounts there
+was no knowin' what he mightn't rise to be at Dublin College," the
+neighbours said. They also often remarked that it was "a surprisin'
+thing to see a great scholar like him spendin' his time over taichin'
+thim two young O'Beirnes." If the speaker happened to be afflicted with
+a twinge of envy about those educational advantages, he was apt to say
+"thim<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> two young bosthoons" or "gomerals." But Dan and Nicholas were
+not, in fact, any such thing. Nicholas, indeed, quickly proved himself
+possessed of what Mr. Polymathers called "a downright astonishin'
+facility at the mathematics," far out-stripping Dan, not quite to Dan's
+satisfaction, as he had always enjoyed the pre-eminence conferred by
+superior physical strength and a practical turn of mind. So well pleased
+was the old man with his eager pupil that he would have liked to do his
+teaching, "nothing for reward," but his host's hospitality, and his own
+ambition, would not permit this. Now and then he rather puzzled Nicholas
+by an apologetic tone in answering questions about his University
+career. And once at the end of a lesson he said, as if to himself: "May
+goodness forgive me if I'm takin' what he'd have done better with. But
+sure he's young&mdash;he's plenty of chances yet." However, as the time for
+his departure drew on, all his misgivings, if such he had, seemed to
+vanish away, and his thoughts became very apt to journey off blissfully
+to Dublin in the middle of the most interesting problems. Nicholas had
+to wait till they came back.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Polymathers left Lisconnel on a fine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> autumn morning, when the air
+was so still that the flashing and twinkling of the many dewdrops seemed
+to make quite a stir in it. The sky was as clear as any one of them, and
+in the golden light the wavering columns of blue smoke rose with curves
+softly transparent. He started with a buoyant step, as well he might,
+since he was setting out on the enterprise into which he had put all the
+spirit of his youth. He felt some regret at parting from his Lisconnel
+friends, but his plans and prospects were naturally very pre-occupying,
+whereas they had the ampler leisure of the left-behind to deplore his
+flitting, which seemed likely enough to be for good. Nearly four years,
+he had explained, must elapse before the crowning height of the B. A.
+Degree could be won, and it was only just possible that he might manage
+to tramp back on a visit meanwhile, during some Long Vacation. This
+doubtful chance was cold comfort for that ardent scholar Nicholas
+O'Beirne, who grieved more than anybody else. Most ruefully did he help
+Dan to carry the candidate undergraduate's library as far as the Town;
+nor could he take more than a downcast pleasure in Mr. Polymathers's
+farewell gift to him of the raggedest <i>Euclid</i>. And as he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> stood
+watching the car out of sight, his eyes were as wistful as if a door
+briefly opened on glimpses of radiant vistas had been inexorably barred
+in his face.</p>
+
+<p>Yet after all Mr. Polymathers's absence was not to be measured by years
+or months. One evening on the threshold of December, Lisconnel was lying
+roofed over by a massy livid-black cloud, which came lumbering up and up
+interminably, and which the weatherwise estimated to contain as much
+snow as would smother the width of the world. The north wind moaned and
+keened dismally under the toil of wafting on this portentous load, and
+its breath was bitingly sharp, so that when the lads came in from the
+forge, their grandfather said, "Ah, Dan, shut over the door, for there's
+a blast sweepin' through it 'ud freeze ten rigiments as stiff as
+staties." We usually take a large view of things at Lisconnel. Dan went
+to carry out this order, but instead of doing so he suddenly shouted:
+"Murdher alive! Here's Mr. Polymathers."</p>
+
+<p>Through the grey gloaming came a Mr. Polymathers, very different from
+what he had been on that brilliant, hopeful morning only a few weeks
+ago, when he had stepped lightly, and held his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> head up as if he were
+looking a friendly fortune in the face. Now his feet stumbled and
+dragged as he fared slowly against the wind's blustering, with his eyes
+on the ground, and his movements seemingly guided more by the weight of
+the bundle he carried than by his own will. Before he came within even
+loud shouting distance, everybody felt a presentiment of disaster; but
+he had not spoken a word to justify or discredit it by the time he got
+indoors.</p>
+
+<p>"Musha, and so it's yourself, sir," old Felix then repeated, in a
+congratulatory tone. "Ah, but it's a hardy evenin', and it's perished
+you are, sir. Come in be the fire."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, I'm back," Mr. Polymathers said slowly, after a hesitating pause,
+as if the remark had been interpreted to him by some second person, "I
+was bringin' the books, thinkin' the lad might use them&mdash;he's young
+enough. But I'm not come to stop on you," he added, speaking faster,
+"on'y just for this night. Early to-morra I must be off to Ardnacreagh,
+and try for the taichin' there again. 'Twas on'y on account of bringin'
+the books I came this way. I'll be on the road quite early."</p>
+
+<p>His insistence on this point made, somehow,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> a very melancholy
+impression on Felix; but he replied jovially: "Is it to-morra? Bedad
+then, sir, don't you wish you may slip off on us that soon, and we after
+gettin' a hould of you agin? What fools we are. Not if you was as
+slithery, ivery inch of you, as a wather-eel."</p>
+
+<p>The wraith of a relieved smile at this came over Mr. Polymathers's face;
+still it looked so grey and withered, and his eyes were so sunken, and
+his large, bony hands so shaky, that all with one consent refrained from
+questions which they were agog to ask; and when Mrs. Keogh by and by
+dropped in, and being an inquisitive and not very quick-witted person,
+said, "Saints among us&mdash;it's Mr. Polymathers. And how's yourself, sir?
+And are you bringing home the grand Degree?" though they all listened
+eagerly for the reply, they wished she had held her tongue.</p>
+
+<p>"The divil a Degree, ma'am," said Mr. Polymathers, "and niver will."</p>
+
+<p>There was a short silence, and then he turned round on his stool&mdash;it was
+the same from which he had made his boast in the summer sunset, but Dan
+had meanwhile mended its broken leg with the handle of a worn-bladed
+spade. "I've given up," he said to them. "I no longer entertain the
+project<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> of becomin' a graduate, or for the matter of that an
+undergraduate of Dublin University; and if I'd done right, I'd niver
+have taken up such an idea. I've put it out of me head. But it's been in
+me mind a great while&mdash;a terrible long while."</p>
+
+<p>"Look you here, Mr. Polymathers, sir, are you after gittin' any bad
+thratment from any people up in thim places?" said Felix, who always
+liked better to lay a grievance on some human and possibly breakable
+head than to believe it the work of the vengeance-baffling demon
+bad-luck.</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all, not at all," said Mr. Polymathers, when the question
+reached him. "I've nothin' to complain of. They're very respectable
+people in Dublin, and it's a fine city. But me head's a bit giddy yet
+wid the drivin' they have in the streets, that makes one stupid. I mind
+there was a car tatterin' along, and I crossin' over the College Green,
+had me down on the stones, on'y a dacint lad gript a hould of me, and
+whirled me inside the College gates. There I was before I rightly knew
+anythin' had happened me, and I after spendin' the best part of me life
+gettin' to it. 'Twasn't the way I thought it 'ud be.... But the College
+is as grand as any notion I had of it; on'y since I've seen it, 'tis
+like a drame to me that ever I set fut<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> in it, just a sort of drame....
+Great ancient places the squares are; I walked round the whole of them
+before I found the Hall. A couple of chaps in uniform like came axin' me
+me business, but I tould them fast enough that I was a candidate&mdash;ah,
+goodness help me.... And the Hall's a spacious and splendid apartment.
+On'y it was strange, now, to see it full of nothin' but young fellows,
+scarce oulder than the two lads there. I might, sure enough, have known
+the way it 'ud be, if I'd come to considher, but somehow it seemed to
+put me out, as if I'd no call to be there at all. There was one of them
+began pricin' me ould hat, and another of them tripped him up against a
+black marble construction with a pair of angels atop of it, that there
+is on the wall&mdash;sure they were just spalpeens. But I'll give you me
+word, when they called me up to the examiner's table, there was a young
+gintleman sittin' at it in his black gown and his cap wid the
+tassel&mdash;bound to be one of the College Fellows, and ivery sort of a fine
+scholar&mdash;and for all the age there was on him he might ha' been me son
+or me grandson.</p>
+
+<p>"So he handed me over a little black <i>Virgil</i> wid the page opened where
+I was to exhibit me acquaintance wid the text. It was merely a bit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> of
+an oration of Queen Dido's that I've known ivery line of these forty
+years as well as I know me own name, and better. And what came over me
+is more than I can tell, but the minute I took the book in me hand, it
+seemed to me as if ivery atom of sinse and manin' slipped out of the
+words, or out of me head&mdash;I couldn't say which, and I just stood starin'
+at them and starin', till iverythin' else got whirlin' round about me,
+fit to shake the panes out of the big windows, and the pictures off the
+walls.... Belike himself persaived I was flusthered, for, 'Take your
+time,' sez he; and after a while they stood steady enough. But, the Lord
+be good to me&mdash;sorra a syllable of the sinse come back. And be that I
+well knew it was all up wid me; and I was thinkin' me father's son had
+no business to be standin' there makin' a show of meself in the middle
+of Trinity College. So the lad in the cap said again, 'Take your time,
+sir, take your time.' But I said to him, 'God help me, sir, I've taken
+very nigh all I'll get, for I declare to you, lad, I'm over seventy
+years of age. But as for your time, sir,' I said, 'I'll be wastin' no
+more of it.' And wid that I put down the book, and out I wint. I mind
+the sun in the square nearly dazzled the eyes out of me fool's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> head. I
+niver seen it blazin' brighter&mdash;and there was a big bell somewhere
+boomin' away, as if they'd set the heart of the world tollin'; it's
+ringin' in me ears yet.... And a couple of days after that I quit out of
+Dublin, and I've been trampin' back to this counthry, takin' me time, as
+he said&mdash;there's no hurry now about anythin'. So that was the ind of me
+University Degree."</p>
+
+<p>"I just wish I could git discoorsin' wid that young feller," said old
+Felix, vindictively, "himself and his tassel in his cap."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure, man, 'twas no fault of his," said Mr. Polymathers, "and I can
+live widout a Degree, if that's all. Me betters did before me. To tell
+you the truth, I've thought often enough as I was comin' along now, that
+I dunno how at all I'd have had the face to meet me poor father one of
+these days, and I cocked up with a <i>Baccalaureatus in Artibus</i>, and he
+wid not so much as a dacint stone over his grave to commemorate his
+name, that was the most illusthrious Polymath in the county Sligo, wid
+more larnin' in the tip of his ear than ever I got into me ould skull.
+Never a hap'orth of good was I at anythin' except the trifle of
+mathematics, but he was as great at the Classics.... I used to humbug
+meself somewhiles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> lettin' on I hankered after it because it would ha'
+gratified him maybe to hear of the event. But little I ever done to
+plase him, God forgive me. Let alone goin' and makin' an ould fool of
+meself up at Trinity College.... 'Twas a terrible upset to him when I
+turned again the Priesthood, after he had the money saved up for the
+seminary and all. Words about it we had, and the ind of it was he put it
+all into me brother Ned's little farm. Ned had no more fancy for larnin'
+than the bastes of the field. A trifle of it would ha' come in very
+handy sometimes for buyin' me books; howane'er it was not to be.... And
+the books there&mdash;I on'y brought them along to lave wid you for the
+youngest lad&mdash;ay, Nicholas. He has a head on his shoulders for the
+mathematics, I can tell you; he might do something yet, if he got his
+chances. They're no use to me now, and I'd as lief be shut of the sight
+of them. And to-morra I'll be off to Ardnacreagh."</p>
+
+<p>So the gaunt old man talked on, groping his way out of hesitating
+pauses, and straying into dreamy meditations, as if he sometimes forgot
+his story, and sometimes its hearers. They did not know what a
+life-wreck it outlined, but they saw and surmised enough to make them
+think of him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> as "the crathur," and speak to him with more deference
+than if he had returned in a radiant glow of success, symbolised as some
+of them had anticipated, by scarlet robes as splendid, at least, as
+Father Rooney's at High Mass. And Felix O'Beirne took occasion of a
+madly skirling gust to say, "Listen now to that, sir, and don't be
+talkin' wild of thravellin' off to-morra. If I might be sayin' so, you'd
+a dale better stay quiet where you are this minyit. And as for taichin',
+sure it's proud and thankful the two boyos 'ud be for e'er a bit more.
+There's Nicholas mopin' about like an ould hin that's lost her chuckens
+iver since you quit."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Polymathers did stop quiet&mdash;very quiet&mdash;but he taught the boys no
+more. In fact, he did nothing except sit all day staring into the fire,
+as if he had lost something in it. Once after Nicholas had sat looking
+very hard at him for a long time with the ragged <i>Euclid</i> ostentatiously
+open at a crux, he seemed to rouse up, and putting out a hand for the
+book, began an explanation. But it died away unfinished in an aimless
+muttering, which both shocked and saddened Nicholas, and the experiment
+was not repeated. Then towards Christmas time all the neighbours were
+saying<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> that Mr. Polymathers was greatly failed to what he had been. And
+Bridget O'Beirne reported that you might as well be argufyin' wid a
+scutty wren to swally down the full of the ducks' dish as persuadin' him
+to take a raisonable bite and sup. Dr. Hamilton from the Dispensary, who
+was consulted on the case, "consaited," Bridget told inquirers, "that he
+might be after gettin' a sort of stroke like unbeknownst;" but her own
+opinion was that "he had, so to spake, lost the knot off his thread, and
+'twould be much if he didn't slip away out of it on them, afore they
+seen e'er another green laif on the bushes."</p>
+
+<p>It was, at any rate, more than happened. One snowy afternoon, when he
+had been busy for some time "scrawmin' a manner of letter," which
+related, he said, to the disposition of his property, Mr. Polymathers
+grew so much worse that Dan and Nicholas ran off for the Doctor and the
+Priest, and before their arrival could possibly be expected, it became
+evident that he could not wait to receive them. Bridget O'Beirne,
+deploring the hap by his bed in the small room off the kitchen, thought
+a few minutes before he went that she heard him murmuring something
+coherent, and she called to little Rosy Corcoran,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> "Child alive&mdash;me
+head's bothered&mdash;come in here and listen, can you make out at all what
+he's sayin'?"</p>
+
+<p>Rosy came reluctantly and listened. "I think," she whispered, "it's some
+sort of prayers like what his Riverence sez."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, then, glory be to God for that itself," said Bridget, "there might
+be a good chance for him after all."</p>
+
+<p>But she had been misinformed. The words Mr. Polymathers was muttering
+over and over to himself were: <i>Admitto te&mdash;admitto te</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>HONORIS CAUSA</h3>
+
+
+<p>The evening of the day after Mr. Polymathers died was a very wild
+black-and-white one out of doors all round Lisconnel, yet,
+notwithstanding the flakes in the air and under foot, the O'Beirnes had
+received some company. Not at a wake, however the purpose of their
+assembly was to discuss a serious business matter, upon which old Felix
+O'Beirne wished for friendly counsel. Hence his contemporary, old Paddy
+Ryan, had prodded little round craters in the snow with his thick stick
+all along the good step of bleak road which lay between his house and
+the forge, and with him had come on the same errand Terence Kilfoyle,
+who, although of so much junior standing, was esteemed as a man of
+notably shrewd sense and judgment. But then neither he nor the
+neighbours knew how often he took and gave Bessie Kilfoyle's advice.
+These two were present<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> by express invitation, but another pair of
+guests, the Dooleys, would never have been asked for the sake of their
+opinion, which they were indeed encouraged to keep to themselves, and
+appeared at this domestic crisis merely by virtue of family ties. Old
+Felix had always thought little of his daughter Maggie's mental powers,
+and less ever since her marriage with Peter Dooley, who kept a shop in
+the Town, and could be described as "an ould gombeen man," if one wished
+to regard him from an unfavourable point of view, which his
+father-in-law not uncommonly did. He had been heard to say of Peter that
+"the chap was that smooth-spoken you might think he was after swallyin'
+a one of his own graisy dipts, on'y he'd liefer be chaitin' some poor
+body over the sellin' of it"&mdash;a perhaps not inexcusable preference. As
+for Peter, he contemplated humanity with a jovial cynicism, and rather
+enjoyed the society of the old blacksmith, despite the gruff sarcasms
+which sometimes made their womenkind turn the conversation
+apprehensively. <i>He</i> had been heard to say of Felix that "It was aisy
+work runnin' down other people's business, and small blame to th' ould
+man if he had a fancy for a light job now and agin, when he would be
+tired poundin' th' ould<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> iron at a profit you couldn't see to pick up
+widout a strong pair of spectacles." Proximity had brought to the
+consultation Mrs. Carbery and Tim O'Meara from adjacent doors; and they,
+with old ancient Mrs. O'Beirne and her daughter and the two lads, formed
+quite a large party about the fire. The business to be brought before
+them was Mr. Polymathers's Will.</p>
+
+<p>Now, lest it should be thought that unseemly haste was displayed in
+attending to this affair while Mr. Polymathers still lay in the little
+next room, I must explain that for special reasons the nature of the
+funeral arrangements depended upon the result of the conference; and how
+deeply important such a point would be considered at Lisconnel I need
+remind no one who has occasionally been perplexed by our propensity for
+the pinching and scraping which takes toll of a life-long penury, that a
+brief show of pomp may invest the last scene of all. This propensity is
+not seldom misconstrued into the outcome of a mere personal vanity,
+whereas it has its root in the worthier sentiment of veneration for our
+Kind. Ould Pat Murphy, who has subsisted all his life upon an
+insufficiency of pitaties, and inhabited a largish sty, never loses the
+sense that he owes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> something better to himself in his character of a
+human being, and he takes painful steps to ensure the ultimate discharge
+of the debt. One of these days he who has hitherto come and gone in
+unimposing guise shall be borne, on wheels if possible&mdash;but here I
+mention grandeur never even dreamed of up at remote Lisconnel&mdash;in
+unwonted state, certain to draw the gaze of every passer-by. But as if
+with a fine touch of courtesy, he so times his assertion of dignity that
+none of his fellows shall thereby be abashed nor envy-bitten. No ragged
+wayfarer shall wish to change places with him as he passes solemnly
+along, nor grudge him the unshared splendour of his sombre equipage; not
+even if it display the crowning glory of woolly black plumes to waggle
+over his head. Accordingly, when Pat has died on his humble bed, which
+is as likely as not just earth tempered with straw, under his rifted
+thatch, through which he may perhaps see the stars glimmer with nothing
+except the smoke-haze and gathering mists between, he is conveyed thence
+with whatever pomp and circumstance his savings permit, and all his
+neighbours feel that the right thing has been done.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that Mr. Polymathers had given no sign of any such sentiment.
+When discreetly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> sounded on the subject during his last days, he had
+replied: "Ah! man, it's very immaterial," in a tone of indifference as
+unmistakable as the phrase was ambiguous. And from this fact, coupled
+with his written instructions, it might, one would have thought, safely
+have been inferred that he desired no costly magnificence at his
+obsequies. Yet the point was obscured in his late host's mind by a thick
+cloud of doubts and scruples.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Polymathers had died surprisingly rich, not less than twenty-five
+pounds, seven shillings and threepence having been counted awestrickenly
+out of his leathern pouch. The ground rents of all Lisconnel did not
+reach to such a figure. It had been larger still before his disastrous
+expedition to the University; but it had never undergone any diminution
+so long as he abode under Felix O'Beirne's roof. On the first Saturday
+after his convalescence he had inquired, pouch in hand: "And what might
+be the amount of me pecuniary debt to you, sir?" And old O'Beirne had
+replied: "And you spendin' your time puttin' the heighth of larnin' into
+the two lads' heads! Bedad, sir, it's debt the other way round,
+supposin' there was to be any talk about it." The same little scene,
+dwindled at last into a mere form and ceremony,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> had taken place on
+every succeeding Saturday. Not that Mr. Polymathers did not feel he had
+grounds for more than merely formal demur. But he was then facing the
+steep hill of his ambition, and had sometimes to stoop as he climbed.</p>
+
+<p>But now, when he had turned back baffled, and all his climbing was done,
+old Felix had no engrossing object to blunt a sense of many scruples
+that must be removed before he himself or his family could with honour
+derive profit from the event; as they would do if Mr. Polymathers's
+instructions were carried out. For by that document, which he had
+finished drawing up only just in time, all his property was left
+unreservedly to Nicholas O'Beirne, with the injunction that as little of
+it as possible might be expended upon "the burying." Of course it was an
+extraordinary thing that such a piece of good fortune should befall,
+such a number of pounds accrue to, anybody at all; but apart from this
+there seemed to be nothing very strange in the bequest. Everybody knew
+that Mr. Polymathers had entertained "a great opinion entirely" of
+Nicholas' abilities. Time and again he had said that the lad would be
+heard of in the world if he got his chance of some good teaching. And he
+once more expressed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> the same conviction, only at fuller length and in
+finer language, in the composition which had been the last effort of his
+wearied brain. "It would give me," he wrote, "the utmost satisfaction to
+think that the legacy may eventually smooth his path to the attainment
+of those University distinctions which have eluded my own grasp." And
+almost his latest moment of consciousness had been pervaded by a faint
+thrill of pleased pride at the turn of the sentence as he read it over.
+This high style was not, however, maintained throughout, and the purport
+could not be misunderstood. Furthermore, everybody knew that he had said
+he had not a relation belonging to him in this world; and that being so,
+it was natural enough for him to make a promising and favorite pupil his
+heir. At first sight, therefore, no difficulties presented themselves;
+but old Felix slept upon the matter, and by morning grave doubts had
+risen in his mind. The gist of them was that "If they took and grabbed
+the ould gintleman's bit of money, and he after dyin' all his lone up
+among them there, wid ne'er a one of his own folks near him to see he
+had his rights, it might look ugly enough agin them, and set some people
+passin' remarks he'd be long sorry to have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> made on him, or any of his
+name;" and that for the precluding of such animadversions it might
+behove them to provide "a buryin'" not merely decent but "very
+respectable whatever," and to expend the remainder of Mr. Polymathers's
+personality upon a headstone for his grave, and Masses for his soul. To
+set against these apprehensions were Mr. Polymathers's wishes and
+Nicholas's interests; and the longer the old man balanced them in his
+mind, the more perplexing became their tremulous poise. So at last,
+goaded by the urgent necessity for a prompt decision, he turned to seek
+it among his neighbours. He could not forbear a hope that their voices
+might be convincingly in favour of giving Nicholas his chances; still
+his strongest feeling was that it would be a relief to get the matter
+settled one way or the other.</p>
+
+<p>Very different in its degree of intensity was the interest with which
+his grandson Nicholas looked forward to the issue. The question to be
+decided seemed to him of almost as vital importance as if it were:
+Whether or no the sun should rise again next morning. For him at least,
+it depended upon that whether his world should loom back again in a
+dreary blankness, or waken lit with new and wondrous gleams. Nicholas's
+thirst for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> knowledge and love of learning were much more essentially
+part and parcel of him than his hands and eyes, and had so far found
+little except dreams and desires to thrive upon. Even before the
+memorable summer evening when the gaunt old man in the curious big hat
+had asked for the night's lodging, which lengthened into a season's
+sojourn, he had often wandered among visions of places where there were
+as many books as anybody could read&mdash;a dozen maybe&mdash;and some people in
+it with a power of book-learning&mdash;as much perhaps as his Reverence or
+the Doctor&mdash;only neither priest nor quality, but just neighbours whom he
+could question about anything that came into his head, as he used to
+question his grandfather, and Paddy Ryan, and Terence Kilfoyle, until he
+got tired of being asked, in reply: "Musha good gracious, and who could
+be tellin' you that?" an answer which had repeatedly left him a
+discouraged atom of bewilderment, symbolically environed by our
+wide-spreading bog. Since Mr. Polymathers's visit, these visions had
+grown clearer, but not under any rays of hope. His initiation into the
+elements of mathematics had pointed out the road along which he should
+travel, but had simultaneously revealed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> all its obstacles,
+insurmountable for him solitary and unequipped. In those days his mind
+was constantly fumbling at some insoluble problem with the sense of
+frustration that one has who gropes vainly in the dark, well knowing how
+a single unattainable match-flare would put what he is seeking into his
+hands. And no brighter prospect seemed to lie before him anywhere in his
+future.</p>
+
+<p>So when he suddenly learned that Mr. Polymathers had left all his
+money&mdash;sums and sums&mdash;to be spent on "getting schooling for Nicholas
+O'Beirne;" and when the sums and sums were actually counted out on the
+table, he felt as if a door into enchanted regions had majestically
+opened in a blank wall. That night he went to bed in a state of joyous
+excitement, only dashed by some pangs of self-reproach for being unable
+to feel more sorrow at the flickering out of his poor old teacher's dim
+life. He had to frame excuses for himself by recollecting how his
+great-aunt Bridget had said, "Ah, sure the crathur's better off, God
+knows. What else 'ud he do, and the heart of him broke, but quit out of
+it, if he got the chance? Ay, bedad, some people have the quare good
+luck."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And when he got up with his happiness still fresh and strange in the
+morning, there was his grandfather declaring "he didn't know if they'd
+have a right to touch the bit of money at all; it might be no thing to
+go do; schoolin' or no schoolin', he wouldn't be givin' people any call
+to say the O'Beirnes were after playin' a dirty thrick." At this
+Nicholas's experience was like that of a desert traveller who should see
+a mirage of palms and pools grow swiftly before his delighted eyes into
+a substantial oasis, and then anon, or ever he could approach it,
+shimmer back, with all its sheen and shade, into mocking illusion again.
+For thus did it fare with his hopes as his grandfather talked of
+renouncing Mr. Polymathers's bequest. Moreover, the grounds which the
+old man alleged forbade his grandson, lothfully though he listened, to
+utter a word of protest, and even made him half ashamed of his vehement
+longing to do so. Nicholas had been an O'Beirne for but fourteen years,
+yet he had already entered upon his inheritance of family pride. Only he
+could not bring himself to believe that the honour of his house called
+for so prodigious a sacrifice; and he could have urged a dozen arguments
+against it, if some other person<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> had been the legatee. As it was, all
+that delicacy would permit him to do for himself was to give piteously
+inadequate expression to his sentiments in casual remarks about the
+grandeur of getting a bit of learning, and the difficulty of
+understanding some things out of one's own head. Altogether that day was
+the longest and the most anxious that he had ever spent.</p>
+
+<p>Dan also, though his fortunes were not involved to the same extent as
+his younger brother's, was not easy in his mind. All day he had been
+thinking rather badly of himself, and suspecting that other people
+thought worse of him than he deserved, and the reflection was depressing
+and irritating. The news of the legacy certainly had not given him
+unmixed pleasure, as he felt that it ought to have done; but at the same
+time he was aware that he neither grudged nor envied Nicholas his good
+fortune, and that this unamiable frame of mind would nevertheless
+probably be ascribed to him, if he betrayed any dissatisfaction or
+disapproval. The truth was that he could not help feeling some
+mortification at the way in which both Mr. Polymathers and his
+grandfather assumed the forge to be his destiny and portion in life. Dan
+did not by any means<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> despise it: he took an interest in the work, and a
+pride in the fact that farmers sent their horses thither from beyond the
+Town, so well reputed was old Felix O'Beirne's shoeing. But it did not
+follow that he wanted to be a blacksmith all his days. Even if he had
+done so, he was sixteen, and consequently of an age to resent any
+prescribed calling, especially since he knew that the selection here had
+been made as the result of an unfavourable comparison of his abilities
+with those of another person. "Dan is no fool, mind you," Mr.
+Polymathers had said once. "But for intellect you need never name him on
+the same day of the month as Nicholas," a verdict which fell with a
+slight shock upon Dan, accustomed to the precedence given by two years'
+seniority, superior strength, and a more practical turn of mind. What
+was far more serious, however, Dan secretly cherished an ambition of his
+own. It took the form of thinking that it would be a wonderfully fine
+thing if he could ever get to learn the doctoring, and be able to drive
+about on a car like Dr. Hamilton, with a name and a remedy for
+everybody's ailment. A particularly fine thing it seemed to understand
+the construction of bones and joints, a knowledge which would put it in
+his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> power to prevent people from coming to such grief as, for instance,
+poor Matt Haloran down at Duffclane, who must limp on a crooked leg to
+the end of his days, because the man who pulled in his dislocated ankle
+for him had made a botch of it, through not knowing rightly what he was
+about. Dan had been much impressed, too, by several cases where a few
+drops of brown stuff out of a bottle had put people to sleep when
+various aches and pains had long hindered them from closing an eye, a
+result which the neighbours were occasionally disposed to view with
+mistrust, as rather probably wrought through the agency of "some quare
+ould pishtrogues (charms)," but which to Dan's mind proved the
+possession of a skill as enviable as it was beneficent. Beside it
+hammering out horseshoes appeared a tedious and aimless pursuit, and he
+sometimes thumped away in a very vague dream of one of these days
+finding himself more congenially employed. Now, however, it was
+perfectly clear to him that if Nicholas "took off wid himself to get
+scholarship," his own portion must be to stick to the anvil. For
+otherwise supposing his grandfather got past his work, or anything else
+happened him, there would be nobody left to look after Dan's great-aunt,
+who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> was not very old, and his great-grandmother, who was such a
+wonderful age entirely that no one could say how much longer she mighn't
+live. Even the wildest of dreams are not quite easy to scare away, and
+it was this chiefly that marred his content with Mr. Polymathers's
+testamentary dispositions. Still, when he heard his grandfather's
+doubts, and saw his brother's downcast looks, he became almost as
+anxious as Nicholas himself that the neighbours might talk away the old
+man's scruples and allow the will to stand.</p>
+
+<p>Thus there were many eager hopes and fears lodged that evening in the
+O'Beirnes' living-room, which was all throbbing with fire-light, as the
+neighbours began to drop in talking out of the dark. People are apt to
+speak loudly when they get their breath after a battle with snowy
+blasts; and the sound of voices came strangely into the stillness close
+by, where there was only a cold glimmer of candle-light, and nobody
+conversing, unless we count old Bridget O'Beirne, who had slipped in to
+repeat a few prayers, and say to herself with a sort of grudging
+wistfulness that everybody else was getting away. Then she came back to
+her world again, and mended the crumbling red-hot bank with sods out of
+her apron,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> and shovelled up the snow-balls shaken off their visitors'
+clogged brogues, that they might not melt into mud patches on the floor.</p>
+
+<p>To Dan and Nicholas, looking on from opposite corners, it seemed a long
+while before anything to the purpose was said. Everybody had to comment
+upon the snow, and Paddy Ryan's remark was that "if it kep' on at it
+that-a-way, they'd be hard enough set to get through the dhrifts be the
+day of the buryin'." This caused Mrs. Carbery to remember how she "had
+been at a one up in the County Cavan, where the gate into the
+buryin'-ground was all blocked up, so that the whole of them had to lep
+over what would be be rights a ten-fut wall. And if they did, the half
+of them plumped up to their necks in a soft place on the other side, and
+came as near losin' their lives as could be thought. Bedad now, they
+were comical to behould, goodness forgive her for sayin' so, all bawlin'
+and flounderin' about like a flock of sheep stuck in a bog, on'y it was
+a white bog and black sheep, as she minded Tom Ennis, that was a quare
+codger, sayin' at the time." And this again started old O'Beirne upon
+reminiscences of remarkable buryings which had come under his own
+observation.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Comical it may have been," he said, "but I'll bet you me best brogues
+ne'er a one of yous ever witnessed a quarer buryin' than a one I seen
+down in the south some ould ages ago, when I was a slip of a lad. But
+I'll maybe ha' tould you the story, ma'am&mdash;about the flood in the
+Tullaroe River?"</p>
+
+<p>"Was that the time it riz up suddint and dhrownded the crathur that was
+diggin' the grave?" said Mrs. Carbery.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure not at all: that happint up at Lough Gortragh, and this I'm
+talkin' about was in the Tullaroe River, a dale souther of the Lough.
+Outrageous it does be in the wet saisons. So one harvest day, when it
+was flowin' over all before it, there was a walkin' funeral about
+crossin' at the ford. The way of it was, they were after hangin' a lad
+up at the jail. In those days it's very ready they were wid the hangin',
+and in a hurry over it too sometimes. Howane'er the frinds of this lad
+had got lave to be buryin' him dacint after he would be hanged; and me
+poor father, and meself, and plinty of other people were follyin'. Till
+they come to the ford, and when they seen the manner the wather was
+runnin' wild, the bearers had a notion to be turnin' back; but they made
+up their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> minds, and on they wint. And as sure as they did, one of the
+lads must needs slip his fut, and they right in the middle of the river,
+and down wid the whole lot of thim, like a stook of oats in a gale of
+win'; 'twas twinty wonders e'er a man of thim ever got his feet under
+him agin. Faix, now the yell every sowl let you might ha' heard
+anywheres at all; for some of thim was thinkin' the misfort'nit body was
+apt to be swep' away and mortally dhrowned to the back of bein' hung;
+and some of thim wasn't thinkin' any such a thing. But as for the
+coffin, I'll give you me word if it didn't take and set off wid itself
+floatin' away bobbin' along atop of the wather as light now, as if it
+was a lafe dhropped down from the boughs archin' over our heads&mdash;and
+wasn't that cur'ous enough? And as quare as anythin' it was to behould
+the people all peltin' along be the two wet banks of the river as hard
+as they could dhrive, and thrippin' theirselves up over the roots of the
+trees, and slitherin' into the pools, wid the coffin just skimmin' and
+swimmin' away down the sthrame ahead of them, as aisy and plisant as if
+it was a bit of a pookawn. You might ha' sworn there was ne'er a nothin'
+in it, to look at it. And he they were after hangin' a fine big man,
+'ud<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> weigh every ounce of fourteen stone. I tould you it was a quare
+thing. So where it would be sailin' to nobody could say; very belike out
+into the bay below. But sure when it come where the river runs past th'
+ould church, the strong current that was racin' under it just gave a
+sort of lap round wid it, and washed it clane up on the flat stones at
+the gate goin' into the buryin'-ground, and left it lyin' there, same as
+if the lads had set it down off their shoulders. Bedad now it was a very
+lucky thing it so happint there was none of the p&oacute;lis or red coats
+about, be raison of their gettin' notice the buryin' was somewhere
+else&mdash;oncommon lucky."</p>
+
+<p>"It's as quare as the rest of it," said Peter Dooley, who had heard the
+story before, "that nobody among them had had the wit to put a few
+brickbats in it, or some good big lumps of heavy stones. Stones is
+plinty, and chape enough."</p>
+
+<p>"They're things you haven't the sellin' of then, I'll go bail," said old
+Felix. He spoke in resentment of the interruption, but Mr. Dooley took
+the speech as a flattering tribute to his business capacity, and
+acknowledged it with a good-humoured smirk.</p>
+
+<p>So Bridget might have spared herself the uneasiness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> which made her say
+hurriedly to her brother: "If you was lookin' for Mr. Polymathers's bit
+of writin', Felix, I left it lyin' convanient to you under the plate
+there on the table."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, ay, bedad, that's what's been botherin' me," said the old man,
+reachin' for it, "I dunno rightly what to say to it. But sure any of
+yous that like can be readin' it, and see what he sez for yourselves."</p>
+
+<p>Reading was not a question simply of liking with all members of the
+company; but everybody could hold the paper and look wise, and if he
+were none the more so afterwards, that may have been only because he
+knew the contents of it beforehand. When it was Peter Dooley's turn he
+examined the signature closely, and said, "But what name's this he's put
+to it? 'John Campion' I see, but divil a sign of any Polymathers."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, that was another thing was botherin' me, too," said old O'Beirne,
+rather dejectedly, "a little while ago, when Dr. Hamilton was comin' to
+see him. For th' ould gintleman tould him Campion was his name; and it
+appairs Polymathers is some discripshin of thrade, and not rightly
+called to anybody at all. So I was thinkin' he was maybe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> annoyed wid
+our callin' him out of his name all the while; but he said all that
+ailed it was it was a dale too good for him; and better plased he seemed
+we would keep on wid it. Oh ay, 'John Campion's' right enough."</p>
+
+<p>"I niver heard of any such a thrade as polymatherin'," said his
+son-in-law; "would it be anythin' in the pedlarin' line?"</p>
+
+<p>"Is it pedlarin'?" said old O'Beirne, "and he that took up wid larnin'
+and litherature he couldn't ha' tould you the price of a pinny loaf.
+Faix, man, if I was Maggie I'd just put a good dab of strong glue in
+your place behind the counter down-below, and stick you standing steady
+in it, for buyin' and sellin's all the notion you have in your head here
+or there. Pedlarin', sez he."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, at all events," said Peter Dooley, unperturbed, "he's got
+together a dacint little fortin one way or the other. Maybe he didn't
+come by it any worser; but sure that's no great odds now. And plain
+enough he sez the young chap there's to have it&mdash;that's all the one
+thing wid yourself. But, anyhow, I dunno who could aisy conthrive to be
+takin' it off you, and he lavin' no one belongin' to him. You have it
+safe enough. Grab all you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> can, and keep a hould of it when you've got
+it, sez I. But you're safe enough, no fear."</p>
+
+<p>Nicholas, watching his grandfather's face from his corner, would have
+given ten years of his life to throttle his uncle's reassuring speech
+midway.</p>
+
+<p>"There's no mistake, I should say, about what he was intendin'," said
+Terence Kilfoyle, in whose hands the paper was by this time; "and who'd
+be apt to know better than himself what he had in his mind so long as he
+was right in his head."</p>
+
+<p>"And if he wasn't, it's little likely he'd be to ha' got that written.
+Hard enough work it is, accordin' to what I can see, even when a body
+has all his wits to the fore," said old Paddy Ryan, whose acquaintances
+did as a rule get more out of breath over a letter than over a wrestling
+match or the recapture of an active pig.</p>
+
+<p>"Mad people do be surprisin' cute some whiles, mind you," said Mrs.
+Carbery. "There was a deminted body used to be up at our place&mdash;Daft
+Jimmy they called him&mdash;and if you axed him the time of day he'd tell you
+to the minyit, exacter than any clock that ever sthruck, and he belike
+not widin a mile of e'er a one."</p>
+
+<p>"It seems a sight of money to be layin' out on larnin'," pursued old
+Paddy; "I dunno where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> you'd be gettin' the vally of it that-a-way,
+onless he was larnin' everythin' twyste over, same as you put two coats
+of whitewash on a wall if you're after mixin' a drop more than you want.
+You might do it then."</p>
+
+<p>His friends' arguments and illustrations had apparently a depressing
+effect upon old Felix, and he said with impatience, "Weary on it,
+man-alive! Sure there's no doubt about what he was manin', at all at
+all. The question is, have we any call to be takin' him at his word, and
+spendin' it away from aught 'ud do him a benefit&mdash;the buryin' and Masses
+and such?"</p>
+
+<p>"That might be a diff'rint thing," said Mrs. Carbery.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd scarce think it," said Terence Kilfoyle, "considherin' he'll say no
+more to make it so. The job's out of his hand, and 'ill stay the way he
+left it."</p>
+
+<p>"He might ha' changed his mind afore now, for anythin' we can tell,"
+said Mrs. Carbery.</p>
+
+<p>"'Deed, then, he might so, the poor man, Heaven be his bed," said Mrs.
+Dooley.</p>
+
+<p>"You could ax the priest about it," Tim O'Meara said diffidently, out of
+the melancholy muteness which it was his habit to maintain.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"That's as much as to say it should go for Masses," said old Felix,
+clutching at any shred of definite opinion, "for it's on'y in the nathur
+of things his Riverence 'ud be recommindin' thim."</p>
+
+<p>But Tim shrank away from the shadow of responsibility, protesting, "Och,
+not at all, not at all. I wasn't as much as sayin' anythin'."</p>
+
+<p>The old man tossed up his chin disgustedly, and meditated gloomily
+during a brief pause.</p>
+
+<p>"There's no denyin'," he said then, "that poor Mr. Polymathers had a
+won'erful great opinion of himself over there." He nodded towards
+Nicholas's corner, and used this periphrasis with a sense that he had
+taken a precaution against perilously arousing the boy's vanity. "Times
+and agin last summer he was sayin' to me the lad 'ud do credit to us yet
+if he had his chances. A pity it 'ud be, he said, if he didn't iver git
+to school, or maybe College itself. And gave him his books and all. But
+sure, I dunno would that make it look any the better for us if we was to
+be grabbin' his bit of money, and we the on'y people he had to see he
+got fairity after he was gone. Ne'er a word have I agin schoolin' and
+College if there would be no doubtin' over the matter; but there's some
+things you can't stand too clear of,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> like the heels of a kickin' horse.
+It might have a quare, bad apparance, rael mane; and long sorry I'd be
+for that. What 'ud you say, now?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked slowly round the flickering room, but met with no response
+from old or young; all silent, from his mother, asleep in her
+elbow-chair by the hearth, to his grandson Nicholas, very wide awake, in
+a nook beyond her. Then his eyes travelled across to the opposite
+corner, and as they lit there upon his other grandson, he specialised
+his question into, "What 'ud <i>you</i> say, Dan?"</p>
+
+<p>Dan, thus abruptly called upon, was intensely conscious that two eyes
+shining out of the shadow over against him had fixed him with an
+unwavering gaze. And it is hard to say how he would have answered their
+urging if at the same moment Mr. Dooley at his elbow had not been loudly
+whispering to Mrs. Dooley&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Colleges? Sure that's just talk he has be way of an excuse for keepin'
+it. A great notion he has of spendin' it on Colleges. He knows better,
+bedad."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Dooley, who was rather like several sorts of rodent animals in the
+face, wore a smile at his own penetration.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I dunno but it might look ugly," Dan suddenly said.</p>
+
+<p>He was staring straight before him, yet he knew somehow, as if by a
+sixth sense, that the shining eyes opposite ceased their watch with an
+angry flash; and he had scarcely spoken before he would have given
+anything to call back his irrevocable speech.</p>
+
+<p>His grandfather's puzzled will closed on the opinion with a vice-like
+grip, as if at a touch given to a powerful spring. Indecision was with
+him an unwonted mood, from which it was an irresistible relief to
+escape, even at some cost. And nobody who knew him could suppose that
+his mind, once made up, would alter.</p>
+
+<p>"Begorrah, Dan, I believe it's true for you," he said. "'Twould be no
+thing to go do, and divil a bit of me 'ill do it. Whatever's over from
+the buryin' and bit of a grave-stone may go for Masses; sorra a penny of
+it a one of the O'Beirnes 'ill touch."</p>
+
+<p>So Nicholas lost his chances, which seems a pity when one considers how,
+for the sake of bringing them to him, old Mr. Polymathers, dazed and
+enfeebled and hope-bereft, came tramping on that long, long journey, day
+after weary day, under the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> scowling wintry sky, and against the
+ruffling blasts, back again across the breadth of Ireland. The road was
+all strewn for him with the wreckage of his shattered dream, and the one
+gleam of consolation that lighted him on the way had been the thought
+that his savings might now give a help to the lad up at Lisconnel. This
+had often been in his mind when he set off, shivering in the bleak
+morning, and when he stopped to shift his over-heavy bundle, and when he
+roused himself painfully from the bewildering lethargies that fell upon
+him. But he had reckoned without the pride of the O'Beirnes.</p>
+
+<p>It was a pity, too, that the affair should have led to an estrangement
+between the two brothers, which set in as tacitly as a black frost, for
+neither of them ever said a word to the other about Dan's intervention.
+This silence left him in the thorny grip of misgivings as to the motives
+with which Nicholas might be charging him. That he had done it on
+purpose to spoil Nicholas's chances out of spite was one of these. And
+although Dan knew very well that he had spoken from an altogether
+different impulse, he was conscious of having had feelings which seemed
+to give him a cruelly clear insight into the possible workings of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>
+Nicholas's mind. "Consaitin' that it was because I was invyin' him,
+that's what he's thinkin' agin me," he said to himself as the days went
+by, and he perceived, or fancied, that Nicholas in his disconsolate
+moping about had no other aim than to keep away from wherever Dan might
+be.</p>
+
+<p>But Dan's unhappiness took an acuter phase in a fortnight or so, when
+Nicholas began to resume his mathematical studies. There lies just
+opposite the O'Beirnes' front door a low turf bank, gently sloping, and
+mostly clothed with short, fine grass, but liable to be cut into brown
+squares, if sods are wanted for roofing a shed, or for spreading a green
+layer of scraws under new thatch. This had been done on a rather large
+scale in the past autumn, and the boys had been in the habit of
+utilising the smooth, bare patches as tablets whereon to trace with
+pointed sticks, or any handy implements borrowed from the forge, the
+figures and diagrams occurring in Mr. Polymathers's scientific lectures.
+Nicholas now, albeit he had buried both teacher and hope, began once
+more to draw his circles and triangles and polygons on the soft mould,
+as it grew damply and darkly through the wearing snow coverlid.
+Sometimes in the excitement of demonstrating involved relations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> between
+AB's and BC's he would for a while forget his disappointment almost as
+completely as he did the wet-winged winds that had been flapping and
+wheeling about the house ever since the thaw set in. His obliviousness
+could not, however, ensure him against the effects of cold shower-baths,
+and before long his geometrical drawing was done to the accompaniment of
+a hollow-sounding cough, which made Dan remember a time some years ago
+when Nicholas had been so seriously ill with pleurisy that voices had
+said at their door, "Ah, the crathur, he'll scarce last the night. Dr.
+Hamilton has no opinion of him at all. 'Deed, now, his poor
+grandfather's to be pitied, losin' such a fine young lad." And he also
+remembered having occasionally heard his great-aunt say that Nicholas
+took after his poor mother, and would never comb a grey head. Now,
+therefore, the figure of Nicholas sitting out on the bank in a vibrating
+mist of rain, with his feet in a puddle, and his hair flickering in damp
+strands about his thin face, became for Dan an ominous and saddening
+spectacle.</p>
+
+<p>But while he was ruefully contemplating it one day, a happy idea struck
+him. He would get Nicholas some clean white paper to draw his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> <i>dygrims</i>
+on. "And then belike he'd be contint to sit in be the fire, instead of
+to be catchin' his death scrawmin' out there in the mud under teems of
+rain." Grand writing-paper was to be had at Isaac Tarpey's, down in
+Ballybrosna, and Dan at this time happened to be in possession of a
+whole shilling, which he dedicated more than willingly to the purchase.</p>
+
+<p>Isaac Tarpey presided over the Ballybrosna Post-office, which was in
+some respects a singularly complete establishment, as not only was the
+raw material for a letter kept in stock there, but the letter itself
+could, for a consideration, be written on the premises by the postmaster
+in person. It is true that Isaac did not supply more than the barest
+necessaries of scribes, the bread and water, so to speak, of stationery,
+the very plainest pens and paper and ink. He kept his ink in a single
+moderate-sized jar, out of which he measured penn'orths and ha'p'orths
+into the various receptacles brought by customers who came to demand "a
+sup" or "a drain." On these sales his profits were certainly enormous,
+not less than cent. per cent., but then the consumption of that article
+was extremely small in Ballybrosna. It took a long while to reach the
+sediment at the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> bottom of the jar, and Isaac's letter-writing, done at
+the rate of thruppence a-piece, probably was a more lucrative branch of
+his business, though the correspondence of the Town was not large enough
+to put his services in frequent requisition. Partly on this account, and
+partly because he was by nature a strong conservative, Mr. Tarpey set
+his face sternly against the spread of education. He was distressed by
+the appearance of any symptoms of it among the neighbouring youth, even
+when it took the form of an inquiry for his limp paper and skewer-like
+pens. In fact, the diffusion of penmanship was what he most seriously
+deprecated and discountenanced. "The Lord knows," his main argument ran,
+"the foolery them spalpeens 'ill be gabbin' permiscuis would sicken you,
+widout givin' them the chance to be sittin' down aisy and invintin' it."
+His wife once suggested that "the crathurs might be more sinsible like,
+when they were takin' time to considher themselves." But Isaac said,
+"Pigs may fly."</p>
+
+<p>At the time when Dan came for his paper the office was occupied by Norah
+Fottrell, engaged in dictating a letter to her sweetheart, Stevie Flynn,
+away in Manchester. The composition still looked discouragingly brief,
+despite Isaac's big, flourishing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> hand, yet Norah's ideas had already
+run so short that she was staring in quest of more up among the cobwebby
+rafters over her head.</p>
+
+<p>"You might say," she said, after a pause, "that I hope he's gettin' his
+health where he is."</p>
+
+<p>"I've said that twyste before," Isaac objected severely.</p>
+
+<p>"Och, murdher, have you?" said Norah, reverting to the rafters with a
+distracted gaze.</p>
+
+<p>"Couldn't you tell him the price your father got for the last baste he
+sould?" said Isaac.</p>
+
+<p>"Bedad, I might so," said Norah; "'twas on'y thirty shillin', but it 'ud
+take up a good bit of room. And look-a, Mr. Tarpey, couldn't we lave the
+rest of the page clane? As like as not the bosthoon wouldn't be
+botherin' his head spellin' out the half of it."</p>
+
+<p>The adoption of this course expedited Norah's love-letter to a happy
+close. But when Dan took her place at the counter Isaac assured him, not
+without satisfaction, that "they were cliver and clane run out of all
+their writin' paper, barrin' it might be a sort of butt-ind of loose
+sheets left litterin' at the bottom of the drawer, and they that thick
+wid dust you could be plantin' pitaties in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> them, forby gettin' mildewed
+lyin' up in the damp so long."</p>
+
+<p>It was not so much compunction at Dan's disappointed countenance as an
+irresistible hankering after a good bargain that ultimately led the
+postmaster to sweep this uninviting remnant together, and fix upon it
+the price of sixpence. The charge was exorbitant, considering the small
+quantity and damaged state of the goods, yet Dan carried off his little
+packet quite contentedly, announcing that he would step over again for
+another sixpenn'orth next week, when, as Isaac reluctantly admitted, a
+fresh supply of stationery would have arrived.</p>
+
+<p>As Dan left the office he passed an unknown gentleman, tall, with a
+shrewd sallow face, dark, peaked beard, and alert grey eyes, who had
+been leaning against the door while the bargain was struck. The stranger
+was Mr. Alfred B. Willett, of New York, a wealthy engineer, who on his
+way home from Europe had been visiting his friend Dr. Hamilton of
+Ballybrosna. His curiosity now was roused by Dan's evident eagerness to
+acquire materials for the drawing of diagrams, the pursuit striking him
+as so strangely incongruous with the aspect of the brown-faced stalwart
+ragged youth,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> that he stepped inside when the place was empty to make
+inquiries on the subject. The post-master's information was to the
+effect that "the O'Beirnes above at the forge had always had the name of
+bein' very dacint respectable people up to then, and he'd never before
+seen any of the young ones settin' themselves up to be askin' after such
+things. He hoped it mightn't be a sign that the old man was goin'
+foolish, and lettin' the lads get past his control. But sure enough we
+must all of us put up wid growin' good for nothin' sometime, unless we
+happint to ha' never been worth anythin' to begin wid. And he wished he
+had a penny ped him for every one of that sort he'd met in the coorse of
+his life."</p>
+
+<p>This cynical disquisition was not very enlightening. However next week
+when Dan slipped over again for his second sixpenn'orth, Mr. Willett it
+chanced was there too, having called to report on the excessive
+thickness and other undesirable peculiarities of some ink lately
+supplied to him. It had been, in fact, composed of "the sidimint"
+artfully diluted with a drop of vinegar; but Isaac Tarpey said it was
+"thick wid the stren'th was in it," and set about uncorking his fresh
+jar with an affronted air, when his customer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> persisted in pointing out
+that its adhesive properties were less valuable in ink than in glue.
+Meanwhile Mr. Willett fell into a conversation with Dan, which ended in
+his engaging the lad to accompany him as guide on a shooting expedition
+next day. The arrangement turned out satisfactorily, and was repeated
+more than once, with the consequence that Dan and the stranger talked
+about many things in the course of several long tramps, until one
+evening the latter, sitting on a stone wall after a steep pull uphill,
+made Dan an offer which caused the most familiar objects to seem unreal,
+because a marvellous dream was coming true among them. For Mr. Willett
+proposed to take Dan home with him, and have him taught whatever he most
+wished to learn. "You're a smart lad, Dan," he said, "and I reckon
+you'll make more of that in the States than in this country."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! the doctorin'," said Dan, turning as red as the young sorrel
+leaves, and letting his darling wish slip out in his surprise as
+involuntarily as he would have blinked at a flash of lightning. But next
+moment he remembered Nicholas, and fell silent; Nicholas, who had not
+looked him in the face since that snowy evening<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> weeks ago. The dream
+seemed to stop coming true.</p>
+
+<p>"There's no need to make up your mind in a hurry," said Mr. Willett,
+"you can be thinking it over between this and Monday."</p>
+
+<p>Dan did think it over deeply that night and the next day and the day
+after. He thought how fine, if rather fearful, it would be to go on such
+a journey; and what a splendid thing to learn the doctoring business,
+and some day come home again able to cure everybody of anything that
+ailed them. "For out in the States, like enough, they had all manner of
+contrivances the people over here had never taught Dr. Hamilton," whose
+skill was occasionally baffled. He imagined the neighbours' surprise
+when he came driving up on his car; if possible he would be driving a
+little blue-roan mare like Farmer Finucane's Rosemary, with whom he had
+made friends in the course of many shoeings. He thought he would be
+sorry to miss seeing them all for so long; and yet it would certainly be
+very pleasant, in a way, to get to a place where things were a bit
+different sometimes, not like here where when you were getting up in the
+morning you knew what was bound to be happening all day just as well as
+you did when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> you were going to bed that night. And next he thought that
+such days would be coming to Nicholas, while he himself was away seeing
+and learning "all manner of everything;" and that if he had held his
+tongue that time, maybe Nicholas would have got his chance with Mr.
+Polymathers's money, instead of its all being spent away on nothing. And
+he thought that it wasn't his fault, for what else could he say when he
+was asked all of a minute, except the first thing that came into his
+head? And he wondered how it would be if anything happened to his
+grandfather. Nicholas wasn't over-strong, and too young altogether
+besides. And then he thought again that Mr. Willett was cleverer than
+anybody he had ever seen, and more good-natured; it was a pleasure to go
+about with him; and people were great fools to give up their chances.
+Maybe Nicholas might get another some day. And maybe Mr. Polymathers had
+been mistaken in thinking that he was the one best worth teaching.</p>
+
+<p>All these things Dan thought, and the result of his cogitations was that
+on the Monday he stole a sheaf of Nicholas's most complicated
+cobweb-like diagrams from their hiding-place in the wall, and brought
+them with him when he went by appointment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> to meet his patron off beyond
+Knockfinny. And when Mr. Willett said to him: "Well, Dan, what about the
+States and the doctoring?" he replied inconsequently by holding out the
+sheets of paper with the explanation: "It's me brother, Nicholas, sir,
+does be doin' them mostly out of his own head."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Willett looked at them for some minutes with interested
+ejaculations. "Upon my word," he then said, "if these were done out of
+his own head, he must have about as much mathematics located in it by
+nature as a spider."</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't they good for anythin' at all then, sir?" said Dan, not knowing
+exactly what he hoped and feared.</p>
+
+<p>"Good? They're astonishing," said Mr. Willett. He asked some questions
+about Nicholas's age, schooling, and so forth; after which he said: "You
+must take me to see this brother of yours, Dan. I expect he'll have got
+to come right along with us."</p>
+
+<p>But Dan stared round and round the spacious brown-purple floor they were
+standing on, and after a far-off flight of wild fowl, and up at the sky,
+where the clouds travel without let or hindrance, before he answered
+hesitatingly: "The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> two of us couldn't ever both go, sir. How could we
+be lavin' the forge and all on me ould grandfather? And Nicholas never
+makes any great hand of the work."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! is that the way the land lies?" said Mr. Willett, as if half
+impatient, and half amused, but not best pleased. He looked hard at Dan,
+and thought he saw how matters stood, "You've no mind to leave the old
+grandfather and the rest of the concern, but you think it would be more
+in the other lad's line."</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact Dan was at that particular moment feeling strongly
+how easily he could have reconciled himself to the separation, and how
+entirely it would be the making of him to do so. But he did not gainsay
+Mr. Willett's statement. To himself he said, "He's a right to have his
+chances; and the one of us is bound to stop in it"&mdash;a mode of expressing
+his sentiments which showed that he had much need of culture; and aloud:
+"Nicholas always had a powerful wish to be gettin' some larnin'; and I'm
+a fool to him at the geomethry anyway."</p>
+
+<p>The upshot of it all was that when some six weeks later Mr. Alfred B.
+Willett sailed for New York, Nicholas O'Beirne accompanied him, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> Dan
+O'Beirne remained at Lisconnel. It was on a gleamful April day that they
+set out, with soft gusts roaming all around, as if they had come from
+very far off, and were eagerly exploring the strange places, and many
+light clouds flitting by swiftly above, as if they had a long journey
+before them, and were in a joyous flurry over it. Dan spent the
+slow-paced hours in the forge, where he hammered loud and long, and
+seldom looked across the threshold. The pleasantest thought in his mind
+was the remembrance of a short conversation which he had had with
+Nicholas while they were tying up Mr. Polymathers's old books at the
+kitchen-door just as the grey chink in the east filled with rose-light,
+and the earliest breeze came over the bog waving the withered grasses.
+Dan had said to Nicholas: "Sure I wouldn't be grudgin' you e'er a bit of
+good luck, lad." And Nicholas had replied: "And never did."</p>
+
+<p>After Nicholas's departure many days bad and good rose on Lisconnel, but
+few of them brought any tidings of the absent. Letters passed now and
+then, laggard and uninstructive as such letters must be, and they grew
+rarer and briefer as time went on. Perhaps a dozen years had gone by,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+when Dan one day received simultaneously an American newspaper and a
+parcel. The newspaper was marked with large blue chalk crosses at a
+paragraph which related how the degree of D.Sc. had been conferred.
+<i>Honoris Caus&acirc;</i> upon Mr. Nicholas O'Beirne by the University of
+Sarabraxville. And in the parcel, more astonishing still, was a
+brown-covered book, lettered on the back: <i>A Treatise on Conic Sections,
+by Nicholas O'Beirne</i>. By this time Dan had been left alone at the
+forge; but he was courting Mary Ryan, Mick Ryan's daughter, so he
+naturally conveyed to her this remarkable news. It produced a profound
+impression. Old Paddy her grandfather was with difficulty brought to
+realise the fact that "they were after makin' a doctor of young Nicholas
+O'Beirne, him that went out to the States the year before the Famine."
+And when he had got the idea into his head, it seemed to act like a
+swivel-joint, and set him nodding to the tune of: "Well tub-be sure;
+glory be to God; young Nicholas O'Beirne."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish to goodness he'd come over and cure Mick, poor man," said Mick's
+wife. "For he hasn't been worth pickin' up off the road ever since he
+was bad with the fever last year, and he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> might as well be dhrinkin' so
+much ditch-wather as the ould stuff Dr. Carson's givin' him."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah but it's not the medical doctorin' Nicholas has gone to," said Dan,
+the shadow of a shadow crossing his face, "there'd be diff'rint letters
+for that." And he proceeded to read out the report of the degree
+conferred <i>honoris caus&acirc;</i> upon the distinguished young Irishman, Mr.
+Nicholas O'Beirne, whose recent contributions to the study of the higher
+mathematics had roused so much interest in scientific circles.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, true for you, Dan," said Mary; "you don't hear them callin' Dr.
+Carson an Honory-causy."</p>
+
+<p>Dan's shred of Latin had grown rustier than the oldest iron in his
+stock, but was not yet utterly worn away. "The manin' of that," he
+explained, "would be, <i>be raison of honour</i>, and I should suppose,
+they've gave it to him for the sake of what all he's after doin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Bedad then, Dan," said Mrs. Mick, "some one had a right to be givin'
+you an Honory-causy yourself, considherin' the cure you're after makin'
+on Mr. Finucane's ould mare, and everybody of the opinion she'd never
+stand on four feet again to the ages' ind."</p>
+
+<p>"Och blathers, ma'am," Dan said, modestly,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> "sure anybody wid the sight
+of their eyes might aisy enough ha' seen what ailed the crathur. That
+was no great comether. And look at what Nicholas is after doin'; he's
+wrote a book, no less."</p>
+
+<p>The "Treatise on Conic Sections" created an even stronger sensation than
+the news of the honorary degree, especially among those who had letters
+enough to spell out the familiar name on the title-page. Dan's Mary was
+not one of these scholars, but she found another page to admire, saying
+that the circles "drew in and out of aich other like a lot of
+soap-bubbles, had an oncommon tasty look, and so had all them weeny
+corners, wid the long bames between, the moral of a chain-harrow, you
+couldn't mistake it. Sure it's proud of it anybody might be."</p>
+
+<p>Probably Nicholas was very proud of this first heir of his invention,
+diagrams, and all. Whether it ever had any successors seems doubtful;
+certainly none of them arrived at his old home. But his Treatise is
+still safely stowed away there in a corner of the dresser. Most likely
+it is the only copy of "O'Beirne on Conic Sections" existing in Ireland;
+and who would expect to find it lodged in a smoke-stained cabin on the
+wild bogland between Duffclane and Lisconnel?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3>BOYS' WAGES</h3>
+
+
+<p>One leaden-roofed morning in the winter after his brother Nicholas had
+gone to the States, young Dan O'Beirne was in rather low spirits, and
+rather out of humour. It was not unnatural that such a mood should
+occasionally overtake him, since he had reached apparently a straight
+and monotonous tract of road, which would have looked interminable to
+the eyes of seventeen had not his household companions been now all
+declining folk, whose presence brought under his constant observation
+the last stages of "a long journey in December gone." Half a century or
+so of smithy work, even with some unlicensed doctoring and illicit
+distilling thrown in, was not by any means the future that he would have
+liked his oracle to predict for him. And though he forecast it
+accurately enough without the intervention of any soothsaying, this no
+more helped him to avoid it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> than if he had been an old-world tragical
+hero, whose friends were seeking by vain devices to circumvent the
+promulgated decrees of his destiny. Dan, indeed, took no steps of that
+sort. For him, as for most of us, the skirts of circumstance were as the
+meshes of the net in which Fate holds us, and his evil star was an
+object of which it seemed very hard to get a good grip. I have always
+wondered myself how people set about it. At any rate, Dan continued to
+walk under his; that is to say, if it were really bad luck that kept him
+at the forge. Upon this point there might be differences of opinion.
+Terence Kilfoyle, for instance, who dropped in to escape from a
+snow-shower in the course of that morning, would not, evidently, have
+taken such a view. For when Dan said something grumblingly about
+Lisconnel being "a slack sort of a place, where one didn't get much
+chance of doin' anythin' at all;" he replied, "Bedad now, if I'd the
+fine business you and your grandfather have to be puttin' me hand to, I
+wouldn't call the Queen me aunt."</p>
+
+<p>In those times the district around our bogland was more thickly
+inhabited than it is at present, and the blacksmith's jobs were
+proportionately plentier. Nowadays the forge is liable to long<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> spells
+of silence, but Dan, who as young Dan has been superseded, philosophises
+over them, and talks no more about chances. On this occasion his remarks
+were overheard by his grandfather, perhaps because the old man had begun
+to have thoughts of chances which made him sensitive to signs of
+discontent in his assistant. And by and by when Terence had gone, he
+said, "Terence said a very sinsible word; a lad might aisy get a worse
+start in life, ay indeed he might so, if it was twyste as slack. But
+anyhow there's them here that 'ud be hard set to make a shift for
+themselves if the two of us was out of it; and I'm apt to be quittin'
+before Biddy at all events." To which Dan replied, "Why what talk was
+there of quittin'?" and the subject ceased out of the conversation.
+During the subsequent silence Dan thought, among other things, that it
+was "aisy for his grandfather to be talkin';" but in this he made a
+mistake. For old O'Beirne remembered vividly that he had once had his
+own restless ambitions, and his chances, too, of realising them, in
+times when he did more stirring things than merely forge pike-heads.
+Therefore he guessed what lent an unnecessary vehemence to his
+grandson's hammering, and if he could have thought of any consolatory<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>
+remark, he would have made it. But it only occurred to him to say that
+the days would soon be len'thenin' now, anyway; and even to himself this
+seemed cold comfort. Dan replied, "Och, they're plinty long enough," and
+sent a thick swarm of fiery bees flitting up the dark-throated chimney.</p>
+
+<p>That evening when Dan closed the broad-leaved forge doors, he shut
+himself out into a world as black and white as moonlight on turf and
+snow could make it. Though the morning's flutter of snow had left but a
+meagre sprinkling on that great bogland, the moonbeams touching every
+scattered flake, seemed to gather it all up widely in one stark spectral
+gleam. Far away towards the horizon this dulled off into a shadowy zone
+of mist, where the wind was muttering and moaning to itself, dimly heard
+across the hushed floor of the night. Beyond that Dan was aware
+wistfully of regions unknown, with all their possibilities fascinating
+and mysterious. But he had small scope for speculation about what he
+should find when he opened the house door fast by; and in fact he
+discovered everything and everybody just as he could have foretold. The
+fire-lit room was filled with the busy weaving of the web that ruddy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>
+gleams and russet shadows never got finished, swiftly as they glanced,
+and overhead the black spaces between the rafters gloomed down like
+inlets of a starless sky. There sat his great-grandmother smoking her
+dudeen in her nook by the hearth, and her big cloak&mdash;a very little of
+wizened old woman to a great many heavy, dark-blue folds. There, too,
+knitted her grey-haired daughter Bridget, who said, as she did every
+evening, "Well, Dan, so you're come in," and would have not much more to
+say for herself that night except the Rosary. And his grandfather, who
+had come in just before him, was lighting his pipe in the opposite
+chimney-corner. A year ago his brother Nicholas would have thrust a
+head, all eyes and rumpled hair, into a patch of bright flickerings, to
+pore over the tattered arithmetic-book; but by this time his absence had
+become a matter of course. The only at all unusual feature was Joe
+Denny, the blind fiddler, who had called in on his way home and had a
+drop of poteen and a farrel of wholemeal cake. Yet Joe was indeed a
+tolerably common incident, and his jokes altered not. He had begun his
+parting one, which was to the effect that sorra a man in the counthry of
+Connaught could see clearer than himself if the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> night was dark enough,
+when Dan's arrival interrupted him, and made him declare, taking out his
+fiddle, that 'twould be a poor case if the lad didn't get e'er a tune at
+all. Dan was not much in the humour for tunes, but he said, "Ay, Joe,
+give us a one, man-alive," and Joe struck up with twangle and squeak.</p>
+
+<p>He was playing&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Over the hills and far away,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Over the hills and beyond the say,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Over the hills and a great way off,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the wind it blew&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>when a thudding knock on the door seemed to beat down the shriller
+sounds and stop the sliding bow. Dan went to see who it was, and found
+standing on the threshold a tall, lean old man in a long, ragged coat,
+with a thick, knotted blackthorn in his hand. A few hard-frozen granules
+pattered in at the opened door, which admitted a glimpse of the moon,
+tarnished by a thin drift of scudding cloud.</p>
+
+<p>"God save all here," said the old man, who was a stranger.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-evenin' to you kindly, sir," responded old Felix from his fireside
+corner; "and wudn't you be steppin' widin?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I'm on'y axin' me way to the place below there&mdash;Ballybrosna beyond
+Duffclane," said the old man; "it's the road I must be steppin', for I'm
+more than a thrifle late."</p>
+
+<p>But he came slowly forward into the room as if lured by the fire, at
+which he looked hungrily. He stooped and limped very much, and when he
+took off his black caubeen, the sharp gleam of his white hair seemed to
+comment coldly on those infirmities.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm widin a mile or so of it, or maybe less, by now, I should suppose,"
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Faix, then, it's the long mile," said the fiddler. "Put half a dozen to
+it, and you'll be nearer; and bedad it's aisier work doin' that in your
+head than on your feet. Be the same token I must be leggin' it, or
+they'll consait I'm lost at our place." And he stepped out darkly into
+the veiled moonlight.</p>
+
+<p>"Wirrasthrew and weary on it," the old man said to himself; and then to
+the others, "Is it that far as he says?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ay is it, every inch," said old O'Beirne. "And too long a thramp for
+you altogether, sir, if I might make so free."</p>
+
+<p>"For the matther of that," said the ragged old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> man, proudly, "I've
+walked the double of it, and more, times and agin, widout so much as
+considherin'. But your road's a bit heavy to-night, wid the snow&mdash;and
+could."</p>
+
+<p>"That's the worst of the roads," said the little old woman, peering
+suddenly out of her corner; "the longer you walk them, the longer
+they'll grow on you, till you begin to think there's no ind to them. And
+after that, the best conthrivance is to keep off of them clivir and
+clane, the way I do. Then they're no len'th at all."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, ma'am, but 'twouldn't be very handy if the young folk took to
+thryin' that plan," the old man said. "<i>We</i>'re bound to keep steppin'
+out."</p>
+
+<p>A short silence followed this remark, because the hearers felt uncertain
+whether he meant the pronoun for a jest. To evade the difficulty, old
+O'Beirne bade Dan fetch a mug for a drop of poteen, and meanwhile said
+to the stranger:</p>
+
+<p>"Sit you down, sir, and take a taste of the fire. Where might you be
+thravellin' from this day?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was livin' over at Innislone," said the old man, sitting down on a
+creepy stool.</p>
+
+<p>"Musha, then, you didn't ever come that far all on ind&mdash;sure it's miles
+untould."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"'Twas the day afore yisterday I quit. Last night I slep' at Sallinbeg,
+and this mornin' I met a man who loaned me a grand lift in his cart."</p>
+
+<p>"I used to know a man lived at Innislone," said old O'Beirne, "be the
+name of Brian English. He come by here of an odd while after the stuff."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, bedad, and a very dacint ould crathur he was. Meself's one of the
+Dermodys&mdash;young Christie they call me&mdash;but ould Christie that was me
+poor father's dead this while back. Thank you kindly, lad," the old man
+said to Dan, who now handed him a little delft mug half full of whisky.
+"Why, you're nigh as long a fellow as meself. Are you good at the
+wrestlin'?"</p>
+
+<p>"Och, I'm no great things whatever," Dan replied with becoming modesty.</p>
+
+<p>"There's not many heavy weights in the parish 'ud care to stand up to
+me," said this young Christie, holding the mug in a gaunt tremulous
+hand. "Faix, it's noways forrard they've been about it since the time I
+come near breakin' Rick Tighe's neck. I've noticed that. Begorrah, now,
+ivery sowl thought I had him massacred," he said, with a transient gleam
+of genuine complacency. "You might have heard tell of it, belike?"</p>
+
+<p>"It 'ud ha' happint before my recollections,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> sir, maybe," said Dan,
+looking at him perplexedly, "if 'twas apt to ha' been a longish while
+ago."</p>
+
+<p>"'Twasn't long to say," said the old man. He drank the spirits
+lingeringly, in slow sips, and seemed to sit up straighter as he did so.
+Then he set down the empty mug on the table, and said, "<i>Boys' wages</i>."</p>
+
+<p>But he had scarcely uttered the words when he perceived that he had
+thought aloud irrelevantly, and made haste to cover the slip. "I'd
+better be gettin' on wid meself," he said, rising, "Thank you, kindly.
+That's an iligant fire you have." He looked at it regretfully, but
+turned resolutely towards the door, still open, and framing the broad
+dim whiteness out away to the bounding curtain of gloom. "It's a grand
+thing," he said defiantly, "to have all the world before you."</p>
+
+<p>The sentiment was not accepted without qualification.</p>
+
+<p>"That depinds," said old O'Beirne. "Somewhiles I question wud you find
+anythin' in it better than a warm corner and a pipe of 'baccy, if you
+thramped the whole of it. And you might happen on a dale worse. What do
+you say, mother?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She was knocking ashes out of her pipe-bowl against the wall, and nodded
+in assent.</p>
+
+<p>"It's no place for people that can keep shut of it," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"If you've ne'er a chance of gettin' into it," said Dan, "I dunno what
+great good it does you bein' there afore or behind."</p>
+
+<p>"Or if you knew there was nothin' left in it you wanted to be goin'
+after," said his great-aunt, half to herself.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, whatever way you look at it," said the strange old man, "I've a
+notion I've a right to be gettin' somethin' more out of it be now than
+boys' wages. Ay, it's time I was. Boys' wages; the lyin' spalpeen."</p>
+
+<p>"If you axed me, sir," said old O'Beirne, "I'd say 'twas time somebody
+else would be gettin' the wages. Isn't there any childer to be earnin'
+for you? Haven't you e'er a son, that you need be thrampin' the counthry
+that fashion, let alone talkin' about all the world, wild like?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've a son, troth have I, if that was all," said the old man, turning
+away, angrily.</p>
+
+<p>"Then it's that much better off than me you are. The only one I had, he
+took and died on me, himself, and his poor wife a couple of days<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> after
+him&mdash;God be good to them&mdash;when the lad there wasn't scarce the height of
+that stool, and a less size on his brother, that's away now in the
+States gettin' all manner of a fine edication. Very dacint poor childer
+they always was, too; but it was a bad job."</p>
+
+<p>"He might ha' done worse agin you than that," said Christie Dermody, "be
+the powers he might." He had retreated as far as the door, but now he
+faced round, and stood on the edge of the thin snow, leaning his right
+shoulder against the post, and looking in at the other old man by the
+fire. "He might ha' fooled you for years and years, and made a
+laughin'-stock of you wid everybody about the place&mdash;and me wid ne'er a
+thought of any such a thing&mdash;he might so, and bad luck to him....
+'Foostherin' about and consaitin' to be doin' a fair day's work, when
+he's the creep of a snail on him, and the stren'th of a rat.' That's
+what I heard Tim Reilly sayin' and I goin' home on the Saturday night.
+But if I come creepin' after him, the young baste, he'd maybe ha' r&aacute;ison
+to remimber it.... And himself and the wife lettin' on there was nothin'
+like me; and he callin' me to come into his room&mdash;I heard him plain
+enough all the while, no fear, but I wudn't be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> lettin' on. There's
+ne'er a hap'orth ailin' him. Troth he may call till he's choked afore
+iver I'll come next or nigh him. And sendin' the little girl slutherin'
+to say her daddy wanted me. I tould her want might be his master. Sure
+they're all the one pack, and the widest width there is in this world
+I'll be keepin' between them and me. Shut of them I'll be for good and
+all&mdash;and I'll make me fortin' yet, and no thanks to him. What talk have
+they of ould men? Boys' wages. Good-night to you all."</p>
+
+<p>To those in the room it seemed as if he dropped away back into the wan
+dusk behind him, and next moment they saw him in motion a few paces
+distant, limping fast, and gesticulating as though he were still
+carrying on his monologue.</p>
+
+<p>"That old crathur's asthray in his mind, I misdoubt," said old O'Beirne,
+"and I wouldn't won'er if he was after gettin' bad thratement among his
+own people."</p>
+
+<p>"Goodness pity him," said his sister Bridget. "It's a cruel perishin'
+night, and snowin' thicker. Where'll he get to at all? And carryin'
+nought but an old stick. We'd better ha' kep' him."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure we couldn't ha' stopped him anyhow,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> said the blacksmith, "no
+more than one of them flustherin' blasts goin' by. When a body's took up
+wid onraisonable notions, you might as well be hammerin' could iron as
+offerin' to persuade him diff'rint. But he'll maybe turn in at the
+Gallahers'."</p>
+
+<p>They watched him until the dark imprints of his receding steps in the
+thin snow-sheet could no longer be distinguished, and then Dan closed
+the door, shutting out the wide world and the fortune seeker. "Things is
+quare and conthr&aacute;ry," he said to himself.</p>
+
+<p>Some two hours afterwards they were all sitting round the fire still. It
+was nearly nine o'clock, which is late in Lisconnel, but they found it
+hard to detach themselves from the cordial grasp of the warm glow.
+Bridget, however, had put by her needles, and begun to tell her beads,
+when another knock broke in upon them.</p>
+
+<p>"He's come back belike," said old O'Beirne; but when Dan opened the
+door, the person who stood there, though likewise tall and gaunt and
+ragged, had grizzled black hair, and was not more than middle-aged. His
+face was hollow-cheeked and drawn, and his eyes glittered while he
+shivered and panted. The night had grown wilder as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> the moon sank low,
+and the snow went past the door like rapid wafts of ghostly smoke. This
+newcomer stumbled into the room without ceremony, as if half blinded,
+and said breathlessly&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Did any of yous be chance see an ould man goin' this road to-day? An
+ould ancient man, somethin' lame; be the name of Christie Dermody?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, sure enough, himself was in it not so long ago," said old O'Beirne.
+"If it hadn't been you, 'twas very apt to ha' been him come back."</p>
+
+<p>In the man's face one trouble seemed to be relieved by another at the
+tidings.</p>
+
+<p>"Glory be to goodness, then, that I've heard tell of him at last," he
+said. "But God help the crathur, what's to become of him streelin' about
+this freezin' night? The snow's as dhry as mail-dust. Perished he'll be.
+Och, he's the terrible man to go do such a thing on us. What way did he
+quit? It's me ould father, sir, that's over eighty years of age."</p>
+
+<p>"And is he after strayin' away on you?" said old O'Beirne.</p>
+
+<p>"Follyin' him since yisterday mornin' I am," said the other, "when it's
+in me bed I should be be rights, for I'm that distroyed wid the could
+on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> me chest I've scare a bit of breath in me body. But sure what matter
+if I can come be the crathur agin. Is it that a-way he went, did you
+notice?"</p>
+
+<p>"You're bound to wait till the flurry of the win's gone by," said old
+O'Beirne, for his visitor pointed out into a shrieking whirl, shrilling
+higher and fiercer. "Sorra a minyit you'll lose, for you couldn't stir a
+step in that or see a stim. Sit you down a while. What was it set him
+rovin'?"</p>
+
+<p>"Did he say anythin' agin us? Anythin' of bein' thrated bad?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I wouldn't say he seemed altogether satisfied in himself," said
+old O'Beirne, remembering his suspicions. "Somethin' he said of bein'
+made a fool of, and tould lies to&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And gettin' boys' wages," said Dan.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, ay, wirrasthrew, that was the very notion he had, goodness help us.
+What will we do at all wid him? You see, sir, me father's a won'erful
+proud-minded man; he is that. And a great big man, and as strong as ten
+he was, ontil he got rael ould entirely. So it's cruel bad he thinks of
+not bein' able for everythin' the way he used to be; and he won't let on
+but he is, be no manner of manes he won't. 'Deed no, he sez he's as good
+a man as ever he was in his life."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Belike now he's of the opinion the sun doesn't dhrop down out of the
+sky of an evenin'," said little old Mrs. O'Beirne, with sarcasm. "What
+does the ould body expec'?"</p>
+
+<p>"I dunno, ma'am, I dunno. Sure it's agin nathur and raison. There's
+meself gettin' as grey as a badger, and noways that supple as I was. But
+me father's a terrible cliver man. You'd niver get the better of an
+argufyment wid him, for he wouldn't listen to a word you'd be sayin'. So
+you see the way of it was, the two of us is workin' this great while on
+Mr. Blake's lan', that's a dacint man enough; and it might be three year
+ago, he sez to me one Saturday night&mdash;for be good luck 'twas me and not
+me father he'd mostly be payin'&mdash;sez he to me, 'Look it here, Ned, it's
+the last time I'll be givin' man's wages to your father, for bedad an
+infant child 'ud do as much as he any day of the week. So I'll put him
+on boys' wages,' he sez, 'that'ill be three shillin's, and every penny
+as much as he's worth,' sez he. And sure I knew it was the truth he was
+sayin', but 'twould break me father's heart.</p>
+
+<p>"So nought better could I do on'y to make out 'twas he would be gettin'
+the man's wages, and meself the boy's. Diff'rint raisons I conthrived,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+he said, with some natural pride in the details of his strategy, "but
+mostly I let on 'twas because of me bein' such a fool about the horses
+they couldn't trust me wid any except the ould ones. Anyway me father
+was contint enough; faix, some whiles he seemed a bit set up like,
+considherin' he had the pull over me, and he'd be sayin' what at all 'ud
+we do without him, and I such an omadhawn. Niver a cross word we had
+until last week I got laid up wid this mischancy could and the pain in
+me chest, so sorra a fut could I go to me work; and I well knew the
+whole thing 'ud come out, if he went when I didn't. Bedad I dhramed it
+all the night asleep and awake, till I was fairly moidhered in me head."</p>
+
+<p>"Tub-be sure," said old O'Beirne, "that's the worst of lettin' on. If
+anythin' goes crooked, it's like the bottom bursted out of a sack of
+mail; you're carryin' about nothin' at all before you know what's
+happint you."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we done the best we could, me wife and me, to dispersuade him off
+of goin' on Saturday. Bad wid the could too, we said he was; but och not
+a fut of him but would go. So Barney McAuliffe was tellin' me wife, when
+the men was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> payin' in the yard, me father he ups and says to Mr. Blake:</p>
+
+<p>"'Beg pardon, sir, but you're after givin' me no more than me son's
+money, and it's meself was workin' this week, not him.'</p>
+
+<p>"And Mr. Blake sez, just goin' off in a hurry, 'What are you talkin'
+about, man? Whethen now, you don't suppose I've been payin' you full
+wages, that hasn't done a stroke of work worth namin' this half-dozen
+year? That'ill have to contint you till Ned's back agin.'</p>
+
+<p>"And Barney sez my father had ne'er a word out of him, but just went
+home dazed like. And me wife sez when he come in, he sits down on the
+form be the door, and niver opens his lips. So she knew right well what
+ailed him, and she said iverythin' she could think of&mdash;how it's
+disthroyed we'd be on'y for him now I was laid up, and the won'erful man
+he was, and this way and that way. But niver a word he heeded, nor near
+the fire he wouldn't come, and had her heart-scalded seein' him sittin'
+there in the draught of the door. And I meself was tired callin' him to
+come in and spake to me, and I lyin' in bed, but next or nigh me he
+niver come, not even for little Maggie that he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> always thought a hape
+of. And the next mornin' if he wasn't quit out of it early, afore
+anybody knew, in the bitter black frost, and a quare threatinin' of
+snow. So then as soon as I heard tell, I up wid me and come after him.
+Troth, I left the wife frettin' wild, the crathur, thinkin' I'd get me
+death; but what else could I do? And now I must be steppin' on again.
+Och no, thank you, lad, if I took a dhrop of spirits, I'd be choked wid
+coughin'. But you might just set me on the right road."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll go along wid him," said Dan, aside to his grandfather, "and if I
+can bring him, or the both of them, back here, I will. It's my belief
+he's as bad as he can stick together."</p>
+
+<p>So Dan and old Dermody's son went out into the night. A lull in the wind
+had come, and the light of the moon, hung near the horizon's rim,
+flickered out dimly ever and anon as the edge of the drifting mist
+lapped up wave-like and touched her. It was piercingly cold. Ned Dermody
+leaned heavily on Dan as they walked, only till he fetched back his
+breath, he said, but it was slow in coming. They had not gone many
+hundred yards, yet vast tracts of solitude seemed to have folded round
+them, before Dan caught sight of something<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> that somehow startled and
+shocked him&mdash;a group of boulders by the road, with a shadow under one of
+them strangely like a human form. A few paces further on he became aware
+that it really was a man&mdash;the old man&mdash;sitting huddled up under the big
+glimmering stone. Thus far had he carried his forlorn quest after
+Fortune, and mutiny against Fate. His snaggy stick lay at a little
+distance, a black line on the snow, and the sight of that made Dan's
+heart stumble. But Ned Dermody shouted out hoarsely and loud: "Be the
+Lord it's himself," and, as Dan afterwards used to tell, "took a flyin'
+lep at him, as if he'd a mind to ha' lep over the world."</p>
+
+<p>"Musha now, and is it there you would be sittin' to catch your death of
+could?" he began, in a tone of gleeful reproach, shaking the old man by
+the shoulder. "Goodness forgive me for sayin' so, but it's yourself's
+the pernicious ould miscreant. Fine thrampin' over the counthry I've had
+after you&mdash;forby givin' us the greatest fright altogether. Sure I give
+you me word the whole of them at home was runnin' in and out of the
+house on Sunday mornin' like so many scared rabbits about a bank. And
+ne'er a man-jack of them, you persaive, had the wit to find out where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+you was off to till meself riz out of me bed to go look. And now,
+man-alive, git up wid yourself and come along, for it's mortal could
+here, and there's tons' weight of snow this instiant minyit ready to
+dhrop down on our heads. Come along. Sure it's niver disthressin'
+yourself you'd be about ould Blake and his wages? Musha sure Norah and
+meself was sayin' on'y on Saturday night that there wasn't many
+stookawns like me had fathers to be bringin' them home shillin's every
+week as regular as the clock, and givin' prisints to the childer, and
+all manner. There's little Maggie frettin' woful to be missin' you out
+of it. Don't be keepin' me standin' on me feet, there's a good man, for
+it's quare and bad I've been, and the doctor was sayin' he couldn't tell
+what ruination mightn't be on me if I didn't mind what I was at. And
+here's the dacint lad waitin' to show us the road. We're just comin'
+along this instant, boyo. Look-a-daddy, 'twas all a mistake, and we'll
+settle it up next week, when we're both workin' agin. Very belike Mr.
+Blake didn't rightly know what he was sayin'. Wake up and come along....
+Daddy darlint, don't you hear what I'm tellin' you? It's raisin' your
+wages they'll be after Lent, I wouldn't won'er, raisin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> them a shillin'
+belike&mdash;rael grand it'ill be&mdash;God Almighty!"</p>
+
+<p>He stood up suddenly and looked towards Dan, but at neither him nor
+anything else. The moon began to shine clearer in a chink between two
+straight leaden bars, and the great white bog seemed to grow wider and
+stiller under the strengthening light. The very wind had forsaken them,
+and gone off keening into the far distance. It seemed to Dan that even a
+flake fluttering down would have been some company, but not a single one
+was in the air. He felt himself seized by a nameless panic, such as had
+not come over him since he was a small child a dozen years ago.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter at all?" he said futilely to Ned Dermody, knowing
+well enough.</p>
+
+<p>"Gone he is," said Ned, "the life was vexed out of him among us all.
+He's gone. And it's follyin' him I'd liefer be, on'y for them crathurs
+at home."</p>
+
+<p>But in another moment he came staggering against Dan, and clutched his
+arm, saying wildly: "Ah, lend me a hand&mdash;for pity's sake&mdash;a hand for a
+minyit. Don't let go of me." And he leant such a heavy dead weight on
+him that all Dan could do was to let it slip down and down as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> softly as
+might be, until the snowy earth took it from him.</p>
+
+<p>Ned had followed in spite of the crathurs at home.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3>CON THE QUARE ONE</h3>
+
+
+<p>Among the unfamiliar faces that show themselves now and then at
+Lisconnel, some make no second appearance, never coming our way again,
+but passing out of our ken as utterly as if their route lay along a
+tangent, or the branch of an hyperbola, or other such unreverting line.
+We seldom, it is true, get proof positive, as in the case of the
+Dermodys, father and son, that they will no more return. Generally their
+doing so any day may be supposed possible as long as anybody remembers
+to suppose it. But some come back at more or less regular intervals,
+like periodic comets, so that if a certain time elapses without bringing
+one of them, the neighbours say they wonder what's took him at all,
+while some reappear erratically enough to preclude any calculations upon
+the subject. Of this latter class was Con the Quare One, who, after his
+first arrival,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> on a summer's evening, now more than a quarter of a
+century since, became a rather frequent visitor, usually stopping for a
+few days at least, before he resumed his travels. It was conjectured
+that these were very extensive, though perhaps less so than Mad Bell's.
+But it was even more difficult to obtain a satisfactory report of them
+from him than from her. Mrs. M'Gurk said he was "so took up with his own
+notions, that he mostly knew no better where he'd been, or what he'd
+been doin', than a baste drivin' home from a fair; you might as soon be
+axin' questions of one as the other; though when Con chose to give his
+mind to it, he knew what he was about as well as anybody else. Sure if
+you wanted to know which way he was after comin', as likely as not he'd
+talk about nothin' on'y the sorts of clouds he'd been watchin' goin' by
+over his head; and 'twould take a cliver body to tell from that what
+road he might ha' had under his feet." This incommunicativeness made him
+a disappointing guest sometimes by the firesides, where he was finding a
+night's lodging; though he might eke out his conversation with a little
+twangling on his fiddle, in which the melody would be quite as vague as
+his narratives. As for his own<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> earlier history, he never gave any clear
+account of it, probably having none to give, and the neighbours'
+speculations upon this point were somewhat wide of the mark, which was
+not surprising, as what stray hints he did let fall could be very
+deviously construed. The opinion most commonly received held that he had
+"took and run off from home, and he but a gossoon, be raison of doin'
+some quare bit of mischief, and had a mind yet to be keepin' out of his
+people's way; though, like enough, they weren't throublin' their heads
+about him be now;" a theory which was not entirely in accordance with
+facts.</p>
+
+<p>Con was not, I believe, an especially quare one at his first start in
+life, begun under the thatch of a little whitewashed cottage, dotted
+down among grass-fields beside a clear, brown river, which kept his
+mother busy exhorting him and his half-dozen brethren to not be falling
+in and drowning themselves on her. Her days were haunted by
+apprehensions of that catastrophe, which, however, was not included in
+the plot of her life's drama. Con's chosen bugbear was the bridge which
+bestrode the river close by, and beneath the arch of which he had once
+happened to be while a cart passed overhead. For the lumbering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> rumble
+had been an appalling experience, which he shuddered to repeat. Yet he
+lacked the moral courage to rouse his elders' derision by an avowal, so
+he followed, and did not let on, whenever their wading and dabbling
+brought them into the hollow-sounding shade. Despite this daily anxiety,
+Con spent his earliest years light-heartedly enough, with no stinting of
+pitaties&mdash;none at least that reached the childer&mdash;and ample scope for
+sports and pastimes. But when he was still very small, his grandmother,
+lately widowed and on her way to a new abode, stopped a night with her
+married daughter, and begged that she might bring home one of the
+grandchildren with her, "just to take the could edge off her
+lonesomeness," a request which could not well be refused. And Con seemed
+the appropriate person to go, as the old woman considered that "the dark
+head of hair he had on him was the moral of his poor grandfather's afore
+it turned white." Therefore the swiftly running mysteriously murmuring
+river flowed away out of his life, and with it vanished all the faces
+and voices and comradeship that had made up his world.</p>
+
+<p>At first he fretted for them rather persistently, but after a time
+adapted himself to circumstances,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> and contented himself with the
+grass-bordered, hedge-muffled lane, which had become the scene of his
+adventures, fraternizing with the reserved fawn-coloured goat and
+demonstrative terrier, who alone took an intelligent interest in them.
+For his grandmother was satisfied with the sense of having him "playin'
+around handy," and could not be counted company.</p>
+
+<p>But after nearly a twelvemonth had passed, Con seemed one day to be
+seized with a fresh fit of homesickness. It was a brilliant late summer
+morning, yet to old Mrs. Quin's perplexity, he continued to sit on his
+little stool, with his slice of griddle-cake half-crumbled in his lap,
+and answered her suggestions that he should finish his breakfast, and
+run out to play, by irrelevant requests for his own ould mammy. He
+wanted her cruel bad, he said, and there was nothin' ailed him, and he
+wouldn't like to look for blackberries along the hedge&mdash;or to throw
+stones for Bran&mdash;or even to be given a whole ha'penny to go buy himself
+a grand sugarstick down at the shop&mdash;he only wanted his mammy. Such was
+his attitude and refrain all that day and the next. After which his
+grandmother said to her neighbour, Judy Ahern, that she couldn't tell
+what had come<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> over the child, and he had her fairly distracted
+listening to him.</p>
+
+<p>And Mrs. Ahern said: "Maybe he might be gettin' somethin'; there's a
+terrible dale of sickness about. But he doesn't look very bad to say.
+Arrah now, Con avic, why wouldn't you run out and play a bit this lovely
+mornin'? Wantin' your mammy? Sure that's foolish talk, and she nobody
+can tell how far away this minyit. It's just a notion you have....
+'Deed, ma'am, I dunno, but maybe you'd a right to let him home to her,
+or else he might get frettin' and mopin' himself into the fever. He's a
+poor little crathur; the face of him this instant isn't the width of a
+ha'penny herrin'."</p>
+
+<p>"And he so continted," said Mrs. Quin, "until he took his fantigue. Rael
+quare it is."</p>
+
+<p>"Most things do be quare and ugly these times," said Mrs. Ahern,
+"Goodness help us all. There's poor Mrs. Duff thravellin' off to-morra,
+to go stay wid her brother at Gortnakil. Very belike she'd take him
+along; and he'd be aisy landed home, once he'd got that far."</p>
+
+<p>And on the morrow Con did actually set off with Mrs. Duff, feeling half
+appeased and half compunctious, as people do when they get what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> they
+have clamoured for; sorry a little to lose sight of Bran, staring
+open-mouthed after him down the lane; and relieved through all by a
+vague sense that he was going whither his heart-strings pulled. If he
+had been a more experienced traveller, he might have noticed some signs
+that things were, as Judy Ahern had said, out of joint. It was
+harvest-time, and the weather was not wet, though dull and chilly, but
+nobody was working in the fields. Nothing seemed to move in them, as
+they lay deserted, except trails of a white mist that drifted low among
+the furrows, where the potato-haulms looked strangely discoloured,
+speckled and blackened, as if a shrivelling flame had run through them
+all, charring and strewing pale ashes. The air was full of a peculiar
+odour, heavy and acrid, the very life-breath of decay. The roads were
+deserted too. For miles nobody would be met, and then a small stationary
+crowd of people would appear, collected it would seem without any more
+purpose than cattle huddled together in a storm, and as dumb as they,
+not giving so much as a "fine mornin'" to the passer-by. Other crowds
+they fell in with now and again, pacing slowly along, and these always
+had a heavy burden carried among them, and sometimes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> women keening.
+Once the car-horse shied violently at some dark, long thing, that was
+stretched out by the footpath, and Mrs. Duff crossed herself and said,
+"God be good to us," and the driver said without looking off his reins:
+"He's lyin' there since yisterday, and I seen another above about the
+four-roads, and I comin' past this mornin'."</p>
+
+<p>Con did not give much heed to these incidents; but one scene in his
+journey impressed him strongly. It was at the small town where they
+slept the night, and it happened while they waited in the broad main
+street next morning for their car to pick them up, as Mrs. Duff
+travelled by a rather disjointed system of lifts in vehicles that were
+going her road. There were few people about, and Con was intensely
+admiring a gaudy tea-chest in the window of the shop before which they
+stood, when a great roar began to swell up round the corner, with a
+lumbering of wheels heard fitfully through it. Presently a large crowd
+came struggling into sight; a street full of men, women, and children,
+surrounding a blue, red-wheeled cart, piled high with dusty-looking
+white sacks. Half-a-dozen dark-uniformed policemen were trying to haul
+on the horse, and keep between<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> the cart and the crowd, whose shout
+generally sounded like: "Divil a fut its to quit&mdash;divil a fut." It was a
+crowd that looked as if it had somehow got more than its due share of
+glittering eyes&mdash;in mistake, apparently, for other things.</p>
+
+<p>As the cart came crawling past where Mrs. Duff and Con stood, a furious
+rush so tilted it over that the horse fell, breaking a shaft, and some
+of the topmost sacks tumbled off, dropping with dull thuds, like dead
+bodies, upon the damp cobblestone pavement. Con saw a little cloud of
+white dust rise up over each as it dumped down, and melt away on the
+air, making him wonder to himself: "Is it smokin' hot they are?" But in
+another moment they were hidden for a while by a wild wave of the crowd,
+which threw itself tumultuously upon them. One of the sacks burst,
+spilling the soft flour in flakes, and round it the jostling and
+writhing grew fiercest. The faces that got nearest to it looked hardly
+the whiter for their smears and powdering.</p>
+
+<p>A young woman, all black eyes and elf locks, with a baby wrapped in her
+shawl, crouching low and making a desperate long arm, grasped a covetous
+handful, which spirted away wastefully between her clenched fingers. She
+moistened<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> some of this in a puddle as she knelt, and held the paste to
+her baby's mouth. But its head was drooping wearily aside, and its lips
+did not move when she touched them. "Ait it up, me heart's jewel," she
+said; "ait it up, mother's little bird. 'Deed, then, but you're the
+conthr&aacute;ry little toad. It's breakin' me heart you'll be roarin' when
+I've ne'er a bit to give you, and sleepin' dead, when I've the chance to
+feed you." She was beginning to shake it, but a young man who stood
+behind her put his hand on her shoulder, saying: "Whisht, whisht, you
+crathur, for God's sake. It's done wid wantin' and cryin', and a good
+job for it too, the Lord knows." Then the girl shrieked again and again,
+and the people about her said from one to the other: "It's her child's
+starved on her." And an old man caught up the little body, and held it
+high over his head, shouting, "Boys, boys&mdash;look yous at that. There's
+the way Henderson's cartin' off the childer's bit of food to make his
+fine fortin in England." And the crowd shouted back through a surge of
+curses: "Divil a fut will he this day."</p>
+
+<p>A very little old woman seized hold of an outlying sack and tried to
+lift it, a ludicrously impossible feat, at witnessing which a cripple
+leaner<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> than his crutches laughed boisterously, saying, "Och, good luck
+to you, granny. You're makin' a great offer at it entirely. Is it often
+you do be liftin' up the Hill of Howth? More power to your elbow." And
+the crowd yelled with laughter too.</p>
+
+<p>At this moment there was a prodigious clatter of hoofs on the stones,
+and round the corner whirled a squadron of hussars, all in their blue
+and yellow like a flight of macaws, coming to the rescue of Mr.
+Henderson's sacks. But Con saw scarcely more than the first confused
+onset, for somebody snatched him up and hurried him into a dark passage.
+The last sight he had of the fray was of a glossy black horse plunging
+frantically back from a cloud of the flour flung into his face, and
+rearing higher and higher, until he fell over with a terrific scrambling
+crash. Con particularly noticed the white gloves of the rider, and
+thought to himself, "He's been grabbin' the flour too." And the women
+about him said, "Och, murdher, the baste&mdash;the man's apt to be kilt!"</p>
+
+<p>When Mrs. Duff and Con emerged again all was quiet in the street&mdash;two or
+three women had even stolen back, and were scraping up the white
+patches&mdash;and he was driven away on a car for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> what seemed to him a vast
+length of time. But at last, as he peered listlessly out on glimpses of
+the dreary, strange road caught between the shawled heads of two other
+passengers, his eyes suddenly fell on something delightfully familiar.
+It was a grey ruined mill which stood by the river, not many hundred
+yards from his home. All at once he seemed to be set down in the middle
+of his old life as if he had never left it, only with a charming
+freshness superadded. A delicious feeling came over him as he watched
+the clear, sky-glinting loops unwind themselves in the grass while the
+car jogged along. There were the big stones over the edges of which the
+brown water broke into dancing crests of crystal bubbles when the river
+was full, and the deep pools under the hollow banks where they had seen
+the trout that was the size of a young whale, and the twisted wild
+cherry tree from beneath which the eddies sometimes twirled away bearing
+fleets of frail, snowy petals. And Johnny and Katty and the rest might
+all come into view paddling round any corner. When the car stopped at
+the gap through which you got into the field just behind his cottage, he
+was almost beside himself with joy, as his fellow-travellers, who were
+less elated, lifted him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> down and handed him his bundle, and bade him
+run straight in to his mother like an iligant child.</p>
+
+<p>He did run down the steep little footpath at the top of his speed, and
+round the corner of the house, and in through the open door. The room
+looked very dusk to him coming in from the mellow afternoon sunshine,
+and the first thing he noticed was that the fire had gone out. The
+hearth was a blackness sprinkled with white ashes, which made him think
+of the flour spilt on the dark ground. Next he saw his mother sitting on
+a stool by the hearth with her head leaned against the wall, and his
+father's old caubeen hanging on its nail above, a very unusual sight at
+that hour. Con rushed at her head-foremost, saying, "Och, mammy darlint,
+I'm come home this long way, and they was fightin' wid all the soldiers
+and spillin' the flour, and his horse rared up on his hind legs till he
+fell off his feet. And where's daddy if he isn't workin'? And musha what
+for is Nannie and Johnny in bed?" He pulled her shawl because she did
+not look round at him, and immediately she dropped down prone on the
+floor as heavily and helplessly as he had seen the white sacks fall. She
+had in truth been dead for hours, but Con ran out screaming that he was
+after killing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> his mammy, and nothing would persuade him otherwise.
+Vainly the neighbours averred that "the crathur was starvin' herself
+this great while to keep a bit for the childer, let alone her heart
+bein' broke frettin' after her poor husband and little Pat, who were
+took from her wid the fever, both of them the one day." Con's mind was
+shut fast into the dreadful moment when he had pulled her shawl and she
+had fallen down, and therein it abode, sorely afflicted, until a spell
+of brain fever intervening let it loose into a region of vaguer and more
+varied dreams.</p>
+
+<p>And when he had struggled through this illness, nobody well knew how or
+why, he woke up to find his world swept very bare. Father, mother, and
+all his brethren, except little Katty, were vanished out of it, and as
+it came looming back to him thus depeopled, its aspect was immeasurably
+desolate. Nor did his loss end here, for from this time dated the
+springing up among his neighbours of a suspicion that he was not all
+there, a suspicion which developed into an accepted article of belief,
+the more readily, perhaps, because nobody remained for whom such a fact
+would have had a personal bitterness, the old grandmother having slipped
+away out of her lonesomeness before his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> recovery. It would not be easy
+to explain how it was that Con grew up into that privileged and
+disfranchised person who is spoken of as "a crathur," and whose
+proceedings are more or less exempt from criticism. People often said of
+him that he had plenty of sense <i>of his own</i>, and the remark was to some
+extent explanatory, as a certain singularity in his way of viewing
+things even more than an occasional inconsequence and flightiness in his
+sayings and doings tended to establish the reputation for eccentricity
+which followed him closely as a shadow, and set an impalpable barrier
+between himself and his kind. As he advanced in life this was
+strengthened by his increasing fondness for his own society, but he did
+not take to his solitary wanderings until after his sister Katty married
+young Peter Meehan and emigrated to New York. It was suggested to him
+that he should accompany them, but he sat looking meditative for a
+while, and then said, "How far might it be from this to the States?"</p>
+
+<p>"I dunno rightly," said his informant, "but a goodish step it's apt to
+be, for people's better than a couple of weeks sailin' there, I'm
+tould."</p>
+
+<p>Con meditated a little more before he put another question. "Would you
+be widin hearin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> out there of the folk talkin' foolish?" he inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, tub-be sure, man, what 'ud hinder you that you wouldn't hear them
+talkin' same as anywheres else?"</p>
+
+<p>"Bedad, then," said Con, "it seems a long way to be thravellin' to a
+counthry as close as that. Sure, if you take out for a stravade over the
+bog here, you'll be throubled wid nothin' the len'th of the day on'y the
+curlew, or maybe a couple of saygulls skirlin'&mdash;raisonable enough. I'll
+be apt to stay where I am."</p>
+
+<p>Con, who was a person of many moods, happened to be in an unusually
+cynical one just then; however, he adhered to his resolution, and when
+his sister had gone he adopted a life of long tramps. Somebody had given
+him an old fiddle, and this he carried with him, though chiefly as a
+sort of badge, as his performances were but feeble, and he could turn
+his hand to many other things when he found it necessary to do so. His
+rovings had gone on for several years before they led him to Lisconnel.
+In those days he was a strange, small figure, who wore a coat too large
+for him, and a hat set so far back on his head that its brim made a sort
+of halo to frame his face, which had a curious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> way of looking fitfully
+young and old, with a shining of violet blue eyes and a puckering of
+fine-drawn wrinkles. A small boy and a little old ancient man would seem
+to change places half a dozen times in the course of a single
+conversation. Even his hair was a puzzle, regarded as an indication of
+age, because its black had become streaked with white in such a fashion
+that its apparent hue varied according to what came uppermost in
+accidents of ruffling and smoothing. A neighbour once said of him that
+he was the living moral of a little ould lepreehawn that they were after
+making a couple of sizes too big by mistake; and my own impression is
+that further opportunities for observing specimens of the race would be
+likely to bear out this statement.</p>
+
+<p>The summer evening on which he was first seen at Lisconnel had followed
+a very fine day. In the heart of its golden afternoon Mrs. O'Driscoll
+trusted her youngest son Terence out on the bog with his brothers and
+sisters and some other children, the eldest of whom, Johanna Harvey, the
+Ryans' orphan niece, was credited with wit enough to keep the party out
+of the holes. They wandered off rather more widely than usual, along the
+foot of the hill, lured on by a sprinkling of dainty white<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> mushrooms,
+which they found, generally with yells, studded here and there. At last
+they sat down on a bank to peel their delicate, pink-quilted buttons,
+all of them except Terence, who was not yet of an age to have acquired a
+taste for mushrooms. He had been carried most of the way, still he had
+toddled further than he was accustomed to do, and his unwonted exertions
+led him to curl himself up behind a sun-smitten rock and fall asleep
+with a quietness which presently brought upon him the fate of out of
+sight out of mind. After a while, however, Johanna did bethink herself
+of him, and was just on the point of wondering aloud where little
+Terence had gone to, when her cousin Thady turned her thoughts into a
+different channel by suddenly saying, "What was there in it before the
+beginnin' of everythin'?"</p>
+
+<p>Thady was a small, anxious-looking child, whose pale and peaky face his
+mother often likened regretfully to a hap'orth of soap after a week's
+washing. He had spent a surprisingly considerable part of his six years
+in metaphysical speculations, and was always disposed to make a personal
+grievance of the difficulties in which they constantly landed him. His
+tone was now rather<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> peremptory as he repeated, "What was there in it
+before the beginnin' of everythin'?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure, nothin' at all," said his elder brother Peter, to whom the answer
+seemed quite simple and satisfactory. But Johanna looked as if she had
+caught sight of some distant object which provoked hard staring.</p>
+
+<p>"Then what was there before the beginnin' of nothin'?" pursued Thady.</p>
+
+<p>"Dunno," said Peter, indifferently, "unless it was more nothin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure not at all; that wouldn't be the way of it," Johanna said,
+dreamily, yet with decision. "If there was nothin' but nothin' in it,
+there'd ha' been apt to not be e'er an anythin' ever. Where'd it ha'
+come from? Don't be tellin' the child lies, Peter. Why, for one thing,"
+she said, her tone sharpening polemically and taking a touch of triumph,
+"there was always God Almighty in it, and the Divil. Maybe that's what
+you call nothin'."</p>
+
+<p>Peter evaded this point, saying, "Well, anyway, those times, if there
+was just the two of them in it, and no harm to be doin', let alone any
+good people to know the differ, it's on'y a quare sort of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> Divil he'd
+get the chance of bein'. I wouldn't call him anythin' <i>much</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"He wouldn't be so very long, you may depind," Johanna pronounced.
+"Musha, sure the Divil couldn't stay contint anywhile at all till he'd
+take to some manner of ould mischief 'ud soon show you the sort of
+crathur he was&mdash;it's his nathur. I should suppose the first thing he'd
+go do 'ud be makin' all the sorts of hijjis roarin' great bastes and
+snakes and riptiles that he could think of, and the disolit black wet
+bogs wid the could win' over them fit to cut you in two when you're
+sleepin' out at night," said Johanna, whose ten years of life had
+brought her into some rough places before her adoption by her Aunt
+Lizzie Ryan, "and the workhouses&mdash;bad luck to the whole of them&mdash;where
+there's rats in the cocoa, and mad people frightenin' you, and the cross
+matrons, and the p&oacute;lis, and the say to dhrownd the fishin'-boats in, and
+dirty ould naygurs that put dacint people out of their little
+places&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"If it had been me," said Peter, "I'd ha' been very apt to just hit him
+a crack on the head when I noticed what he was at, and bid him lave thim
+sort of consthructions alone."</p>
+
+<p>"I dunno the rights of it entirely," Johanna admitted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>, "but it's a
+cruel pity he ever got the chance to be carryin' on the way he's done."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, sure it can't be helped now at all events," said Peter, who was for
+the time being not inclined to quarrel seriously with the scheme of
+things, as he basked on the warm grassy bank, where the wild bees were
+humming in the thyme, happily remote from the grim House and the hungry
+sea.</p>
+
+<p>"Belike it can't," said Johanna; "but 'twould be real grand if it could.
+Suppose I was out on the hill there some fine evenin', and I not
+thinkin' of anythin' in partic'lar, and all of a suddint I'd see a
+great, big, ugly, black-lookin' baste of a feller, the size of forty,
+skytin' away wid himself along the light of the sky over yonder, where
+the sun was about goin' down, and his shadder the len'th of an awful
+tall tree slippin' streelin' after him, till it was off over the edge of
+the world like, and that same 'ud be just the Divil, that they were
+after bundlin' out of it body and bones, the way he wouldn't get
+meddlin' and makin' and annoyin' people any more. So wid that I'd take a
+race home and be tellin' you all the iligant thing was after happenin'.
+And in the middle of it who'd come landin' in but me father and mother,
+and little Dan. And then, if it isn't the grand cup of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> tay I'd be
+makin' her, ay begorra would I, and a sugarstick to stir it wid."</p>
+
+<p>Johanna's vision of the millennium was broken in upon querulously by
+Thady. "Sure I know all about God Almighty and the Divil," he said
+comprehensively, "I was on'y axin' what was in it before the beginnin'
+of everythin', and you're not tellin' me that."</p>
+
+<p>"There's a dale of things little spalpeens like you wouldn't be tould
+the rights of at all," said Peter, loftily, being rather annoyed at the
+interruption. He would have liked to hear some further details about the
+felicity to be inaugurated by that exquisite cup of tea. "Go on
+romancin', Han."</p>
+
+<p>But Johanna, who felt that this assumption of superior knowledge was an
+uncandid subterfuge, and yet had not magnanimity enough to disclaim it
+on her own part, remained uneasily silent for a moment, and then only
+said: "Sure it's time we was gettin' home." This they accordingly
+proceeded to do, and had gone most of the distance before it occurred to
+anybody that little Terence O'Driscoll was not with them. Then, after a
+superficial and unproductive search among the scattered stones and
+bushes, they thought it expedient<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> to run back in a fright, and report
+that the child had gone and got lost, unless by any odd chance he'd come
+home along wid himself.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it was that when Terence wakened from his nap, he found himself
+deserted, and thrown completely upon his own resources. As he had not
+been quite three years in amassing these, they were on the whole but
+scanty. In fact, he was helplessly unable to realise a world with
+nothing in it except endlessly swelling up slopes of furzy grass, no
+Molly nor Micky for him to trot after, and to carry him wherever they
+were going, whenever he intimated the desirability of that step by
+abruptly plumping down on the way. So he set off in a great hurry to
+escape from such a wilderness. He still walked with a wobbling stagger,
+and his long frock of whity-brown homespun kept on tripping him up,
+which retarded his progress. But he was not at all long in mentally
+reaching the precincts of a wild panic which rose up and seized him in a
+grip never to be quite forgotten, though only a few desperate minutes
+ensued before he stumped blindly against Con's legs. It was so
+unutterable a relief to have come on somebody who could hear him roar,
+that Terence ceased roaring immediately, and let Con pick him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> up
+without demur. The appearance of Molly or Micky would, no doubt, have
+been more satisfactory, but this stranger man might serve well enough at
+a pinch to carry him home, which it was inconceivable that anybody of
+such a size could be unable or unwilling to do. As for Con, the
+inference he drew from Terence's dimensions was that his family and
+friends were probably not far to seek; and he recognised the shrewdness
+of the conjecture when he presently espied a shawled figure coming
+swiftly towards him over the edge of a slope, with the amber of the
+sunset glowing behind her, and her long shadow sliding on far below her,
+as if it were in an even greater hurry than herself.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. O'Driscoll's head was among the golden sunbeams, but her heart had
+gone down to the very bottom of the blackest and deepest hole in the
+bog. For towards that dreadful goal she had seen a small form toddling
+ever since the other children came home alarmingly late with the news
+that Terence had got lost on them, and they couldn't find a bit of him,
+high ways or low ways. She was so overjoyed at her rescue that her
+delighted gratitude cast a sort of glamour around Con, which never
+wholly faded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> away. Ever after the appearance of his queer figure called
+up in her mind a dim reminiscence of the moment when she had seen it for
+the first time come into view, laden with what she well knew was Terence
+sitting bolt upright in a manner that betokened him to have experienced
+neither drowning nor any other disaster.</p>
+
+<p>As Con put the child into her arms, where it seemed to fit into a niche
+specially designed for it, he said: "Sure now, ma'am, when I seen him
+stumpin' along his lone, and he about the heighth of a sizable boholawn
+(ragweed), sez I to meself there was apt to be somebody lookin' after
+him. For bedad it seems to me mostwhiles the littler a thing is the more
+people there'll be consaitin' they can't get on widout it; and that's
+lucky, belike, or else it might aisy get lost entirely, like a
+threepenny bit rowled away into a crack. But if you come to considher,"
+Con said, hurrying on lest his allusion to the coin should be construed
+as a hint that he thought of payment for his services, "most people's
+lookin' out for somebody, or else somebody's lookin' out for them. It's
+on'y a few odd ones like meself that makes no differ here or there. I
+won'er now is the raison that it's after losin' ourselves we are in a
+manner&mdash;I've<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> I've me notions about that. For first I think I dunno if
+anythin's rightly lost that nobody's lookin' to find, and then I think I
+dunno but you might as well say you couldn't find anythin' you weren't
+after losin' and lookin' for, and that's not the truth be no manner of
+manes."</p>
+
+<p>"And you after findin' the child," said Mrs. O'Driscoll.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure not at all, ma'am," said Con, modestly, deprecating not the
+statement but the implied praise. "Small thanks to me for that, when the
+woful bawls of it you might have heard a mile o' ground. You could as
+aisy ha' missed a little clap of thunder, if a one was be chance comin'
+tatterin' along between the furzes, wid the head of it bobbin' up now
+and agin, and makin' all the noise it could conthrive. Troth it's the
+quare bawls <i>I</i> might be lettin' these times afore the rest of them 'ud
+hear me, for if it's lost I am, I'm strayin' a terrible long while;
+they're apt to disremimber they ever owned me. I do be thinkin', ma'am,
+that if you forgit what you've lost, 'tis maybe all the one thing as if
+you'd found it; and after that agin I do be thinkin' maybe 'twould be
+liker losin' it twyste over. It's quare the diff'rint notions there is
+about most things. And a good job too,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> or else what would you be
+considherin' in your mind, when you was thrampin' around? 'Deed now if
+you couldn't be supposin' they were this way and that way, and argufyin'
+over them wid yourself in your own mind, 'twould be like as if you took
+and swallied down a lump of 'baccy instead of chewin' it, and what sort
+of benefit or plisure 'ud you git out of that?"</p>
+
+<p>This was Con's first bit of philosophising at Lisconnel, and it was not
+his last by many, as the place became one of his favourite resorts. His
+liking for it was perhaps partly due to the fact that its inhabitants
+received him on more equal terms than were generally accorded to him
+elsewhere; and this again may be largely attributed to the influence of
+Mrs. O'Driscoll. For her grateful feelings towards the restorer of
+Terence made her loth to recognise any deficiencies in him, and her
+neighbours, soon perceiving that she seemed vexed if Con was spoken of
+as cracked or crazy or "wantin' a corner," were ready enough to modify
+their language, and even their judgment, in accordance with her view.
+Still it was convenient to distinguish him from another resident Con,
+about whom there were no very striking features. Therefore her little
+Rose having been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> heard to say that she was "after seein' Con, not Con
+Ryan, but the quare one," they caught up and applied the epithet, which
+in Lisconnel is regarded as a safely colourless term, not likely to hurt
+the most sensitive feelings.</p>
+
+<p>Con, on his part, formed the highest opinion of Mrs. O'Driscoll, and
+often took counsel with her about perplexing points which had presented
+themselves to him in the course of his meditations. In one practical
+matter, however, he showed an obstinacy that did not further her in her
+wish to uphold him on a footing with quite sensible people. This was his
+fancy for adorning the band of his broad-brimmed caubeen with a garnish
+of feathers and flowers. Mrs. O'Driscoll disapproved of the freak,
+rightly judging that it often created irrevocable first impressions, and
+fixed his standing at a glance. In this age and clime the Seven Sages
+could hardly maintain among them a reverend aspect, under the frivolity
+of a single flaunting blossom, much less the gaudy bunches and fantastic
+plumes upon which Con recklessly ventured. So at last, having hinted and
+remonstrated ineffectually, she contrived somehow to find time and stuff
+among her laborious days and scanty stores, and fashioned for him a
+round cloth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> cap of a severely plain design, which she thought would
+give no scope for any unseemly appendages. Upon being presented with
+this headgear, Con dutifully assumed it, and went about wearing it for a
+day or two in a depressed frame of mind. Then he appeared in the morning
+at the O'Driscolls', cheered, and crested with a remarkably long
+gannet's feather stuck upright in the crown of his cap, through which he
+had bored a hole to admit of the insertion. He was resolved to brazen
+out the matter, so he presently took off his cap, and twirling it round
+with an unconcerned air as he leaned against the door, said to Herself:
+"Well, ma'am, what do you think of that?"</p>
+
+<p>"To tell you just the truth, Con," said Herself, whose countenance had
+fallen as she saw the failure of her little plot, "I was thinkin' it
+looked a dale better before you cocked that ould gazabo on top of it.
+'Deed now it gives you the apparance of a head of cabbage that's
+sproutin' up and goin' to seed. Sure you niver see the other lads
+trapesin' about wid the like on them."</p>
+
+<p>Con, who seemed rather cast down by this criticism, was about to reply,
+when young Ned Keogh took the cap out of his hand and affected to
+examine it closely, saying: "Glory be to goodness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>, what sort of thing
+is it at all at all? Bedad it's the won'erful conthrivance&mdash;ah, tub-be
+sure; <i>I</i> see what it is. He's about growin' a pair of wings for his wit
+to fly away wid. But musha good gracious, he needn't ha' throubled
+himself to be gettin' them that sizable. Somethin' the bigness of a
+hedge-sparrer's, or maybe a weeny white butterfly's, 'ud ha' plinty
+stren'th enough for the job, if that was all they had to do." Ned meant
+no harm, but his witticisms did not fall in with Con's humour, so he
+snatched back the cap and went off affronted, nor did he call at the
+O'Driscolls' again for some weeks.</p>
+
+<p>The next time he came, however, Herself had espied him a bit down the
+road, and was standing at the door to receive him with his discarded
+caubeen in her hand. "You'd be better wearin' it, Con, after all," she
+said, "for the eyes are scorched out of your head under the sun widout
+e'er a scrap of brim." And as Con took it, he observed with glee that
+she had fastened into the band a dove-coloured kittiwake's wing-feather,
+a somewhat cherished possession of her own, which she used to keep over
+her best picture on the wall. Thus did she seek to make amends for the
+speech about the sprouting cabbage-head,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> which had been weighing
+heavily upon her conscience.</p>
+
+<p>The kittiwake's feather had to weather rain and sunshine for many a year
+in Con the Quare One's old caubeen; but it is now on a room-wall again,
+the Kilfoyles' this time. Con brought it to Mrs. Kilfoyle one autumn
+evening in the year Mrs. O'Driscoll died. It was much longer than usual
+since he had wandered into Lisconnel, illness and one thing and another
+having detained him in the North for the last twelvemonth and more&mdash;all
+her blackest days of childless widowhood&mdash;so that this was his first
+visit since the departure of his earliest friend.</p>
+
+<p>"Could you be keepin' it somewheres safe for me, ma'am?" he said,
+showing the soft grey feather to Mrs. Kilfoyle, who was sitting by the
+fire with her sons and her future daughter-in-law, and Ody Rafferty's
+aunt, and the Widow M'Gurk. "I'll be wearin' it no more. 'Twas she
+herself stuck it in for me, but sure I knew well enough all the while
+she'd liefer I wouldn't be goin' about wid such things on me head, and
+sorra a bit of me will agin."</p>
+
+<p>"Whethen now but yourself's the quare man, Con," said Ody Rafferty's
+aunt, "to be takin' up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> wid that notion these times, when ne'er a differ
+it'ill make to her. There might ha' been some sinse in it, if you'd done
+it to plase her, but now you're more than a trifle too late wid that. A
+day after the fair you are. Sure she'll never set eyes on you or your
+old caubeen agin," she said, as if announcing some unthought-of
+discovery of her own, "no matter what ould thrash you might take and
+stick in it. You might be wearin' a young haystack on your head for
+anythin' she could tell."</p>
+
+<p>"That may be or mayn't be," said Con. "But at all evints the next body
+that goes there out of this countryside 'ill be very apt to bring her
+word. Discoorsin' together they'll be of all the news, and as like as
+not he&mdash;or it might be she&mdash;'ill say to her&mdash;'I seen Con the Quare One
+goin' the road a while back, and he wid ne'er a thraneen of anythin' in
+his hat, good or bad; the same way the other boys are; lookin' rael
+dacint and sinsible.' Belike she might be axin' after me herself, and
+that 'ud put it in the other body's head. Yourself it may be, Moggy.
+Faix now, I wouldn't won'er a bit if it was, for there must be a
+terrible great age on you these times. Sure you looked to be an ould,
+ould woman the first day I ever beheld<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> you, and that's better than a
+dozen year ago."</p>
+
+<p>"Troth then there's plinty of oulder ould people than me, let me tell
+you," protested Moggy, who was about ninety, "that you need be settlin'
+I'm goin' anywheres next. Musha cock you up. And your own hair turned as
+white as sheep's wool on a blackthorn bush."</p>
+
+<p>She seemed so much put out by Con's statement and inference that young
+Thady Kilfoyle, always a good-natured lad, sought to soothe her.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure there's no settlin' any such a thing, and for the matter of goin',
+the young people often enough get their turn as fast as anybody else.
+It's meself," he said, "might be sooner than you bringin' news of yous
+all, and Con's ould caubeen, and everythin' else to Heaven the way he
+sez."</p>
+
+<p>"I dunno if you've any call to be talkin' that fashion," said the Widdy
+M'Gurk, disapprovingly, "as if you could be walkin' permisc-yis into
+Heaven widout wid your lave or by your lave. Maybe it isn't there any of
+us'ill be bringin' our news."</p>
+
+<p>"Might you know of e'er a better place then, ma'am?" said Con.</p>
+
+<p>"Heard you ever the like of that?" said Ody<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> Rafferty's aunt, not
+unwillingly scandalised, "I should suppose nobody, unless it was a born
+haythen, 'ud know of any place better than Heaven."</p>
+
+<p>"That's where she is then," said Con, stroking his feather. "For the
+best place ever was is none too good for her, God knows well."</p>
+
+<p>"And thrue for you, man," said the Widdy M'Gurk. "But she's one thing,
+and we're another. It's not settin' ourselves up we should be to have
+the same chances."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, well, sure maybe we're none of us too outrageous altogether," said
+Mrs. Kilfoyle, looking hopefully round at her company. "And if they can
+put up wid us at all at all, they will. We'll get there yet, plase God.
+And anyway I'll be takin' good care of your feather, Con. Ay will I so;
+same as if it was dropped out of an angel's wing."</p>
+
+<p>"So good-night to you kindly, ma'am," said he. "I'll be steppin' back to
+Laraghmena. I on'y looked in on you to bring you that, and give you news
+of Theresa. And I question will I ever set fut agin in Lisconnel."</p>
+
+<p>He did not, however, leave it quite immediately. A little later, when
+Brian Kilfoyle was escorting Norah Finnegan home, they saw him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> sitting
+on the bank near the O'Driscolls' roofless cabin. Its mud walls were
+fast crumbling into ruin. Already the little window-square had lost its
+straight outline, and would soon be as shapeless as any hole burrowed in
+a bank. Con sat with his back turned to it until the dusk had muffled up
+everything in dimness, and then he stole an armful of turf-sods from the
+nearest stack, and groped his way in through the deserted door. The
+shadows within were folded so heavily that he could scarcely more than
+guess where the hearth had been. One of Con's peculiarities was a
+strange horror of a fireless hearth. At the sight of its hoarily
+sprinkled blackness he always felt as if he were standing on the verge
+of some frightful revelation; a vague reminiscence, no doubt, from the
+scene of his life's tragedy, all distinct memory of which had been
+blurred away by his illness. Now he piled and crumbled his sods with
+practised skill, and set them alight in well-chosen places. But he
+stayed only for a minute or so, till the little fluttering flames had
+fairly taken a hold, and were sending golden threads running along the
+netted fibres. Then he groped his way out again, and returned to his
+seat on the bank. Presently, as he watched, he saw a red<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> light
+beginning to flicker through window and door, and growing steadier and
+stronger. When it was at its brightest, he got up and turned away.
+"That's the very way it would be shinin'," he said, "and I comin' along
+the road to see Herself and Himself and the childer&mdash;God be good to them
+all, wherever they may be. And that's the notion of it I'll keep in me
+mind."</p>
+
+<p>And Con the Quare One came no more to Lisconnel.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h3>MAD BELL</h3>
+
+
+<p>Not so very long before the sound of Con the Quare One's fiddle ceased
+to enliven Lisconnel any more, Mad Bell's singing had begun to be heard
+there occasionally, as it has been at intervals ever since she arrived
+with her two housemates, Big Anne and the Dummy, and took up her abode
+in the last of the cabins that you pass on the left hand, going towards
+Sallinbeg. Perhaps Lisconnel should not reckon her among its residents,
+so much of her time is spent on the tramp as an absentee. Still, she
+sometimes has tarried with us for a long while, and she is understood to
+have some property in the house-furniture, so it seems natural to
+consider the place her home.</p>
+
+<p>From the first it appeared obvious to all that the dementedness which
+characterised the little wizened yellow-faced woman was of a much more
+pronounced type than Con the Quare One's.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> Any attempt to spare people's
+feelings by ignoring the fact would have been very futile, and it was
+therefore lucky that the three new-comers, Mad Bell herself included,
+were quite content to accept the situation. The neighbours were at first
+inclined to commiserate Big Anne, who was pronounced to be "a dacint,
+sinsible, poor woman," for the oddities of her household, the
+incalculable flightiness of Mad Bell, and the impenetrable silence of
+the Dummy. But to their condoling remarks she was wont to reply in
+effect&mdash;"Ah sure, ma'am, that's the way I'm used to them, the crathurs.
+Why, if Mad Bell said anythin' over-sinsible, or poor Winnie said
+anythin' at all, it's wond'rin' I'd be what was goin' to happin us
+next." And Big Anne evidently looked upon this as an uncomfortable frame
+of mind. At first, too, they speculated much about the circumstances
+which had brought the curious trio together beneath one thatch, and
+found it especially hard to conjecture how the daft little vagrant had
+come into possession of sundry tables and chairs. All its members,
+however, being incommunicative persons, no satisfactory elucidation of
+these points was arrived at in Lisconnel.</p>
+
+<p>The coalescence of Big Anne's and the Dummy's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> fortunes is a simple
+history enough. Anne Fannin, while yet a youngish woman, was left alone
+in the world to do for herself in her little wayside cabin. Without a
+dowry to recommend her rough-hewn features and large-boned ungainliness,
+she never had any suitors, and she found it as much as she could
+contrive to make out her single living by means of her "bit of poultry"
+and her pig. Nevertheless, when her nearest neighbours&mdash;the
+Golighers&mdash;died, leaving their daughter Winnie, "who had niver got her
+speech, the crathur," to live on charity or the rates, what else was a
+body to do except take her in? Anne would have put this question to you
+with a sincere want of resource. So Winnie Goligher transferred to Anne
+Fannin's house, herself and all her worldly goods, which consisted of
+the clothes she had on, and a prayer-book, and a lame duck, and
+thenceforward the two "got along the best way they could."</p>
+
+<p>Mad Bell's history has more complications in it. They began one pleasant
+April day when she was only a slip of a lass, who had taken a little
+place at the Hunts' farm near her home, for the purpose of saving up a
+few pounds against her marriage with Richard McBirney. She had been
+given an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> unexpected holiday, and was running home across the fresh,
+spring-green grass-fields, thinking to take her people by surprise, when
+she came to a hedge-gap whence you look down into a steep-banked lane.
+And at the foot of the bank Richard McBirney was sitting with his arm
+round her sister Lizzie's waist.</p>
+
+<p>To a dispassionate observer this transference of his attentions might
+have seemed a matter of small moment. Most of their acquaintances, for
+example, were just as well satisfied that he should court Eliza as
+Isabella. But the sight turned all the current of her life awry. For it
+set her off rushing away from it across the same sunny green fields, and
+she never came home again. Nor ever again would she settle down quietly
+anywhere. She had a strong, clear voice and a taste for music, and this
+led her to take to singing ballads about the country at markets and
+fairs. The harder she was thinking about fickle Richard McBirney, the
+louder and shriller she sang. A very few years of such wandering
+shrivelled up her plump "pig-beauty," so that in her little sallow,
+weather-beaten face her own mother would scarcely have recognised pretty
+Isabella Reid. Then, after a long spell of illness in a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> Union
+infirmary, she began to grow noticeably odder and stranger in her looks
+and ways; until at length the children shouted "Mad Bell" as she passed,
+and that became her recognised style and title.</p>
+
+<p>Such, briefly, had been her experience of life, when one September
+evening she came by chance to Big Anne and the Dummy's door. She had got
+a very bad cold, and felt hardly able to drag herself along between the
+berried hedges, and was so hoarse that she could with difficulty ask for
+the night's lodging, which they granted without demur. Their times had
+been unusually bad of late. In fact, their room was looking several
+sizes larger than they were accustomed to see it, because they had sold
+any articles of furniture for which "e'er a price at all" could be
+obtained. But to whatever accommodation this bareness permitted they
+made Mad Bell kindly welcome, the crathur being sick and crazy, and she
+stayed with them for three or four days. By that time, finding herself
+recovered, she resumed her journey, setting off early in the morning
+with the abruptness and absence of circumlocution which, as a rule,
+distinguished her proceedings. A friendly nod and grimace she made serve
+for announcement<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> of departure and leavetaking all in one. As her
+hostesses watched her out of sight down the road, Big Anne said&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now, I never seen that quare little body in this counthry before,
+and we're very apt to not set eyes on her agin. God be good to us all,
+but the likes of her is to be pitied. She's worse off than the two of
+us. But bedad, Winnie, if thim hins there don't prisintly take to layin'
+a thrifle, it's in a tight houle we'll be ourselves. I dunno what's
+bewitchin' them. And the sorra an ould stick have we left in it that man
+or mortal 'ud give us the price of a pullet's egg for&mdash;and small blame
+to him, unless he was as deminted as herself that's quittin'."</p>
+
+<p>Mad Bell's tramp that day was all along a sequence of lonesome winding
+lanes, where few dwellings were dotted among the green and gold of the
+fields. The bustle of the harvest, its reaping and binding, was over in
+them, and they lay without stir or sound. In some of them the stooks
+were still encamped, but some were smooth stubble, empty, except where a
+flock of turkeys filled it with dark, bunchy shapes. She walked steadily
+on the whole day without any adventure, but when the dew was beginning
+to fall through the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> twilight she came to a short, shady reach of lane,
+at the end of which stood, in a green nook, a small, prim white cottage
+with two peaked windows and a door to match. That, at least, is how it
+would under ordinary circumstances have presented itself to a passer-by.
+Just then, however, nobody would have noticed anything about it except
+the fact that out of the open door thick coils of woolly black smoke
+were rolling and rolling, stabbed through every now and again by thrusts
+of flame, which even in the lingering daylight gleamed strongly fierce
+and red. The house was evidently on fire. As Mad Bell drew nearer, she
+became aware of a wheaten-coloured terrier standing in front of it; and
+when he saw her he began to bark vehemently. She was used to being
+barked at, though not in this way, for howls were interspersed, and it
+was clearly meant not for a menace but an appeal. No other live creature
+was visible about the place, until she had come quite close to the
+surging door, when a small gossoon jumped up out of the ditch on the
+opposite side of the road and rushed across to her.</p>
+
+<p>"What 'ill I do at all, then?" he said, whimperingly, catching hold of
+her shawl. "If them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> childer's burnt up widin there, Mr. Wogan 'ill be
+in a fine way. It's for killin' the whole of us he'll be. And it wasn't
+me set it afire. Sorra the match was I meddlin' wid, I could swear it. I
+wasn't out of it any time, gettin' a few ripe berries to pacify them
+childer, agin they would be wakin' and roarin', and when I come back,
+there it is all a smother of smoke. Divil a thing else was I doin' on'y
+mindin' them childer, and not meddlin' wid the matches, and goin' after
+a couple of blackberries. And Mr. Wogan himself's away to
+Ballymacartrican wid his boxes in the ass-cart. And all of them goin' to
+quit out of it to-morra, if it wasn't for them childer bein' burnt up
+inside&mdash;or maybe it's smothered they are. It's as unhandy as anythin'.
+It went afire of itself. And he'll be ragin'."</p>
+
+<p>He bawled all this louder and louder in competition with the clamour of
+the dog, who kept on jumping up at each alternately, and evidently
+considered his remarks better entitled to a hearing. But Mad Bell merely
+replied, "Whisht gabbin', and hould that," thrusting, as she spoke, her
+little handkerchief bundle into his arms. And thereupon, making a sudden
+dive, she vanished among the flame-sheathing smoke.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Scarcely had she disappeared when an empty donkey-cart came round the
+turn of the lane, led by a rather dejected-looking middle-aged man,
+whose countenance, nevertheless, had for some time back been gradually
+clearing up at every wind of the way that brought him nearer to this
+particular point of view. But as he caught sight of the black smoke
+drifting and rolling, his aspect of reasonable melancholy changed to one
+of a despair that could not have been wilder if the reek of hell-mouth
+had blown into his face. He dropped the bridle, and hurled himself down
+the road like the distracted body that he well might be. For a
+twelvemonth ago he had lost his wife and both his elder children in one
+week, and his pair of two-year-old twins were now all that stood between
+himself and world-wide desolation. At the front door his frantic rush
+was met and baffled by a choking puff, which sent him fleeing round in
+hopes that entrance might be more possible through the back; and on the
+way he came face to face with the wrathful visages of his son and
+daughter, whom Mad Bell was carrying in the disregardful manner that
+betides a cumbrous load snatched up in a mortal hurry. She had escaped
+by the back door.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If the most radiant of guardian angels, in snowy plumes and golden
+tresses, had restored his children to him with a befitting speech, poor
+Matthew Wogan could not well have been more joyfully relieved from his
+terror than he was when this odd little yellow-faced woman, with a red
+handkerchief wisped round her head, and a singed grimness generally
+pervading her, handed over to him Minnie and Tom, casually remarking,
+"Bedad, it's the big heavy lumps they are." Minnie and Tom both were
+crying and coughing loudly, because the smoke had got into their eyes
+and throats, which they resented; and when their father returned with
+them to the front of the house, this noise was swelled by the gleeful
+yap-yapping of the terrier and the voices of a few other people who had
+appeared upon the scene&mdash;a matronly looking woman and two or three
+sun-burnt harvestmen. From Mrs. Massey's observations it could be
+gathered that she had been minding the Wogan twins by deputy, and
+further that she entertained the gloomiest views about the mental and
+moral qualities of her son little Larry, who replied to her
+animadversions with over-reaching protestations about matches and
+theories of spontaneous combustion. While they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> wrangled in the
+background, the young men inspected the conflagration, which proved to
+be less extensive than it looked, though undoubtedly serious enough to
+have soon put the sleeping children past waking, if rescue had not come.
+A heap of blankets and other bedding, that smouldered and blazed near
+the front door, was the source of the most stiffling smoke; and when it
+had been subdued by many buckets of water, everybody began to drag what
+bits of the furniture they could out of harm's way. There was not much,
+because, as Wogan explained, he had sent "the marrow of it" to his
+sister at Ballymacartrican; and the legs of the largest table were
+charred so badly that it collapsed with a crash "the instiant minyit it
+set its four feet on the ground," as Mrs. Massey said. However, there
+were two smaller ones not much the worse, and three or four chairs, and
+a couple of stools, and some pots and pans, and a small clothes-horse,
+and a wagging clock, whose round white face glimmered through the dusk
+like a fallen moon as it lay flat on the grass. All these things made a
+little crowd on the plot of sward by the door.</p>
+
+<p>"And what will you be doin' wid them now?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> said Mrs. Massey. "There's
+my place below you'd be welcome to stand them in as long as you plase.
+'Deed would you, sir. The dear knows I'm not throubled wid too many
+sticks of furnitur'. That's a very handy-sized washin'-tub Larry's after
+carryin' out for you. I was noticin' to-day ours has a lake in it this
+long while back that dhrips over everythin'. I must get himself to thry
+mend it."</p>
+
+<p>"That's a <i>lovely</i> table," suddenly said Mad Bell, who had hitherto made
+no remarks. "A rael grand one it is," she repeated, in a wistful sort of
+way, smoothing the leaf fondly with her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"And very welcome you'd be to have it in a prisint, ma'am, if you've
+e'er a fancy for it; ay, or for the matter of that to the whole lot of
+them altogether," said Matthew Wogan, who, with his arms full of the
+smoky twins, felt a weight of gratitude which he would gladly have
+expressed in deeds. "Little vally there is on them&mdash;it's a small thing
+after what you're after doin' for us. I wouldn't like to be payin' away
+me bit of money from the childer, or else&mdash;But if I auctioned them
+things off the way I was intindin' it's on'y a thrifle of a few
+shillin's they'd be bringin' me. Welcome you are to them, ma'am."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Sure what use at all 'ud such a thing be to the likes of her?" put in
+Mrs. Massey. "It's on'y annoyed you'd be, woman, wid tables and chairs.
+And she thrampin' about, you may depind, wid ne'er a place to be
+bringin' them to, if she had them twyste over, let alone any way of
+movin' them. It's very convanient we are, just round the turn of the
+road."</p>
+
+<p>"She might take the little cart and the ould ass along," said Matthew
+Wogan, looking at his equipage, which was straying towards them
+intermittently as the beast grazed the green border of the lane.
+"They're no use to me now. Then there'd be nothin' delayin' her that she
+couldn't be cleanin' out of it wid them right away&mdash;You needn't throuble
+yourself to be liftin' the little stool, Mrs. Massey. What wid fire and
+water, that'll be no place to sleep in," he said, pointing to the still
+smoking door. "The Mahonys 'ud take us in for to-night, and to-morra
+early we're off to me sister's and next day to Queenstown. 'Twill be a
+grand thing for the childer to be settled near their uncle Tom, that's
+doin' right well in New Jersey, in case anythin' happint me. So I'd as
+lief be shut of all that collection, supposin' they'd be any benefit to
+this crathur."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Saints bless us, but you're givin' away all before you, Mr. Wogan,"
+said Mrs. Massey, with a discomfited laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you e'er a house you could be puttin' them in?" one of the
+harvestmen asked of Mad Bell.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, bedad," she said. And with that she picked up a chair, and dumped
+it down into the cart, which had come to a halt at the door.</p>
+
+<p>This promptitude on her part seemed to settle the question. Without more
+ado the rest of the salvage was loaded in, all except the handy-sized
+washing-tub, which by means of an adroitly taken up position Mrs. Massey
+contrived to have overlooked and left behind, when Mad Bell drove away
+with her newly acquired property.</p>
+
+<p>On through the gloaming she drove, till the white dust flakes gathered
+up by the wheels grew damp and fragrant with dew, and till the moonlight
+was glimmering among the golden sheaves silverly, and till live embers
+were fanned out of the ashes low in the east. The small hours had a
+frosty chill, and old Ned's short steps were leisurely, and his halts
+for refreshment frequent; still Mad Bell continued to sit with serene
+patience. She was retracing her route of the day<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> before, but at so much
+slower a rate of progress that the sun had been up for more than an hour
+when she stopped in front of Big Anne and the Dummy's little house. They
+were disturbed at their breakfast by the sound of the arrival, and when
+they came to the door, saw their visitor in the act of depositing a
+second chair upon the ground beside the cart.</p>
+
+<p>"Whethen now and is it yourself back agin?" said Big Anne. "And what at
+all have you got there?"</p>
+
+<p>"Inside they're goin'," said Mad Bell, pointing to the cart-load with an
+elated air. "It's a dale handier to have some chairs and tables."</p>
+
+<p>This was a fact which Big Anne might well have admitted, considering
+that she had just been squatting on her heels to eat her plate of
+stirabout. However, she only continued her perplexed catechism: "Where
+at all was you after bringin' them things from, and who might be ownin'
+them?"</p>
+
+<p>"Out of a house burnin' down," said Mad Bell.</p>
+
+<p>"Och between us and harm. What house is it then? And how did it get
+burnin'?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure it's aisy enough settin' a house on fire,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> said Mad Bell with a
+grin, which to Big Anne who at this time was not familiar with her
+manners, looked rather sinisterly significant. "Flarin' up rael strong,"
+she said, pushing towards her, as if in confirmation of the statement,
+the little wooden clothes-horse, whose rails were blackened and charred.</p>
+
+<p>"Aisy it may be," Big Anne said, looking aghast at it, "but dreadful
+divilment it is to do such a thing, wid the misfort'nit people very apt
+to lose their lives, let alone everythin' else."</p>
+
+<p>"There was nobody in it on'y the couple of fat little childer," said Mad
+Bell.</p>
+
+<p>"The saints be among us all, woman," said Big Anne, "what sort of talk
+have you? It's not streelin' about the counthry you are, wid them ould
+sticks of furnitur', and lavin' the little childer in the house blazin'
+up? The Lord pity the crathurs, what 'ud become of them if they was left
+thataway? Burnt to cinders be now very belike."</p>
+
+<p>"Stufficated," said Mad Bell, with a complacent nod.</p>
+
+<p>Big Anne and the Dummy stared at one another in great horror. The Dummy
+could express her feelings only by crossing herself and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> gasping; but
+Big Anne spoke volubly: "May God forgive me for openin' me lips to the
+likes of you. Och but you're the unnatural wicked woman to go do such a
+thing, if you was twyste as cracked and crazy itself. Git along out of
+this, yourself and your ould cart, afore the p&oacute;lis comes after you. Och
+the misfort'nit little crathurs. And don't be offerin' to darken our
+doors agin wid the ojis sight of you."</p>
+
+<p>"Gimme a hand wid liftin' in them two tables," said Mad Bell. Whereupon
+Big Anne whisked away from her, and banged the door in her face.</p>
+
+<p>Mad Bell, however, did not appear to be discouraged by this reception.
+She finished unloading the cart of all except the tables, which she
+found unwieldy single-handed. Then she unharnessed old Neddy, and went
+and seated herself on the low wall beside the house. She was seemingly
+quite content with the situation. But to the two women indoors it was a
+dreadful experience. Their minds were firmly persuaded that the daft
+little woman had designedly set fire to some dwelling, and made off with
+what household gear she could lay hands on, leaving the hapless children
+to perish amid the flames. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> shocked and enraged them that their
+premises should be infested by the presence of such a criminal, and that
+her ill-gotten goods and chattels should be brought to their very
+threshold, not to speak of her outrageous proposal to harbour them under
+their roof. Big Anne declared that wid the legs of them chairs and
+tables glimpsing through the door, as if they were on'y turned out to be
+airin' a bit, she and the Dummy seemed as good as a pair of murderers.</p>
+
+<p>Every now and then they went to the door and peered out, and the
+incendiary always greeted them with cheerful nods. On these occasions
+Big Anne sometimes said: "Oh, very well, me good woman. Just you sit
+brazenin' there till the patrol comes round this way, and then if I
+don't give you in charge as sure as the sun's shinin' crooked over our
+heads.&mdash;Begone out of that, and take them things out of litterin' about
+our place." Or she would remark loudly to her companion: "Just stop a
+minyit, Winnie, till I sling me ould shawl over me head, and run down to
+the barracks. It's not very long they'll be puttin' her out of it, and
+bundlin' her into jail, instead of to be sittin' there, wid ne'er a
+spark of shame in her, annoyin' dacint people." But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> neither mode of
+address produced any effect. The morning sunbeams still slanted down on
+the small pile of furniture, and old Neddy went on munching the blades
+off which they were drying the dew, and Mad Bell continued to sit upon
+the wall, as if placidly waiting for events.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the posture of affairs until towards noon, when an outside-car
+came trotting quickly down the lane. On one side of it sat a
+black-whiskered man in his best clothes, with each hand tightly grasping
+a small, fat, wrigglesome child. And the three were Matthew, Tom, and
+Minnie Wogan. On catching sight of Mad Bell, he made the driver pull up.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, ma'am," he called to her, "so you're after gettin' home. Bedad
+it's the fine long step you've took th'ould donkey; one while he'd be
+doin' it. And you're about gettin' in the few things? Very welcome she
+is to the whole of them," he continued to Big Anne, who had now emerged.
+"And begorrah nobody else had a better right to any trifle might be
+saved out of it. She'll ha' tould you, ma'am, the way the place was set
+on fire on me last night&mdash;some little divil of a spalpeen playin' wid
+matches it seems. But anyhow, there it was in blazes, and me galloppin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>
+home like a deminted cow, consaitin' these two imps of the mischief here
+would be smotherin' inside it. And, troth, if herself over there hadn't
+them fetched out safe into the yard, when it was as much as your life
+was worth to put your head in at the door, for the stiflin' of the
+smoke. I dunno how she conthrived it. Maybe the crathur isn't altogether
+over sinsible," he said in a confidential tone; "but if she'd had all
+the wit ever was thought of, she couldn't ha' done better be the
+childer. So it's kindly welcome she is to the bits of furniture, and the
+ould baste. And dhrivin' on we must be. Good mornin' to yous all."</p>
+
+<p>Mad Bell listened to this praise with the same equanimity as to Big
+Anne's threats and reproaches. But when the car had trotted on, she came
+up to her, saying just as before, "Gimme a hand wid liftin' in thim
+tables;" and Matthew Wogan, jogging down the long lane, may have caught
+the last glimpse of one of them as it vanished in at the doorway.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it was that Mad Bell came to be domiciled with Big Anne and the
+Dummy in the pauses between her wanderings. The arrangement seemed
+equitable in view of her substantial contribution to the plenishing of
+the house. The donkey-cart,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> likewise, was found very serviceable,
+enabling them to turn a penny occasionally by fetching and carrying. And
+the coalition worked well upon the whole. But after a few years of such
+prosperity that they were seldom without a bit of food in the house, and
+sometimes had bacon on Sunday, things took a turn for the worse. Old Ned
+died under the burden of his many years, and a sort of murrain among the
+fowl cut off several promising pullets in the heyday of their youth.
+Then arose difficulties about "rint," while their landlord, who was new
+to the property, had a natural zeal for sweeping it clear of encumbering
+tenants. And the end of it was that the three women transferred
+themselves to Lisconnel, where they became not the least respected of
+its inhabitants.</p>
+
+<p>But these particulars about their antecedents were never learned by the
+neighbours there; and the joint ownership of the furniture still
+presents itself as one of our unsolved problems. Another of them was
+propounded somewhat later, when Mad Bell returned from an unusually long
+ramble, during which she had crossed the Liffey by the spacious
+O'Connell Bridge, and had heard the boom of the big College bell, and
+with her wizened-lemon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> face had half-scared the smallest-sized children
+in villages round about Dublin. For she was wearing an elaborately
+fantastic piece of headgear, which moved everybody's curiosity so
+strongly that it cannot have been for want of wondering if we failed to
+find out how she had come thereby. Strangely incongruous it did
+undoubtedly look; yet the stages by which it had descended from its
+stand in the milliner's show-room and alighted upon the head of the
+little wandering-witted tramp, were much fewer than might have been
+supposed probable.</p>
+
+<p>One blustery March morning when Mrs. M'Bean was on her way along by the
+low sea-wall to buy a bit of bacon at Donnelly's shop in Kilclone, the
+east wind did her the shrewd turn of whisking off her hat and dropping
+it into the water. It was a most shabby old black straw, rusty and
+battered, and torn, yet Mrs. M'Bean, a labourer's wife, who had nothing
+at all handsome about her, seemed to think it worth a serious risk. For
+she mounted on the broad wall-top, and thence made so unwary a snatch
+that she overbalanced herself and splashed headlong into the heaving
+high-tide, where she would very soon have perished beneath the cold
+olive-gray swell, had not the brothers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> Denny, fishing for bass hard by,
+noticed the perilous accident, and pulled timely to the rescue.</p>
+
+<p>When they disembarked her, gasping and dripping, at the nearest
+landing-place, she was understood to say, "Sure me heart's broke," a
+remark which Police-sergeant Young, who formed one of the group gathered
+by the disaster, considered sufficient grounds for marching her off to
+the handiest J. P. on a charge of attempted suicide. Mrs. M'Bean
+vehemently repelled the accusation. She explained that she had said her
+heart was broke only "because she had lost her ould hat, and every
+thread of a rag on her had been dhrenched and ruinated with the salt
+water. How could she go for to do such a sin as destroy herself, she
+urged, and she wid a houseful of little childer waitin' for her at home,
+the crathurs?" Her arguments proved convincing, and the charge was
+summarily dismissed, not without strictures upon Sergeant Young's
+excessive zeal, by which he, recking nothing of Talleyrand's maxim, felt
+himself puzzled and aggrieved.</p>
+
+<p>The incident, however, brought some more agreeable consequences to Mrs.
+M'Bean, as the J. P.'s ladies, commiserating her half-drowned plight,
+sent her that same evening a goodly bundle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> of cast-off clothes, over
+which her eyes grew gleefully bright in her careworn face. At one of the
+articles included they widened with almost awe. This was an enormous hat
+made of white fluffy felt, with vast contorted brims, and great blue
+velvet rosettes and streamers. Its fabric was very stout and
+substantial, and withal quite new, for its original owner had speedily
+found it so stiff and heavy that to wear it gave her a headache and a
+crick in her neck. Mrs. M'Bean, for her part, could not entertain the
+idea of carrying anything so sumptuous upon her grizzled head; and when
+she tried it on her eldest daughter, it totally extinguished and nearly
+smothered the child. So she stowed it away in a corner, where it
+remained unseen for several weeks.</p>
+
+<p>But next month, on the afternoon of Easter Day, Mrs. M'Bean had two
+visitors over from Ballyhoy: Annie Cassidy, elderly and rather grim,
+with her young friend Nelly Walsh.</p>
+
+<p>"Nelly's bound to be havin' bad luck this year of her life," Annie
+observed in the course of conversation, "for not a new stitch has she
+put on her to-day, and it Easter. That's an unlucky thing, accordin' to
+the sayin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Ne'er a bit am I afraid of me luck," averred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> Nelly, cheerful and
+threadbare, not to say ragged. But Mrs. M'Bean was pricked by a sudden
+thought up the ladder to the little attic aloft, whence she creaked down
+again, bringing with her the great white hat. "There, Nelly," she said,
+"just clap that on your head, and then nobody can pass the remark that
+you didn't get the wear of somethin' new, any way."</p>
+
+<p>Nelly took the hat, which struck her nearly dumb with admiration, but as
+she tried to catch a glimpse of it in the shred of looking-glass on the
+wall, her delighted expression waxed so eloquent that Mrs. M'Bean was
+impelled to say: "You're to keep it, girl alive, if you've e'er a fancy
+for it. Sure it's fitter for you than the likes of me, that 'ud look a
+quare old scarecrow if I offered to go about in such a thing." She had
+not at first intended this generosity, her worldly goods being so few
+that she could not lightly part with even a very unpromising possession.</p>
+
+<p>Nelly, on her side, could hardly believe in her high fortune, when,
+after some polite demur, she found herself carrying off the splendid
+hat. To wear it on an ordinary walk would have seemed profane, so she
+held it under her old shawl all the way home to her cabin on the shore
+at the foot of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> the Black Banks, a good step beyond Ballyhoy. But when
+she reached the door, she could not forbear the pleasure of making her
+entrance in the glory of her new adornment. Her reception was altogether
+disappointing. For her mother's and grandmother's voices rose up shrill
+and shriller, demanding what at all hijjis gazabo she'd got on her.
+Billy, her eldest brother, said: "Musha, she's put a pair of blinkers on
+her like an ould horse;" and Larry, his junior, remarked with terse
+candour, "Och, the fright." More mortifying still, Joe Tierney, her
+sweetheart, who had called to conclude arrangements about the morrow's
+holiday, said in a disgusted tone: "Tare and ages! I hope to goodness,
+Nelly, you're not intindin' to make that show of yourself at the circus
+to-morra. Bedad, I niver seen such a conthrivance; you might as well be
+walkin' alongside some sort of deminted musharoon." This rather aptly
+described the effect of the huge white brim upon Nelly, who was small
+and short of stature; but it hurt her feelings badly.</p>
+
+<p>The only upholder of the hat was Annie Cassidy, who is fond of
+controverting the opinions of other people, and who despises men. She
+said: "Don't be lettin' them put you out of consait with it,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> Nelly; it
+suits you lovely. Sure if anyone doesn't think your app'arance is good
+enough for them, you needn't throuble them wid your company. Circuses,
+to my mind, is thrash&mdash;to be watchin' folks figurandyin' on a pack of
+ould horses' backs. There's a lot of us goin' over to-morra to Rathbeg,
+where they've merry-go-rounds you can ride in yourself, and all manner,
+if you'd just step down to the Junction station and come along wid us on
+the early train."</p>
+
+<p>"'Deed then I might," said Nelly; not that she had the least intention
+of doing any such thing, but because, being somewhat of a belle, she was
+unaccustomed to uncomplimentary criticisms and much affronted by them.
+Furthermore, for the same reason, she escorted Annie home, and stayed so
+long talking, that Joe before she returned had to go off about his
+milking, which annoyed him a good deal.</p>
+
+<p>However, he had quite forgotten his vexation next morning, as he hurried
+through his early tasks with a day's pleasuring before him. He worked at
+the Kellys', whose land is bounded north and south by the Junction lane
+and the sea; and as he walked about the fresh April fields he was in
+view of Howth, dark pansy-purple<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> against the eastern amber, confronting
+the sweep of the Dublin mountains, outlined in wild hyacinth-coloured
+mist, across the dancing silver of the bay. The calves had been fed so
+expeditiously that Joe found he could spare time to stop at the starred
+bank under the hedge and pick a bunch of primroses, some of which
+Nelly's mother would proudly keep in a jam-pot on the window-stool,
+while Nelly herself might like to wear a few at the circus, brightening
+up her brown-striped shawl.</p>
+
+<p>But when he was compressing a thick sheaf of the cool soft stalks in one
+hard hand, he chanced to look up, and saw what thrilled him with dismay.
+Bobbing along over the jagged edge of the wall, a short way down the
+lane went a gleaming white object, which he at once recognised as
+Nelly's new hat. He ran aghast to look through the gate, and despite
+intercepting road-curves and obstructive hedges, the hat it unmistakably
+was, making for the Junction station. So Nelly, intending a serious
+quarrel, had thrown him over and joined the Rathbeg party. A pleasure,
+hoarded in anticipation for many a month, shrivelled into dead leaves
+suddenly like fairy gold, as he perceived how certainly this must be the
+case.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>His first angry impulse was a resort to Haskin's Public at Portbrendan,
+where he might spend his spoilt holiday taking drinks and making bets in
+the society of some cronies. What hindered him from immediately acting
+upon it was a compunctious forecast of the concern which would prevail
+in his family, if he absented himself contrary to expectation. "There's
+me mother's never aisy," he reflected, "unless she's persuadin' herself
+some of us are kilt on her." This made him resolve to postpone
+Portbrendan till after breakfast, and he turned lothfully homewards. As
+he passed along the Kellys' yard-wall, he relieved his feelings by
+tossing his nosegay over it at the place where he heard the grunting of
+their pigs, who on that occasion fared almost as delicately as Marvel's
+rose-lined fawn.</p>
+
+<p>It was early still when he reached his cabin, one in the Walshes' row;
+and he sat down listlessly on a bank, to wait for nothing in particular.
+Presently Mrs. Walsh, senior, came by with a twinkling can of water.
+"Och, there you are, Joe," she said: "Nelly's been lookin' out for you
+this good while."</p>
+
+<p>"Whethen it's quare lookin' out she had," said Joe, "and she took off
+wid herself to ould Annie<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> Cassidy&mdash;bad manners to her for her
+interfarin'."</p>
+
+<p>"What's the lad talkin' about at all?" said Mrs. Walsh, standing amazed;
+"Nelly's widin there this instiant of time, readyin' herself up."</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe you'll tell me," said Joe, "that I didn't see her streelin' down
+the Junction lane afore I was lavin' Kellys'."</p>
+
+<p>"And maybe <i>you</i>'ll tell <i>me</i>," said Nelly's grandmother, "that she
+wasn't just now callin' to me they were wantin' wather. It's a fine bawl
+she'd ha' had to let out of her, if I was to be hearin' her, and she up
+beyond Kellys'."</p>
+
+<p>"There she was anyway," Joe said, doggedly. "Wouldn't I know that dad
+fetched-lookin' ould new caubeen she's stuck on her a mile o' ground?"</p>
+
+<p>"You great gomeral," said Mrs. Walsh. "If that's all you might aisy
+enough ha' seen the big hat goin' the road&mdash;but have you the notion it's
+growin' on Nelly's head? Why, you omadhawn, you hadn't quit ten minyits
+last night, and Nelly was just after gettin' back, when who should come
+by but poor Mad Bell. Och now the raggedy objick the crathur was, wid
+nothin' over her misfort'nit head but an ould wisp as full of houles as
+a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> fishin'-net. So little Larry sez, jokin' like, 'Look here, Nelly,'
+sez he, 'you'd a right to be lettin' Mad Bell have a loan of your grand
+nappy hat to keep the sun out of her eyes.' But belike Nelly'd took a
+turn agin the thing wid the way they'd all been makin' fun of it; for
+sez she, 'Will you have it, Bell?' sez she, houldin' it out to her. And
+if she did, Mad Bell grabbed it in her two hands&mdash;it's not often she'll
+have a word for anybody&mdash;and no more talk about it, but cocked it on,
+and tied it firm under her chin wid the sthramers, as tasty as you
+plase. Musha good gracious, to see the len'th she drew the bow out on
+aich side of her bit of a yeller face, and the nod she gave her ould
+head when she'd got it done. So that's what's gone wid the hat. Goodness
+guide us, if she wasn't the poor crazy-witted body she is, 'twould be a
+sin to let her go makin' such a show of herself; but sure no one 'ud
+think to mind anythin' the likes of the crathur might have on her, the
+saints may pity her. Ay, bedad, them kind of quare consthructions do be
+fit for nothin' unless Quality and mad people," old Mrs. Walsh
+continued, without malice, soliloquising, as Joe had caught up the can,
+and was hurrying it with prodigal splashes towards his sweetheart's
+door.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The circus, with its flaring lights and whirl of tinselled prancing
+marvels, was so rapturous an experience to Nelly that she had not a
+regret for her discarded hat, which at this time was moving on beneath a
+soft dappled sky, between greening hedges, westward along quiet roads
+and lanes. It found shelter for the night under the ley of a tall
+hayrick near Santry, thus ending the first stage of Mad Bell's tramp
+home to the wide brown bogland of Lisconnel.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h3>A FLITTING</h3>
+
+
+<p>Among the latest of the strangers that have visited Lisconnel were some
+who came at a time when the neighbours stood rather in need of
+distraction. For the summer following Mrs. Kilfoyle's death was, between
+one thing and another, a drearyish season with us. That little old woman
+had left a great gap; and then there were many long spells of gloomy bad
+weather, which seemed to beat people's troubles down upon them as the
+damp drove the turf-reck back through their smoke-holes into the dark
+rooms, where they could scarcely see how dense the blue haze was
+growing. Stacey Doyne's marriage also had removed something young and
+pleasant, and at times, when the thatch dripped without and within,
+neighbours were apt to talk about her in tones of commiseration, and
+say, "Sure, her poor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> mother's lost entirely." So that towards autumn
+the diversion of some new residents' arrival happened opportunely
+enough. It was made possible by the fact that Big Anne had given up her
+holding and entered into partnership with the widow M'Gurk, thus leaving
+her late abode empty for another tenant, who appeared much sooner than
+any one might have anticipated from the aspect of the cabin.</p>
+
+<p>Except as a fresh topic of conversation, however, the strangers gave
+small promise of proving an acquisition to the community. Lisconnel did
+not like their appearance by any means, and further acquaintance failed
+to modify unfavourable first impressions. These were mainly received in
+the course of the day after their arrival, which took place on a night
+too black for anything beyond a shadowy counting of heads, and a
+perception that the bulk of the new-comers' household stuff had jogged
+up on one donkey, and must therefore be small. A portion of Big Anne's
+furniture had remained behind her in the cabin, owing to certain arrears
+of rent. Her heart was scalded, she said, wid the prices she'd only get
+for her early chuckens, and they the weight of the world, if you'd feel
+them in your hand; and poor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> Mad Bell, that 'ud mostly bring home a few
+odd shillin's wid her, was away since afore last Christmas, and might
+never show her face there agin, the crathur; and the poor Dummy gone,
+that was great at the knittin' if she got the chance&mdash;a bit of narration
+which would look funny enough in anybody's rental. Mrs. Quigley, who
+went to the door with the offer of a seed of fire, found it shut, and a
+voice inside called, "as onmannerly as you plase," "No, we've got
+matches;" whereupon another voice, further in the interior, quavered,
+"Thank'ee kindly, ma'am." So she departed little wiser than she had
+come. But daylight showed that the party consisted of an old man, and
+his son, and his son's wife, and her sister, and three small children,
+besides some cochin-china fowl, and a black cat with vividly green eyes.
+This much was apparent on the surface. Also that the old man was frail,
+bent, shrivelled, and civil spoken, that the son was "a big soft gomeral
+of a fellow," that both the women were sandily flaxen-haired, with
+broad, flat cheeks and light eyes, and that two of the children
+resembled them, while the third&mdash;a girl a trifle older&mdash;was a
+dark-haired, disconsolate-looking little thing, "wid her face," Mrs.
+Brian said, "not the width of the palm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> of your hand, and the eyes of
+her sunk in her head." As for the fowl, there could be no doubt that
+their "onnathural, long, fluffety legs were fit to make a body's flesh
+creep," and the cat looked "as like an ould divil as anythin' you ever
+witnessed, sittin' blinkin' atop of the turf-stack."</p>
+
+<p>Other less self-evident facts came out by degrees&mdash;more slowly than
+might have been expected, as the strangers were generally close and
+chary of speech. They came from the north, where their affairs had not
+prospered&mdash;in fact, they had been "sold up and put out of it," as the
+young man divulged one day to Brian Kilfoyle. They were a somewhat
+intricately connected family, by the name, predominantly, of Patman. The
+sister-in-law was Tishy M'Crum, which seemed simple enough, but the two
+light-haired boys were Greens, Mrs. Patman having been a widow, while
+the little girl was the child of a wife whom Tom Patman had already
+buried; for though he looked full young to have embarked upon matrimony
+at all, this was his second venture. "And it's a quare comether she must
+ha' been after puttin' on him," quoth Mrs. Quigley, "afore he took up
+wid herself, that's as ugly as if she was bespoke, and half a dozen year
+oulder<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> than the young bosthoon, if she's a minyit." It is true that at
+the time when Mrs. Quigley expressed this unflattering opinion she and
+her neighbours had been exasperated by an impolite speech of Mrs.
+Patman, who had said loudly in their hearing, "Well, for sartin if I'd
+had a notion of the blamed little dog-hole he was bringin' us into,
+sorra the sole of a fut 'ud I ha' set inside it;" and had then proceeded
+to congratulate herself upon having prudently left "all her dacint bits
+of furniture up above at her mother's, so that she needn't be bothered
+wid cartin' them away out of a place that didn't look to have had ever
+e'er a thing in it worth the throuble of movin', not if it stood there
+until it dropped to pieces wid dirt." Mrs. Quigley rejoined (to Judy
+Ryan) that "it would be a great pity if any people sted in a place that
+wasn't good enough for them, supposin' all the while they was used to
+anythin' a thraneen better&mdash;maybe they might, in coorse, and maybe they
+mightn't. It was won'erful to hear the talk some folks had, and they wid
+every ould stick they owned an aisy loadin' for Reilly's little ass."
+But Judy Ryan, with a flight of sarcastic fancy, hoped that Mrs. Patman
+and her family "were about goin' on a visit prisintly to the Lady<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>
+Lifftinant, because it was much if they'd find any place else where
+there'd be grandeur accordin' to their high-up notions."</p>
+
+<p>Skirmishes such as this, however, were a symptom rather than a cause of
+the Patmans' unpopularity. That sprang from several roots. For one
+thing, both the women had harsh, scolding voices, and it was even
+chances that if you passed within earshot of their cabin you would hear
+them giving tongue. Their objurgations were, as a rule, addressed to the
+young man or the old, the latter of whom soon grew into an object of
+local compassion as "a harmless, dacint, poor crathur," while his son
+came in for the frank-eyed looking-down-upon which is the portion of an
+able-bodied man, shrew-ridden through sheer supineness and
+"polthroonery." But what Lisconnel often said that it "thought badder
+of" was the stepmotherly treatment which seemed to be the lot of the
+little girl Katty. Of course the situation was one which, under the
+circumstances, would have made people believe in such a state of things
+upon the slenderest evidence. Still, even to unprejudiced eyes, it was
+clear that Katty's rags were raggeder than those of her small
+step-brothers, and that she crept about with the mien of a creature<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>
+which has conceived reasonable doubts respecting the reception it is
+likely to meet in society. When the autumn weather began to grow wintry,
+little Katty Patman, "perishin' about out there in the freezin' win',"
+became a spectacle which was viewed with indignant sympathy from dark
+doorways whence she received many an invitation to step in and be
+warmin' herself. Her hostesses opined that she was fairly starved just
+for a taste of the fire, and didn't believe she was ever let next or
+nigh it in her own place. Often, too, the consideration that she had no
+more flesh on her bones than a March chucken led to the bestowal of a
+steaming potato or a piece of griddle-bread; but the result of this was
+sometimes unsatisfactory to the giver, Katty being apt to dart away with
+her refreshments, which she might presently be seen sharing among Bobby
+and Stevie, for whom she entertained a strong and apparently
+unreciprocated regard.</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't go for to be sayin' anythin' to set her agin them," Mrs.
+Brian Kilfoyle remarked on some such occasion. "But, goodness forgive
+me! I've no likin' for them two little brats. I'd misthrust them."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, sure they've no sinse," said Biddy Ryan.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> "Where'd they git it? And
+the biggest of them, I'd suppose, under four year ould."</p>
+
+<p>"Sinse!" said Mrs. Quigley. "Bedad, then, if sinse was all that ailed
+them, the pair of them is as 'cute as a couple of young foxes. I mind
+on'y a day or so after they'd been in it, I met the laste one on the
+road, and I comin' home wid be chance a sugarstick in me basket. So,
+just to be makin' friends like, I gave it a bit for itself, and a bit
+for the other that I seen comin' along. Well, now, ma'am, if it had took
+and ate up the both of the bits, I'd ha' thought ne'er a pin's point of
+harm&mdash;'twould ha' been nathural enough to the size of it. But I give you
+me word, when it seen it couldn't get the two of them swallied down
+afore its brother come by, what did it go do but clap the one of them
+into a crevice in the wall, and cover it under a blackberry laif. And
+wid that down it squats, and begins sayin', 'Creely-crawly
+snail&mdash;where's the creely-crawly snail I'm after huntin' out of its
+houle?'&mdash;lettin' on to be lookin' for somethin' creepin' in the grass.
+And a while after it come slinkin' back, when it thought nobody was
+mindin', to poke the bit out of the wall where I was gatherin'
+dandelions under the bank. So while it was fumblin' about,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> missin' the
+right crevice, sez I, poppin' up, thinkin' to shame it, 'Maybe the
+crawly snail's after aitin' it on you,' sez I. 'Och, yis; I seen it,'
+sez the spalpeen, as brazen as brass. 'Gimme 'noder bit instid.' There's
+a schemin' young rapscallion for you!"</p>
+
+<p>"They're too like their mother altogether to plase me," said Judy Ryan.
+"The corners of their eyes do be as sharp as if they were cut out wid a
+pair of scissors. Not that I'd mind if they'd e'er a sthrake of
+good-nathur in them; but I misdoubt they have. The little girl, now, is
+as diff'rint as day and night."</p>
+
+<p>"If <i>she</i> takes after her father, she's a right to want the wit
+powerful, misfort'nit little imp," said Mrs. Brian. "For if he isn't a
+great stupid gomeral and an ass, just get me one. Why, if he was worth
+the dust blowin' along the road, he'd purvint of his own child bein' put
+upon."</p>
+
+<p>"Och, they have him <i>frighted</i>," said Mrs. Quigley, with scornful
+emphasis. "They won't let him take an atom of notice of her, they're
+that jealous. Sure, if he gets talkin' to her outside the house there,
+one of them 'ill let a bawl and send him off to be carryin' in turf or
+wather. I've seen it times and agin."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"If he'd take and sling it about their ears some fine day he'd be doin'
+right, and it might larn them to behave themselves," said Judy.</p>
+
+<p>"But the ould man would disgust you," pursued Mrs. Quigley, "wid the
+romancin' he has out of him about his son Tom. You'd suppose, to listen
+to him, that the omadhawn's aquil never stepped. He'll deive you wid it
+till you're fairly bothered. Troth, he thinks the young fellow's doin'
+somethin' out of the way if he just walks down the street, and expec's
+everybody to stand watchin' him goin' along. It's surprisin' the foolery
+there does be in people."</p>
+
+<p>"Och, murdher, women alive!" said Ody Rafferty, whose pipe went out at
+this moment, "there's no contintin' yous at all. It's too cute they are,
+and too foolish they are. Musha, very belike they're not so much off the
+common if you'd a thrifle more exparience of them; there's nothin' to
+match that for evenin' people. Bedad, now, there's some people <i>I</i> know
+so well that I can scarce tell the one from the other."</p>
+
+<p>Lisconnel, however, generally declined to fall in with Ody's
+philosophical views, and the Patmans, whether suspected of excessive
+cuteness or folly, remained persistently unpopular. There was only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> one
+exception to this rule. The widow M'Gurk has a certain fibre of
+perversity in her which sometimes twists itself round unlikely objects,
+for no apparent reason save that they are left clear by her neighbours,
+and this peculiarity renders her prone upon occasion to undertake the
+part of Devil's Advocate. When, therefore, she had once delivered
+herself of the opinion that the newcomers were "very dacint folks," she
+did not feel called upon to abandon it because it stood alone. As
+grounds for it she commonly alleged that they were "rael hard-workin'
+and industhrious," which was obviously true enough, since Mrs. Patman
+and her sister might constantly be seen tilling their little field with
+an energy far beyond the capacity of its late tenant. Her neighbours'
+unimpressed rejoinder, "Well, and supposin' they are itself?" did not in
+the least disconcert the widdy, nor yet their absence of enthusiasm when
+she stated that it was "a sight to behould Tishy M'Crum diggin' over a
+bit of ground; she'd lift as much on her spade as any two strong men."
+As for little Katty, "she'd never seen anybody doin' anythin' agin the
+child; it might happen by nature to be one of those little <i>crowls</i> of
+childer that 'ud always look hungry-like and pinin', the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> crathurs, if
+you were able to keep feedin' them wid the best as long as the sun was
+in the sky." In short, something more than talk was usually needed to
+put the widow M'Gurk out of conceit with any notion she had taken up.
+Perhaps the comparative aloofness of her hillside cabin helped to
+maintain the Patmans at their original high level in her estimation. At
+any rate they had not sunk from it by the time that they had been nearly
+three months in Lisconnel, and when Mrs. Patman and her sister were on
+terms of the very glummest civility with all the other women in the
+place. Even towards the widow M'Gurk they were tolerant rather than
+expansive. She said "they had done right enough to not be leppin' down
+people's throaths."</p>
+
+<p>One morning not long after Christmas, the widow, being bound on an
+errand down below, called in at the Patmans' with a view to possible
+commissions. Meal was wanted, and, while Tishy M'Crum stitched up a rent
+in the bag, Mrs. M'Gurk noticed where little Katty, who had been "took
+bad wid a could these three days," rustled uncomfortably among wisps of
+rushes and rags in an obscure corner. Fever made her bold and
+self-assertive, for she was wishing nothing less than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> that her daddy
+would get her an orange&mdash;"An or'nge wid yeller peel round it"&mdash;Katty
+laid stress upon this point&mdash;"like the one her mammy got her a long time
+ago. And daddy'd be a good daddy and get her another now. And she'd keep
+a bit for Bobby and Stevie and all of them&mdash;a big yeller or'nge."
+Katty's eyes blazed with excitement as she reiterated these extravagant
+desires.</p>
+
+<p>"She's got an oncommon fancy for a one," said her daddy, looking
+wistfully from the child to his wife.</p>
+
+<p>"They have them down below," suggested the widow, "pence apiece."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Patman's hand was slipping towards her pocket. "If it was just for
+wunst," she had begun, when Tishy tweaked her sleeve viciously and
+interpolated a rapid whisper, "It wont <i>be</i>; there'll be no ind to it if
+you begin humourin' them," so the sentence was badly dislocated. "She'll
+do a dale better widout any such thrash," Mrs. Patman concluded, and
+walked off to throw sods on the fire.</p>
+
+<p>Just then the widow became aware that old Joe Patman was grimacing at
+her from a corner fast by in a way that might have startled her had she
+not been familiar with such modes of beckoning.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> But when she obeyed his
+summons, what she saw did astound her outright, for Joe was stooping low
+over a leathern pouch which he had drawn from a wall-cranny, and which
+seemed to contain marvellous depths of silver money, with here and there
+a golden gleam among it, as he warily stirred it up, circling a hurried
+forefinger. She had only the briefest glimpse ere he shoved back the
+pouch and thrust a sixpence into her hand, muttering, "Git her the
+orange&mdash;don't be lettin' on for your life."</p>
+
+<p>As she turned away with a reassuring nod, she perceived that Tishy
+M'Crum was standing unexpectedly near, and looking towards them over the
+top of the meal-bag. Tishy was bitting off a loose end of thread, which
+gave her a determined and ferocious expression, but whether she could
+have seen anything or not the widow felt uncertain. She thought not.</p>
+
+<p>About ten days after this Mrs. M'Gurk was roused at a very early hour by
+a thumping on her door. When she opened it she found some difficulty in
+recognising her visitor, as the dawn had scarcely done more than dim a
+few stars far away in the east, which is an ineffective form of
+illumination. "Whethen, now, Joe Patman, is it yourself?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> she said,
+peeringly. "And what's brought you out at all afore you can see a step
+or a stim? Is the little girl took worse?" For Katty's illness still
+continued, and had grown rather serious.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure, no," said the old man; "Katty's just pretty middlin'. But it's
+waitin' I've been the len'th of the mornin', till 'twould turn broad
+daylight, before I'd be disturbin' of you, ma'am, to tell you the quare
+sort of a joke they're after playin' on me down yonder."</p>
+
+<p>"Saints above, man, what talk have you of jokin' at this hour of the day
+or night?" said Mrs. M'Gurk, feeling the unseasonableness acutely as a
+bitter gust came swooping up the slope and indiscriminatingly ruffled
+the rime-dusted grass-tufts and her own grizzled locks.</p>
+
+<p>"Och, bejabbers, it's a great joke they have agin me whatever," said old
+Patman, who was shivering much, with cold partly, and partly perhaps
+with amusement. "You see the way of it was, last night, no great while
+after we'd all gone asleep, I woke up suddint, like as if wid the crake
+of a door or somethin', but, whatever it might be, 'twas slipped beyond
+me hearin' afore I'd got a hould of me sinses rightly. So I listened a
+goodish<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> bit, and somehow everythin' seemed unnathural quiet, till I
+heard Katty fidgettin', and I went over to see would she take a dhrink
+of wather. The Lord presarve us and keep us, ma'am, if all the rest of
+them hadn't quit&mdash;quit out of it they have, and left us cliver and
+clane."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, now, don't be romancin' man," said the widow, remonstrantly. "What
+in the name of the nation 'ud bewitch any people to go rovin' out of
+their house in the middle of the black night, wid the frost thick on the
+ground?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quit they are," said the old man. "Tom's gone, and the wife, and every
+man-jack of them. They've took the couple of chuckens I noticed Tishy
+killin' of yisterday. Begorrah, I believe they've took Tib the cat, for
+ne'er a sign of it I see about the place, that would mostly be sittin'
+cocked up atop of the dresser. Goodness guide us, sorra a sowl there is
+in the house but the two of us, me and the child, and she's rael bad.
+It's a quare ould joke."</p>
+
+<p>"It 'ud be the joke of a set of ravin' mad people," said the widow.</p>
+
+<p>"But the best of it is," he went on, "do you mind, ma'am"&mdash;he looked
+round him suspiciously and lowered his voice&mdash;"the leather<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> pouch you
+might ha' seen wid me the other day?"</p>
+
+<p>"Whoo!" said Mrs. M'Gurk, "are they after takin' that on you? Sure, man,
+I thought you had it unbeknownst."</p>
+
+<p>"Aye, it's took," old Patman said, "but how she grabbed it I dunno,
+onless, I was thinkin', be any chance you mentioned somethin' about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Divil a bit of me did," the widow averred, with truth, which her hearer
+accepted. "And how much might you have had in it at all?"</p>
+
+<p>"Troth, I couldn't be tellin' you," he said; "I never thought to count
+it. 'Tis just for a pleasure to meself I keep it. This long while back
+I've put ne'er a penny in it, but when we used to be livin' up at
+Portnafoyle I'd slip in the odd shillin's now and agin, and sometimes
+I'd think 'twould be handy for buryin' me, and other times I'd think I'd
+give it to Tom as soon as I'd gathered a thrifle more, on'y some way the
+thought of partin' wid it 'ud seem to go agin me, and since poor Tom
+made a match with Martha M'Crum 'tis worse agin me it goes. 'Tis that
+good-for-nought weasel of a slieveen Tishy's after conthrivin' it on me,
+I well know, and bad luck to her," quoth the old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> man, with a sudden
+spasm of resentment. "Tom 'ud never play such a thrick&mdash;I mane it wasn't
+he invinted the joke; he doesn't throuble himself wid much jokin'; he's
+too sinsible, and steady, and perspicuous, and oncommon set on me and
+the child, all the while. There's no better son in Ireland. Och, but the
+rest of them mane no harm wid it; they're just schemin' to dhrop in
+prisintly and be risin' a laugh on me."</p>
+
+<p>Steps which were promptly taken to verify old Joe Patman's strange story
+proved it to be correct in every particular. The only fresh fact which
+investigations brought to light was the presence of a five-shilling
+piece lying on the dresser, where Joe had overlooked it in the early
+dusk. All the other inmates, chuckens and cat included, had disappeared,
+and with them most of the few movables, the old man and the sick child
+being left as forlorn fixtures. Lisconnel at large was neither slow nor
+circumlocutory in forming and expressing its opinion as touching the
+nature of the joke, a firm belief in which old Joe resolutely opposed to
+his troubles as they thickened around him. For no tidings came from the
+absentees, nor were any heard of them, while Katty's fever ran so high
+that it seemed likely her grandfather would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> be at small further charges
+on her account&mdash;a prospect which, however financially sound for a
+capitalist of five shillings or under, none the less filled his soul
+with grief. Then, one night, when Katty was at her worst, a great gale
+came rushing and roaring across the bog, and when the day broke it
+discovered the Patmans' brown thatch-slope interrupted by a gaping
+crevasse, over which a quick-plashing rain-sheet quivered.</p>
+
+<p>The widow M'Gurk had less spare room than heretofore at her disposal now
+that she harboured a co-tenant, with a slight accession of tables and
+chairs. Yet she made out a dry corner for the child and her grandfather,
+who accepted these quarters in preference to any others, because the
+widow, whatever may have been her private views, was prevented by a
+mixture of contrariness and magnanimity from joining in the general
+denunciation of her former allies, compromising as were the
+circumstances under which they had elected to take their departure. In
+her society, therefore, he was not obliged to overhear trenchant
+criticisms upon his Tom's behaviour, and could dilate, at least
+uncontradicted, upon those gifts and graces in the young man, which
+recent events had certainly placed in some need of exposition.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Other disquieting voices there were, however, which he could not dodge,
+and they spoke louder every day. For his five shillings were melting,
+dwindling&mdash;had vanished; and Lisconnel, with the best will in the world,
+could ill brook a burden of two incapables more laid upon its winter
+penury. No word on the subject had reached the old man's outer ears; but
+as Katty struggled slowly and fractiously towards convalescence, it
+became clearer in his mind that unless something happened, she must,
+when well enough to be moved, seek change of air away at the big House.
+Perhaps this prospect was now more constantly before him than even the
+thought of Tom's filial virtues, as he sat drearily on the bank by the
+widow M'Gurk's door. He might often be seen to shake his head
+despondently, and then he was probably saying to himself: "Belike he
+thought bad of me, keepin' the bit of money unbeknownst."</p>
+
+<p>By that time he had abandoned the joke theory, and fixed his hopes upon
+the arrival of a letter to explain the mysterious nocturnal flitting,
+and say whither they had betaken themselves after passing through
+Duffclane, the furthest point to which the detective forces of the
+district had tracked the party. Young Dan O'Beirne, whose work brought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>
+him daily up from down below to the forge a long way on the road toward
+Lisconnel, had safely promised to convey this letter so far whenever it
+came; and on many a day the neighbours nodded commiseratingly to one
+another as they saw "the ould crathur, goodness may pity him, settin'
+off wid himself" in quest of it. The prompt January dusk would have
+already fallen before he struggled up the Knockawn, to be greeted by the
+widow in the tone of marked congratulation which our friends sometimes
+adopt when all reason for it is conspicuously absent: "Well, man alive,
+there wouldn't be ere a letter in it this day anyway."</p>
+
+<p>"Och tub-be sure, not at all," he would answer cheerfully, "I wouldn't
+look to there bein' e'er a one sooner than to-morra. I hadn't the notion
+of expectin' a letter whatever. 'Twas just for the enjoyment of the bit
+of a walk I went."</p>
+
+<p>"Why tub-be sure it was. But be comin' in, man, for you're fit to dhrop,
+and be gettin' your ould brogues dhried. Och man, you're dhrownded
+entirely; 'tis a mighty soft evenin' it's turnin' out."</p>
+
+<p>"And here's Katty lookin' out for you this great while," Big Anne would
+say, "she's finely this evenin', glory be to goodness."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII.</h2>
+
+<h3>A RETURN.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Affairs were much in this posture, when the widow M'Gurk was one day
+perplexed by the occurrence of two small incidents. In the first place,
+as she was starting on an expedition to the Town she saw at a little
+distance something run across the road which looked uncommonly like the
+Patmans' black cat Tib. Lisconnel owns no other cats for which she might
+have mistaken it; still, as she was puzzled to think how the creature
+should have hidden itself away for more than a fortnight, she concluded
+that she had been deceived by some fluttering bird or glancing shadow.
+In the next place, she happened in the Town upon one Larry Donnelly, who
+in the course of conversation remarked: "So you've that young Patman
+back wid yous agin. What took him to be leggin' off wid himself that
+way?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And what put that in your head at all?" said the widow. "Light nor
+sight we've seen of him, or a one of them, or likely to. It's off out of
+the counthry he is belike, and he after robbin' his ould father, that's
+niver done talkin' foolish about him, and lavin' his innicent child to
+go starvin' into the Union&mdash;bad luck to him." She found a free
+expression of her sentiments rather refreshing after the restrictions
+under which she was placed at home.</p>
+
+<p>"Well now," said Donnelly, "I'd ha' bet me best brogues I seen that chap
+a couple of nights ago streelin' along the road down about our place;
+but 'twas darkish enough, and I might aisy be mistook."</p>
+
+<p>The widow pondered much over this statement on her homeward way, but had
+the forbearance to say nothing about it. She was still undecided whether
+or no she would communicate it to anybody, when, next morning, on her
+way for a can of water, she saw the black cat, unmistakable this time,
+run across the road, and, as on the day before, make off over the bog
+towards the little river. Widow M'Gurk stood staring after it for a few
+minutes, and came to a resolution. Then she looked about her, and was
+aware of Andy Sheridan's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> head leaning against his doorpost. Of Andy her
+opinion was, as we have seen, rather low, but she could descry no other
+person available for her purpose, so she called to him: "Andy, lad, I'm
+goin' after me two pullets that's strayed on me; come and be givin' me a
+hand." Andy lounged over to her goodnaturedly, and they turned into the
+bog, where Ody Rafferty presently joined them. The widow thought her
+fowl might be among the broken ground, where the stream runs at the back
+of the Knockawn, and the three went in that direction. It was a mild
+soft grey morning, and they met with neither stir nor sound, till they
+came abruptly upon a grassy hollow, shut in by furzy banks, and fronted
+by the running water, and then the widow, who alone had been expecting
+the unexpected, uttered a suppressed screech, and said: "Och, boys dear,
+goodness gracious guide us!"</p>
+
+<p>What they saw was the figure of a man in a long great-coat, "crooched
+all of a hape" under the bank. Near him were ranged in a row half a
+dozen oranges, strikin' up a wonderful golden glow. A small grimy scrap
+of paper was spread out near them, covered with several piles of
+shillings and pennies, and a silver thimble. Beside these Tib<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> the black
+cat sat severely tucked up, apparently dissatisfied, and irked by the
+situation. At the widow's exclamation the man raised his head, and was
+seen to be Tom Patman, looking haggard and dazed, and as hollow-eyed as
+little Katty herself. Widow M'Gurk and Ody and Andy stood in a line
+facing him.</p>
+
+<p>"Whethen now, Tom Patman," said Ody, "and what might <i>you</i> be doin' wid
+yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sittin' here," said Tom.</p>
+
+<p>"Och musha, tell us somethin' we don't know then. Sittin' there you are,
+sure enough, but what the mischief are you after, might I politefully
+ax? or what you mane <i>by</i> it at all at all?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sittin' here," said Tom again, "and starvin' I am; and sittin' and
+starvin' I'll be morebetoken till the ind of me ould life. Sure what
+else 'ud I be doin', and meself to thank for it, wid niver a sowl left
+belongin' me in the mortal world, nor a place to be goin' to?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well tub-be sure," said Mrs. M'Gurk, "if that talk doesn't bate all
+that iver I heard! And himself after trapesin' off as permisc-yis as an
+ould hin that won't sit on her eggs, and lavin' his own flesh and blood
+behind him as if they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> were the dust on the road. And then he ups and
+gives chat about niver a sowl bein' left him."</p>
+
+<p>"'Twas Tishy&mdash;bad cess to her," said Tom. "Och, but it's the
+mischievious ould divil-skins is Tishy M'Crum, and it's herself stirred
+up Martha, that wouldn't be too bad altogether if she'd be let alone,
+till the two of them had me torminted wid tellin' me th' ould man had
+pots of money he'd niver spend as long as he had us to be livin' on; and
+that we'd all do a dale better if some of us slipped away aisy widout
+risin' a row, and left him for a bit, while we'd be sellin' Martha's
+things, and seein' about gettin' into a dacint little place, instid of
+the whole of us to be starvin' alive up at Lisconnel, that's nothin'
+more than a bog bewitched; and he after lettin' us be sold up, they
+said, and all the while ownin' mints of money, so that we'd no call to
+be overly partic'lar about lavin' him to make a shift along wid the
+child, if 'twas a convanience; on'y he'd be risin' a quare whillabaloo,
+if he knew we were goin' off anywheres. Troth, I couldn't tell you all
+the gabbin' they had day and night&mdash;and showin' me the place he kep' his
+bag hidden in, and this way and that way. Och bedad themselves 'ud
+persuade<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> the hair on your head it grew wrong side out, if they'd a mind
+to it."</p>
+
+<p>"They might so," said Ody, "supposin' I was great gomeral enough to be
+mindin' a word they'd say, or the likes of them." In his subsequent
+reports of the interview, Ody always alleged that he had replied: "Aye,
+very belike, supposin' it grew on the head of an ass," which was
+certainly neater. But Ody Rafferty's repartees, like those of other
+people, are occasionally belated in this way.</p>
+
+<p>"So the ind of it was," Tom went on, "nothin' else 'ud suit them except
+gettin' all readied up for us to be slinkin' out in the evenin' late.
+Faith, I'd twenty minds in me heart agin quittin' little Katty, and she
+that bad. Howane'er they swore black and white that me father'd be
+spendin' all manner of money on her when he got us out of it, and we
+were to be writin' for them to come after us as soon as we were settled,
+and iverythin' agreeable&mdash;so I went along. But if I did, ma'am, sure
+when they'd got the bits of furniture sold, the on'y notion they had was
+to be settin' off to make fortins in the States, and ne'er a word about
+Katty and th' ould man. Och they had me disthracted; outrageous they
+were; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> that ould thief of the world, Tishy, allowin' me sorra a
+penny, so as I mightn't ha' been bound to stop wheriver they was. But
+one day they thought they had me asleep in the room-corner, and the two
+of them was colloguin' away at the table, so all of suddint Tishy whips
+out me poor father's bag, that I knew the look of right well, when he
+used to keep his 'baccy in it, and down she slaps it, and it jinglin'
+wid money. 'What's that for you?' sez she, and: 'The laws bless us,' sez
+Martha, 'is it after takin' that you are? And what's to become of them
+crathurs up at Lisconnel?' 'Och blathers,' sez Tishy, 'you needn't be
+lettin' on you didn't well know all this while I had it. Sure th'ould
+one might ha' plinty more hidden away on us. Anyway, I left them
+somethin' to get along wid,' sez she."</p>
+
+<p>"The five shillin's," said the widow. "Och but that one's a caution."</p>
+
+<p>"Rael hard-workin' and industhrious she is," observed Andy.</p>
+
+<p>Tom resumed his narrative: "'Them two'll do as well inside as out,' sez
+Tishy. 'I'll just be countin' the bit of silver,' sez she. But bedad I
+was fairly past me patience, and up I leps, and I grabbed a hould of the
+little bag. Och it's a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> quare fright I gave them that time, and they not
+thinkin' I was mindin', rael terrified they were," said Tom, sitting up
+more erect, and recalling this rare experience with evident complacency.
+"And 'Lave that, you omadhawn,' sez Tishy, wid the look of a divil on
+her,' what foolery are you at now?' 'You thievin' miscreant,' sez I to
+her, 'it's shankin' off to the p&oacute;lis I'll be, and layin' a heavy charge
+agin you for robbin' and stealin', and you after lavin' the innicent
+child there and th' ould man to starve widout a penny to their names,'
+sez I. 'Faugh!' sez she, 'for that matter the fever's liker to have took
+her off agin now wid no throuble to be starvin', and maybe a good job
+too for iverybody.' And 'Be this and be that,' sez I, 'if I thought
+there was e'er a fear of it, 'tis wringin' your ugly neck round I'd be
+this instiant.' 'Let go of that bag,' sez she, sweepin' up some of the
+shillin's that was spilt. 'The p&oacute;lis,' sez I, 'and a heavy charge, if
+there's another word out of your hijjis head.' 'I vow and declare,' sez
+Martha, 'I believe 'twould be the chapest thing we could do wid him, to
+let him take it and go. Sure he'd be divil a ha'porth more use for an
+immigrant than the ould cat there I was ape enough to bring along to
+pacify the childer.' So then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> Tishy gave some more impidence, but the
+last ind of it was we come to an agreement that I'd take the note and
+the silver, and they'd keep what bits of gould was in it, and they'd go
+off wid themselves wheriver they plased at all, and I'd thramp straight
+back here to be lookin' after the child and th' ould man. Ay, bedad, we
+settled it up civil enough. And afore I went Martha handed me out th'
+ould thimble, and bid me bring it to Katty. ''Twas her mother's,' sez
+she, 'I was keepin' for her; and thick it is wid houles be the same
+token; but don't say I'd be robbin' it off her.' And they tould me to
+take Tib along, or else they'd be lavin' her to run wild; so I put her
+in the basket. Begorrah, I believe Bobby had a notion to be comin' wid
+me and the cat, for he was lettin' sorrowful bawls the last thing I
+heard of him.</p>
+
+<p>"So away I come wid the best of me haste; och I knocked the quare
+walkin' out of meself entirely. And I stopped at the last big place I
+was passin' to get Katty the oranges. And I was thrampin' it all the
+night after, till just when there was a sthrake of the mornin' over the
+bog, I come into Lisconnel. But och wirra wirra&mdash;the roof's off of the
+house&mdash;och the look of the black<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> houle wid the rafters stickin' thro'
+it, and ne'er a breath of smoke, till me heart was sick watchin' to see
+might there be an odd one; and the door clap-clappin'. Sure be that I
+well knew the child was dead, and me father quit out of it, or maybe
+buried himself, and I after lavin' them dyin' and starvin'. So for
+'fraid somebody'd be comin' out and tellin' me, off I run away into the
+bog, till I was treadin' here in the could wather. And then I tumbled
+th' ould cat out of the basket, that was scrawmin' and yowlin' disp'rit,
+and I took and slung the basket into the sthrame&mdash;there's the handle
+among them rushes&mdash;and down I sat under the bank. I dunno how many
+nights and days it is at all&mdash;but here I'll stop; niver a fut I'll stir
+to be lookin' for bite or sup, or lettin' on I'm in it&mdash;and anybody may
+take the bit of money and welcome; I'd as lief be pickin' up the dirt on
+the road&mdash;for I'll just give me life a chance to ind out of the world's
+misery and disolation."</p>
+
+<p>"Now, may goodness forgive you," said the widow M'Gurk, "it's a poor
+case to want the wit. Troth, and yourself's the quare ould
+child-desertin', mane-spirited, aisy-frighted slieveen of a young
+bosthoon; but what sort of a conthrivance is it you have on you at all
+at all be way of a head<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> that you couldn't have the sinse to considher
+the roof blowin' off a body's house 'ud be raison enough for them to be
+quittin' out of it, and no signs of dyin' in the matter? D'you think the
+win' was apt to be waitin' till there happened to be nobody widin, afore
+it got scatterin' the thatch? God help us all, you've little to do to be
+squattin' there talkin' about disolations and miseries, wid the two of
+them this instiant minyit sittin' be the fire up at my place, and sorra
+a hand's turn ailin' them, forby Katty's a thrifle conthr&aacute;ry now and
+agin, thro' not bein' entirely strong yet."</p>
+
+<p>"And bedad at that hearin'," reports of the occurrence used to proceed
+from this point, "the lep he gathered himself up wid, and the rate he
+legged it off&mdash;musha, he was over the hill while we were pickin' up his
+things for him. And as for th' ould cat that he tripped over, it rowled
+three perch of ground before it got a hould of its four feet."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure we were sittin' there as quite as could be consaived"&mdash;the
+conclusion of this precipitate rush was thus recounted&mdash;"when all of a
+suddint we couldn't tell what come bouncin' in at the door, as if it had
+been shot out of the inds of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> earth, and had us all jumpin' up and
+screechin', till we seen it was on'y Tom Patman, and he in such a takin'
+you might suppose he thought somethin' 'ud swally up ould Joe and the
+child on him before he could get at them."</p>
+
+<p>Lisconnel's opinion was divided as to whether Tom would actually have
+stayed and starved in his hiding-place had he not been discovered. Mrs.
+M'Gurk thought it likely enough. "The cat goin' back and for'ards that
+way," she said, "gave her an idee there was somethin' amiss in it, and
+that was why she took Andy along. 'Deed and she got a quare turn when
+first she spied the chap croochin' under the bank&mdash;she couldn't tell but
+he might ha' been a corp."</p>
+
+<p>Brian Kilfoyle's view was: "Divil a much! Sure if he'd had e'er a notion
+to be doin' anythin' agin himself, there was plinty of deep bog-houles
+handy for him to sling himself into, and have done wid it." Whereupon
+Mrs. Sheridan crossed herself and said deprecatingly: "Ah, sure, belike
+the crathur wouldn't have the wickedness in him to go do such a thing."
+Her husband didn't know but he might. "Them soft sort of fellers 'ud
+sometimes stick to anythin' they took into their heads, the same as a
+dab of morthar agin a wall."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> And Ody Rafferty supposed the fact of the
+matter was, "that if be any odd chance they got a notion of their own,
+they mistook it for somebody else's."</p>
+
+<p>On one point, however, the neighbours, Mrs. M'Gurk not excepted, were
+practically unanimous, the utter flagitiousness, namely, of Tishy
+M'Crum. There was a tendency to begrudge her the trivial merit of having
+voluntarily left behind her the five-shilling piece. For this marred
+that perfect symmetry of iniquity which is so pleasant to the eye when
+displayed by people of whom we "have no opinion." Only Mrs. Brian said
+it was a mercy she had that much good nature in her itself. But even she
+added that the fewer of them kind of folks she saw comin' about the
+place, the better she'd be pleased, and she hoped they'd got shut of
+them for good and all.</p>
+
+<p>This aspiration seemed the more likely to be fulfilled, when within a
+week or so the Patmans heard from the family of Tom's first wife, who
+held out prospects of work for himself, and a home for Katty and his
+father&mdash;a proposal which was gladly accepted. Their departure left as
+the single trace of their sojourn in Lisconnel, Tib the cat, which
+remained behind, a somewhat unwelcome<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> bequest to the widow M'Gurk.
+Indeed, I fear the creature became a source of some annoyance to her,
+because Andy Sheridan contracted a habit of addressing it by the name of
+Tishy, and bestowing upon it the same laudatory epithets with which the
+widow had been wont to justify her admiration for the energetic sisters.</p>
+
+<p>It was on a hushed February morning that the Patmans finally departed.
+The smell of spring was in the air, and filmy silvery mist had begun to
+float off the dark bogland in vanishing wreaths, soft and dim as the
+frail sloe-blossom, already stolen out over the writhen black branches
+up on the ridge. A jewel had been left in the heart of every groundling
+trefoil and clover-leaf, and the long rays that twinkled to them were
+still just tinged with rose. Here and there a flake of gold seemed to
+have lit upon the clump of sombre green furze-bushes, by which
+neighbours in a small knot stood watching the three generations of
+Patmans dwindle away down the road with its narrow dewy grass-border,
+threading the vast sweep of sky-rimmed brown. Father and son walked,
+while little Katty bobbed along, balanced in a swaying donkey-pannier.
+The widow M'Gurk, who felt a good deal of concern about the destiny<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> of
+her late lodgers, hoped "they were goin' to dacint people, for there
+wasn't as much sinse among the three of them as you'd put on a fourpenny
+bit." And Mrs. Quigley thought "'twould be hard to say which the young
+man or ould one was the foolishest; for the blathers ould Joe talked
+about Tom, and the gaby Tom made of himself over the child, now that he
+had his own way wid her, was past belief."</p>
+
+<p>"And I can tell you," said Ody Rafferty, "there's folks goin' about that
+you'll want all the wits you iver had, and maybe a thrifle tacked on, to
+get the better of rightly."</p>
+
+<p>"Augh, I question will they iver do any great things, goodness help
+them," said Mrs. Sheridan. "'Twill be much if he keeps them outside the
+House."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, anyway," said Biddy Ryan, "I'd liefer be in their coats, for
+fortin or no fortin, than like them two ugly-tempered women, settin' off
+to the dear knows where, after robbin' and plunderin' all before them."</p>
+
+<p>"Thrue for you, then, Biddy," said Mrs. Brian, turning away from her
+wide outlook, "we're none so badly off, when we're stoppin' where we
+are, instid of streelin' about wid the notion of such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span> black villinies
+in our minds. For sure enough," she said, as she faced round towards the
+grey-peaked end-walls, and smoke-plumed thatch of Lisconnel, "the
+world's a quare place to get thravellin' thro', take it as you will."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>GOOD LUCK</h3>
+
+
+<p>Although Laraghmena is no great distance from Lisconnel as the crow
+flies, but little intercourse takes place between the two hamlets. For
+the crow's flight would be over a rugged mountain ridge, sinking into a
+trackless expanse of bog, which often spreads rough and wet walking
+before wayfarers who have to experience it at closer quarters than those
+who merely throw down a flapping shadow as they pass. And round by the
+road is a good long tramp, not to be lightly undertaken. So it does not
+happen half a dozen times in the year, perhaps, that anybody comes from
+thence to Lisconnel, and our visits thither are fewer still. The
+neighbours say that the people up there do be very poor entirely, and
+are wont to use a commiserating tone when speaking of them. But their
+knowledge of the locality and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> its inhabitants is by no means intimate,
+and would be even less so, were it not that Theresa Joyce and her
+brother Mick, the remnant of Mrs. Kilfoyle's family, are now living
+there, which makes a connecting link.</p>
+
+<p>Laraghmena is scattered rather wildly over the slopes of a grey mountain
+that shoulders the sea at the point where its foam comes nearest to
+Lisconnel. Some of the cabins stand so low along the shore that the
+shingle knocks clatteringly at their doors when the tide is full and
+rough; and other some are perched so high up on the hillside that they
+constantly disappear from view behind a curtain of the pale mists which
+haunt its summit, creeping to and fro. When one of these little white
+dwellings, with its field-fleck beside it, emerges from the clouds, you
+feel as if the slightly improbable had happened, since at such a height
+you would have expected nothing but the appropriate rocks and swampy
+patches. There was once a French princess who would no doubt have
+wondered why on earth any people should choose to live and farm in such
+unchancy places. Rather than that she would have ploughed herself up a
+little bit of the rich green land which spreads in broad tracts round
+about, with sometimes sheep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> nibbling over it, and here and there a few
+deer. But the views of this young lady are represented as having been so
+far in advance of her age that she seems hardly possible as an
+historical personage, and withdraws into the myth-mists. To that region
+certainly belongs the ancient chronicle in which we read how the Irish
+Nemedians, revolting against the intolerable deal of cream and butter
+and wheaten meal exacted from them by their oppressors, the Fomorians,
+those ferocious African pirates, emigrated to Hellas, in hope of better
+things, but were at last driven back home to escape the heavier yoke of
+the Athenians, who compelled them to: "Dig clay in the valleys, and
+carry it in leathern bags to the top of the highest mountains, and the
+most craggy rocks, in order to form a soil upon those barren places, and
+make them fruitful, and able to bear corn." That history should repeat
+itself is, of course, to be recognised as merely a commonplace fact; but
+a myth reproducing itself in the shape of events happening visibly
+before our eyes, is a rarer phenomenon. And it seems to be occurring
+whenever a string of Laraghmenians come plodding up their winding
+mountain-path under the burden of heavy creels filled with earth, or
+oftener with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> slippery brown sea-wrack and leathery weed. For it is in
+this way that whatever scanty foothold their starveling crops may find,
+has been fashioned and maintained in the stony little fields. Year by
+year, as the blustery days of late autumn darken into winter, the
+steep-ledged path is wetted all along with sea-water, and bestrewn with
+dark trails and tough tawny pods out of the dripping creels, until it
+grows as sharply ocean-odorous as the beach, while the many bare feet
+are continually toiling slowly up and quickly pattering down it. Yet
+their efforts are rewarded by only meagre and stunted growths; so
+intractable is the material upon which they are expended. Micky Joyce
+has been heard to declare, as he took a despondent bird's-eye view of
+his holding, that "you might as well be thryin' to raise crops in the
+crevices of the stone walls."</p>
+
+<p>However, as we were just now shown, these dwellers at Laraghmena have
+another resource to fall back upon. In fact, they have nothing less than
+the wide sea as a supplement to their bit of land. The queer small boats
+hauled up on the strand, and the dark-brown net festooning the rafters,
+betoken that, as does also the bit of salt-fish hung against the wall,
+pallid and juiceless,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> a shadowy, wraith-like looking viand. But the
+bounty of the sea has limits; it does not yield up its stores for
+nothing, but takes as well as gives. And it helps itself sometimes on a
+liberal scale. Some years ago, for instance, it took poor Thady Joyce
+and several of his companions, who had gone off in a couple of luggers
+after the herrings. The event is remembered with awe at Laraghmena,
+because in that wild March gloaming Con the Quare One had met Thady
+himself face to face stepping up the winding path, and had given him
+good evening, and asked him how he had got all dripping wet, just at the
+very time when the unlucky lad must have been lying drowned miles and
+miles from there, among the surges of Galway Bay. Other such toll has
+often been levied since then; for the curraghs and pookawns in which
+Laraghmena goes to sea are frail craft to cope with the billows come
+rolling, maybe, from the fogbanks of Newfoundland, and blasts that have
+cooled their breath among hills of ice before they sweep across the
+Atlantic. Now and then a boat comes to grief even on the short voyage
+made for the purpose of cutting wrack from the shelves of the black-reef
+that lies a bit off the shore. So, on the whole, the inhabitants of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>
+Laraghmena may be considered to pay dearly for their supplies of fish
+and seaweed; and we at Lisconnel, though we live beyond reach of such
+things, and have few substitutes for them, are not far wrong in speaking
+of the people up there as "rael poor entirely."</p>
+
+<p>Yet they themselves would not by any means have it supposed that they
+"think bad," as they call it, of their fortunes and habitation. On the
+contrary, whatever their private opinion may be, they are disposed to
+uphold the merits of the place in public, and to prove themselves sudden
+and quick in resentment of any outsiders' disparaging criticism. The
+most deadly insult that can be offered to a Laraghmenian as such, is an
+allusion to the libellous report which has somehow become current to the
+effect that his Riverence at Drumroe, the nearest parish, always sends
+over a special messenger on Saturday night to remind them of the
+morrow's Mass; the innuendo being that Laraghmena's out-of-the-way
+situation, and general want of culture, preclude its inhabitants from
+knowing the day of the week. This is why an innocent-seeming remark such
+as, "Well, boys, it's Tuesday this mornin'," has been known to set
+blackthorns whirling wildly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Something of the sort occurred at Sallenmore fair, one day in last
+September, when Matt Doyne and Andy Sheridan from Lisconnel fell in with
+their acquaintances, Larry Sullivan and Felix Morrough, from Laraghmena.
+After they had fought as long as seemed good to them, they exchanged
+what news they had. The most important piece was that Larry and Felix
+were presently setting off to the States. They were rather urgent in
+advising the other two lads to join their party; but Andy said that
+everything would go to sticks at home if he was out of it, and Matt
+averred that his mother would be of the opinion she was lost and kilt
+entirely, if he so much as mentioned any such an idea. "And herself wid
+your brother Terence at home to be keepin' her company," objected Felix.
+"Sure there's me mother wid ne'er another crathur in the world, you may
+say, but meself, and she's never done this last six months persuadin' me
+to go along."</p>
+
+<p>"Then it's the quare woman she must be, bedad," said Matt, "unless it's
+yourself's the quare bosthoon on her entirely, and maybe that's liker;"
+a rejoinder which brought on a renewal of hostilities.</p>
+
+<p>Just at this time a spell of fine weather, very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> bright and serene, had
+been brooding over Lisconnel. It was the early spring of autumn, when
+leaves and berries here and there were taking a blossom-like vividness;
+the frost-touched brier-sprays seemed to have found and dipped in the
+same red that had dyed the young buds and shoots of April. The air was
+so still that the seeded dandelions stood day after day with their fairy
+globes unbereft of a single downy dart, like little puffs of vapour
+among the grasses. A soft mist rounded off all the bogland, holding in a
+drowse the sunbeams that steeped it, and letting them waken to their
+full golden glory at the very heart of noon. But one morning the haze
+began to thicken and darken on the horizon, as if wafts of murky smoke
+were blown through it, and towards evening massy shapes of black clouds
+came slowly lifting themselves up, some with outlines curved like bosky
+clumps of wood, some ruggedly ledged and angled like a drift of begrimed
+icebergs. By sunset the far west was all a sullen gloom veined with
+lurid, tawny streaks, and mottled with deeper stains. Old Peter
+Sheridan, who is reputed to have "a great eye for the weather," turned
+it forebodingly upon the prospect, and said the sky was "the moral for
+all the world of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span> the back of an ould brindled bull, and he'd never
+known any good come of that manner of apparance."</p>
+
+<p>And true for him. Before sunrise next morning Lisconnel was roused by
+the r&eacute;veille of a crashing thunder-peal, which preluded a violent storm.
+It is seldom that one booms and rattles so loudly over our bogland, or
+glares with so fierce a flame. Brian Kilfoyle, taking a rapid
+observation through his door, said, "Be the powers of smoke, I never
+seen the aquil of that. You might think they was after whitewashin' the
+whole place wid blindin' fire. Here's out of it, sez I." And he
+retreated blinking to his dark corner. At the height of it, even Andy
+Sheridan, who is probably our freest thinker, felt secretly relieved to
+know that his stepmother and his sisters were saying their prayers. The
+arrangement seemed to give him a sense of security without claiming any
+concessions from his superior strength of mind. But in the end the
+perilous clouds rolled away growling and gleaming towards the mountains
+and the sea, leaving only one victim behind&mdash;the Quigley's little goat,
+who had been struck dead by a lightning flash, to the sorrow of her
+owners, and the awe of all Lisconnel in contemplation of the black and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span>
+white body stretched out still on her wide grazing-ground.</p>
+
+<p>The storm, however, seemed to have broken up the fair weather, and the
+days that followed it were blustery and rainy. On the next of them Larry
+Sullivan and Felix Morrough were seen passing through Lisconnel,
+evidently equipped for a journey. Larry, who had parted from no near
+friends, was apparently in good spirits; but Felix looked so much cast
+down that his contemporaries refrained from any references to the days
+of the week, and the pair went on their way unmolested amongst the
+lengthening shadows. They reported the storm to have been terrific
+altogether up at Laraghmena. The Widdy Bourke's thatch was set in a
+blaze, "and it was a livin' miracle that the whole of them wasn't
+frizzled up like a pan of fryin' herrin's."</p>
+
+<p>It may have been ten days or so after this that a good many of the
+neighbours had dropped in one evening at Mrs. Doyne's. She had been
+ailing of late, and old Dan O'Beirne had stepped up from the forge to
+prescribe for her, and cheer her with accounts of how finely young Dan
+and her daughter Stacey were getting on at their place down below in
+Duffclane. The rest of the party<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> had assembled merely for company and
+conversation. It included members of nearly all our families&mdash;Kilfoyles
+and Quigleys and Ryans and Raffertys and the Widdy M'Gurk and Big Anne.
+Presently Judy Ryan, who was looking out of the door, had an
+announcement to make.</p>
+
+<p>"Whethen now, and who might yous be when you're at home? There's two
+women comin' along the road from Sallinbeg ways, I dunno the looks of at
+all, I should say; but the rain's mistin' thick between me and them.
+Carryin' bundles they are. If they're not any of the Tinkers we're right
+enough. One of them's a little ould body, and the other's a good size
+bigger. Strangers they are. Och, mercy on me, have I eyes in me head at
+all? How strange she is! Sure it's Theresa Joyce herself. But we haven't
+seen her this great while, and who she has along wid her I couldn't be
+tellin' you. A feeble sort of crathur she looks to be, accordin' to the
+way she's foostherin' along."</p>
+
+<p>When these two travellers arrived at the Doynes' door, nobody failed to
+recognise Theresa Joyce, notwithstanding the estrangement of a long
+absence; and she hastened to introduce her unknown companion, who kept a
+tight clutch on her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> arm, as if afraid to let go, and looked at nobody's
+face, but seemed to listen from one to the other. She was, it appeared,
+the widow Morrough from Laraghmena, who had been struck blind by the
+lightning in the great storm Friday was a week&mdash;the sight of her eyes
+clean destroyed with one flash as she was throwing a bit of food to the
+fowl at her door. And the last child she had belonging to her set off
+the next morning to the States. And now she herself was going into the
+Union down at Moynalone, for what else could she be doing, that couldn't
+see her hand before her face? So Theresa was bringing her down, and they
+thought they might have got as far as Duffclane against night; but the
+creature wasn't well used yet to walking in the dark, so they were slow
+coming, and they'd hardly do it.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the outline of Mrs. Morrough's history up to date, and its
+rehearsal had at once the effect of arousing a sympathetic bustle about
+her, which did not subside until she sat a wet and wayworn guest, in the
+most comfortable hearth-corner, and had been provided with a cup of the
+tea that Mrs. Doyne had made herself in her character of an invalid. She
+now sat on one side of the blind woman, and stirred her tea for her, and
+on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> other Dan O'Beirne shook his head in regretful confirmation of
+the opinion pronounced by the Drumroe doctor, which was reported to be
+that mortal man couldn't do her a thraneen of good. Meanwhile Theresa
+Joyce, who was likewise bedrenched and weary, found a seat in the
+opposite corner, where her nearest neighbours were Ody Rafferty, and her
+niece-in-law, Mrs. Brian Kilfoyle, with her daughter Rose.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Theresa, it's the long while since you've stepped over to see
+us," Ody said, starting the conversation, "and it's the soft evenin'
+you've chose to be comin'. Your shawl's dhreeped. Take it off, and I'll
+give it a shake above the fire. Bedad, Theresa, the two of us has been
+wearin' the dusty male-bags on our heads since the time I seen you
+first. As black as a sloe you was; but now it's liker the blossom it's
+turned."</p>
+
+<p>"And time for it," said Theresa. "Sure I'm over sivinty year of age now,
+any way, every day of it&mdash;and the long days there was among them, God
+knows."</p>
+
+<p>"But wid all that, ne'er a one of them was long enough for you to be
+findin' a man to your mind in it," said Ody. "And I declare to goodness
+I dunno but maybe it's the very sinsible woman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> you were for that same.
+Sure meself was a great while afore ever I thought of axin' Biddy, and
+for anythin' I can tell I might ha' done better if I'd held me tongue a
+bit longer and then said nothin', as the sayin' is. I was ould enough to
+know me own mind any way. But, musha, for that matter, Rose there 'ill
+prisintly be settin' up to think she's ould enough to know hers, and
+it's twinty chances if she has as much wit as you."</p>
+
+<p>"And why would she," said Theresa, "or anybody be wishin' it to her? Oh,
+let that alone. There's a dale of diff'rint sorts of wit, and no raison
+why one of them shouldn't be as good as another. Look at her
+grandmother, me sister Bessy, it's plinty of paice and comfort she had
+wid her marryin'."</p>
+
+<p>This was quite true, as although she had been rather early widowed, and
+her only daughter had married an emigrant, her son and his wife had
+taken such care of her, and made so much of her, that the neighbours had
+never thought of calling her the widdy, a title reserved for a woman
+left struggling alone; and she had remained Mrs. Kilfoyle to the end of
+her days.</p>
+
+<p>"And look at the poor crathur there, what she's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> come to," said Ody,
+instancing the tragical figure of the widow Morrough.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, the saints may pity her," said Theresa. "But the likes of such bad
+luck happins few people married or single, thank God."</p>
+
+<p>"It's a quare unnathural young villin her son must be," said Mrs. Brian,
+"to skyte off and lave her that-a-way. Sorra the bit he can be good
+for."</p>
+
+<p>"'Deed, now, Norah woman, that's the very notion is disthressin' me,"
+said Theresa, "for I dunno but it's after usin' him ill, I am. You see
+the way of it was the poor sowl&mdash;poor Mrs. Morrough&mdash;had the great dread
+of the say upon her, be raison of her husband and her father gettin'
+dhrowned at the fishin', so she'd always the fear in her mind of the
+same thing happ'nin' her couple of boys. Howane'er, the eldest of them
+went off to California a good few years back, and was doin' pretty
+middlin' well out there the last she heard of him, but that's a long
+while ago now; about gettin' married he was. But Felix, the lad she had
+at home wid her until the other day, often enough he was bound to be on
+the wather, after the fish and the sayweed, if he was to get his livin'
+at all. And disthracted she was seem' him goin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span> out in their ould boat,
+that's laiks enough in her to sink the biggest ship ever set sail, and
+herself wid scarce the width to hould a sizable flounder. Sez I to Felix
+one wild evenin', when we was argufyin' wid him, that sure the little
+loadin' he could be puttin' in her 'ud never be worth losin' his life
+for. But sez he to me, the bit of food they'd put in their mouths was
+littler agin, and yet they might be losin' their lives for want of it.
+And ne'er a word had I to say to that. But one night last winter he was
+as nearly lost as anythin' in a squall, and after that his mother would
+be tormintin' herself worse than she was before. So she set her heart
+entirely on gettin' him to take off to the States, and be out of the way
+of fishin' and dhrowndin'. She'd ha' gone wid him herself, on'y they
+said she was too ould, and spoilin' his chances she'd be. A long while
+it was before he'd hear any talk of it. The whole summer she was
+persuadin' him; but at last he made up his mind he would. 'Twas no
+notion of his own to be lavin' her, I'll say that for him."</p>
+
+<p>"Whethen now, but that was as curious a plan as ever I heard tell of for
+keepin' a person from dhrowndin'," said Ody; "to be sendin' him off over
+the rowlin' says, sailin' goodness can tell<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> you how many hunderds and
+tousands of miles. What was she dhramin' of at all at all to go do such
+a thing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, but sure it's a diff'rint sort of sailin'," said Theresa. "Why,
+they say one of them big stamers 'ud carry a couple of our little boats
+along wid her, and you'd scarce notice she had them on board. Terrible
+safe they must be if they're that size."</p>
+
+<p>"And morebetoken," said Mrs. Brian, "there's such a sight of ships
+comin' and goin' between this and the States, wouldn't you think that
+agin now they'd ha' got a kind of track line, crossin' over, as if it
+was a manner of road they was follyin' that nothin's apt to happen them
+on, and not sthrayin' about permisc-yis in the storms?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Thrack?</i>" said Ody, shrilly. "Bedad, then, its the quare thrack, and
+the quare places it brings them into. D'you know that, for one thing,
+they go slap through the Bay of Bisky?"'</p>
+
+<p>"And is that an ugly bay?" said Mrs. Brian.</p>
+
+<p>"You may call it that. I wouldn't be sayin' so to herself over there,"
+said Ody, with much careful mystery. "For it might be on'y discouragin'
+the crathur worse than she is already. But it's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span> the place where the
+Seven Oceans of the World meet. Ay, indeed, ma'am&mdash;but don't be lettin'
+on to her. I was spakin' to a man who had a brother went through it, and
+he said the ragin' and tearin' of them all flowin' together 'ud terrify
+the sinses out of King Solomon. They had the great big stamer he was in
+whirlin' round and round and round, the same as if it was a float on one
+of its own paddlewheels, he couldn't tell how many days and nights.
+Thracks, how are you. It's a very ready one there is in it to the bottom
+of the say."</p>
+
+<p>"Still a good few people gets through it safe enough," said Theresa,
+"ay, and comes back through it of an odd while."</p>
+
+<p>"But how many's lost in it that you never hear tell of?" said Ody. "And
+besides that, the man I was talkin' to tould me his brother was never
+right in his head after the tossin' he got. It's a poor case to be
+landin' ravin' mad in a sthrange counthry, supposin' you get there
+itself. But me own notion is that if people's well off, they've a right
+to stop where they are, and if they're misfort'nit, they've a chance any
+way of better bad luck stayin' at home."</p>
+
+<p>Ody stated his own notion authoritatively, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> Theresa looked depressed
+by the dilemma in which it seemed to place the emigrant.</p>
+
+<p>"'Deed, now, maybe it's a bad turn I'm after doin' the two of them," she
+said; "but poor Mrs. Morrough, many a time she sez to me it 'ud be the
+greatest comfort to her at all to get quit of the fear she was in
+continyal wheniver he went out wid the ould boat. Sure she might be a
+bit lonesome, she'd say, but after all what great company was he to her
+when half the time she would be drowndin' him under the rowl of the say,
+like his poor father and grandfather? And wid the most he could do it's
+hard set he was to make what 'ud keep him. So she'd planned she'd be
+able to conthrive well enough wid her hins and her spriggin' work, till
+Felix could be sendin' her over a thrifle. A very cliver woman she was
+at the spriggin'; the handkercher corners she'd work was rael iligant.
+Pence a-piece she got for them, and I've known her finish a dozen in
+three days.</p>
+
+<p>"Och, but I got a turn on the Friday mornin' when I stepped down to her
+place to see what way they were after the storm, and there she was
+sittin' crouched up in a corner, and screechin' to me to know who was
+comin' in, and I standin' before her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> eyes in the middle of a sun-bame.
+And 'Glory be to God,' sez she, 'that it's yourself, for you'll have the
+sinse to give me a hand wid endeavourin' to keep the knowledge of what's
+after happenin' me from Felix, the way he won't be purvinted of goin'
+to-morra. Sorra a fut would he if he knew aught ailed me; and then sure
+he might stay at home for good and all; and dhrownded he'll be, and
+meself'ill go deminted.' And sure I thought it was maybe no thing to be
+doin', and so I said to her. But it seemed the heart of her was to be
+broke altogether if anythin' 'ud hinder him gettin' out of it. And then
+I was mindin' the father and grandfather of him, the way they went, and
+me brother, poor Thady, and I couldn't tell but I might ha' raison to
+think bad of biddin' him stay; and if he did, sure perhaps he couldn't
+be keepin' her at all, and she so helpless; it's better able he might be
+to help her out in the States. And sorry I'd ha' been to disappoint the
+crathur of the first wish she'd took a thought of sittin' in the dark of
+her misfortin. So the ind of it was I settled I'd stop wid her for that
+day, and thry could we let on there was nothin' amiss when Felix come
+in, that was out somewhere since early in the mornin' before the storm
+began.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"But 'deed now it was the quare conthrivin' we had after he'd come home.
+And where'd he been but off down to Drumroe gettin' her an iligant big
+taypot for a keepsake? So the sorra a stim of it, in coorse, could she
+see; and I done me best biddin' her look at the grand gilt handle, and
+the wrathe of pink roses on it, and she'd say the same thing after me;
+but sure its noways very aisy to fall into an admiration of a taypot
+you've never set eyes on; and I misdoubt the poor lad thought she wasn't
+so much plased with it as he expected. And then he'd be walkin' in and
+out, and axin' for this and that he was to put in his bundle; and she
+could on'y be tellin' him where to look for them, instid of readyin'
+them up for him herself. And the pair of socks she'd promised him she
+couldn't get to finish&mdash;rael fretted she was wid it all. Howsome'er one
+way or the other we made a shift, till poor Felix went off in the grey
+of the mornin' wid ne'er a notion of anythin'. Sez he to her: 'You'll be
+seem' me steppin' in agin one of these days;' and sez she: 'Ay will
+I&mdash;as sure as I'll see the sun shinin';' so he consaited she was well
+enough contint&mdash;but the two of them was thinkin' diff'rint things.</p>
+
+<p>"Ne'er a word of it we said to anybody before<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> Felix was gone, or else
+somebody 'ud ha' been safe to ha' tould him, for there's plinty of
+people couldn't be goin' about widout tellin' everythin' they hear any
+more than a wasp could fly widout buzzin' its wings. And then we got the
+docther to her, but he couldn't do e'er a hand's turn. Sure what could
+anybody do agin the lightnin', that's a sort of miracle, you may say,
+unless it was wid another one?"</p>
+
+<p>"And I dunno has people any call to be settin' themselves up to thry do
+them," said Mrs. Brian. "We'd better lave the like to Them that
+understands the nathur of such things."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, I should suppose we'd a right to be thryin' whativer we get the
+chance to," said Theresa, "and that's little enough, the Lord knows.
+Plinty of things there is kep' up out of the raich of our meddlin' wid
+them."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay bedad, or else it's the quare regulatin' we'd be givin' them now and
+agin&mdash;we would so," said Ody, regretfully. "Och, but there's an odd few
+good jobs I'd give more than a thrifle to be puttin' me hand to this
+minyit if I could get a hould of them."</p>
+
+<p>"And that's the way it is, I'm afeared, wid the lightnin'-blindin',"
+said Theresa. "Howane'er, up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> at Laraghmena we'd ha' done the best we
+could for her, if she'd ha' been contint to ha' sted there; we'd ha'
+conthrived among us all to keep her well enough. But not a bit of her
+would for all we could do or say. She wouldn't be a burden on the
+neighbours she said. You see she's proud in her mind, the crathur,
+that's what it is, goodness help her."</p>
+
+<p>"And when a body has that sort of a notion," said Ody, "you might as
+aisy crack an egg ind-ways as get it out of their head."</p>
+
+<p>"So that's the way of it," said Theresa. "But if you could be tellin' me
+whether it's wrong I done or right, you know more than meself. Felix 'ud
+be for killin' me if he knew, that's sartin, and small blame to him I
+was thinkin' part of the while comin' along. For bad work there's apt to
+ha' been, sure enough, in anythin' that inds in landin' a body in the
+Union."</p>
+
+<p>The blind woman in her corner across the hearth seemed to have caught
+the last word, for she abruptly said, "Ay, ay, it's there I'm goin', and
+the first of the Morroughs iver wint on the rates, or the Conroys
+aither. But I'm not takin' their name along wid me; troth no; sorra the
+Ellen Morrough 'ill they find in it."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Sure not at all, woman dear," said Theresa. "Why, Mrs. Doyne, it's
+great work the two of us had this day comin' along the road, plannin' a
+fine name for Mrs. Morrough to have in the Union', for she sez it's none
+any dacint poor people own she'll be bringin' into it. So we've settled
+she's to be Mrs. Skeffington Yelverton. That's an iligant soundin' one,
+isn't it, ma'am?"</p>
+
+<p>Everybody expressed admiration, and a forlorn glimmer of complacency at
+the arrangement passed over even the sorrowful countenance of Mrs.
+Skeffington Yelverton herself, as she sat in her ragged old wisp of a
+shawl. She was holding under it her grand new delft teapot, whose
+beauties she should never see; though by this time much fingering had
+made her familiar with the outlines of its raised pink-rose wreath. Then
+Theresa Joyce said, "We ought to be steppin' on wid ourselves, if we're
+to get to Duffclane before dark. The evenin's took up a bit. I see the
+sky there turnin' like goulden glass agin the windy-pane." But the
+neighbours protested against their setting forward again; and it was
+agreed that they should sleep the night at the Kilfoyles'.</p>
+
+<p>When this point had been decided, Mrs. Morrough<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> said, "Would that be
+the say&mdash;the rustlin' I hear outside there?"</p>
+
+<p>Upon this people looked ruefully at her and at each other, as if the
+question had given them a glimpse into the darkness in which she was
+sitting.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, no, ma'am," said Mrs. Doyne, "that's on'y the sedge-laves in the
+win' round the big pool just back of the house. Few days of the year
+there is, summer or winter, but they'll be shoosh-sooin' that way. A
+dhrary sort of noise it is to my mind. I do be tired listenin' to it in
+the night sometimes."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure there's ne'er a dhrop of say-wather nearer us, ma'am, than the
+place you're after quittin' out of," said Judy Ryan, "it's the quare
+whillaloo it 'ud have to be risin' before we'd hear it that far."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, well," said the blind woman, "yous are the very lucky people, I'm
+thinkin', all of yous, that see the shinin' of the sun, and live beyond
+the sound of the say."</p>
+
+<p>Her remark was followed by a short silence, during which her hearers
+were, perhaps, questing for consolatory rejoinders rather than
+congratulating themselves upon their own luckiness. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> was Big Anne who
+broke the pause, saying, with the best intentions, "Ah, sure, ma'am
+dear, plase God, <i>you</i> won't be so, and <i>we</i> won't be so;" a sentiment
+which apparently did not meet with the approval of Ody Rafferty, as he
+frowned bushily at her and said in a testy undertone, "Musha, good
+gracious, woman, what talk have you out of you at all?"</p>
+
+<p>Just at this moment sounds, the nature of which could not easily be
+mistaken, rose up close by&mdash;shouts and laughter and thumps and trampling
+of feet. People who ran quickly to the door were in time to see a knot
+of youths fall confusedly out of the house over the way&mdash;the
+Quigleys'&mdash;obviously, to judge by their subsequent proceedings, for the
+purpose of continuing a scuffle with ampler elbow room. But it was only
+for a very brief space that their wrestling and skirmishing among the
+puddles held anybody's attention. That was speedily diverted to the far
+more extraordinary and astonishing behaviour of their visitor, Mrs.
+Morrough. For she suddenly sprang up off her chair, exclaiming, "Saints
+above&mdash;it's Paddy&mdash;that's Paddy's voice&mdash;him that I haven't set eyes on
+for nine year next Easter&mdash;and there's Felix yellin' too! The both of
+them's come back, glory be to God!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> And so saying out of the house she
+ran, and across the road as straight as a dart, she who not an hour
+before had been led gropingly in, and would have put her foot among the
+glowing hearth-sods, if her guides had not pulled her away.</p>
+
+<p>The neighbours could at first look on in only mute amazement, but in any
+case the two boys and she were for some time so intricately entangled
+that any attempt to elicit any explanation would have been futile. When
+at last questions and answers were possible, no very lucid account of
+the matter was forthcoming. To the many voices that demanded: "Is it
+seein' you are, woman alive? Is it seein' you are?" all Mrs. Morrough
+could answer was: "Ay, bedad am I, and as well as iver I done in me
+life&mdash;praise be to goodness. Sure I dunno what way it was, but me sight
+came back to me all of a flash, the same as it went, just the very
+minyit I was hearin' the lads shoutin'. Och, Paddy, avic, but you're the
+grand man grown; and Felix, och now, to be seein' you agin, and
+everythin' else as clear as clear. It's meself's the lucky woman this
+day&mdash;glory be to God and Mary."</p>
+
+<p>In short, the marvellous restoration of her sight<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> is to this day a
+miracle, very freshly in remembrance at Lisconnel and Laraghmena, where
+the inhabitants know little about paralysed optic nerves, and might
+perhaps continue to wonder none the less even if they knew more. Beside
+it the unexpected reappearance of the two young Morroughs seemed almost
+a commonplace incident, though Paddy's fine new suit and gold
+watch-chain were, indeed, very exceptional things at Lisconnel. His
+story ran that he had prospered highly of late out in California, having
+made enough to set him up grandly on a good bit of land in the old
+country, and give Felix a fair start, and keep the old mother in comfort
+all the rest of her life. With which objects in view they had landed at
+Queenstown, he and his wife, a girl belonging to very respectable,
+decent people in the county Wicklow. "So next mornin', walkin' along the
+Quay, who should I see but me gintleman there, and another chap along
+with him, and both of them lookin' as wild as if they'd been caught. And
+says I to Sally, 'You bet, that's Felix from our place at home;' and
+right I was, and just slick in time to stop him goin' on board." Paddy
+had then left his wife with her family in Wicklow, where he had seen a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span>
+promising farm; and he and Felix were now on their way to fetch their
+mother thither.</p>
+
+<p>"And it's in the quare consternation you'd ha' been," said Theresa
+Joyce, "if you'd landed up at Laraghmena, and found her quit out of it
+the way she was."</p>
+
+<p>"And that would ha' happint us," said Felix, "if it hadn't been for
+young Dan Ryan in there just now passin' the remark that we couldn't
+expec' Father Martin to be sendin' us notices all the way to the County
+Cork, and supposin' I'd very belike missed the right day for the stamer
+be raison of it. For if we hadn't got fightin' and tumblin' out of the
+house, you might aisy ha' gone along wid yourselves, and niver known we
+were in the place at all. 'Twas great luck entirely."</p>
+
+<p>Fortune, in truth, had seemingly taken Mrs. Morrough and her affairs
+into the highest favour. Even the luck-insurance of a trivial loss was
+not wanting to her, as in her hasty exit she had dropped her new teapot,
+which broke into many pieces on Mrs. Doyne's floor. So that, as has been
+said, she never beheld it in its beauty. But the very skies had cleared
+above her head, swept by a waft of wind that scattered the clouds faster
+and further than a drift of withered leaves, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> the sinking sun
+broadened in splendour before the eyes that had lost sight of him
+through ten interminable days. The wet stones on the road glistened like
+jewels, and the shallowest pools between them held unfathomed deeps of
+blue, when the Morroughs set off for Laraghmena, where they intended to
+sleep the night, and bid their friends farewell. "And if it's themselves
+won't be in the fine astonishment when they set eyes upon you, woman
+dear!" said Theresa Joyce, "for if you'd been twenty year away
+thravellin' the world crooked and straight, you couldn't ha' come back a
+diff'rinter crathur from what you were, and we settin' out this woeful
+mornin'. Little notion you had what was comin' to you, and it all the
+while runnin' up your road, so to spake, like the sun racin' the shadows
+on a windy day. 'Deed now, I'd be goin' along wid you to hear what
+they'll say to it, but I'm ould you see, and ivery step I've thramped I
+have the feel of in ivery bone of me body; so I'll stop this night up at
+Brian's."</p>
+
+<p>"And bedad, ma'am, it's well off you are, if you've the feel of nothin'
+worse in them," said the querulous voice of old Peter Sheridan, whose
+acquaintances describe him as being "terrible<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> gathered up with the
+rheumatism this great while," so great, in fact, that everybody except
+himself has by this time become accustomed to his condition.</p>
+
+<p>For the most part, however, they were rather pleased faces that watched
+the three strangers out of sight, the last long beams from the sunset
+making blink the eyes of nearly all Lisconnel. The west dispread its
+fiery golden bloom wider every moment as the swelling scarlet disc
+wheeled lower, burning with orbed flame a hollow path through the
+kindled haze. One laggard cloud, a great, soft nest of snow, drifted
+into the heart of it, and out of it again, flushed and glistering, and
+sailed on, a radiant shape, to meet and eclipse the misty white
+ghost-moon, faint and dim in the east. Far away over the level bog the
+light was stealing about in streams like water spilt on a floor.</p>
+
+<p>"Well now, I declare," said Mrs. Brian, "it does one's heart good to see
+a bit of luck like that happenin' to a body."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, does it," said Judy Ryan, "the crathur to be gettin' back her sight
+just in the right minyit of time to see her son comin' home to her. Sure
+now one might take a plisure in plannin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> such a thing, if one had the
+managin' of them."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, dear, but I wish somebody 'ud be conthrivin' a bit of good luck for
+us then," said Mrs. Quigley.</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe there's plinty more where that's comin' from," suggested Brian
+Kilfoyle, hopefully.</p>
+
+<p>"It's apt to stay there, then," quoth Mrs. Quigley, "for any signs I can
+see."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, ma'am, that's me own notion," said Peter Sheridan, bitterly; "I'm
+thinkin' we'll have to be goin' there, wheriver it is, and lookin' after
+it for ourselves, if it's good luck we're a-wantin'."</p>
+
+<p>"And I dunno what better we could be doin'," said Theresa Joyce, "than
+goin' where it is, when we get the chance. Ah, there's the last of the
+sun," she said, as a quivering red shaft shot up suddenly, and trembled
+away into nothing on the air. "Ay, for sure, he goes down a great way
+off out on the bog; the crathur 'ud ha' been plased to see it. 'Deed no,
+I dunno anythin' better we could be doin' than goin' after our good
+luck."</p>
+
+<p>So all through that gathering twilight Mrs. Morrough and her two sons
+were journeying<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> away with their high fortune to Laraghmena. They were
+still on the road long after the clear moon had filled the air with
+shimmering silver, and sent their shadows stretching darkly far over the
+frosted grass. But Lisconnel had gone to seek, for the time being, its
+good luck in the land of dreams.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h3>Transcriber's Notes</h3>
+
+<p>This book contains inconsistent use of "'ill" contracted with the
+previous word.  See <a href="#Page_29">Page 29</a>: "The lads 'ill be" and <a href="#Page_87">Page 87</a>: "the
+Union'ill be shut."  These have been left as in the original.</p>
+
+<p>There are also some inconsistent spellings in the dialect that have been
+left alone. For instance, iligant and illigant.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Strangers at Lisconnel, by Barlow Jane
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Strangers at Lisconnel, by Barlow Jane
+
+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: Strangers at Lisconnel
+
+Author: Barlow Jane
+
+Release Date: July 31, 2006 [EBook #18957]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRANGERS AT LISCONNEL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Melissa Er-Raqabi, Ted Garvin and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+STRANGERS AT LISCONNEL
+
+_A SECOND SERIES OF IRISH IDYLLS_
+
+
+BY
+
+JANE BARLOW
+
+
+
+
+  NEW YORK
+  DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
+  1895
+
+
+  _Copyright, 1895_,
+
+  by
+
+  Dodd, Mead and Company.
+
+
+
+
+  TO
+
+  M. L. B.
+
+  [Gaelic: Is fada me beo do dhiaigh.]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                       PAGE
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+OUT OF THE WAY                            1
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+JERRY DUNNE'S BASKET                     14
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+MRS. KILFOYLE'S CLOAK                    31
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+A GOOD TURN                              53
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+FORECASTS                                80
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+A FAIRING                               112
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+MR. POLYMATHERS                         139
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+HONORIS CAUSA                           168
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+BOYS' WAGES                             211
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+CON THE QUARE ONE                       235
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+MAD BELL                                271
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+A FLITTING                              303
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+A RETURN                                324
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+GOOD LUCK                               340
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+OUT OF THE WAY
+
+
+To Lisconnel, our very small hamlet in the middle of a wide bogland, the
+days that break over the dim blue hill-line, faint and far off, seldom
+bring a stranger's face; but then they seldom take a familiar one away,
+beyond reach, at any rate of return before nightfall. In fact, there are
+few places amid this mortal change to which we may come back after any
+reasonable interval with more confidence of finding things just as we
+left them, due allowance being made for the inevitable fingering of
+Time. We shall find some old people who have aged under it, and some
+who, as certain philosophers would hold, have grown younger again. The
+latter may be seen just beginning, perhaps, to sit up stiff on a woman's
+arm, or starting for a trial crawl over mother earth; and of them we
+remark that there is another little Ryan or Quigley; while the former
+stay sunning themselves so inertly, or totter about so shakily, that we
+notice at once how much old Sheridan, or the Widow Joyce, has failed
+since last year. These babies and grandparents often associate a good
+deal with one another at the stage when the old body is still capable of
+"keepin' an eye on the child," and the child still resorts to all fours
+if it wants to get up its highest speed. But this companionship does not
+last long in any given case. Very soon the expanding and the contracting
+sphere cease to touch closely. On the one hand, the world widens into
+more spacious tracts for nimbler and bolder ranging over with all manner
+of remarkable things growing and living upon it, to be gathered and
+captured, or at least sought and chased, among pools, and hillocks and
+swampy places. On the other, it shrinks to within the limits of a few
+dwindling furlongs and perches, traversed ever more feebly, until at
+length even the nearest stone, on which the warm rays can be basked in,
+seems to have moved too far off, and the flicker-haunted nook by the
+hearth-fire becomes the end of the whole day's journey.
+
+Thus the generations, as they succeed one another, wave-like preserve a
+well-marked rhythm in their coming and going--play, work, rest--not to
+be interrupted by anything less peremptory than death or disablement.
+This wag-by-the-wall swings and swings its bobbed pendulum without
+pause, but one swing is much like the other, and their background never
+varies. Little Pat out stravading of a fine morning on the great
+brown-wigged bog, and, it may be hoped, enjoying himself thoroughly, is
+taking the same first steps in life as young Pat his father, now busy
+cutting turf-sods, and old Pat, his grandfather, idly watching them
+burn, with a pipe, if in luck, to keep alight. And the Lisconnel folk,
+therefore, because the changes wrought by human agency come to them in
+unimposing forms, are strongly impressed by the vast natural
+vicissitudes of things which rule their destinies. The melting of season
+into season, and year into year, the leaf-like withering and drifting
+away of the old from among the fresh springing growths, are ever before
+their eyes, and the contemplation steeps them in a sense of the
+transitoriness of things good and bad. Even the black soil they tread on
+may next year flutter up into a vanishing blue column through a
+smoke-hole in somebody's thatch. They carry this sense with a light and
+heavy heart. In like manner they make the very most of all unusual
+events. They find materials for half-an-hour's talk in the passage by
+their doors of one of those rarely coming strangers, who do appear from
+time to time, as frequently, indeed, as anybody would expect, having
+surveyed the thoroughfare that links us with humanity. For if we follow
+it southward, where, like the unvanishing wake of some vessel, it
+streaks the level plain, that is lonely as a wide water, but stiller, we
+pass by Dan O'Beirne's forge, now neighbourless, and through humble
+Duffclane, and on to Ballybrosna, our Town; but we must go many a mile
+further to reach anything upon which you would bestow that title. Or, if
+we turn northward, we only find it seaming another ample fold of
+bogland, outspread far and far beyond Lisconnel before a grey hill-range
+begins to rise in slow undulations, crested with furze and broom. Here
+we smell turf-smoke again, and see a cabin-row that is Sallinbeg, and
+hence the road strikes north-westward in among the mountains, where a
+few mottled-faced sheep peer down over it from their smooth green walks,
+but do not care to trust their black velvet legs upon it. And then, by
+the time that the air has become sea-scented, the road climbs to the
+top of a hill, and stops there abruptly, as if it had been travelling
+all the while merely to look at the view. The truth is that the funds
+for its construction would go no further, and, in consequence, wayfarers
+coming along by the shore still have to tread out a path for themselves
+across a gap of moorland, if they are bound for Lisconnel.
+
+You may perceive, therefore, that Lisconnel lies out of the way, on the
+route to no places of importance, and as its own ten or a dozen little
+houses are, I fear, collectively altogether insignificant, it has small
+reason to expect many visitors. The Widow M'Gurk said one day that you
+might as well be living at the bottom of the boghole for any company you
+got the chance of seeing; but this was an exaggeration. She was vexed
+when she made the remark, because Mrs. Dooley, old Dan O'Beirne's
+married daughter, then staying at the forge, had promised to come and
+inspect a pair of marketable chickens, in anticipation of which Mrs.
+M'Gurk had wetted a cup of tea and used up her last handful of wholemeal
+for a cake, that Mrs. Dooley, who was in rather affluent circumstances,
+might not think them "too poorly off altogether." But, after all, the
+hours had slipped blankly by, and nobody had arrived. So the widow had
+ruefully put her teapot to sit on the hob until himself came in--for,
+properly speaking, she was at this time not yet a widow--and had stepped
+down her tussocky slope with her double disappointment to Mrs. Kilfoyle.
+
+Mrs. Kilfoyle was knitting at her door and not looking out over the bog,
+where the flushed light of the sunset drowsed on the black sod in an
+almost tangible fire-film. Against it the poppies stood up dark and
+opaque, but the large white daisies had caught the wraith of the glow on
+their glimmering discs. She had been thinking how not so long ago her
+son Thady used to come whistling home to her across the bog when the
+shadows stretched their longest. The sunset still came punctually every
+evening, but had grown wonderfully lonesome since the kick of a
+cross-tempered cart-horse had silenced his whistling and stopped his
+home-coming for ever. Thady's whistling had been indifferent, considered
+as music, yet it had sounded pleasant in her ears, and Mrs. M'Gurk's
+trouble seemed to her not very serious. However, she replied to her
+complaint: "Ah, sure, woman dear, like enough she might be here
+to-morra."
+
+"And if she is, she'll be very apt to not get e'er a chuck or a chucken
+off of me--not the feather of a one," said Mrs. M'Gurk, resentfully,
+"plenty of other things I have to do besides wastin' me time waitin' for
+people that don't know their own minds from one minyit to the next, and
+makin' a fool of meself star-gazin' along the road, and ne'er a fut
+stirrin' on it no more than if it was desolit wildernesses."
+
+She would not for the world have alluded to her expenditure of more
+material resources, and accordingly had to explain her vexation by
+putting a fictitious value upon her time, which, in reality, was just
+then drearily superabundant.
+
+"Sure," suggested Mrs. Kilfoyle, "the poor woman maybe was kep' at home
+some way, and she wid ivery intintion to be comin'. I declare, now,
+you'd whiles think things knew what you was manin' in your mind, and riz
+themselves up agin it a' purpose to prevint you, they happen that
+conthrary."
+
+As Mrs. M'Gurk's experience did not dispose her to gainsay this
+proposition, and she was nevertheless disinclined to be mollified by it,
+she likewise had recourse to generalities, and said:
+
+"'Deed then it's welcome anybody is to stop away if they're wishful,
+hindered or no. Long sorry I'd be to have people disthressin' themselves
+streelin' after _me_." And she added, rather inconsistently, the remark
+already mentioned: "But the likes of this place I never witnessed. You
+might as well be livin' at the bottom of the blackest ould boghoule
+there, for e'er a chance you have to be seein' a bit of company."
+
+"And it's yourself 'ud make the fine sizeable waterask, ma'am," a
+high-pitched voice said suddenly from within doors, causing Mrs. M'Gurk
+to start and peer into the dark opening behind her, somewhat taken aback
+at finding that she had had an unsuspected audience, which is always
+more or less of a shock. The first object she descried through the hazy
+dusk was the figure of the old woman known to Lisconnel as Ody
+Rafferty's aunt, but in fact so related to his father, sitting with her
+short black dudeen by the delicate pink and white embers, for the
+evening was warm and the fire low. Ody himself was leaning against the
+wall, critically examining Brian Kilfoyle's blackthorn, and forming a
+poor opinion of it with considerable satisfaction. Not that he bore
+Brian any ill-will, but because this is his method of attaining to
+contentment with his own possessions.
+
+"Whethen now and is it yourself that's in it, Ody Rafferty?" said Mrs.
+M'Gurk, as she recognised him. "And what talk have you out of you about
+waterasks? You're the great man, bedad."
+
+"Me aunt's lookin' in on Mrs. Kilfoyle, ma'am," said Ody, "be raison of
+Brian bein' off to the Town. And right enough you and me knows what's
+took him there; and so does Norah Finegan. Och, good luck to the pair of
+thim."
+
+"Coortin'," said his aunt, who preferred to put things briefly and
+clearly. "But I was tellin' Mrs. Kilfoyle to not be frettin', for sure
+God is good, and they'll be apt to keep her in it all's one."
+
+"Goodness may pity you, woman," said Mrs. M'Gurk. "Brian 'ud as lief
+take and bring home a she _hyenna_, and it ravin' mad, as anybody 'ud
+look crooked at his mother, I very well know."
+
+"Norah's a rael dacint little slip of a girl," Mrs. Kilfoyle said
+tranquilly, considering that her son's character needed no certificate.
+But the old woman only grunted doubtfully, and said: "Och, is she?" For
+she had been a superfluous aunt so long that she found it hard to
+believe in anything better than toleration.
+
+"Talkin' of company," said Ody, to change the subject--which his aunt's
+remarks often disposed people to do--"Mad Bell's just after shankin'
+back wid herself; she's below colloguin' wid Big Anne. It's a fine long
+tramp she's took this time; so if she was in the humour she'd a right to
+ha' plinty to be tellin' us."
+
+"Well, now, I'm glad the crathur's home," said Mrs. Kilfoyle. "It's
+lonesome in a manner to think of the little ould bein' rovin' about the
+world like a wisp of hay gathered up on the win'; for all, tubbe sure,
+it's her own fancy starts her off."
+
+"I won'er where to she wint this time," said Mrs. M'Gurk.
+
+"You might as well," said Ody, "be won'erin' where a one of thim
+saygulls goes, when it gives a flourish of its ould flippers and away
+wid itself head foremost--barrin', in coorse, that Mad Bell's bound to
+keep on the dhry land at all ivents. But from Sallinbeg ways she come
+this evenin', singin' 'Garry Owen' most powerful--I know that much."
+
+"Ah, then she might be chance ha' been as far as Laraghmena, and ha'
+seen a sight of me brother Mick and Theresa," Mrs. Kilfoyle said, with
+wistful interest. For at Lisconnel we still look not a little to the
+reports brought by stray travellers for news of absent friends, much as
+we did before the days of penny posts and mail trains. And our
+geographical lore is vague enough to impede us but slightly in our hopes
+of obtaining information from any quarter. Only the probability seems to
+be increased if the newcomer arrives from the direction in which our
+friend departed.
+
+"Sure she might so," said Ody. "But niver a tell she'll tell onless she
+happens to take the notion in the quare ould head of her. It's just be
+the road of humouring her now and agin, and piecin' her odd stories
+together, you git e'er a discovery, so to spake, of the places she's
+after bein' in."
+
+The scenes of Mad Bell's wanderings did indeed reveal themselves to her
+neighbours confusedly and dispersedly in her fitful and capricious
+narrative, like glimpses of a landscape caught through a shifting mist.
+As this sometimes distorts the objects that loom within it, so Mad
+Bell's statements were occasionally misleading. Once, for example, she
+threw the Quigley family into most distracted concern by her accounts of
+the terrific "shootin' and murdherin' and massacreein'" she had seen in
+progress down away at Glasgannon, where Joe Quigley had taken service
+with a strong farmer; these disturbances being in reality nothing more
+than a muster of the county militia.
+
+"But I can tell you how she thravelled a good step of the way home," Ody
+now continued, "for she tould me herself. The Tinkers gave her a lift in
+their ould cart. Somewheres beyant Rosbride she met wid them; glory be
+to goodness 'twasn't any nearer here they were, the ould thieves of sin.
+Howane'er, _Mrs. M'Gurk_ belike 'ud be wishful to see thim comin' along.
+Fine company they'd be for anybody begorrah. Troth, it's the quare ugly
+boghoule she'd find the aquil of thim at the bottom of."
+
+Mrs. M'Gurk, however, said protestingly, "Och, wirrasthrew, man, don't
+be talkin' of the Tinkers. They'd a right to not be let set fut widin
+tin mile of any dacint place. Thim or the likes of any such rogues."
+
+And Mrs. Kilfoyle said, "I'd liefer than a great deal they kep' out of
+it. Ne'er a one of the lot of them I ever beheld but had the eyes
+rowlin' in his head wid villiny. And the childer, goodness help them, do
+be worse than the grown people."
+
+And Ody Rafferty's aunt said, "Bad cess to the whole of them."
+
+For in Lisconnel nobody has a good word to say of the Tinkers.
+
+The tribe and their many delinquencies have even supplied us with a bit
+of the proverbial philosophy in which not a little of our local history
+is epitomised. The saying, "As pat as thievin' to a tinker" is probably
+quoted among us as frequently as any other, except, perhaps, one which
+refers to Jerry Dunne's basket. This latter had its origin in a certain
+event, not like the former in the long-accumulating observation of
+habits and propensities, and to explain it therefore is to write a
+chapter of our chronicles. Moreover, the event in question is otherwise
+not unimportant from a sociological point of view, because it is very
+likely to have been the first morning call ever made at Lisconnel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+JERRY DUNNE'S BASKET
+
+
+So it is worth while to tell the reason why people at Lisconnel
+sometimes respond with irony to a question: "What have I got? Sure, all
+that Jerry Dunne had in his basket." The saying is of respectable
+antiquity, for it originated while Bessy Joyce, who died a year or so
+back, at "a great ould age entirely," was still but a slip of a girl. In
+those days her mother used often to say regretfully that she didn't know
+when she was well off, like Rody O'Rourke's pigs, quoting a proverb of
+obscurer antecedents. When she did so she was generally thinking of the
+fine little farm in the county Clare, which they had not long since
+exchanged for the poor tiny holding away in the heart of the black bog;
+and of how, among the green fields, and thriving beasts, and other good
+things of Clonmena, she had allowed her content to be marred by such a
+detail as her Bessy's refusal to favour the suit of Jerry Dunne.
+
+Mrs. Joyce eagerly desired a brilliant alliance for Bessy, who was
+rather an important daughter, being the only grown-up girl, and a very
+pretty one, among a troop of younger brethren; so it seemed contrary
+enough that she wouldn't look the same side of the road as young Jerry,
+who was farming prosperously on his own account, and whose family were
+old friends and neighbours, and real respectable people, including a
+first cousin nothing less than a parish priest. Yet Bessy ran away and
+hid herself in as ingeniously unlikely places as a strayed calf whenever
+she heard of his approach, and if brought by chance into his society
+became most discouragingly deaf and dumb.
+
+It is true that at the time I speak of Bessy's prospects fully entitled
+her to as opulent a match, and no one apparently foresaw how speedily
+they would be overcast by her father's improvidence. But Andy Joyce had
+an ill-advised predilection for seeing things what he called "dacint and
+proper" about him, and it led him into several imprudent acts. For
+instance, he built some highly superior sheds in the bawn, to the
+bettering, no doubt, of his cattle's condition, but very little to his
+own purpose, which he would indeed have served more advantageously by
+spending the money they cost him at Moriarty's shebeen. Nor was he left
+without due warning of the consequences likely to result from such
+courses. The abrupt raising of his rent by fifty per cent, was a broad
+hint which most men would have taken; and it did keep Andy quiet,
+ruefully, for a season or two. Then, however, having again saved up a
+trifle, he could not resist the temptation to drain the swampy corner of
+the farthest river-field, which was as kind a bit of land as you could
+wish, only for the water lying on it, and in which he afterwards raised
+himself a remarkably fine crop of white oats. The sight of them "done
+his heart good," he said, exultantly, nothing recking that it was the
+last touch of farmer's pride he would ever feel. Yet on the next
+quarter-day the Joyces received notice to quit, and their landlord
+determined to keep the vacated holding in his own hands; those new sheds
+were just the thing for his young stock. Andy, in fact, had done his
+best to improve himself off the face of the earth, and he should
+therefore have been thankful to retain a foothold, even in a
+loose-jointed, rush-roofed cabin away at stony Lisconnel. Whether
+thankful or no, there, at any rate, he presently found himself
+established with all his family, and the meagre remnant of his hastily
+sold-off gear, and the black doors of the "house" seeming to loom ahead
+whenever he looked into the murky future.
+
+The first weeks and months of their new adversity passed slowly and
+heavily for the transplanted household, more especially for Andy and his
+wife, who had outgrown a love of paddling in bogholes, and had acquired
+a habit of wondering "what at all 'ud become of the childer, the
+crathurs." One shrill-blasted March morning Andy trudged off to the fair
+down below at Duffclane--not that he had any business to transact there,
+unless we reckon as such a desire to gain a respite from regretful
+boredom. He but partially succeeded in doing this, and returned at dusk
+so fagged and dispirited that he had not energy to relate his scraps of
+news until he was half through his plate of stirabout. Then he observed
+"I seen a couple of boys from home in it."
+
+"Whethen now, to think of that," said Mrs. Joyce with mournful interest,
+"which of them was it?"
+
+"The one of them was Terence Kilfoyle," said Andy.
+
+Mrs. Joyce's interest flagged, for young Kilfoyle was merely a
+good-looking lad with the name of being rather wild. "Ah sure _he_ might
+as well be in one place as another," she said indifferently. "Bessy,
+honey, as you're done, just throw the scraps to the white hin where
+she's sittin'."
+
+"He sez he's thinkin' to settle hereabouts," said Andy; "I tould him
+he'd a right to go thry his fortin somewhere outlandish, but he didn't
+seem to fancy the idee, and small blame to him. A man's bound to get his
+heart broke one way or the other anywheres, as far as I can see. I met
+Jerry Dunne too."
+
+"Och and did you indeed?" said Mrs. Joyce, kindling into eagerness
+again.
+
+Jerry had been absent from Clonmena at the time of their flitting, and
+they had heard nothing of him since; but she still cherished a flicker
+of hope in his connection, which the tidings of his appearance in the
+neighbourhood fanned and fed.
+
+"And he's quit out of it himself," Andy continued, "for the ould uncle
+of his he's been stoppin' wid this while back at Duffclane's after dyin'
+and lavin' him a fine farm and a hantle of money, and I dunno what all
+besides. So it's there he's goin' to live, and he's gave up the ould
+place at Clonmena, as well he may, and no loss to him on it, for he sez
+himself he niver spent a pinny over it beyont what he'd be druv to, if
+he wanted to get e'er a crop out of it at all, and keep things together
+in any fashion: he wasn't such a fool." Andy hesitated, as if on the
+brink of a painful theme, and resumed with an effort: "He's bought
+Magpie and the two two-year-olds off of Peter Martin. Chape enough he
+got them, too, though he had to give ten shillin's a head more for them
+than Martin ped me."
+
+"Mavrone, but some people have the luck," said Mrs. Joyce.
+
+"And Jerry bid me tell you," said Andy, the memory of his lost cattle
+still saddening his tone, "that he might be steppin' up here to see you
+to-morra or next day."
+
+At this Mrs. Joyce's face suddenly brightened, as if she had been
+summoned to share Jerry Dunne's good luck. She felt almost as if that
+had actually happened. For his visit could surely signify nothing else
+than that he meant to continue his suit; and under the circumstances,
+Bessy's misliking was a piece of folly not to be taken into account.
+Besides that, the girl, she thought, looked quite heartened up by the
+news. So she replied to her husband: "'Deed then, he'll be very
+welcome," and the sparkle was in her eyes all the rest of the evening.
+
+On the morrow, which was a bright morning with a far-off pale blue sky,
+Mrs. Joyce hurried over her readying-up, that she might be prepared for
+her possible visitor. She put on her best clothes, and as her wardrobe
+had not yet fallen to a level with her fortune, she was able to array
+herself in a strong steel-grey mohair gown, a black silk apron with
+three rows of velvet ribbon on it besides the binding, a fine small
+woollen shawl of very brilliant scarlet and black plaid, with a pinkish
+cornelian brooch to pin it at the throat, all surmounted by a snowy
+high-caul cap, in those days not yet out of date at Lisconnel, where
+fashions lag somewhat. She noticed, well-pleased, Bessy's willingness to
+fall in with the suggestion that she should re-arrange her hair and
+change her gown after the morning's work was done; and the inference
+drawn grew stronger, when, for the first time since their troubles, the
+girl began to sing "Moll Dhuv in Glanna" while she coiled up her long
+tresses.
+
+All that forenoon Mrs. Joyce had happy dreams about the mending of the
+family fortunes, which would be effected by Bessy's marriage with Jerry
+Dunne. When her neighbour, Mrs. Ryan, looked in, she could not forbear
+mentioning the expected call, and was further elated because Mrs. Ryan
+at once remarked: "Sure, 'twill be Bessy he's after," though she
+herself, of course, disclaimed the idea, saying: "Och musha, ma'am, not
+at all." The Ryans were tenants who had also been put out of Clonmena,
+and they occupied a cabin adjoining the Joyces', these two dwellings,
+backed by the slopes of the Knockawn, forming the nucleus of Lisconnel.
+
+About noon, Paddy, the eldest boy, approached at a hand gallop,
+bestriding a donkey which belonged to the gang of men who were still
+working on the unfinished road. As soon as the beast reached the
+open-work stone wall of the potato-field it resolutely scraped its rider
+off, a thing it had been vainly wishing to do all along the fenceless
+track. Paddy, however, alighted unconcerned among the clattering stones,
+and ran on with his tidings. These were to the effect that he was "after
+seein' Jerry Dunne shankin' up from Duffclane ways, a goodish bit below
+the indin' of the road, and he wid a great big basket carryin', fit to
+hould a young turf-stack."
+
+The intelligence created an agreeable excitement, which was undoubtedly
+heightened by the fact of the basket. "Very belike," said Mrs. Ryan,
+"he's bringin' somethin' to you, or it might be Bessy." And while Mrs.
+Joyce rejoined deprecatingly: "Ah sure, woman alive, what would the poor
+lad be troublin' himself to bring us all this way?" she was really
+answering her own question with a dozen flattering conjectures. The
+basket must certainly contain _something_, and there were so few by any
+means probable things that would not at this pinch have come acceptably
+to the Joyces' household, where the heavy pitaty sack grew light with
+such alarming rapidity, and the little hoard of corn dwindled, and the
+childer's appetites seemed to wax larger day by day. She had not quite
+made up her mind, when Jerry arrived, whether she would wish for a bit
+of bacon--poor Andy missed an odd taste of it so bad--or for another
+couple of hens, which would be uncommonly useful now that her own few
+had all left off laying.
+
+Mrs. Ryan having discreetly withdrawn, Mrs. Joyce stood alone in her
+dark doorway to receive her guest, and, through all her flutter of hope,
+she felt a bitter twinge of housewifely chagrin at being discovered in
+such miserable quarters. The black earth flooring at her threshold
+gritted hatefully under her feet, and the gusts whistling through the
+many chinks of her rough walls seemed to skirl derisively. She was
+nevertheless resolved to put the best possible face upon the situation.
+
+"Well, Mrs. Joyce, ma'am, and how's yourself this long while?" said
+Jerry Dunne, coming up. "Bedad I'm glad to see you so finely, and it's
+an iligant place you've got up here."
+
+"Ah, it's not too bad whatever," said Mrs. Joyce, "on'y 'twas a great
+upset on us turnin' out of the ould house at home. Himself had a right
+to ha' left things the way he found them, and then it mightn't iver ha'
+happened him. But sure, poor man, he niver thought he'd be ruinatin' us
+wid his conthrivances. It's God's will. Be steppin' inside to the fire,
+Jerry lad; there's a thin feel yet in the win'."
+
+Jerry, stepping inside, deposited his basket, which did not appear to be
+very heavy, rather disregardfully by him on the floor. Mrs. Joyce would
+not allow herself to glance in its direction. It struck her that the
+young man seemed awkward and flustered, and she considered this a
+favourable symptom.
+
+"And what way's Mr. Joyce?" said Jerry. "He was lookin' grand whin I
+seen him yisterday."
+
+"'Deed, he gits his health middlin' well enough, glory be to goodness,"
+she said; "somewhiles he'll be frettin' a bit, thinkin' of diff'rent
+things, and when I tell him he'd better lave botherin' his head wid
+them, he sez he might as aisy bid a blast of win' to not be blowin'
+through a houle. Och, Andy's a quare man. He's out and about now
+somewheres on the farm."
+
+Mrs. Joyce put a spaciousness into her tone wholly disproportionate to
+their screed of tussocks and boulders; and then paused, hoping that the
+next inquiry might relate to Bessy.
+
+But what young Jerry said was, "You've got a great run, anyway, for the
+fowls."
+
+The irrelevance of the remark disappointed Mrs. Joyce, and she replied a
+little tartly: "A great run you may call it, for begorrah our hearts is
+broke huntin' after the crathurs, and they strayin' off wid themselves
+over the width of the bog there, till you've as much chance of catchin'
+them as the sparks flyin' up the chimney."
+
+"That's unhandy, now," said Jerry. He sat for some moments reflectively
+ruffling up his flaxen hair with both hands, and then he said, "Have you
+the big white hin yit that you got from me a while ago?"
+
+"We have so bedad," said Mrs. Joyce, not loth to enlarge upon this
+subject. "Sure we made a shift to bring a few of the best chickens we
+had along wid us, and sorry we'd ha' been to lose her, and she a
+won'erful layer, and after you a-givin' her to us in a prisint that
+way."
+
+"There was some talk that time," said Jerry, "about me and Bessy."
+
+"Ay, true for you, there was," said Mrs. Joyce, in eager assent, "plinty
+of talk." She would have added more, but he was evidently in a hurry to
+speak again.
+
+"Well, there's none now," he said. "Things is diff'rent altogether. If
+I'd ha' known, I'd ha' kep' the hin. The fact of the matter is I'm about
+gettin' married to Sally Coghlan, that's me poor uncle's wife's niece.
+He's after leavin' her what he had saved up. She's a fine figure of a
+girl as iver you saw, and as good as gould, and the bit of lan' and the
+bit of money had a right to go the one way. So I was thinkin', Mrs.
+Joyce, I might as well be takin' home the ould him wid me--things bein'
+diff'rent now, and no talk of Bessy. Sally has a great wish for a white
+hin, and we've ne'er a one of that sort at our place. I've brought a wad
+of hay in the basket meself, for 'fraid yous might be short of it up
+here." Jerry gave a kick to the basket, which betrayed the flimsy nature
+of its contents by rolling over with a wobble on its side.
+
+At this critical moment Mrs. Joyce's pride rallied loyally to the rescue
+of her dignity and self-respect, proving as effectual as the ice-film
+which keeps the bleakest pool unruffled by the wildest storm wing. With
+the knell of all her hope clanging harshly in her ears, she smiled
+serenely, and said gaily: "Ay bedad, himself was tellin' us somethin'
+about it last night. Sure, I'm rael glad to hear tell of your good luck,
+and I wish you joy of it. And will you be gettin' married agin
+Shrovetide? Och, that's grand. But the white hin now--the on'y thing is
+the crathur's been sittin' on a clutch of eggs since Monday week. So
+what are we to do at all?"
+
+"There's hapes of room for the whole of them in the basket, for that
+matter," Jerry suggested promptly.
+
+"Ah, sure, it's distroyed they'd be, jogglin' along, and the crathur
+herself 'ud go distracted entirely; sorra a bit of good you'd get of
+her. But look here, Mr. Dunne, I've got another out there as like her as
+if the both of them had come out of the one egg, and you could be takin'
+that instid. It's a lucky thing I didn't set her to sit the way I was
+intendin'; on'y I niver could get a clutch gathered for her, be raison
+of the lads aitin' up the eggs on me. Sure, I can't keep them from the
+little bosthoons when they be hungry."
+
+"'Twould be all the same thing to me, in coorse, supposin' she was
+equally so good," Jerry admitted with caution.
+
+"Ivery feather she is," said Mrs. Joyce. "I seen her runnin' about there
+just this minute; you can be lookin' at her yourself."
+
+She went towards the door as she spoke, and was somewhat taken aback to
+perceive her husband leaning against the wall close outside. How much of
+the discussion he might have heard, she could not tell. The white hen
+also appeared within easy reach, daintily resplendent under the sunshine
+on a background of black turf. And Mrs. Ryan, standing darkly framed in
+her doorway, was very certain to be an interested observer of events.
+For the moment Mrs. Joyce's uppermost anxiety was to avoid any betrayal
+of discomfiture, and she accordingly said in a loud and cheerful tone:
+
+"Och, and are you there, Andy? Jerry Dunne's wishful for the loan of a
+clockin' hin, so I'm about catchin' him the young white one to take home
+wid him."
+
+But, to her intense disgust, Jerry, who had followed her with his
+basket, said remonstrantly: "Whethen now, Mrs. Joyce, the way I
+understand the matter there's no talk in it of borryin' at all. I'm on'y
+takin' her back instid of the ould one, and I question would any
+raisonable body stand me out I don't own her be rights. It's an unjust
+thing to be spakin' of loans."
+
+Mrs. Joyce was so dumbfounded by this rebuff that she could only hide
+her confusion by displaying an exaggerated activity in the capture of
+the hen.
+
+Her husband, however, said blandly, "Och, don't make yourself onaisy,
+man. Loan or no loan, you needn't be under any apperhinsion we'll be
+comin' after her wid a basket. Divil a much. Stir yourself, Kitty, and
+be clappin' her in under the lid. He's in a hurry to get home to his
+sweetheart wid the iligant prisint he's after pickin' up for her. Ay,
+that's right, woman alive; give a tie to the bit of string, and then
+there's nothin' to be delayin' him."
+
+After this everybody said good-bye with much politeness and affability,
+though withal a certain air of despatch, as if they were conscious of
+handling rather perishable goods. And when Jerry was beyond earshot,
+Andy, looking after him, remarked, "I niver liked a bone in that
+fellow's skin. Himself and his ould basket. The lads 'ill be prisintly
+comin' in to their dinners."
+
+"D'you know where Bessy is?" said Mrs. Joyce, her heart sinking still
+lower at the thought of the disappointment, which she had presumably
+been helping to prepare for her daughter.
+
+"When I seen her a while back, she was out there wid the childer,
+discoorsin' to Terence Kilfoyle," Andy said contentedly.
+
+"Musha, good gracious, Terence Kilfoyle, and what's _he_ come after?"
+she said in a bitter tone.
+
+"He stepped up wid a couple of pounds of fresh butter and a dozen of
+eggs. He said he minded Bessy havin' a fancy for duck-eggs, and he
+thought we mightn't happen to have e'er a one up here. She seemed as
+pleased as anythin'. But if you ax _me_, Kitty," he said with a
+twinkle, "I've a notion he's come after somethin' more than our ould
+hin."
+
+"He's a great young rogue," said Mrs. Joyce. Yet there was an accent of
+relief in her voice, and on her face a reflection of her husband's
+smile.
+
+And Jerry Dunne's basket still occupies its niche in the stores of our
+proverbial philosophy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+MRS. KILFOYLE'S CLOAK
+
+
+The opprobrious proverb already mentioned is not the only permanent mark
+of unpopularity that the Tinkers have earned for themselves at
+Lisconnel. Their very name has become a term of reproach among us, so
+that "an ould tinker" is recognised as an appropriate epithet for any
+troublesome beast or disagreeable neighbour. If they were not
+case-hardened by long experience, they would surely be mortified
+sometimes at the reception with which they meet almost wherever they go.
+The approach of the two queer vehicles in which they now generally
+travel is watched by displeased eyes all over our countryside, and they
+are so to speak lighted on their way by the gleam of suspicious or
+resentful glances. And it must be admitted that their evil reputation
+has not been bestowed upon them gratuitously. According to Ody Rafferty,
+"The like of such a clanjamfry of thievin' drunken miscreants, you
+wouldn't aisy get together, if you had a spring-trap set for them at the
+Ould Fellow's front door for a month of Sundays. And if himself didn't
+do a hard day's work the time he was consthructin' them, he niver done
+one in his life, and that's a fac'." But Ody is apt to be particularly
+severe in his strictures upon the Tinkers, because he feels an
+aggravated form of rivalry existing between him and them. For the
+wiliness which is understood to be Ody's forte also pre-eminently
+characterises many of the Tinkers' nefarious proceedings, and this makes
+it seem to him that they not only set their wits against his, but throw
+discredit upon his favourite quality by the glaring moral defects which
+they exhibit in conjunction with it. One's pleasure in being described
+admiringly as "the ould boyo that's in it," is much diminished when one
+hears the same thing said bitterly of some slieveen who has filched a
+poor body's meal bag, or run off with a lone widdy woman's fowl.
+
+Still, although the Tinkers' name has become a by-word among us through
+a long series of petty offences rather than any one flagrant crime,
+there is a notable misdeed on record against them, which has never been
+forgotten in the lapse of many years. It was perpetrated soon after the
+death of Mrs. Kilfoyle's mother, the Widow Joyce, an event which is but
+dimly recollected now at Lisconnel, as nearly half a century has gone
+by. She did not very long survive her husband, and he had left his roots
+behind in his little place at Clonmena, where, as we know, he had farmed
+not wisely, but too well, and had been put out of it for his pains to
+expend his energy upon our oozy black sods and stark-white boulders. But
+instead he moped about fretting for his fair green fields and few
+proudly-cherished beasts--especially the little old Kerry cow. And at
+his funeral the neighbours said: "Ah bedad, poor man, God help him, he
+niver held up his head agin from that good day to this."
+
+When Mrs. Joyce felt that it behoved her to settle her affairs, she
+found that the most important possession she had to dispose of was her
+large cloak. She had acquired it at the prosperous time of her marriage,
+and it was a very superior specimen of its kind, its dark-blue cloth
+being superfine, and its ample capes and capacious hood being
+double-lined and quilted, and stitched in a way which I cannot pretend
+to describe, but which made it a most substantial and handsome garment.
+If Mrs. Joyce had been left entirely to her own choice in the matter, I
+think she would have bequeathed it to her younger daughter Theresa,
+notwithstanding that custom clearly designated Bessy Kilfoyle, the
+eldest of the family, as the heiress. For she said to herself that poor
+Bessy had her husband and childer to consowl her, any way, but little
+Theresa, the crathur, had ne'er such a thing at all, and wouldn't have,
+not she, God love her. "And the back of me hand to some I could name."
+It seemed to her that to leave the child the cloak would be almost like
+keeping a warm wing spread over her in the cold wide world; and there
+was no fear that Bessy would take it amiss.
+
+But Theresa herself protested strongly against such a disposition,
+urging for one thing that sure she'd be lost in it entirely if ever she
+put it on, a not unfounded objection, as Theresa was several sizes
+smaller than Bessy, and even she fell far short of her mother in stature
+and portliness. Theresa also said confidently with a sinking heart: "But
+sure, anyhow, mother jewel, what matter about it? 'Twill be all gone to
+houles and flitters and thraneens, and so it will, plase goodness,
+afore there's any talk of anybody else wearin' it except your own ould
+self." And she expressed much the same conviction one day to her
+next-door neighbour, old Biddy Ryan, to whom she had run in for the loan
+of a sup of sour milk, which Mrs. Joyce fancied. To Biddy's sincere
+regret she could offer Theresa barely a skimpy noggin of milk, and only
+a meagre shred of encouragement; and by way of eking out the latter with
+its sorry substitute consolation, she said as she tilted the jug
+perpendicularly to extract its last drop:
+
+"Well, sure, me dear, I do be sayin' me prayers for her every sun goes
+over our heads that she might be left wid you this great while yet;
+'deed I do so. But ah, acushla, if we could be keepin' people
+that-a-way, would there be e'er a funeral iver goin' black on the road
+at all at all? I'm thinkin' there's scarce a one livin', and he as ould
+and foolish and little-good-for as you plase, but some crathur'ill be
+grudgin' him to his grave, that's himself may be all the while wishin'
+he was in it. Or, morebetoken, how can we tell what quare ugly misfortin
+thim that's took is took out of the road of, that we should be as good
+as biddin' thim stay till it comes to ruinate them? So it's prayin' away
+I am, honey," said old Biddy, whom Theresa could not help hating heart
+sickly. "But like enough the Lord might know better than to be mindin' a
+word I say."
+
+And it seemed that He did; at any way the day soon came when the heavy
+blue cloak passed into Mrs. Kilfoyle's possession.
+
+At that time it was clear, still autumn weather, with just a sprinkle of
+frost, white on the wayside grass, like the wraith of belated moonlight,
+when the sun rose, and shimmering into rainbow stars by noon. But about
+a month later the winter swooped suddenly on Lisconnel: with wild winds
+and cold rain that made crystal-silver streaks down the purple of the
+great mountain-heads peering in over our bogland.
+
+So one perishing Saturday Mrs. Kilfoyle made up her mind that she would
+wear her warm legacy on the bleak walk to Mass next morning, and
+reaching it down from where it was stowed away among the rafters wrapped
+in an old sack, she shook it respectfully out of its straight-creased
+folds. As she did so she noticed that the binding of the hood had ripped
+in one place, and that the lining was fraying out, a mishap which should
+be promptly remedied before it spread any further. She was not a very
+expert needlewoman, and she thought she had better run over the way to
+consult Mrs. O'Driscoll, then a young matron, esteemed the handiest and
+most helpful person in Lisconnel.
+
+"It's the nathur of her to be settin' things straight wherever she
+goes," Mrs. Kilfoyle said to herself as she stood in her doorway waiting
+for the rain to clear off, and looking across the road to the sodden
+roof which sheltered her neighbour's head. It has long been lying low,
+vanquished by a trouble which even she could not set to rights, and some
+of the older people say that things have gone a little crookeder in
+Lisconnel ever since.
+
+The shower was a vicious one, with the sting of sleet and hail in its
+drops, pelted about by gusts that ruffled up the puddles into ripples,
+all set on end, like the feathers of a frightened hen. The hens
+themselves stood disconsolately sheltering under the bank, mostly on one
+leg, as if they preferred to keep up the slightest possible connection
+with such a very damp and disagreeable earth. You could not see far in
+any direction for the fluttering sheets of mist, and a stranger who had
+been coming along the road from Duffclane, stepped out of them abruptly
+quite close, to Mrs. Kilfoyle's door, before she knew that there was
+anybody near. He was a tall, elderly man, gaunt and grizzled, very
+ragged, and so miserable-looking that Mrs. Kilfoyle could have felt
+nothing but compassion for him had he not carried over his shoulder a
+bunch of shiny cans, which was to her mind as satisfactory a passport as
+a ticket-of-leave. For although these were yet rather early days at
+Lisconnel, the Tinkers had already begun to establish their reputation.
+So when he stopped in front of her and said: "Good-day, ma'am," she only
+replied distantly, "It's a hardy mornin'," and hoped he would move on.
+But he said: "It's cruel could, ma'am," and continued to stand looking
+at her with wide and woful eyes, in which she conjectured--erroneously
+as it happened--hunger for warmth or food. Under these circumstances
+what could be done by a woman who was conscious of owning a
+redly-glowing hearth with a big black pot, fairly well filled, clucking
+and bobbing upon it? To possess such wealth as this, and think seriously
+of withholding a share from anybody who urges the incontestable claim of
+wanting it, is a mood altogether foreign to Lisconnel, where the
+responsibilities of property are, no doubt, very imperfectly understood.
+Accordingly Mrs. Kilfoyle said to the tattered tramp: "Ah, thin, step
+inside and have a couple of hot pitaties." And when he accepted the
+invitation without much alacrity, as if he had something else on his
+mind, she picked for him out of the steam two of the biggest potatoes,
+whose earth-coloured skins, cracking, showed a fair flouriness within;
+and she shook a little heap of salt, the only relish she had, on to the
+chipped white plate as she handed it to him, saying, "Sit you down be
+the fire there, and git a taste of the heat."
+
+Then she lifted her old shawl over her head, and ran out to see where at
+all Brian and Thady were gettin' their deaths on her under the pours of
+rain; and as she passed the Keoghs' adjacent door--which was afterwards
+the Sheridan's, whence their Larry departed so reluctantly--young Mrs.
+Keogh called her to come in and look at "the child," who being a new and
+unique possession was liable to develop alarmingly strange symptoms, and
+had now "woke up wid his head that hot, you might as well put your hand
+on the hob of the grate." Mrs. Kilfoyle stayed only long enough to
+suggest, as a possible remedy, a drop of two-milk whey. "But ah sure,
+woman dear, where at all 'ud we come by that, wid the crathur of a goat
+scarce wettin' the bottom of the pan?" and to draw reassuring omens
+from the avidity with which the invalid grabbed at a sugared crust. In
+fact, she was less than five minutes out of her house; but when she
+returned to it, she found it empty. First she noted with a moderate
+thrill of surprise that her visitor had gone away leaving his potatoes
+untouched, and next, with a rough shock of dismay, that her cloak no
+longer lay on the window seat where she had left it. From that moment
+she never felt any real doubts about what had befallen her, though for
+some time she kept on trying to conjure them up, and searched wildly
+round and round and round her little room, like a distracted bee strayed
+into a hollow furze-bush, before she sped over to Mrs. O'Driscoll with
+the news of her loss.
+
+It spread rapidly through Lisconnel, and brought the neighbours together
+exclaiming and condoling, though not in great force, as there was a fair
+going on down beyant, which nearly all the men and some of the women had
+attended. This was accounted cruel unlucky, as it left the place without
+any one able-bodied and active enough to go in pursuit of the thief. A
+prompt start might have overtaken him, especially as he was said to be
+"a thrifle lame-futted," though Mrs. M'Gurk, who had seen him come down
+the hill, opined that "'twasn't the sort of lameness 'ud hinder the
+miscreant of steppin' out, on'y a quare manner of flourish he had in a
+one of his knees, as if he was gatherin' himself up to make an offer at
+a grasshopper's lep, and then thinkin' better of it."
+
+Little Thady Kilfoyle reported that he had met the strange man a bit
+down the road, "leggin' it along at a great rate, wid a black rowl of
+somethin' under his arm that he looked to be crumplin' up as small as he
+could"--the word "crumpling" went acutely to Mrs. Kilfoyle's heart--and
+some long-sighted people declared that they could still catch glimpses
+of a receding figure through the hovering fog on the way towards
+Sallinbeg.
+
+"I'd think he'd be beyant seein' afore now," said Mrs. Kilfoyle, who
+stood in the rain, the disconsolate centre of the group about her door;
+all women and children except old Johnny Keogh, who was so bothered and
+deaf, that he grasped new situations slowly and feebly, and had now an
+impression of somebody's house being on fire. "He must ha' took off wid
+himself the instiant me back was turned, for ne'er a crumb had he
+touched of the pitaties."
+
+"Maybe he'd that much shame in him," said Mrs. O'Driscoll.
+
+"They'd a right to ha' choked him, troth and they had," said Ody
+Rafferty's aunt.
+
+"Is it chokin'?" said young Mrs. M'Gurk, bitterly. "Sure the bigger
+thief a body is the more he'll thrive on whatever he gits--you might
+think villiny was as good as butter to people's pitaties--you might so.
+Shame how are you? Liker he'd ate all he could swally in the last place
+he got the chance of layin' his hands on anythin'."
+
+"Och, woman alive, but it's the fool you were to let him out of your
+sight," said Ody Rafferty's aunt. "If it had been me, I'd niver ha' took
+me eyes off him, for the look of him on'y goin' by made me flesh creep
+upon me bones."
+
+"'Deed was I," said Mrs. Kilfoyle, sorrowfully, "a fine fool. And vexed
+she'd be, real vexed, if she guessed the way it was gone on us, for the
+dear knows what dirty ould rapscallions 'ill get the wearin' of it now.
+Rael vexed she'd be."
+
+This speculation was more saddening than the actual loss of the cloak,
+though that bereft her wardrobe of far and away its most valuable
+property, which should have descended as an heirloom to her little
+Katty, who, however, being at present but three months old, lay
+sleeping happily unaware of the cloud that had come over her prospects.
+
+"I wish to goodness a couple of the lads 'ud step home wid themselves
+this minit of time," said Mrs. M'Gurk. "They'd come up wid him yet, and
+take it off of him ready enough. And smash his ugly head for him if he
+would be givin' them any impidence."
+
+"Aye, and 'twould be a rael charity--the mane baste--or sling him in one
+of the boghoules," said the elder Mrs. Keogh, a mild-looking little old
+woman. "I'd liefer than nine nine-pennies see thim comin' along. But I'm
+afeard it's early for thim yet."
+
+Everybody's eyes turned, as she spoke, towards the ridge of the
+Knockawn, though with no particular expectation of seeing what they
+wished upon it. But, behold, just at that moment three figures, blurred
+among the grey rain-mists, looming into view.
+
+"Be the powers," said Mrs. M'Gurk, jubilantly, "it's Ody Rafferty
+himself. To your sowls! Now you've a great good chance, ma'am, to be
+gettin' it back. He's the boy 'ill leg it over all before him"--for in
+those days Ody was lithe and limber--"and it's hard-set the thievin'
+Turk 'ill be to get the better of him at a racin' match--Hi--Och." She
+had begun to hail him with a call eager and shrill, which broke off in a
+strangled croak, like a young cock's unsuccessful effort. "Och, murdher,
+murdher, murdher," she said to the bystanders, in a disgusted undertone.
+"I'll give you me misfort'nit word thim other two is the polis."
+
+Now it might seem on the face of things that the arrival of those two
+active and stalwart civil servants would have been welcomed as happening
+just in the nick of time; yet it argues an alien ignorance to suppose
+such a view of the matter by any means possible. The men in invisible
+green tunics belonged completely to the category of pitaty-blights,
+rint-warnin's, fevers, and the like devastators of life, that dog a man
+more or less all through it, but close in on him, a pitiful quarry, when
+the bad seasons come and the childer and the old crathurs are starvin'
+wid the hunger, and his own heart is broke; therefore to accept
+assistance from them in their official capacity would have been a
+proceeding most reprehensibly unnatural. To put a private quarrel or
+injury into the hands of the peelers were a disloyal making of terms
+with the public foe; a condoning of great permanent wrongs for the sake
+of a trivial temporary convenience. Lisconnel has never been skilled in
+the profitable and ignoble art of utilising its enemies. Not that
+anybody was more than vaguely conscious of these sentiments, much less
+attempted to express them in set terms. When a policeman appeared there
+in an inquiring mood, what people said among themselves was: "Musha cock
+him up. I hope he'll get his health till I would be tellin' him," or
+words to that effect; while in reply to his questions they made
+statements superficially so clear and simple, and essentially so
+bewilderingly involved, that the longest experience could do little more
+for a constable than teach him the futility of wasting his time in
+attempts to disentangle them.
+
+Thus it was that when Mrs. Kilfoyle saw who Ody's companions were, she
+bade a regretful adieu to her hopes of recovering her stolen property.
+For how could she set him on the Tinker's felonious track without
+apprising them likewise? You might as well try to huroosh one chicken
+off a rafter and not scare the couple that were huddled beside it. The
+impossibility became more obvious presently as the constables striding
+quickly down to where the group of women stood in the rain and wind
+with fluttering shawls and flapping cap-borders, said briskly, "Good-day
+to you all. Did any of yous happen to see e'er a one of them tinkerin'
+people goin' by here this mornin'?"
+
+It was a moment of strong temptation to everybody, but especially to
+Mrs. Kilfoyle, who had in her mind that vivid picture of her precious
+cloak receding from her along the wet road, recklessly wisped up in the
+grasp of as thankless a thievin' black-hearted slieveen as ever stepped,
+and not yet, perhaps, utterly out of reach, though every fleeting
+instant carried it nearer to that hopeless point. However, she and her
+neighbours stood the test unshaken. Mrs. Ryan rolled her eyes
+deliberatively, and said to Mrs. M'Gurk, "The saints bless us, was it
+yisterday or the day before, me dear, you said you seen a couple of them
+below near ould O'Beirne's?"
+
+And Mrs. M'Gurk replied, "Ah, sure, not at all, ma'am, glory be to
+goodness. I couldn't ha' tould you such a thing, for I wasn't next or
+nigh the place. Would it ha' been Ody Rafferty's aunt? She was below
+there fetchin' up a bag of male, and bedad she came home that dhreeped,
+the crathur, you might ha' thought she'd been after fishin' it up out
+of the botthom of one of thim boghoules."
+
+And Mrs. Kilfoyle heroically hustled her Thady into the house as she saw
+him on the brink of beginning loudly to relate his encounter with the
+strange man, and desired him to whisht and stay where he was in a manner
+so sternly repressive that he actually remained there as if he had been
+a pebble dropped into a pool, and not, as usual, a cork to bob up again
+immediately.
+
+Then Mrs. M'Gurk made a bold stroke, designed to shake off the hampering
+presence of the professionals, and enable Ody's amateur services to be
+utilised while there was yet time.
+
+"I declare," she said, "now that I think of it, I seen a feller crossin'
+the ridge along there a while ago, like as if he was comin' from
+Sallinbeg ways, and accordin' to the apparence of him I wouldn't won'er
+if he _was_ a one of thim tinker crathurs--carryin' a big clump of cans
+he was, at any rate--I noticed the shine of thim. And he couldn't ha'
+got any great way yet to spake of, supposin' there was anybody lookin'
+to folly after him."
+
+But Constable Black crushed her hopes as he replied, "Ah, it's nobody
+comin' _from_ Sallinbeg that we've anything to say to. There's after
+bein' a robbery last night down below at Jerry Dunne's--a shawl as good
+as new took, that his wife's ragin' over frantic, along wid a sight of
+fowl and other things. And the Tinkers that was settled this long while
+in the boreen at the back of his haggard is quit out of it afore
+daylight this mornin', every rogue of them. So we'd have more than a
+notion where the property's went to if we could tell the road they've
+took. We thought like enough some of them might ha' come this way."
+
+Now Mr. Jerry Dunne was not a popular person in Lisconnel, where he has
+even become, as we have seen, proverbial for what we call "ould
+naygurliness." So there was a general tendency to say, "The divil's cure
+to him," and listen complacently to any details their visitors could
+impart. For in his private capacity a policeman, provided that he be
+otherwise "a dacint lad," which, to do him justice, is commonly the
+case, may join, with a few unobtrusive restrictions, in our neighbourly
+gossips; the rule, in fact, being--Free admission except on business.
+
+Only Mrs. Kilfoyle was so much cast down by her misfortune that she
+could not raise herself to the level of an interest in the affairs of
+her thrifty suitor, and the babble of voices relating and commenting
+sounded as meaningless as the patter of the drops which jumped like
+little fishes in the large puddle at their feet. It had spread
+considerably before Constable Black said to his comrade--
+
+"Well, Daly, we'd better be steppin' home wid ourselves as wise as we
+come, as the man said when he'd axed his road of the ould black horse in
+the dark lane. There's no good goin' further, for the whole gang of
+them's scattered over the counthry agin now like a seedin' thistle in a
+high win'."
+
+"Ay bedad," said Constable Daly, "and be the same token, this win' ud
+skin a tanned elephant. It's on'y bogged and drenched we'd git. Look at
+what's comin' up over there. That rain's snow on the hills, every could
+drop of it; I seen Ben Bawn this mornin' as white as the top of a
+musharoon, and it's thickenin' wid sleet here this minute, and so it
+is."
+
+The landscape did indeed frown upon further explorations. In quarters
+where the rain had abated it seemed as if the mists had curdled on the
+breath of the bitter air, and they lay floating in long white bars and
+reefs low on the track of their own shadow, which threw down upon the
+sombre bogland deeper stains of gloom. Here and there one caught on the
+crest of some grey-bouldered knoll, and was teazed into fleecy threads
+that trailed melting instead of tangling. But towards the north the
+horizon was all blank, with one vast, smooth slant of slate colour, like
+a pent-house roof, which had a sliding motion onwards.
+
+Ody Rafferty pointed to it and said, "Troth, it's teemin' powerful this
+instiant up there in the mountains. 'Twill be much if you land home
+afore it's atop of you; for 'twould be the most I could do myself."
+
+And as the constables departed hastily, most people forgot the stolen
+cloak for a while to wonder whether their friends would escape being
+entirely drownded on the way back from the fair.
+
+Mrs. Kilfoyle, however, still stood in deep dejection at her door, and
+said, "Och, but she was the great fool to go let the likes of him set
+fut widin her house."
+
+To console her Mrs. O'Driscoll said, "Ah, sure, sorra a fool were you,
+woman dear; how would you know the villiny of him? And if you'd turned
+the man away widout givin' him e'er a bit, it's bad you'd be thinkin'
+of it all the day after."
+
+And to improve the occasion for her juniors, old Mrs. Keogh added, "Ay,
+and morebetoken you'd ha' been committin' a sin."
+
+But Mrs. Kilfoyle replied with much candour, "'Deed, then, I'd a dale
+liefer be after committin' a sin, or a dozen sins, than to have me poor
+mother's good cloak thieved away on me, and walkin' wild about the
+world."
+
+As it happened the fate of Mrs. Kilfoyle's cloak was very different from
+her forecast. But I do not think that a knowledge of it would have been
+consolatory to her by any means. If she had heard of it, she would
+probably have said, "The cross of Christ upon us. God be good to the
+misfort'nit crathur." For she was not of at all an implacable temper,
+and would, under the circumstances, have condoned even the injury that
+obliged her to appear at Mass with a flannel petticoat over her head
+until the end of her days. Yet she did hold the Tinkers in a perhaps
+somewhat too unqualified reprobation. For there are tinkers and tinkers.
+Some of them, indeed, are stout and sturdy thieves, veritable birds of
+prey, whose rapacity is continually questing for plunder. But some of
+them have merely the magpies' and jackdaws' thievish propensity for
+picking up what lies temptingly in their way. And some few are so honest
+that they pass by as harmlessly as a wedge of high-flying wild duck. And
+I have heard it said that to places like Lisconnel their pickings and
+stealings have at worst never been so serious a matter as those of
+another flock, finer of feather, but not less predacious in their
+habits, who roosted, for the most part, a long way off, and made their
+collections by deputy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+A GOOD TURN
+
+
+Along the road to Sallinbeg little seemed to be abroad besides foul
+weather, but there was a great deal of that. The gusts that came
+flapping wide-winged over the bog met the wayfarer with a furious hurtle
+and grapple, as if for want of better sport they had concentrated all
+their forces upon his sole repulse; and the drops they dashed into his
+blinded eyes and against his benumbed hands were as icy as they could be
+without ceasing to be wet. Their combined assaults were calculated
+feelingly to persuade a man of his uninfluential position in the scheme
+of things--his voice in this matter was so tyrannically howled down--or,
+if of less philosophic mind, to bring home to him the special
+disadvantages of going half-starved and clad in threadbare tatters. This
+was the plight of Thady Quinlan as, leaving Lisconnel, soon lapt out of
+sight behind him amid the grey web of the rain-mists, he tramped
+haltingly away, with Mrs. Kilfoyle's cloak bundled under his arm, and
+the dread of pursuit on his mind, and in his heart a great remorse, the
+object of which you are perhaps guessing wrongly. But he had also a hope
+and a purpose, and is therefore not wholly to be pitied, although the
+one did wane until the other looked impossible, as mile after mile
+unrolled its drenched and dreary length without bringing him apparently
+nearer to his goal.
+
+All the while, however, he was slowly gaining upon a traveller, who had
+taken the same road a few hours earlier, hopelessly and aimlessly, and
+even more inadequately equipped than he. It was his sister Judy Quinlan,
+from whom he had parted on the worst of terms about three o'clock that
+morning. The fact is that the Tinkers' raid upon Jerry Dunne's premises,
+although carried out with unusual success, had led, not at all
+unusually, to complications when it was time to divide the spoil. Over
+Mrs. Dunne's second-best shawl it was that the difficulty arose. Mrs.
+Dunne, despite her husband's thrifty turn, owned many shawls, few of
+them inferior enough to be worn at all frequently, and she had pinned on
+this one three times only during the half-dozen years of her
+proprietresship. So it was certainly bitter bad luck that she should by
+chance have worn it to Confession on Friday, and got it soaked coming
+home, and hung it up in the passage by the back door to dry slowly,
+"instead of to be all cockled into gathers wid the heat of the fire
+blazin' on it, you stookawn," as she explained with exasperation to
+Ellen Roe, her servant-girl, who had officiously suggested the kitchen
+hearth. For this precaution proved tragically self-defeating, and put
+its object into the very hands of Thady Quinlan and Joe Smith, when,
+under cover of the wild, wet night, they forced the feeble lock, and
+made a clean sweep of all portable property that lay within easy reach.
+The shawl formed the most valuable prize. It was very admirable, indeed,
+being of a dappled fawn colour, with an arabesque border of shaded
+chocolate and amber; but in the eyes of its new owners its greatest
+charm was its weight and thickness. Judy Quinlan declared, pinching a
+fold fondly between a finger and thumb, that just the feel of it done
+your heart good. Her own shawl was really only a ragged cotton
+table-cover, and had, as she often remarked, "no more warmth in it than
+an ould dish-clout." I should observe, to make the situation clear, that
+the Tinkers' confraternity at this time consisted of Thady Quinlan and
+his sister Judy, and their married sister Maggie Smith, with her
+husband, and his brother, and his father, and three or four children.
+Hence it is obvious that in any dispute which might arise between Judy
+and Maggie, the latter was likely to have numbers preponderantly upon
+her side. And this was what now actually took place, the place being the
+driest end of the un-roofed cabin in Dunne's boreen, where the Tinkers
+had for some time past made their camp.
+
+The screed of thatch still adhering to the wall sheltered their fire of
+purloined sods, and it burned steadily and strongly between the blasts
+which made its red flame duck and sweel, and sent the white ash-flakes
+fluttering. So there was light enough to show how covetous gleams from
+the sisters' eyes flashed together on the shawl, of which each held a
+corner. And no great wisdom was needed to forecast a storm. Mrs. Smith's
+shawl was undeniably better than Judy's by many degrees but she had not
+the magnanimity to consider this, even so far as to propose that Judy
+should at any rate enjoy the reversion of her own. On the contrary, she
+had rapidly planned its division between her two little ragged girls.
+Judy, for her part, had set her heart desperately upon the acquisition,
+and she deemed it her best policy to say in a tone studiously
+matter-of-course:
+
+"Faix, now, it's glad enough I'll be to get shut of this ould wad that's
+on me. Every breath of win' goes thro' it as ready as if it was a
+crevice in a wall, fit to freeze you into mortar."
+
+A very vain device, for her sister promptly rejoined with a sarcastic
+laugh and a tightened grip: "Musha moyah, how bad you are entirely.
+Don't you wish you may?" which intimated plainly that the shawl was not
+to be had uncontested.
+
+At this crisis Judy had fully expected to be backed up by Thady; but he
+naturally taking a more dispassionate view of the matter, recognised
+with reluctance the futility of pitting himself singly against three
+opponents, two of them better men than he, who was "no great things at
+all, let alone havin' one knee quare." Therefore he turned his back upon
+the controversy, and feigned unconsciousness of it, instead of bouncing
+up and saying with appropriate action, "And I'd like to know who at
+all's got a better right to it than herself has?"
+
+His defection aggrieved her so bitterly, that the fiercest of her wrath
+turned upon him; and after a wrangle wherein all the parties concerned
+had made liberal use of those "aculeate and proper" words against which
+the wary Bacon warns his quarrelling readers, she flounced away into the
+darkness of the small hours of the stormy December morning, loudly
+avowing her determination never to see a sight of the ugly, dirty,
+mane-spirited poltroon, or open her lips to him as long as she had an
+eye or a tongue in her head. Jeering laughter followed her exit on a
+skirl of sleet-fledged wind.
+
+She seethed over her anger for many a long mile, to such fierceness was
+its flame fed by disappointment and more potent jealousy. For had not
+Thady, the only person she cared much about in all the world, turned
+against her and sided with Maggie, "who was always a greedy grabbin'
+little toad ever since she stood the height of a creepy stool?" It was
+an hour or so before daybreak when she sat down to rest under an immense
+bulging boulder that loomed dimly on her beside the road a little way
+beyond Lisconnel. Then she began to look backwards and forwards. Far
+back to the time when her father kept a little shop in Bantry, before he
+was stone broke one bad year and took to carrying the remnant of his
+stock-in-trade about in a basket as a higgler, which eventually led
+other members of his family to wander, less reputably, for their
+livelihoods. She remembered that even in those days Thady was always her
+ally, and had lamed himself for life by a fall on the road when running
+to rescue her from the Hutchinsons' wicked mastiff, who had knocked her
+down near their gate, and was standing over her with a growl and a grin
+of which she still sometimes dreamed. And again she remembered how once
+she had been laid up for a long while with the fever, and had crept out
+of the Union infirmary to find that her relations, supposing her dead,
+had all "tuk off wid thimselves to the States," and was keening like one
+demented over her desertion outside McNeight's public, when what should
+come familiarly round the corner but Thady himself, who had stopped
+behind, foregoing his assisted passage, because the divil a fut of him
+would stir out of it so long as there might be e'er a chance at all of
+Judy coming back. Whereupon it recurred vividly to her mind how she had
+just called him, among other things, "a great dirty, good-for-nothin'
+hulk of a poltroon," and had expressed a hope that she might never again
+see sign nor sight of any such a hijjis baste hobblin' anywheres on her
+road; to which he had rejoined that she might go to blazes and welcome
+for anythin' _he_ had to say agin it, and that bedad a crosser-tempered
+ould weasel of a wizened-up ould witch wouldn't be apt to land there in
+a hurry. At last, being very tired, she escaped for a while from these
+fluctuations of wrath and ruth into a nook of sleep, but the bitter cold
+routed her out of it soon after sunrise, and she took the road again,
+cramped and numbed, in the teeth of the gusty showers that were still
+stalking over the bogland.
+
+As she went, the hills beyond Sallinbeg rose up frowning before her
+through rifts in the cold white fleece trailed and knotted about their
+front of harsh purple gloom, on which the streaks and patches of ravines
+and fences and fields, with here and there a cabin gleaming, began by
+degrees to be traced dimly as if a fragment of the countryside were
+reflected on a dark thunder-cloud. But she was now thinking more about
+her journey's end than about anything she saw on the way thither--the
+bleak many-windowed workhouse at Moynalone that she well knew must be
+presently her fate. Since she had thrown herself on her own resources,
+three ha'pence was all she could command for ransom from the durance
+into which self-preservation assuredly would not forbear to betray her.
+Experience gave a dreary definiteness to anticipation. Once again she
+would morning by morning awaken in the grim whitewashed ward to all the
+old hardness and roughness of existence with a tyrannous restraint and
+monotony superadded. She said to herself, it is true, that she might as
+well be in one place as another, since she would not have Thady to go
+along with anymore--the black-hearted, thievin' miscreant--and if she
+had as much wit in her as an ould water-rat, she'd just creep away into
+some dry ditch, and be done with the whole of it. Still, as she did come
+short of that wisdom, the alternative continued to lie across her path,
+a murky shadow, which she could by no means evade nor disperse.
+
+The invisible sun was low when Judy came to a place where the road
+forks, sending one branch to creep across the level bogland towards
+Sallinbeg, and one to climb up among the first tilted slopes of the
+mountains. Here the Rosbride river comes jostling its way down a rocky
+ravine spanned at the mouth by a bridge, past which the swift, brown
+stream darts along in a more spacious and smoother channel, bound for
+Rosbride Bay. Judy stood for a while and looked down over the parapet at
+the swirls of creamy foam that swept under the arch. Then she took out
+of her pocket a battered-looking heel of a loaf, and began to munch it.
+But before she had half finished it, she tossed the crust away into the
+river, being too heartsick to go on eating once the rage of hunger was
+subdued. She wished sincerely that she dared fling herself after it, but
+she was far too much cowed by cold and weariness to muster the courage
+for such a resolve. Perhaps there was not under Irish skies that
+December day, a more miserable woman than Judy Quinlan as she stood all
+alone in the world on Rosbride bridge, while a black mountain rampart
+lifted itself slowly against the shrouded west, and the dusk thickened
+on the long, shelterless road, whence eager blasts whistled a summons to
+her, nearer and nearer, till they fluttered her rags, and keened about
+her ears, and chilled her to the bone.
+
+Suddenly something heavy and soft seemed to grasp her by the shoulders,
+and thence fall around her in long, wide folds, covering her from head
+to foot, much as if a small tent had been blown down on her. Of course
+she screamed shrilly, and almost in the same breath she saw that Thady
+was at her elbow. He had for some little time been stalking her warily,
+with the great coat expanded ready to throw over her, and having done
+so, was now holding it on with a rough hug. The joy with which he had at
+last caught sight of the forlorn, bedraggled figure had overflowed
+irrepressibly into this joke, and its successful accomplishment put the
+finishing touch to his happiness. As for Judy, if the sun had leaped up
+again in a fiery flurry, till the hills and the plain and the river were
+all flooded with flushed light, gleaming and glowing, it would have but
+dimly symbolised the transfiguration of her world. In the twinkling of
+an eye her stark despair was changed into rapturous relief, a miracle
+which just at first made the marvellous cloak seem almost a matter of
+course. Any good thing might naturally be expected to befall her since
+Thady was not estranged and lost to her after all. "Whethen now, and is
+it yourself come streelin' along?" she said. "You tuk your time, bedad.
+I'm here this half-hour."
+
+"Sure, I stopped till I would get a thrifle of things together," said
+Thady. "And what d'you call that for an ould flitterjig?"
+
+"It's not too bad," said Judy, stroking down the cape with caressing
+fingers. "A grand weight there's in it, to be sure. But where at all did
+you come by it? You're not after gettin' it off of thim thievin'
+rapscallions of Smiths, anyway?"
+
+"Thim or the likes of thim--sure not at all," said Thady, loftily.
+"'Twas in a house away down below there at Lisconnel. A young woman bid
+me step in to ait a pitaty, and, tellin' you the truth, I'd no fancy to
+be delayin', for I'd a mistrust in me mind that the polis was follyin'.
+The notion I had was to ax her had she seen you goin' by, on'y I wasn't
+wishful to be lettin' on I was anythin' to you, in case they come along.
+So I thought she might be chance pass the remark herself. But out she
+ran, and the first thing I noticed was this consarn lyin' convanient to
+me hand in the windy. And wid that I whipped it up and made off. For
+anythin' I could tell, I might ha' met me fine gintleman full tilt at
+the door; and begorrah, it's as heavy to carry as a pair of fat geese.
+Howane'er, I knew it's distressed you were entirely for the want of such
+a thing, and bejabers, you've got it now."
+
+"Troth have I," said Judy, delightedly groping her way about her new
+garment. "Rael dacint it was of you to be bringin' it to me, for
+perished and lost I did be, and that's no lie. Och but it's the grand
+one. Look at the hood there is to it. Sure it's as good as a little
+house of your own. You might be out under buckets of wet in it, and
+ne'er a tint you'd git whatever."
+
+"Ay, or, for that matter, takin' a rowl through the river there, and
+sorra the harm it 'ud do you wid that on," said Thady, with pride. "But
+we'd better be quittin' out o' this," he added, with a shrug and a
+shiver, "for the win's tarrible, and there's a shower comin' up on us
+yonder as thick as thatch. I was thinkin' you'd maybe had thrampin'
+enough for this day. 'Twill be as dark prisintly as the inside of a cow,
+and we'd see daylight agin before we come to Moynalone. So we might put
+the night over under th'ould bridge. There's a good dry strip along the
+one side of it, and the way the rain's dhrivin' we'd git a grand
+shelter."
+
+Judy readily agreed, and they descended the little stony footpath which
+led down to the river. Beneath the arch, where Thady's booted steps
+reverberated hollowly, they found, as he had said, a broadish strip of
+dry ground, for the bridge had allowed the stream ample measure in its
+stride. The little platform was bordered by a scattering of stones and
+boulders, amongst which the shallow water gurgled. It seemed to Thady
+and Judy that their quarters would be very tolerable; but they soon made
+a discovery which promised luxury indeed. This was a dead branch, which
+lay at one end of the arch, having evidently been floated down the
+current, and perhaps hauled out of the water by some thrifty body, who,
+however, had made no further use of it. Long ago that must have been,
+for it was dried and bleached till it glimmered through the dusk like an
+intricate white skeleton. Better fuel no one could desire. Thady made
+for it at once with knife and matchbox, and in a few minutes crackling
+flames were crunching up the twigs and gnawing at a log. The red light
+washed flickering over the wet walls, and was caught on the glancing of
+the water as it fled by, rapid and dark. Blue smoke trailed up lazily
+against the frame of the arch, blurring gleams of tossed foam as it
+melted out into the mist.
+
+But a fire naturally suggested food, and Judy said ruefully, after
+feeling in her empty pocket: "It's starved wid the hunger you'll be,
+Thady, and the sorra a taste of anythin' have I in the world. 'Deed now,
+if I'd on'y known the way it 'ud be, and I passin' thim houses below in
+the boreen a while ago! I seen where there was a big cake of
+griddle-bread coolin' itself, laned agin the windy-ledge, and man nor
+mortal near it. I might ha' raiched it down as aisy as puttin' me fut to
+the ground. But sure I was that knocked about wid one thing and another,
+I thought I wouldn't be bothered wid it, so I just left it where it was,
+I did so--may God forgive me," she said, with unfeigned contrition.
+
+Thady, however, did not seem to share in her regrets. He was lifting his
+cluster of cans off his shoulders, and extracting from one of them a
+bundle tied up in a red handkerchief. "Is it starved you'd have us?" he
+said as he untied the first corner. "Starved! How are you?" And he
+continued to repeat: "Is it starvin' she said?" while he was undoing the
+several knots. When they were all unfastened, the handkerchief was seen
+to hold a number of eggs and a fair supply of broken bread. Thady might
+well scout the possibility of famishing. "That's somethin' like," he
+said, as he saw Judy surveying his stores, "and I've a shillin'
+somewheres besides."
+
+"Glory be!" said Judy, looking as if she could scarcely realise a world
+with which they were so much beforehand.
+
+"And we'll be givin' them a boil in a one of the little saucepans," said
+Thady. "Raw eggs do be ugly could brashes, and we've plinty of wather
+handy--lashins and lavins of dhrink runnin' on tap there, so to spake."
+
+Supper was accordingly prepared on these simple lines with much success.
+They boiled many eggs and ate them, using their scraps of bread for
+plates--an expedient not unknown at far earlier banquets--and they
+scooped up water to drink out of the palms of their hands--also in an
+old-fashioned manner. But when they had finished Thady gave a
+comparatively modern touch to the entertainment by lighting his pipe. He
+occupied the nearest place to the fire, in consideration for the
+scarecrow-like raggedness of his garments, which now began to weigh upon
+Judy's mind amid the comfort of her magnificent wrap.
+
+"Froze stiff you'll be in thim ould tatters, man alive," she said
+despondently. "Sure, you might as well be slingin' yourself round wid
+the ould wisps of spiders' webs up over your head for any substance
+there is in thim. I won'er, now, could I conthrive to reive the top-cape
+off of this. 'Twould be as good that way as a cloak apiece for the two
+of us."
+
+Thady, however, said decidedly: "Blathers, not _at all_. Is it
+destroyin' it you'd be after? I'm plinty warm enough." And he rolled the
+big red handkerchief which had held the eggs into many folds about his
+neck, tucking it down under his coat-collar all round. "There was a
+surprisin' hate in it," he said.
+
+By this time the dusk far and near had gloomed into darkness--the black
+beetle had scared away the grey moth. As Thady and Judy sat with their
+backs to the curving wall, they caught only fitful glimpses of the
+opposite one when any long-fronded flickers of the fire-light waved
+across and touched it. More often they fell short, and made quivering
+circles shine where they struck the broken water in the mid-stream.
+Without, beyond either arch, nothing was distinguishable except glimmers
+of white foam shaken and tossing. On the left, looking up the river, it
+seemed as if many spectral hands, borne nearer and nearer, came waving
+and beckoning out of the night, to pass by and away down the river,
+still beckoning and waving, carried further and further, on into the
+night again. Every now and then a waft of the wind sighed in on them
+along with the river, puffing about the flame and smoke, and blowing
+ice-cold in their faces. When it had passed Thady always inquired: "Is
+it warm at all, Jude?" and she always answered, drawing "its" folds
+together with ostentatious satisfaction: "Och scaldin'."
+
+But between whiles there was little conversation to interrupt the
+monologue of the river, which seemed to find itself many voices under
+the bridge. The one unceasing rustle of the main stream was frayed along
+its margin into a myriad finer noises of murmuring and plashing, as the
+massed foliage on a bough dwindles at its edges into more delicate
+traceries of distinct sprays and leaves. Round some stones the water
+whispered mysteriously, coiling in and out of gurgling recesses, and
+against others it broke with a clear chiming tinkle as if elfin anvils
+rang; here it droned on with a bee's hum soft and steady, and here it
+chuckled and chirped, bubbling up in sudden little rapids and cascades.
+At Judy's feet was a thin flat stone, which rested loosely on the top of
+another, and flap-flapped, bobbing up and down as the ripple rose and
+fell. Sitting idle in the firelight, warmed and fed to unwonted
+contentment, Judy watched it half drowsily for a while. Presently she
+said:
+
+"That's the very way the lid of our ould kettle would be goin' at home
+when it was on the boil, and me poor mother 'ud bid us keep an eye on
+it--like enough to keep us out of divilmint. Och, but that was a cosy
+little room of a could night. D'you mind it, Thady?"
+
+"Ay, sure," said Thady, "but it's one while ago."
+
+"It is that. A matter of thirty year and more, anyway, since we owned
+the little shop. Sure now I remimber the day they shut it up, and put us
+out of it, as plain as if it was on'y this mornin'. Grand we that was
+childer thought it, because of somebody givin' us the ind of an ould jar
+of sweets out of the windy to pacify us. Bedad the fightin' we had over
+it was fit to ha' raised the town. But I grabbed meself a biggish lump
+of peppermint twist, and would be slinkin' behind me mother to finish
+it, and she talkin' at the door to ould Mrs. McClenaghan, and I heard
+her sayin' her heart was broke. So I got wond'rin' to myself if the
+raison was maybe that we'd ate it all on her. Och, but it's the quare
+foolishness people does be remimberin'!"
+
+"Belike the raison of that is because it's as plinty as anythin' else
+wid thim," said Thady, cynically, "or maybe a trifle plintier."
+
+"Sure we was on'y brats thim times," said Judy, apologetically. "For
+anythin' we could tell we might as well be streelin' about under the
+width of the sky like a string of wild duck, as stoppin' at home wid a
+roof over our misfort'nit heads. Ould Mrs. McClenaghan next door had a
+cloak the same pattern as this," Judy continued, selecting her memories
+with better judgment. "But 'twas all tatters at the bottom, not worth a
+bawbee to mine."
+
+And Thady said with interest: "Had she now?"
+
+"And as for me ould shawl," Judy went on, "it's been a scandal and a
+caution this last three or four year; droppin' in bits it is, and small
+blame to it. I wish I'd a penny for every mile I've tramped in it. Do
+you remimber the joke me mother had about it's bein' a conthrary thing
+that people thravellin' 'ud always begin a mile at the wrong ind? She'd
+be talkin' that way to hearten up me father; but as often as not he'd
+on'y let a roar at her to whisht, he was that discouraged. 'Twas a great
+wish he had, poor man, to git her back settled in a little place of her
+own before he was took. But 'twas in the big barracks of a Union at
+Monaghan----"
+
+"Well, it's all one to the two of thim now anyway," said Thady, finding
+that Judy's reminiscences of their family history did not tend to
+enliven his meditations over his pipe.
+
+"Ah sure, everythin' will be all one to the whole of us, plase God, one
+of these days," said Judy, who in her present mood could not easily have
+realised the keen contentions and scorching jealousies of the night
+before; "and when we get done with the thrampin', 'twill make little
+enough differ whether it's one mile we wint or twinty hunderd. On'y I'd
+liefer than a good dale thim two had had better luck wid it all. Cruel
+put about they were many a time, and wantin' the bit to keep the life in
+thim, and it just fretted out of thim in the ind I'm thinkin'. The
+thought of it comes agin a body when one's sittin' warm and snug," Judy
+said, gazing remorsefully round her shadowy, gusty lodging, and then
+into the flames, lighting up a bare earth-patch, and down at the dark
+folds that fell about her as she crouched on it. She seemed sunk into a
+reverie. But after a while she looked up and said without apparent
+relevance: "Heaven be her bed this night, the cratur. Thady, you
+heathen, we'd a right to be sayin' the Rosary before we git too stupid
+altogether. The eyes of you are droppin' into your head wid sleep this
+minnit."
+
+"And me just after lightin' me pipe," remonstrated Thady.
+
+"Ah thin, hurry up and finish it," said Judy, betraying by this
+injunction an invincible ignorance touching a man's sentiments towards
+his last screw of tobacco, "or else I'll be off sound. It's the fine
+warmth makes me sleepy. Sure wid this on me sorra a breath of could gits
+next or nigh me to be keepin' me awake."
+
+"Och thin, wait till it's out," said Thady.
+
+"I will so," said Judy. "Sling another stick on the fire, lad, the way
+you won't be perished sittin' there in thim woful ould rags. I've plinty
+of prayers I might be sayin' till you're ready."
+
+But in a little while, Thady, lingering over his pipe, became aware,
+somewhat to his relief, that she had gone fast asleep, muffled up to the
+chin in her cloak, with her head leaning back against the stone wall. He
+sat and looked at her for some moments with an expression partly
+complacent and partly compunctious. "Bedad now the crathur was bein'
+perished alive before I brought that to her," he said to himself. "Very
+apt she was to be gettin' her death. 'Twas great luck I had entirely to
+pick it up. It's the hard life the likes of her has whatever thrampin'
+around. Ay, glory be to God, 'twas the best good turn iver I done her."
+
+Just at the time when Thady the Tinker was making these reflections
+while the firelight flickered and the waters fleeted under Rosbride
+bridge, some mile or so higher up the stream, where the long mountain
+slopes are folded closer and steeper about it, a great turmoil had
+arisen in a deep hollow among walls of the bare rock. Down one face of
+these, a huge glistering slab, the river had for certain thousands of
+years been taking a foamy leap; but to-night it happened that the rains,
+beating for many days on the mountains, had eaten away the clay setting
+which cemented a ponderous lump of rock into a niche immediately over
+the fall, and the mass had now crashed down into the channel on the very
+verge, blocking all the waterway. This, however, was a door hard to keep
+shut, when every affluent rill and runnel out on the broad mountain
+shoulders went darting swift and white, so that every minute swelled the
+forces gathering pent in the barred passage. As the bridled torrent
+seethed and climbed, hissing, behind that barrier, the great stone
+tottered and swayed, and before the first foam-crest could overpeer it,
+yielded to the weight of waters leaned against it, and rocks and flood,
+thunderously roaring, rushed down together.
+
+The sound of it, dulled into a moan, came through Rosbride bridge, and
+Thady, who had grown very drowsy, thought to himself that the wind was
+getting up, and that they couldn't have done better than stop where they
+were, instead of to be setting off tramping on such a dirty wild night.
+God knew where they might have got to.
+
+The flood that broke away, with wave tumbled over wave, out of the
+whirling pool, had not far to race down its stony stairs before it
+reached a place with a turbulent floor, where the white mouths of other
+two streams foamed into it through rock-rifts, loud-throated on either
+hand. Thenceforward the water which had threaded the large boulders in
+heavy strands coiled like monstrous braids of snaky locks, rose up and
+drew together above their tallest heads into a single obliterating fold,
+as it slid on smoothly with only now and then a quiver puckering its
+surface, as if it had rolled over some live creature that writhed. Its
+mounded solidity made its rapid motion look strange and terrible. Where
+circles of thin froth swam round on it slowly, it was as black and white
+as a bit of the bog in a snowstorm or under a drift of summer daisies.
+At the turn of the ravine's last winding above the bridge, it plucked
+away as it passed a small company of fir-trees, that long had dropped
+their cones and needles into the river from a coign of vantage on a
+jutting crag, and a minute after, anybody who had looked up from beneath
+the arch would have seen the glimmering points of foam extinguished like
+lights, further and nearer, lost amid the shadowy onsweeping of
+something that set all the darkness astir as if it were one vast wing
+unfurling. And then for a moment, in the narrow space lit by the fading
+fire, he would have known that he was cut off from the world by chaos,
+which poised towards him a formless surging front, and stooped and fell.
+But as it happened nobody was keeping a watch there.
+
+What wakened Thady was the clang of his cluster of tinware, which the
+wave dashed against the wall behind him. But before he knew this, it had
+gathered him up and swung him across with it over to the other side of
+the arch. There he caught hold of a twisted ivy-tod and a bough of
+mountain-ash, whence he dropped on the bank, and crawled up it out of
+reach, commenting in forcible language upon the occurrence, by which he
+was still astoundedly bewildered.
+
+Judy, who was aroused in like manner, had her chance too. For a branch
+of the same tree crooked a friendly arm towards her as she was borne
+past, and she would have grasped it only that the weight of her heavy
+cloth cloak dragged her down. So that instead of returning to dry land
+for many a long day's tramp, she went out to sea in company with sundry
+wrenched-off boughs, and mats of heather, and bundles of withered
+bracken, and other such waifs and strays, none of which were ever again
+heard tidings of any more than they were inquired after in the lonely
+places they had left. Only for some stormy days the wrecked and sodden
+banks of the Rosbride river were haunted by a forlorn-looking object of
+a lame tramp, who sought vainly what his despair hoped to find. As he
+roamed about in it, he had just one spell of consolation, which he was
+often muttering over to himself. It was something he called, "The best
+turn, anyway, I iver done the crathur in her life. Little enough, God
+knows, little enough, but the best good turn."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+FORECASTS
+
+
+When Mrs. Joyce used in her last days to predict regretfully that her
+youngest daughter would never marry, she said a bold word, for at this
+time still Theresa's years fell short of twenty, and she was generally
+recognised as the prettiest girl to be seen at Mass in the small, ugly
+chapel down beyant near Ballybrosna. Some people, it is true, said that
+she was "just a fairy of a crathur, and too little for anythin'," and
+she was, no doubt, diminutive in size. Nor had she any brilliancy of
+colouring to make amends in a humming-bird's fashion for the
+insignificance of her proportions, resembling rather, with her dark eyes
+and hair, one of those filmy white blossoms which look the paler and
+frailer for their knots of ebon stamens, or the delicate moth who shows
+fine black pencillings among his pearly down. Still, nobody denied that
+she had "an uncommon purty face of her own," and the neighbours,
+moreover, always found her "plisant and frindly and gay enough," when
+they found her at all. But they remarked among themselves that one
+seldom seen e'er a sight of Therasa Joyce these times anywheres about.
+They supposed she was took up wid lookin' after her mother, who wasn't
+gettin' her health over well this good while back. I think myself that
+Theresa's invisibility could be only in part accounted for thus, as the
+explanation does not cover the fact that to slip the wrong side of the
+dyke, or turn aside among screening hillocks and hollows when she
+noticed the approach of her acquaintances, was the course she always
+adopted if she could achieve it without hurting anybody's feelings.
+Theresa much disliked doing this, as a rule, though she broke it on one
+occasion in a way that surprised and puzzled those who knew her best.
+
+But whether Mrs. Joyce forecast the future rightly or wrongly, she had
+certainly an erroneous impression on her mind when, as often happened,
+she wound up her disconsolate musings by saying resentfully, "And the
+back of me hand to some I could name." If she had proceeded to do so,
+she would probably have mentioned persons who had done nothing to bring
+about the result she was deploring, and she never thought of connecting
+it with the events which had accompanied Ody Rafferty's flitting from
+the Three Mile Farm more than a twelvemonth before Denis O'Meara came to
+the place.
+
+Until Ody took up his abode at Lisconnel he had always lived with his
+father, who farmed a remote bit of land out towards Lough Glenglas. It
+was a holding which had been wrested from the grip of a surrounding bog
+by earlier generations of Raffertys, who were a strenuous race; but in
+Ody's father's time their energies had taken a turn not conducive to
+reclamation, or even to the maintenance of what was already won. All
+Ody's many elder brethren--sisters there were none--had run wild, and
+ended by running it so far afield that the narrow, whitewashed house,
+lonesome and bleak, saw them no more. Its mistress also died, failing,
+perhaps, other means of exit--running wild being in her case
+impracticable--and finding life impossibly dreary without Ned, the
+least-good-for of her sons; and the household was thus reduced to old
+Michael Rafferty, and his aunt, and little Ody. These domestic changes,
+in conjunction with other untoward chances, sadly hindered farming
+operations, and nature made prompt use of the pause. Season by season
+the patch of tilled ground seemed to shrink at the wish of the greedy
+black land that girdled it about. The outlying fields grew first garish
+with golden ragweed and scarlet poppies, and then dull green again with
+the brown-knotted rushes and sombre sedge, and all other marish growths,
+until the re-annexation was complete, and they once more were
+homogeneous part and parcel of the conquering bog. Old Michael used to
+trudge heavily round his dwindling territories, which were haunted by
+memories of better days. There had been a time when they had actually
+"kep' a pair of plough-horses." I believe that he would have fretted his
+heart out much sooner than he did if it had not been for Ody, his only
+remaining son, "whose aquils," his aunt Moggy sometimes remarked rather
+bitterly, "he consaited you wouldn't find plintier in the world than an
+apple sittin' on a sloe-bush." As the boy grew up the old man's pride
+and pleasure in him were tempered by apprehensions lest he should "take
+off wid himself like the other lads." However, Ody never did this nor
+anything worse than wax somewhat over-confident and self-opiniated; and
+a year or so before his father's death he became associated with Felix
+O'Beirne in the management of an illicit still off away in the bog,
+which gave him an object in life, and had a sobering and settling effect
+upon him.
+
+He was not more than twenty when his father suddenly died one early
+spring morning, and he found himself left responsible for a few acres
+well cropped with weeds, and sundry arrears of rent to be extracted from
+their produce. Whereupon he resolved to abandon the struggle, and set up
+on a less ambitious footing in one of the cabins at Lisconnel. So he got
+ready for the move by selling off his little bit of live stock, all
+except Rory, the old black pony, who had a very large head and a white
+face like a grotesque mask, and with whom he would not have parted on
+the most tempting terms. As for his great-aunt Moggy, when she heard of
+this arrangement, she resigned herself to her fate, which was obviously
+the Union away at Moynalone. What else should become of her, since she
+was past field-work, and nobody could expect Ody now to be bothered with
+keeping her idle, and he with scarce a penny to his name after settling
+with Mr. Nugent. "Ody," she reflected, "didn't mind a thraneen what way
+he had things in the house, and didn't care to be keepin' fowls, so what
+good 'ud he get out of her at all?" Moggy was a dull and rather
+cross-tempered old person, who had grown up in souring shade, and never
+had a life of her own to live, nor yet a faculty for slipping smoothly
+into other people's. Her slight intercourse with Ody had hitherto
+chiefly consisted of quarrels. In fact, only the day before his father's
+death, they had fallen out abusively about the broiling of some bacon,
+and this seemed to make her destination all the more inevitable.
+Therefore Moggy likewise set about her few dismal preparations,
+oppressed by a stunned sense that the black hour she had been dreading
+most of her life was now just going to strike.
+
+On the morning of the day Ody was to flit she held a sort of carouse at
+her solitary breakfast over the remnant of a pound of tea which she had
+saved after the wake. Tea was ten prices fifty years ago, and a very
+rare luxury at the Three Mile Farm. As she poured it strong and black
+out of the badly broken teapot, the whole one being packed up, she
+thought that was the last time she'd ever have the chance again in this
+world to be wetting herself a cup of tea, and she thickened it
+recklessly with lumps of damp brown sugar, and swung it round in her
+cracked saucer to cool, and tried hard to enjoy it. She was still
+lingering over it when Ody came into the kitchen, which caused her, poor
+soul, instinctively to thrust away the betraying teapot out of sight on
+the black hob.
+
+"What way was you intindin' to go, then, aunt?" said Ody.
+
+"To Moynalone?" she said, turning to face her future with a deep sinking
+of heart. "Sure, I suppose it's trampin' over I'll be."
+
+"And I won'er how long you think to be doin' it," said Ody--"a matter of
+ten mile?"
+
+"Where's the hurry at all, supposin'?" said his aunt, desperately.
+
+"Blathers!" said Ody, "there's room in the cart waitin' ready. You'd be
+better bundlin' yourself into it than to be sittin' here all the mornin'
+delayin' us."
+
+"'Deed, then, beggars drive as chape as they walk," she said, "and I
+might as well be gettin' the lift as far as you can take me."
+
+The old white-faced pony preferred to pace slowly on the long bog-road,
+and, as Ody always respected his whims, the journey barely ended with
+the March daylight. The old, sad-visaged woman sat all the while under
+her muffling shawl in silent apathy undisturbed, and as during the
+latter stages of the drive a blinking drowsiness co-operated with her
+want of interest in the scenes through which she jogged, she naturally
+looked around her in bewilderment when roused by the jerk of the
+stopping cart. She expected to find herself in the streets of Moynalone,
+drawn up, probably, at the door of the big Union workhouse. But, instead
+of its long rows of casements staring down blankly on her, she saw only
+the one mole's-eye window of a tiny whitewashed cabin peering at her
+from beneath its thatched eaves, and all about it the great lonely bog
+spreading away with never a trace of any town.
+
+"Och, wirrasthrew, man, what are you after doin' on me?" she said,
+beginning to bewail herself querulously. "Sure you haven't brought me to
+any place at all. Every hour of the black night it'ill be afore ever
+I'll get there now, and the Union'ill be shut, and what's to become of
+me then I dunno. You'd a right to ha' tould me----"
+
+"Blathers!" said her nephew, "git down out of that wid your yawpin'.
+D'you want the folk here to think you're a sackful of ould hins? And go
+in and be seein' after a bit of fire; it's late enough to be sure. What
+fool's talk have you about the Union, and bad luck to it? You'll find
+the things for the supper in the inside of the ould churn. Union,
+moyah!"
+
+And old Moggy, alighting with cramped limbs, entered her home at
+Lisconnel, feeling blissfully as if she had been _unpacked_ out of a
+most horrible nightmare.
+
+Ody was probably actuated by several unassorted motives in dealing thus
+with his superfluous old great-aunt. Pride and pity and perversity and
+generosity--all had, no doubt, some influence upon his conduct, while
+long use and wont had unawares given her the same sort of hold upon his
+affections that was possessed in a much higher degree by Rory, the pony,
+whose humours were of course easier to put up with than human foibles.
+But the old woman measured his magnanimity by the immensity of the
+benefit which it had conferred upon her, and with a strong revulsion of
+feeling she formed an opinion of his virtues and talents as exalted
+quite as that which she had often secretly jibed at in his father.
+Accordingly she sang his praises unweariedly among their new neighbours,
+and, as Ody was vain enough not to dislike the echoes which reached him,
+he soon began to look upon her with more complacency, so that they
+agreed much better than heretofore. She found no small solace, too,
+after her long cronyless isolation up at the Three Mile Farm, in the
+company of Mrs. Joyce, and Mrs. Keogh, and the other Lisconnel dames. In
+short, a kind of Indian summer of content seemed to be setting in for
+her. Moggy's mind, however, was of the self-tormenting type, and soon
+devised means of marring it. They took the form of apprehensions that
+Ody would presently get married, and that thereupon "the wife would put
+her out of it." If she had only known, Ody was at this time, as for many
+years ensuing, far too much taken up with himself, and Rory, and "the
+little consarn away in the bog," to entertain any such project; but as
+it was she felt that the event, with all its direful consequences,
+perpetually hung over her, and might at any moment bring her new
+prosperity to a miserable end. Her impending great-niece-in-law was a
+vaguely appalling spectre, who threatened to take the roof from over her
+head, and the bit out of her mouth, and turn her adrift to founder
+hopelessly on the workhouse doorsteps. But it was not until more than a
+year after their settlement at Lisconnel that she endued her bogey with
+one definite form, by making up her mind that Ody "was thinkin' of
+Theresa Joyce."
+
+Her reason was that she had one fine evening seen him carrying Theresa's
+water-pail for her down the hill, an ordinary act of courtesy enough,
+but the sight of which suddenly darkened the world before her foolish
+old eyes more dismally than if the golden fleece of the summer sunset
+had been smothered under the blackest pall ever woven in cloud-looms.
+"Fine colloguin' they're havin' together," she said to herself as she
+watched them and their long shadows down the slope, "and he sloppin' the
+half of it over the edge instead of mindin' what he's doin'. It's
+throwin' me out on the side of the road she'll be." In reality Theresa
+was wondering why there would be, a quare black sidimint like, in the
+water on some days and not on others; and Ody was explaining the
+phenomenon confidently and erroneously on an extemporised theory of his
+own. But to old Moggy's fears it seemed quite possible that they might
+be fixing the wedding-day. For Theresa Joyce herself she had no manner
+of misliking at all, considering her to be "a very dacint plisant-spoken
+little girl," but Mrs. Ody Rafferty seemed none the less certain to
+evict her without remorse. And Ody's aunt retired to rest that night in
+a despondent mood.
+
+It was just about this time that Denis O'Meara came to stay at Lisconnel
+on sick leave. The O'Mearas lived in one of the three cabins which used
+to stand near the O'Beirne's forge, but which the great Famine and Fever
+year left tenantless for ever after. Their household consisted of the
+two infirm old people with their melancholy middle-aged son Tim, and
+their sickly grandson, little Joe Egan, who was Denis's cousin. Now
+Denis had been wounded in a battle somewhere out in India, and had been
+promoted sergeant--"and he but a young boyo so to spake"--and owned four
+medals, and stood six foot three in his stockings, and was as fine a
+figure of a man as you could wish to see, let alone his gorgeous scarlet
+uniform, which was a sight to behold; so if he was not a hero, get me
+one, as we say in Lisconnel. But Lisconnel was quite satisfied with him
+in that worshipful character, and found it very easy to adopt the
+appropriate attitude towards him. For Denis was good-natured and
+cheerful and never conceited at all, nor vain when there was anything
+more to the purpose for him to be; qualities which have an irresistible
+fascination in distinguished personages and make their followers' duty
+a pleasure. It was wonderful how his sojourn enlivened everybody, even
+his mournful little old grandmother, whose gratification expressed
+itself chiefly in regrets that his poor father and mother had not lived
+to see the illigant man he'd grown. When she said this to the younger
+matrons of Lisconnel, they thought that the crathurs' fate was
+commiserable indeed, and earnestly hoped that they themselves would be
+spared, plase God, to witness the splendid careers that lay before their
+own Denises at present playing among the puddles. But the older ones had
+to content themselves with the knowledge that if they had only just so
+happened to get the same chances, their own lads would have done the
+very same things; a fact which seemed to give them a sort of
+hypothetical proprietorship in Denis's glory. His presence brightened up
+society as a tall poppy brightens up all a sombre potato-plot, and his
+conversation brought strange lands and extraordinary events within one
+remove--a single pair of eyes and ears--of everybody's experience. For
+many years after "the summer we had Denis O'Meara up here" made a vivid
+time-mark in our annals; and I fancy that the stories of some of his
+exploits, with their outlines looming large through a mythical
+mistiness, still float in our atmosphere. There is at least one legend
+relating how a soldier out in the East cut off a mad elephant's head at
+a stroke of his sabre, with the hero of which Denis O'Meara could
+probably be identified. Altogether he was so exceptionally brilliant a
+figure both in himself and in his fortunes, that the interest which he
+excited had no element of envy in it, as might have been the case had
+emulation seemed less utterly beyond everybody's reach.
+
+Next to his cousin, Joe Egan, a stunted, starved-looking sprissawn of a
+lad, perhaps the most appreciative of his admirers was big Hugh
+McInerney, whom people were apt to call an omadhawn. He also was,
+comparatively speaking, a stranger at Lisconnel, having come there only
+that spring to give John O'Driscoll a hand with the building of his mud
+cabin, after which he stayed about doing what odd jobs offered at that
+slack season of the year. Now and then he tramped on distillery business
+for Felix O'Beirne, and generally acquitted himself in a manner which
+appeared worthy of contempt to young Ody Rafferty, who was his companion
+on these expeditions. Ody expressed his opinion in unqualified terms,
+saying, "Sure it 'ud disgust you to see him moonin' along like an ould
+donkey strayed out of a fair." But his senior partner, rather to his
+annoyance, persisted in replying, "But, mind you, the chap's no fool."
+He had nobody belonging to him at Ballybrosna, whence he came, and some
+people said that he had been a workhouse child.
+
+At the time of Denis O'Meara's arrival, he was darning the widow Joyce's
+thatch for her, and "not killin' himself ever the job," as people said,
+when they reckoned how many days he had been visible crawling about on
+the top of her little house, a conspicuous position in which he looked,
+Mrs. Con Ryan remarked, "a quarer great gawk than he did on dry lan'."
+He was occupied thus on the first afternoon that Denis walked up there
+with some of the other lads, and while they talked to Mrs. Joyce and
+Theresa underneath, the thatcher took a leisurely and critical survey of
+the scarlet and golden newcomer, from his wonderfully polished boots to
+his sleek dark head and fierce moustache. The verdict he pronounced to
+himself with unfeigned satisfaction was, "Grandeur's no name for him."
+Hugh himself, of large and lumbering frame, had a shag of reddish
+flaxen hair, which made thatch-like eaves above his small, light-blue
+eyes and high burnt-brick-coloured cheek-bones. He wore whitey-brown
+rags. After the rest had gone on and in, he slithered down to the ground
+and told Theresa, who was still standing by the door, that she didn't
+look the size of a bit of a lady-bird beside the soldier fellow. If
+anybody else had made this personal remark, Theresa might have been a
+little hurt by it, as she wished herself of more imposing stature; but
+sure nobody minded poor Hugh McInerney; at any rate she said, "Aye, he's
+a terrible big man, isn't he? Apt to knock the head off himself he'd be
+if he was offerin' to come in at our door."
+
+However, on the very next day Denis contrived to accomplish that feat
+without any such accident when he called in at the Joyces' to ask was
+his grandmother there--which she was not, nor indeed likely to be.
+Failing to find the old woman, he postponed his quest for the present
+and stayed talking to Theresa, who, as it happened, was at home; and
+then he stopped again outside to help Hugh McInerney by handing him up
+some rolls of green-sodded scraws and slippery bundles of rushes. His
+long reach made him serviceable here, though his left arm was still
+partially disabled by the sabre-cut that had invalided him. The gleam of
+the red coat at the Joyces' door had apparently as fascinating an effect
+upon Lisconnel as if the place had been inhabited by a population that
+bellowed and gobbled its greetings instead of saying, "How's yourself,
+lad?" and "It's a grand day, thank God," as it came sauntering up
+dispersedly from various quarters. Before many minutes had passed quite
+a numerous group were collected, for in these long midsummer days there
+is little to be done up here except save the turf, a business which fine
+weather makes short work of. In the weeks before the potato-digging,
+employment becomes as scarce as the pitaties themselves, and the hours
+hang limp and flaccid between the meals which punctuate them with a
+plateful of coarse-grained gruel. Therefore to Christy Sheridan and
+Terence Kilfoyle, with half a dozen of their neighbours, the sight of
+their distinguished visitor was an oasis in a very arid desert, and they
+made towards it thirstily.
+
+By and by the group drifted away from the road before the Joyces' house
+into the rough sward behind it; rather literally drifted, as the cause
+of the move was the wind, a strong soft west wind which had been blowing
+over the bog all the morning in great wide gusts. They seemed to lean
+hard against whatever they met, and made standing still an effort, and
+devastated conversation by carrying off important fragments of it
+uncaught, no matter how loudly one bawled. But the big boulders and
+furze-clumps strewn about in a slight depression close by offered seats
+and shelter opportunely; so amongst them presently appeared Denis
+O'Meara's scarlet tunic, and Theresa Joyce's brown-striped shawl, and
+Mrs. Ryan's white-frilled flapping cap, which she said was bein'
+fluttered to destruction off her ould head, and Hugh McInerney's
+many-rifted caubeen, for he declared that until the flurry of the blast
+went down a bit you might as well be lettin' on to thatch the sails
+whirlin' of a win'mill. And the rest of the company following suit might
+be described in terms of their attire as for the most part sad-coloured
+and dilapidated. It was just such a gathering as may be sitting to sun
+themselves at Lisconnel this day--if it happens to be a fine summer
+one--but with a touch of brilliance, both for eye and ear, added by the
+young soldier's presence. They had, however, but fitful gleams to bask
+in, for the sky was all feathered over with little silver-white plumes,
+which the wind kept ruffling by so fast that the light flickered in and
+out continually, as if it had come through a canopy of large slowly
+waving leaves. Still, they gossiped beneath it with much satisfaction,
+and catechised Denis about his adventures, and told him all the news of
+the countryside; and there seemed to be no particular reason why they
+should not go on doing so indefinitely. What in the end broke up the
+assembly was a slight mishap that befell Theresa Joyce.
+
+It cannot be denied that Theresa was rather vain about her long black
+hair, which she had only of late begun to put up in thick silken coils.
+Her mother said you had to take your two hands to a one of them, like as
+if you were twisting a big _suggawn_ (hay-rope); and they looked almost
+too heavy for her small head, no matter how closely they were wound
+about it. A rippling wave, moreover, ran through these tresses, which
+were exceedingly soft and fine; so her vanity was perhaps excusable. At
+any rate, it led her to fashion herself a small knot of cherry-coloured
+ribbon made of a bit that had trimmed the sleeve of her mother's purple
+merino gown. It was a _very_ small knot, because most of the bit had got
+mildewed lying up, before Theresa grew to concern herself about such
+things. But it looked as bright in her hair as a ruddy berry on a dark
+foliaged creeper, and she wore it with a pleasure, which was destined to
+be brief. For as she sat knitting with the quietly creeping fingers of
+an expert in that art, a vagrant gust maliciously whisked off her little
+gawd, and tossing it contumeliously on the ground, as if it were not
+worth carrying, began to puff it along, skimming over the heather and
+tussocks. Denis O'Meara all but rescued it for her, only that Hugh
+McInerney--the omadhawn--starting forward at the same time, blundered up
+against him, and tumbled with him into a furze-bush. And before they
+picked themselves up, the cherry-coloured knot had met its fate in the
+shape of the Ryans' black and white kid. She was tethered close by, and
+had been apparently absorbed in scratching her forehead with her left
+hind foot in a way that said much for the limberness of her youthful
+joints. But as the bit of ribbon flirted past her she made a rapid
+snatch, and swallowed it at a gulp. Mrs. Ryan stood dismayed at possible
+serious consequences to the kid, and Theresa at the certain loss of her
+scrap of finery; and everybody else was saying to Hugh McInerney: "Och,
+you great omadhawn, why couldn't you keep yourself aisy? He had it safe
+enough on'y for you gettin' under his feet"--everybody, that is, except
+Denis O'Meara, who said: "Sure now the both of us wasn't mindin' rightly
+where we was chargin' to; and the raison of that belike was the nayther
+of us thinkin' so much of what we was runnin' after, as of who we was
+runnin' for--and small blame to us bedad."
+
+But Hugh's self-esteem was not restored by the good-natured excuse. He
+said: "Truth it is, I'd a right to ha' sted quiet. For the on'y notion I
+had was puttin' meself for'ard to be gettin' a hould of it before any of
+the others." And he walked off crestfallen to resume his perch on the
+thatch.
+
+As for Theresa, she ignored Denis's pretty speech, and said 'deed now
+she remembered her mother had bid her step up and see what way Ody
+Rafferty's aunt was that morning. And she, too, withdrew from the group
+to make this visit of inquiry.
+
+As she passed on her way under the place where Hugh was thatching, he
+dropped a small handful of rushes on her head to call her attention, and
+when she looked up she saw his red-brick-hued face in a wild
+tow-coloured halo peering down at her from over the eaves. "I am sorry I
+lost it on you," he said.
+
+"Ah, no matter about it; and it wasn't your fau't more than another's,"
+said Theresa.
+
+"You'd ha' had it now," said Hugh, "if it wasn't for the little goat
+gettin' the chance to ait it while himself was tumblin' over me. But I'd
+as lief have your hair the way it is now. It is the blackest ever I
+seen. One might think you'd gathered it out of the middles of them red
+poppies there. Stick a couple of them in it, if you want anythin'; but
+to my mind it's better widout. On'y if you've the fancy to be tyin' the
+bit of red string through it, I'm sorry it was ate."
+
+Hugh's head drew back, and disappeared from her view; but next moment
+she heard him say mournfully: "What am I after doin'? Puttin' me fut
+that far down a houle it's caught fast between a couple of rafters.
+Firrm it is, begorrah. If I don't mind what I'm at, it's pullin' the
+half of their house down, and wranchin' me ankle I'll be before I free
+meself." And she saw him struggling cautiously on the roof all the
+while she was ascending the slope to Ody Rafferty's door, within which
+his aunt was at present a prisoner.
+
+A reluctant and repining one she was, having been seized with a bad
+attack of lumbago at a time when she felt particularly anxious to keep a
+vigilant eye upon what occurred in her neighbourhood, instead of being
+left dependent upon hearsay for a knowledge of anything happening
+outside her four draughty walls. Many a care-infested hour she fretted
+away between them. For how could she tell with what insidious steps the
+calamity to ensue from Ody's courtship of Theresa Joyce might all the
+while be stealing on her? She dared not confide her fears to any
+neighbour, nor would she have put much faith in the report of
+observation unwhetted thereby; and she lived in daily dread of hearing
+the news announced as no mere conjecture or rumour, but a very hard
+fact. As the days wore on the idea took possession of her more and more
+completely, but she could only wreak her helpless ill-humour by doing
+foolish and futile things, such as dilating to Ody upon the imprudence
+of getting married, and the undesirable qualities of black-looking slips
+of colleens--a simple and ingenious expedient for putting him out of
+conceit with all and any of them; while she assumed towards Theresa a
+demeanor so glum and repellent that the girl could not attribute it
+entirely to the irritability caused by rheumatic twinges, and from one
+of her charitably intentioned visits returned with a disconcerted
+expression, and a resolve, which she kept, to pay no more. But in fact
+Ody was during these weeks even more than usually engrossed by the
+affairs of the inobtrusive little manufactory, which he and Felix
+O'Beirne superintended away in a retired part of the bog; and not they
+alone, but Lisconnel collectively, had been going through some
+excitement on this account. This was occasioned by the livelier interest
+which the police had recently manifested in that branch of home
+industry, stimulated by admonitions from their authorities to the effect
+that the hunting down of illicit stills, and confiscation of the
+produce, might with advantage be carried on more energetically. Hence
+had resulted several appearances in Lisconnel of the constabulary from
+Ballybrosna and other stations, and when these occurred Ody was in his
+element of wiles and stratagems. More than once he enjoyed the moment of
+their visitors' departure on a wild-goose chase, "consaitin' they've got
+us be the hind leg this time for sartin;" and long did he chuckle over
+the evening when they came and "sat discoorsin' as plisint and aisy as a
+rabbit in its houle," by a hearth where there was "enough of the stuff
+to float the lot of them lyin' widin six inches of their shiny brogues."
+It was, however, thought expedient to guard against a repetition of this
+perilous entertainment, and the contraband crocks were transferred to a
+still more secluded hiding-place in the queer tiny sod-and-stone shanty
+with Hugh McInerney, who had displayed unexpected strategical ability
+and presence of mind under late emergencies, now knocked up for himself
+in a hollow behind the hill. So old Moggy's fears might have been better
+employed. Then about this time, too, a thrill was caused by the
+mysterious horseman, who visited the O'Beirnes' forge one night, and got
+old Felix to break open for him an immensely strong, small iron box
+which he carried. The same box being found next morning lying empty in
+the little Lisconnel stream, beside which the horse, "a grand big roan,"
+was quietly grazing, while his rider was nowhere, nor was ever after
+anywhere, to be seen; an incident which gave scope for infinite
+speculation at Lisconnel.
+
+All these things happened before Ody's aunt got about again. By that
+time it was well on in August, and the season having been hot and dry,
+Lisconnel's oat-patches were already reflecting as if in a mirror,
+tarnished somewhat and rusted, the broad golden blaze that had looked
+down on them so steadily, and people had begun to think about reaping.
+The Ryans' field, indeed, was so ripe by the day of Ballybrosna Big
+Fair, that Paddy Ryan commissioned Hugh McInerney to bring him back a
+reaping-hook from it. Hugh was going to attend it on business of his
+own, and Ody Rafferty had some bulkier commissions to execute in behalf
+of his neighbours. But he encountered some difficulties in getting under
+way, due to the inopportune devices of old Rory, whom he proposed to
+bring with him. Ody had been careful not to put on his best clothes
+until he had caught the beast, because, as he remarked, "He well knew
+the crathur 'ud be off wid himself hidin' in the unhandiest place the
+divil 'ud put in his mind, if he noticed e'er a dacint stitch on him."
+Yet despite this precaution, when his master went to look for him after
+breakfast, no black pony was in sight.
+
+"And he that'll be foosterin' everywhere under your feet other whiles,
+he's that fond of company," said Ody's aunt, who hobbled out of doors
+for the first time to assist in the search. "Belike he's seen you
+rubbin' up your brogues, and be raison of that he's took off wid
+himself. Bedad, now the big ould head of him is as full of desate as it
+can hould."
+
+"He's a notorious schemer, God forgive him," Ody said, rather sadly, for
+it went against the grain with him to admit defects in Rory.
+
+But his scheming bade fair to prove successful, as Ody after long
+hunting stood baffled at the door, with his expedition seemingly
+frustrated, when Hugh McInerney passing by reported that he "was after
+seein' the baste lanin' gathered up close agin the back of the big stone
+above there, wid a continted grin on the ould gob of him that 'ud
+frighten you wid the villiny was in it." Whereupon the two young men
+went to dislodge him from his fool's paradise, and the three started
+together without further delay.
+
+Till a short way down the road they met old Felix O'Beirne, and with him
+Denis O'Meara, at whose heels followed Joe Egan, ragged and small, his
+habit being to dog his splendid cousin so persistently that old Mrs.
+Byers next door said she wondered "the young chap didn't of an odd
+while take him be the two shoulders and sling him over the dyke."
+
+"So you're off to the fair," said old O'Beirne. "And is it sellin' the
+pony you'd be at last? Sure, now, he'll be the pick of the market,
+that's sartin."
+
+"Ah, they'll niver give me me price for him, the naygurs," said Ody.
+
+"Our Captin-Commandin' here had a right to take him off of you for a
+throoper," said old O'Beirne, "and, faix, there wouldn't be his aquil in
+the len'th and breadth of the army. What 'ud you offer for him, lad?
+Look at the size of the head he has on him, and the onnathural white
+face of him that's fit to scare a rigimint before it, if there was
+nothin' else."
+
+"Is it broke bankrupt you'd have me then?" said Denis, "settin' up to be
+buyin' meself mounts of that expinsive discripshin?"
+
+"Musha, good gracious, man, promise him the first thruppinny-bit you
+meet floatin' down the river on a grindstone, and you'll be buyin' every
+hair in his tail," said the old man. "But come along and don't be
+delayin' thim. They're goin' after fairin's for their sweethearts, the
+way you'd be yourself if you worn't too great a naygur. Or, maybe,
+there isn't anythin' good enough for her to be had in Ballybrosna--is
+that the raison of it?"
+
+Little Joe was beginning to say in a resentful shout: "Naygur
+yourself--he and I are goin' to get----" But Denis pulled him on
+jocularly by the collar, and the parties went their several ways.
+
+Ody then said: "Sweethearts is it? He's the quare ould man for talkin'.
+Glory be to the great goodness, I'm throubled wid ne'er a one. 'Here's
+out of it,' sez I. 'Onnathural,' sez he, musha cock him up, and himself
+shoein' ould garrons all the days of his life. Hi along, Rory, jewel!"
+
+But Hugh said, meditatively, and more than half to himself, which was
+rather a habit of his: "Well, now, for the matter of the fairin', it's
+just the best len'th of ribbon I can get thim to give me for a shillin'.
+Yella it's to be. I wasn't long aither plannin' a way to find out the
+colour she'd like. Sure, I gave her a bunch of flowers wid poppies in
+it, and daisies, and furze-blossom, and foxglove, and forgit-me-not, and
+midowsweet, and sez I to her, which of thim was the finest coloured.
+And, sez she, the furze-blossom was, be raison of it bein' the bright
+gould all over, that the others had mostly only a spark of somewheres
+inside. So it's to be yella. Tellin' you the truth, I'd liefer she
+wouldn't be wearin' e'er such a thing at all, anyways not in her hair,
+that's a sight purtier just in the big black twists. But, sure, it's the
+fancy she has, and morebetoken, I think bad of me lettin' the little
+goat swally the weeny bit she had on her. Ay bedad, I'd a right to be
+bringin' it to her; and, at all evints, I'd be doin' a foolish thing to
+come home widout it, and me not gettin' the bit of fat bacon these six
+weeks next Saturday to make up the price. I won'er now what len'th
+they'd give you for one shillin'?"
+
+But Ody, who had not been listening, only said, oracularly: "Och! that's
+accordin'," which did not materially assist Hugh's speculations.
+
+Yellow ribbons were not plentiful at Ballybrosna fair, and Hugh
+McInerney had to ask for them vainly at several stalls before he came to
+an old-clothes cart, where the proprietress, being hot and cross, took
+him aback by replying: "And who ever heard tell of sellin' ribbons be
+the len'th, you quare-lookin' stookawn?"
+
+"Sure it's meself couldn't say but you might; I niver had any call to be
+buyin' such a thing before. But a bit that one shillin' 'ud be the
+price of is what I'm wishful to be gettin', if it was yella--and beggin'
+your pardon, ma'am," Hugh answered with a glib meekness, which mollified
+the old woman as much as his not undesigned mention of his shilling.
+
+So she said, "'Deed, now, I believe I've a splindid yella bit
+somewheres, a trifle creased in the folds, that I could make you a
+prisint of for a shillin'." And she rummaged, and unrolled before him
+interminable coils of vivid dandelion-hued ribbon. "The grand colour of
+it couldn't be bet," she said, "in Ireland. You could see it a mile off,
+and you wouldn't get the match of it in Dublin under half-a-crown. If
+she wouldn't be plased wid that, you've got an odd one to satisfy."
+
+Ody with Rory came by as she was wrapping it up in paper, and Hugh,
+pointing to his purchase with a melancholy air, said, in an aggrieved
+tone: "It's a _terrible_ quantity they're about givin' me--yards and
+yards--enough to rope round a haystack; and it's an ojis colour. Troth,
+now, if she takes the notion to be stickin' the whole of it on top of
+the little black head of her, it's an objec' she'll make of herself, she
+will so. It's a pity. I'd liefer there hadn't been the half of it."
+
+"What for then are you gettin' more than enough of whatever it is?" Ody
+asked not unreasonably. "Supposin' you wanted any such thrash at all at
+all."
+
+"Ah, sure, I settled in me own mind to be spendin' me shillin' on it,
+and that's the way it is," Hugh said resignedly. "Maybe she'll have more
+wit, the bit of a crathur; she might never put it on. So now I've on'y
+to see after Paddy Ryan's rapin'-hook, and then I'm done. And is it
+carryin' them two bags all the way home you'd be? Sure there's plinty of
+room for them on the baste."
+
+"Ay, is there?" said Ody. "But the fac' is Rory's in none too good a
+temper this minyit, goodness help him, and he'll be apt to thravel more
+contint, the crathur, if he sees he's not the on'y body wid a loadin'."
+
+"Rax me over the one of them," said Hugh, "I've nought barrin' the bit
+of ribbon, and the rapin'-hook 'ill be nothin' to me at all."
+
+And in this way they plodded back to Lisconnel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A FAIRING
+
+
+Up at Lisconnel, meanwhile, as the idle hours loitered by, Ody
+Rafferty's aunt grew tired of her solitary housekeeping, and late in the
+afternoon she made her way down as far as the Joyces'. Here a number of
+the neighbours were sitting about in almost the same place where Theresa
+had sustained the loss of her cherry-coloured knot. But to-day there
+were no rough breezes stirring to bring about such disasters by their
+unmannerly pranks. The sun-steeped air was so still that the thick
+bushes stood as steady as the boulders, and even the rushes nodded
+slightly and stiffly. As the old woman hobbled down the slope she saw
+Denis O'Meara's scarlet uniform gleaming martially against a background
+of dark broom and hoary rock. Its wearer was, however, very peacefully
+employed in pulling the silky floss off the heads of the bog-cotton,
+which lay in a great heap before him on a flat-topped boulder, with a
+big bunch of many-hued wild flowers beside it. Theresa Joyce, who sat
+opposite to him, was pulling bog-cotton too, though less diligently, for
+it might have been noticed that she often looked off her work, and
+towards the scrap of road that lay within her ken. Joe Egan was at his
+cousin's elbow, and a few other lads and lasses made a rough circle. But
+old Mrs. Joyce, and old Mrs. Ryan, and old Paddy Ryan, and old Felix
+O'Beirne had established themselves on a low grassy bank at a little
+distance. It was kept so closely cropped by the Ryans' goat that its
+dandelions grew dwarfed and stalkless, and were set flat in the fine
+sward like mock suns. All this day the real sun had shone on it so
+strongly that the air was aromatic with the odour of its dim-blossomed
+herbs, and to touch it was like laying your hand on the warm side of
+some sleek-coated beast. Old Paddy said you might think you were sitting
+on the back of an ould cow, but his wife rejoined that "you'd have to go
+far enough from Lisconnel, worse luck, before you'd get the chance of
+doin' such a thing." And she shook her head over the reflection so
+regretfully that a matter-of-fact person might have inferred her to have
+been formerly much in the habit of enjoying seats on the backs of cows.
+
+These elders, from where they sat, commanded a comprehensive view of the
+crops of Lisconnel, its potatoes and oats, green and gold, meshed in
+their grey stone fences, and flecked with obstructive boulders and
+laboured cairns. In the middle of the Ryans' neighbouring field there is
+a block of quartzite, as big as a small turf-stack, which gleamed
+exceedingly white from amongst the deep muffling greenery of the
+potato-plants. Mrs. Joyce had been praising their thriving aspect to old
+Paddy, who, however, was disposed to express a gloomy view of them.
+
+"It's too rank they're growin' altogether," he said; "ne'er a big crop
+you'll get under that heigth of haulms. 'Heavy thatchin' and light
+liftin',' as the sayin' is."
+
+To Felix O'Beirne the smooth leafy surface recalled a far-off incident
+of the War, when the dense foliage of a certain potato-field had
+permitted the execution of a curious military manoeuvre. It was one of
+old O'Beirne's favourite stories, and he often related it at full
+length, but to-day it was cut short by the arrival of Ody Rafferty's
+aunt, whom Mrs. Joyce and Mrs. Ryan were prompt to greet, making room
+for her between them on the bank with an alacrity which somehow conveyed
+an impression of uneasiness lest she should establish herself elsewhere.
+
+Presently she said: "And what at all is Theresa busy wid over
+yonder--and young O'Meara? Is it bogberries they're after pullin'?"
+
+Mrs. Joyce said: "No, ma'am, it isn't bogberries;" and left further
+explanations to Mrs. Ryan, with the air of one who refrains from
+self-glorification, but counts upon its being done for her, more
+gracefully, by deputy.
+
+"Sure wasn't he out on the bog the len'th of the day, since early this
+mornin', he and little Joe, gadrin' her the bog-cotton?" said Mrs. Ryan.
+"The full of a pitaty-creel he brought her. They have it there in a
+hape."
+
+"'Twas because he heard her sayin' last night she wished she had a good
+bit of it to stuff the pillow she's makin' me," put in Mrs. Joyce. "Off
+he went after it the first thing this mornin'."
+
+"Whethen now, is that the way of the win'?" said Ody Rafferty's aunt,
+with a pleased smile, striking out unfamiliar paths among her wrinkles.
+"Troth, but I'm rael glad to hear it. Bedad, it's a grand thing for
+little Theresa."
+
+"He's a very dacint poor lad," Mrs. Joyce said, looking over with pride
+at the handsome young sergeant, and thinking that Ody Rafferty's aunt
+must have some good nature in her after all, since she was so evidently
+glad of their good luck.
+
+"'Deed but there's not a finer young man in the kingdom of Connaught
+this day," said Mrs. Ryan, who could, of course, be frankly laudatory.
+"And wid everybody's good word, high and low, and drawin' grand pay, and
+the colonel in his rigimint ready to do a turn for him any time, and a
+rael steady kind-hearted lad to the back of that. But sure he's after as
+nice a little girl as he'd ha' found anywheres, wid all his thravellin',
+and as good as gould. He'll be very apt to be spakin' out to her
+prisintly, for it's gettin' near his lave's ind, and what for would they
+be waitin'? But to my mind it's as good as made up after what he's done
+to-day."
+
+In a little while after this Ody Rafferty's aunt slipped away, and set
+off hobbling along the road towards Duffclane. She wanted to intercept
+her grand-nephew on his way home and tell him this news. For all day she
+had been haunted by an apprehension that Ody meant to return with a
+fairing for Theresa, the presentation of which might bring about a
+crisis in his courtship very disastrous from her own point of view. Old
+Moggy surveyed her world rather steadily at all times from that
+particular outlook, finding in her solitary superfluousness little to
+deflect her gaze. The disappointment which, on her own theory, these
+tidings would bring to Ody did not do so now, and she put her best foot
+foremost, animated by the pleasure of telling some new thing, one,
+moreover, that threw a reassuring light upon her situation. With even
+her amended opinion of the lad she could hardly imagine that he would
+have a chance against magnificent Denis O'Meara, whom nobody would have
+ever expected to look for a wife in poor little Lisconnel--but you never
+could tell, and she felt that it still behoved her to be on her guard
+against all possible perils. Therefore she at present thought it
+expedient to waylay Ody, and let him know that if he had any notion of
+Theresa Joyce, he was a day after the fair.
+
+Hobbling on bent and breathless, wrapped in her rusty black shawl, with
+her shadow flitting far out over the level bog amid the slanted beams,
+she looked a not inappropriate messenger of woe, symbolically impotent
+and insignificant; a little dark speck in the wide westering light; a
+feeble stir of life creeping on the verge of a vast silent solitude;
+and full, withal, of baseless fears and futile plots, concerning the
+withered shred of existence that remained to her. She was just in the
+nick of time, she said to herself, when she saw the trio presently
+coming over the top of the hill. Ody was pointing out conciliatingly to
+the morose Rory how they'd be at home now nearly in the time he'd be
+waggin' his tail; and Hugh McInerney was resolving that he would go on
+straight to his own place, and defer the presentation of the ugly yellow
+ribbon until to-morrow. All three were hot and fagged and dusty.
+
+"Well, lad, and what's the best good news wid you?" Ody's aunt said to
+him, as they met.
+
+"Little enough," said Ody.
+
+"And you comin' out of a fair?" she said. "Bedad now, we make a better
+offer at it ourselves up here for the matter of news."
+
+"What's that at all?" said Ody.
+
+"Sure amn't I just after hearin' tell of a grand weddin' there's goin'
+to be prisintly?" said his aunt, "and that doesn't happen every day of
+the year."
+
+"Och, a weddin'," said Ody. "I was thinkin' maybe there was somethin'
+quare at our little place beyant yonder. But as long as it's nothin'
+worser than weddin's you're hearin' tell of, I'm contint, if you
+listened the two ears off your head."
+
+"It's Denis O'Meara and Theresa Joyce has made a match of it," said his
+aunt, conscious that she was slightly overstating facts; "settled up it
+is on'y this evenin'. And the weddin's bound to be before his lave's
+out--so there's for you."
+
+"Sure good luck to the both of thim," said Ody, "Theresa Joyce is a
+plisant little bein', I'll say that for her, and divil a bit of harm
+there is in O'Meara aither. A fine chap he is for a sodger; not that
+they're any great things as far as I can see--just polis a thrifle
+smartened up."
+
+Ody's thoughts were for the moment running on the police, a couple of
+whom he had lately espied at a short distance coming across the bog.
+
+"Well, if you wanted to see the two of thim," said his aunt, raising her
+voice as he began to drive Rory on, "there they are, just at the back of
+her place, sortin' the stuff he's after gettin' her on the bog. He
+brought her the full of the pitaty-creel. Her mother's as plased over it
+as anythin', and sot up too, aye is she bedad."
+
+The old woman was for the time being almost as much disappointed as
+relieved by the equanimity with which Ody had received her tidings; yet
+if she had but known, they had not failed to produce a strong sensation.
+Only she never thought of considering how they might affect that quare
+big gawk Hugh McInerney. What did occur to her in his connection as he
+begun to trudge alongside her after the pony, was that "he was as ugly
+as if he had been bespoke." For Hugh's long tramp under the sultry sun
+had scorched him a deeper and more uniform red brick than usual, and his
+shock of tow-coloured hair jutting from beneath an unnoticeable round
+cap, looked more than ever like thatch over his blinking blue eyes. When
+they had gone a few yards in silence he suddenly said musingly--
+
+"I dunno why he wouldn't have as good a right to be bringin' her
+anythin' she had a fancy for off the bog in a pitaty-creel, as me to be
+buyin' her len'ths of hijis-coloured ribbons to make a show of herself
+wid. But all the same, I'd as lief he'd let it alone. For some raison or
+other I've the wish in me mind I was slingin' the whole of it into one
+of thim bog-houles out there--and that 'ud be no thing to go do on
+her.... And that was a quare story the ould woman had about thim
+gettin' married. Somebody was apt to be makin' a fool of her. Who was it
+would be tellin' her I won'er?"
+
+But old Moggy partly overheard and said: "Thim that knew what they was
+talkin' about, supposin' it's any affair of yours."
+
+So he did the rest of his meditating inaudibly. He said to himself that
+he was steppin' home straight--continuing the while to walk in quite the
+opposite direction--and that he wouldn't be goin' to the Joyces' place
+to-night at all; what 'ud bring him there, and it gettin' so late? But
+of course he went there, as surely as a swimming bubble goes over the
+cataract's smooth lip, or a fascinated little bird down the snake's
+throat.
+
+For the sensation which he had begun to experience, and which was a
+strong one, and strange to him, was nothing less than jealousy. He was
+jealous of that pitaty-creel.
+
+When he came to the place Ody's aunt had told of, he found a group of
+young Joyces and Ryans and others gathered among the boulders and bushes
+in a circle of which the heap of bog-cotton formed the centre; and a
+glance having showed him that it included Denis and Theresa, he sat down
+facing them, and said to himself:
+
+"If I'd known, now, it was bog-cotton she was wantin', I could ha' been
+gadrin' her plinty last night after I come home. There's a gran' big
+moon these times, wid lashin's and lavin's of light to be gettin' thim
+kind of glimmerin' things by. I seen a black place below between the
+sthrame of wather and the roadside all waved over white wid it, like as
+if it was a fall of snow thryin' could it flutter off away wid itself
+agin out of the world. I'd have got her enough to fill a six-fut sack.
+What for didn't the crathur tell me?"
+
+Pursuing these and other such reflections Hugh's attention, which at all
+times had a long tether, strayed far afield. He did not hear Denis
+O'Meara inquire of him twice whether Ody Rafferty had got his fine price
+for the old pony; not yet Peter Ryan rejoin after an interval that he
+supposed it was such a big one, anyway, Hugh McInerney couldn't get it
+out of his mouth--that was sizable enough. No doubt it was this symptom
+of absentmindedness that emboldened Thady Joyce to set about twitching
+out of Hugh's pocket the flimsy paper parcel seen protruding from it, a
+feat which he achieved undetected, while his surrounding accomplices
+nudged one another and whispered: "Och he has it now--whoo-oo he'll do
+it."
+
+Thady conveyed what he had filched to Molly and Nelly Ryan, who
+manipulated it for some time amid much giggling; and then Nelly, with
+dexterous audacity pinned their handiwork on to the cap of her neighbour
+Denis O'Meara, who sat all unawares. Thus it came to pass that when Hugh
+was at last roused to a vague sense of tittering all round him, which
+reached him much as the clacking chirp of sparrows gets meaninglessly
+into our frayed morning dreams, and looking up out of his reverie,
+stared about him for an explanation, the first thing his eyes lit on was
+Denis's smart cap surmounted by a mass of gaudy yellow ribbon in immense
+bows and loops and streamers, flapping and waggling absurdly at every
+movement made by their unsuspecting wearer. And the spectacle caught his
+breath, and dazzled his sight with a sudden scorching blast of wrath.
+For it seemed to him that Denis was not making merely a mock of him and
+his fairing, which he thought intrinsically of small amount, but through
+it of Theresa herself and her foolish little fancies. And there sat
+Theresa looking on, with a quick pink flush, and shining eyes, and a
+quiver about her mouth. The next moment Hugh had hurled at the bedizened
+cap what he happened to be holding in his hand. And this was Paddy
+Ryan's new reaping-hook.
+
+Thereupon followed a terrible confusion and clamour, which seemed to
+fill at a sweep all the spacious drowsy light of the sunsetting. For the
+missile had gone surely to its mark, and had not simply knocked off
+Denis's cap, but made a shocking gash in his temple, so that there were
+only too sufficient reasons for the rising shrieks of "Holy Virgin, he's
+murdhered--he's kilt!" Amid all the turmoil, with Denis fallen on the
+ground, and Hugh standing staring, and everybody else rushing through
+other like crows in a storm, one person alone appeared to act with a
+definite purpose, and that was little Joe Egan. The event had made him
+like one possessed with rage and despair. To Joe, weakly and timorous
+and not over-wise, his valiant, handsome, good-natured soldier cousin
+had come as the most splendid apparition that had shined upon him in the
+dim course of his fifteen years; and he had spent the past three months
+in adoring it very devoutly. So that now to see him laid low suddenly in
+this savage fashion was a sight that might well cause a burning thirst
+for vengeance upon the miscreant who had dealt the stroke. Joe generally
+had to get his revenges wreaked by deputy; and now, as he darted away,
+his intention was to find the polis somewhere, and bring them to take up
+"that great bastely murdherin' divil, Hugh McInerney," and if by any
+means possible get him hung. He attained his object sooner than might
+have been expected, as not far down the road a pair of constables were
+run into by a small tatterdemalion figure, who, choking and stammering
+and writhing in an ague fit of fury, proceeded to inform them that "Big
+Hugh McInerney was just after murdherin' Denis O'Meara up above
+there--takin' the head off him wid a rapin'-hook," and, further, that
+"if they looked in the dirty thief's little place at the fut of the
+hill, they'd find that every other stone in the walls of it was nothin'
+else but a crock of poteen."
+
+This was the cause of the police's prompt arrival on the scene, where
+nobody resented Joe's action. Denis's injury, though so grave, happily
+did not seem to be mortal, in fact, on this occasion young Dan O'Beirne,
+albeit scarcely more than a spalpeen, displayed a handiness and resource
+about bandaging and other remedies, which foreshadowed his future
+reputation throughout the district for knowledgableness in surgery and
+medicine. Hugh McInerney was, of course, at once arrested, without any
+resistance on his part, or any sympathy from the indignant neighbours.
+He appeared to be what old Will Sheridan termed, "fallen into a serious
+consternation," and was heard to make only one remark. It was when
+people were saying that Theresa Joyce had took a wakeness, and her
+brothers had carried her indoors. "Och, the crathur," he said, "and it
+might aisy have hit her, very aisy. Miself's the quare divil."
+
+Once the police and their prisoner had gone, Denis having been brought
+into the Ryans' house, a deep and melancholy hush settled down upon
+Lisconnel, as if a murky wing had flapped out its brief flare of
+excitement. The whole thing had happened so quickly that the rich light
+from the west was still bronzing the edges of the flat-ledged furze
+boughs, and rosing their white stems, when the little hollow behind the
+Joyces' house rested quiet and deserted, with no traces left of the
+company lately there assembled, except a litter of silky white
+bog-cotton tufts, soon to be swept away by the breeze, and the unchancy
+yellow ribbon, which had been torn out of Denis's cap, and lay coiling
+among the rough grass, whence, as the dusk thickened, it glinted like
+the wraith of a lost sunbeam or a ray from an evil star.
+
+But that night fell very dark, with a moon so closely veiled that the
+flaggers and bulrushes waving their swords and spears fast by, dwindled
+into mere rustlings and murmurs--the air was full of them. At the
+dimmest hour anybody who had stolen out of a neighbouring door, and
+passed between the faintly glimmering white boulders, as if in search of
+something lost there, might have seemed only one of the whispering
+shadows. And these might have begun so say, "Sorra aught can I do at
+all, at all. And ne'er a soul is there to spake a word--all of thim agin
+him, and it no fau't of his, when he would be torminted that way. They'd
+no call to go play such a thrick on him, and he didn't mane it a'
+purpose, I very well know; but the other chap was intindin' to annoy
+him, sittin' there wid a great ugly grin on his face. I wish he'd never
+come next or nigh Lisconnel." But be that as it may, when the next
+morning's light twinkled among the dewy blades, the yellow ribbon had
+disappeared.
+
+After this the days seemed to drag heavily at Lisconnel, where a dulness
+and flatness had come over society. Dr. Hamilton had carried off Denis
+O'Meara to Ballybrosna, and there was nothing to fill up the blank he
+left except speculations about his chances of recovery, and censures
+upon Hugh McInerney, monotonously unanimous. In his favour, indeed, no
+one seemingly had a word to say. People declared that "they'd never have
+thought he'd take and do such a thing, for though he might ha' been a
+quare sort of bosthoon, he was always dacint and paiceable." But
+cancelled praise is the bitterest of blame; and they added that "it was
+rael outrageous of him to go do murdher on the likes of Denis O'Meara,
+and no credit to Lisconnel for it to be happenin' him there. Iligant
+characters it 'ud be givin' them if he wint back to the rigimint wid his
+eyes slashed out of his head, as much as to say he hadn't a fair chance
+among us unless he'd come wid his side-arms."
+
+The neighbours were of opinion, too, that "it was no wonder little
+Theresa Joyce had got a bit moped and quiet, after her sweetheart bein'
+as good as destroyed before her eyes, and it hard to say if she'd ever
+see a sight of him again."
+
+"It was a misfort'nit thing," Mrs. Con Ryan remarked one day, when the
+subject was under discussion, "that young O'Meara hadn't actually spoke
+out before it happint thim. 'Twould ha' made her a dale aisier in her
+mind now, I wouldn't won'er. Because the way the matter stands, he
+might take up wid some diff'rint notion, and just be off wid himself
+like a cloud blown out of the sky, and she couldn't be sayin' a word, if
+she was ever so sure of what he was intindin'."
+
+Young Mrs. Keogh, to whom she made the observation, refused to entertain
+this view, and replied, "Sorra a fear is there of that. It was aisy to
+see he'd ha' gone to the Well of the World's End after her, let alone
+steppin' up from the Town, if he's spared to get his health. Ay, he'll
+be comin' back for her one of these fine days, sure enough, plase God."
+
+But the fulfilment of her confident prediction looked several degrees
+more doubtful in the light of one of the two pieces of news which Mrs.
+Carbery, accompanied by her daughter Rose, conveyed to the Joyces' on a
+bright September morning a short while after. Her son had come home with
+it from the Town too late the night before. One of them was that Hugh
+McInerney, who had been awaiting the assizes in Moynalone Jail, had died
+of the fever there on last Friday. There was nothing very surprising in
+this event, as Hugh's open-air life could have but ill acclimatised him
+to the atmosphere of the unclean little jail; and it was not likely to
+be very deeply deplored at Lisconnel, where he had not been known long,
+nor, as we have seen, much to his advantage.
+
+As Mrs. Carbery sat in the three-cornered arm-chair, with the sun-dazzle
+off a burnished mug on the dresser shimmering into her eyes, and making
+her blink quaintly, she said, with rather severe solemnity, that "she
+hoped the young fellow had had time to repint of his sins, or else it
+was very apt to be a bad look-out for him, and he after comin' widin a
+shavin' of takin' another man's life no time at all ago, so to
+spake--ne'er a chance but it would be clear in everybody's
+recollection."
+
+Mrs. Joyce, however, said: "Ah, sure maybe the crathur wasn't intindin'
+any such great harm all the while, God be good to him. And, anyway,
+where he's gone he'll find plinty ready to be spakin' up for him, and
+puttin' the best face they can on the matter."
+
+"Ay will he," said old Biddy Ryan, who was calling too, "and bedad it's
+one great differ there is, be all accounts, between that place and this.
+For here if a misfort'nit body does aught amiss, the first notion the
+rest of us have, God forgive us, is to be axin' what worser he was
+manin', like as if it was some manner of riddle, that there's bound to
+be an answer to, if one could find it."
+
+"'Deed, and I dunno if they haven't very far to look, ma'am," said Mrs.
+Carbery, with dignity, "when a chap does his endeavours to take the head
+off another man wid a rapin'-hook, ma'am."
+
+"And _I_ dunno, ma'am, for that matter," said old Biddy, also with
+dignity, "if it's any such a great dale better to have one's mind took
+up wid invintin' other people's bad intintions than if it was wid one's
+own."
+
+"Ah, well! I wouldn't be thinkin' too bad of poor Hugh McInerney, at all
+events," said Mrs. Joyce. "'Twas maybe a sort of accident, for he seemed
+a dacint crathur afore that. Och now, to think it's on'y a few odd weeks
+since he was creepin' about over our heads up there, mendin' th' ould
+thatch! You'd whiles hear him hummin' away, talkin' to himself like some
+sort of big bee--and in his grave to-day! But isn't it a lucky thing
+that he's lavin' nobody belongin' to him to be breakin' their hearts
+frettin' after him? Theresa, child dear, you've ne'er a stim of light to
+be workin' in, sittin' there in the corner."
+
+But Theresa said she had light enough to blind her, and was only
+winding a skein, and could see better to do that in the dark. So Mrs.
+Carbery passed on to her second piece of news, which, though less
+tragical than the first, was not likely to sound very cheerfully in the
+ears of some among her audience. It ran that her son Ned was "after
+seein' Denis O'Meara down beyant, and that he was doin' finely, next
+door to himself again: and that the people in the Town did be sayin' he
+was coortin' Mary Anne Neligan, the people's daughter that he was
+lodgin' wid--a terrible fortin she was said to have--and that he'd be
+very apt to be takin' her along wid him prisintly when his lave was up."
+Mrs. Carbery supposed they were none of them ever likely to see him
+again up at Lisconnel. And the rest of the neighbours, having heard her
+tale, supposed so likewise, and said among themselves that Theresa Joyce
+was to be pitied.
+
+Yet not many days after this, while the early autumn weather was still
+soft-aired and mellow-lighted over our blue-misted bogland, where the
+leaves and berries were brightening, and even the little frosty-grey
+cups on the lichened boulders getting a scarlet thread at the rim, on
+one clear, dew-dashed morning, who but Denis O'Meara himself should
+come stepping into Lisconnel? The neighbours who saw him go by were glad
+to notice that he looked as well as ever he did in his life, and he
+greeted them all blithely though briefly, eluding every attempt to
+entangle him in conversation, and making very straight for the Widow
+Joyce's house, which was by these same observers considered to betoken a
+healthy frame of mind.
+
+Only Mrs. Joyce and Mrs. Kilfoyle were in the little brown room when he
+arrived, but they gave him a cordial welcome, and he took a seat from
+which he could keep a watch on the door while they talked about
+different things. One of these, naturally, was the melancholy end of
+Denis's assailant--poor Hugh McInerney--and Mrs. Joyce said it was
+little enough they'd have thought a while ago that it would be Denis
+who'd come back. "But indeed," she said, "if anythin' had took you, we'd
+ha' been in no hurry ever to set eyes on the other unlucky bosthoon."
+
+Denis said: "Faith, ma'am, I'd give six months' pay the thing had never
+happint. Divil a bit of harm I believe there was in poor McInerney; and
+I spoke to Dr. Hamilton to spake to Mr. Nugent and the other magistrates
+for him; but they said, after what me cousin Joe let out about the
+poteen at his place, the polis would be wishful to keep him convanient
+to thim for a while; and to be sure, they kep' him too long altogether.
+I know, ma'am, young Rafferty and the rest had his shanty pulled down
+before the polis come up next day; but they thought they'd git somethin'
+out of him. The little jackass ought to ha' held his tongue. It was a
+pity, bedad. Hard lines it is on a man to be losin' his life, you may
+say, along wid his temper, just be raison of a bit of a joke."
+
+Still as he looked out into the sunshine he could not help thinking that
+he would have had a greater loss of his life than poor Hugh McInerney,
+who, it was evident, would always have met with a cold reception from
+everybody at the Joyces'. Then he said to Mrs. Joyce: "And how's
+Theresa, ma'am?"
+
+Mrs. Joyce was in the middle of replying that she was grandly, and had
+just run over to Mrs. Keogh on a message, when Theresa herself came in.
+
+Denis jumped up quickly, saying: "Ah, Theresa, it's a great while since
+I've seen you."
+
+But Theresa only lifted her head without turning it, and walked straight
+on as if nobody had accosted her.
+
+"Arrah, now, Theresa darlint, don't you see Denis O'Meara?" said her
+mother, puzzled and rather dismayed.
+
+And then Theresa did turn and look at him. "Yis, I see him," she
+said--and, indeed, she might as easily have overlooked the red flame in
+a lantern as the tall scarlet lancer in her mother's little
+misty-cornered room. "I see him," she said, "and I hate the sight of
+him." And thereupon she turned again, and walked out of the door,
+leaving a dead silence behind her.
+
+This was one of the very few harsh sayings that Theresa Joyce has
+uttered in the course of her long life, and it came like a shock upon
+her hearers.
+
+Mrs. Joyce at last said blankly: "What at all has took the child?"
+
+And Bessie Kilfoyle said to Denis, who stood dumbfounded: "But indeed
+now, you may be sure there's not a many up here, at any rate, who do
+that."
+
+But he replied: "If _she_ does, it's many enough for me, Mrs. Kilfoyle.
+And I won't stop here to be drivin' her out of the house. So I'll say
+good-bye to yous kindly, for I'll be off now to Dublin to-morra or next
+day."
+
+"And in coorse," Mrs. Joyce remarked ruefully, after he had departed,
+retreading his steps through the bright fresh morning with so
+crestfallen a mien that all the neighbours knew things had not run
+smoothly, "you couldn't raisonably expec' him to stay here to be hated
+the sight of. And indeed, what wid one thing and another, it's none too
+good thratement the poor lad's got up at Lisconnel, more's the pity."
+
+Theresa herself never had any explanation to offer of "why she would be
+that cross wid poor Denis O'Meara." Her mother accounted for it by pique
+at the Carberys' ill-timed gossip about his imaginary courtship of Mary
+Anne Neligan; and Mrs. Kilfoyle was for a while inclined to the same
+opinion, until one day by chance she espied in the little old tin box
+which contained Theresa's treasures, a roll of bright yellow ribbon
+wrapped up very carefully; and thenceforward she silently ceased to hope
+that things might all come right yet, if Denis O'Meara came back again
+on leave.
+
+So, although Mrs. Joyce may have drawn wrong inferences, the results
+were much as she had foreseen. Theresa never married, and when her
+mother died she went to live with her brother Mick at Laraghmena, where
+she is living still, notwithstanding that it is so long since all this
+happened--since the fine summer when Denis O'Meara was at Lisconnel, and
+Hugh McInerney, who luckily left nobody to be breaking their hearts
+fretting after him, died in Moynalone Jail.
+
+The yellow ribbon lies safely in her box, and with it a grimy bit of
+paper, brought to her one day by a trusty hand, to which Hugh found out
+a way of committing it "before he was took bad entirely." Theresa
+herself has never deciphered its wild scrawls, being an unlettered
+person, but its bearer read it over to her until she knew it by heart
+every word. "For your own self the yella ribin is," the letter ran, "but
+don't be wearin' it unless you like it. And I'm sorry the man got hit;
+but I do be dhramin' most nights that it's you I'm after rapin' the
+little black head off of; and I'd liefer lose me life than think I'd be
+after hurtin' a hair of it. But the Divil was busy wid me that evenin'.
+And I'm very apt never to get the chance to set fut again out on the big
+bog. It 'ud do me heart good to see the sun goin' down in it a great way
+off, for this is a quare small place. It's a long while. But sure, to
+the end of all the days of me life," it said to her, like an echo
+beaten back from the walls of the great abysm, "it's of yourself I'll be
+thinkin' off away in contintmint at Lisconnel."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MR. POLYMATHERS
+
+
+It was to an accidental circumstance that Lisconnel owed the prolonged
+sojourn there of perhaps the most distinguished scholar who has ever
+visited us. For when he arrived at O'Beirne's forge one misty June
+evening, the night's lodging only was all he asked or desired. But in
+those times, now some fifty years since, we had "a terrible dale of
+sickness about in the country," and next morning the stranger was down
+with the fever, which, although so mild a case that even Bridget
+O'Beirne never gave him over more than twice in the same day, brought
+his journey perforce to a halt. At the beginning he was very loth to
+believe that he must relinquish his intention of reaching Dublin by a
+certain date--the first Monday in July; however, having once recognised
+the impossibility of doing so, he showed no haste to quit his quarters,
+and his stay with the O'Beirnes lengthened into months as the summer
+slipped away. At this time the forge was owned by Felix O'Beirne,
+blacksmith, shebeener, and ex-whiteboy, and with him lived his orphan
+grandsons, Daniel and Nicholas, his very old, ancient mother, who still
+drew enjoyment in whiffs through the stem of her black dudeen, and his
+elderly sister, Bridget, who had taken little pleasure in anything since
+the redcoats shot her sweetheart in the War. The missing third
+generation was represented occasionally when Mrs. Dooley, Felix's
+married daughter, came on a visit. It was conjectured among them that
+"the fancy the ould gintleman had for larnin' all manner to young
+Nicholas continted him to stop." And this may have had something to do
+with it, though less, probably, than the vaguer fact that he from the
+first "took kindly" to the O'Beirnes, and they to him. His appearance
+puzzled them a little. He was of a massive, large-boned frame, such as
+nature seems to design for rough uses; but, as Felix remarked, "you
+could aisy tell be ivery finger and thumb on him that hard work wasn't
+the handle he'd took a hould of the world by." He wore a very long, grey
+frieze coat, and a chimney-pot hat so old and tall that it looked as if
+it must have grown slowly to its great height. When he took it off he
+uncovered a shock of soft white hair, like the wig of a seeded
+groundsel, about a face which was furrowed and wrinkled ruggedly enough,
+in a different pattern somehow from what is commonly seen at Lisconnel,
+where sun and wind have a large share in the process. His baggage
+consisted of two bundles, very unequal in size and weight. The contents
+of the smaller one were mainly a shirt and three socks, knotted loosely
+in a blue cotton handkerchief; the other was done up carefully in
+sacking, and he liked to have it under his eye.
+
+Of course the O'Beirnes' visitor was often talked about among the groups
+gathered of an evening, much as they are nowadays, for gossip and poteen
+within the broad-leaved forge doors, through which on dark nights the
+fire still blinks as far across the bog as the amber of the sunset, or
+the rising glow of the golden harvest moon. Even from Felix's first
+report it appeared that the stranger was no ordinary person.
+
+"Won'erful fine discoorse he has out of him, anyway," he told the
+neighbours a few nights after the arrival; "ivery now and agin he'll out
+wid a word as grand like and big as his Riverence at Mass--goodness
+forgive me for sayin' so. Sometimes we've been hardset to tell what he's
+drivin' at. But that's the way it is wid thim words that has a power of
+manin' in thim. They're apt to bother you a bit when you're used to
+spakin plain."
+
+"Belike it's the fever in his head sets him talkin' oddly," said young
+Barney Corcoran. "I mind me brother Joe when he was bad wid it would be
+ravin' wild. Sorra the sinsible word there was out of him for the best
+part of a week."
+
+This way of accounting for his guest's fine language rather affronted
+Felix, and he consequently said, "Musha now, was there not? And how long
+might yourself be under that descripshin of fever?"
+
+"Ah sure, what 'ud we do at all if poor Barney was took that way?" said
+Peter Keogh, "and nobody able to tell was it ravin' he was, or settin'
+up to be talkin' raisonable for any differ they could see."
+
+Barney cleared his throat disconcertedly, and the old man, recalling his
+responsibilities as a host, and perhaps not admiring his sarcasm thus
+elaborated, said conciliatingly, "Och, he'll do right enough if he niver
+raves any worse than Mr. Polymathers. All that ails him is that we want
+to git a bit used to his manner of spakin'."
+
+"Polymathers?" said Peter.
+
+"To be sure, Polymathers. Did you say it any better than I?"
+
+"Well, I nivir heard tell of anybody called that way before. It's a
+quare she-he soundin' sort of name," said Peter.
+
+"Faix, then, there may be plinty quarer in it, we niver heard tell of,
+if that was all," said Felix. "Anyhow, it's his name, and his people's
+afore him. Himself tould me his father was the ouldest of all the
+Polymatherses there was in the counthry he came out of--somewheres down
+south, I think he said--and the head of the whole of thim forby."
+
+"Ay, he did so," said Dan. "Sez you to him, there was a dale of water
+run down hill since the time there was O'Beirnes blacksmiths in this
+part of the counthry; and your father was a one, sez you. And sez he to
+you, he couldn't be any manner of manes purtind to be the aquil to what
+_his_ father was. And sez you to him, what was he? And sez he, it was
+one of the Polymatherses he was, and well known for his larnin' through
+the len'th and breadth of the county Sligo. And a name it was, he sez,
+any man might be proud of ownin'."
+
+"Be jabers, himself has the great consait of it, at all ivents," said
+Peter. "But he might find people could be tellin' him there's Keoghs as
+good as any Polymatherses iver was in it--ivery hair."
+
+The stranger's patronymic having thus been ascertained, it was desirable
+to fix his calling, and, despite his disclaimer of inherited erudition,
+several circumstances bespoke him a schoolmaster, even before the
+question seemed settled by the first act of his convalescence being an
+inquiry into the amount of book-learning which Dan and Nicholas had
+amassed during their sixteen and fourteen years. This was not large,
+though as much as could be expected, considering that in all Lisconnel
+there were not just then, I believe, more than four volumes, one of
+which being merely the index to a non-existent _Encyclopaedia_, can
+scarcely rank as literature. The boys themselves, and their grandfather,
+were deeply interested in the examination, and very anxious that it
+should have a creditable result. For learning and the learned have at
+all times been held in profound respect among us away on our bogland,
+where the devotion to something afar springs perhaps the more abundantly
+because so many things are remote. On this occasion Mr. Polymathers
+opened his most sizable bundle, and it was seen to be filled with books,
+not fewer, doubtless, than a score, in leather bindings, ragged and
+battered, and brownly time-stained all over their margins, as if the
+river of years had for them run no metaphor, but a russet bog-stream.
+They comprised _Homer_, _Virgil_, _Livy_, and other ancients; likewise
+two Latin lexicons, which looked extravagant until you observed how each
+did but supplement the other's deficiencies, and this so imperfectly
+that their owner was still liable to search in vain for words between MO
+and NA.
+
+These, however, were evidently not the most prized portion of Mr.
+Polymathers's library, though he displayed them with some complacency,
+reading out here and there a sonorous "furrin" phrase, at which his
+audience said, "More power," and "Your sowl to glory," and the like. It
+was when he handled the shabbiest of the volumes, with broken backs and
+edges all curling tatters, that his touch grew caressing. The
+lookers-on, contrariwise, thought but poorly of them because they set
+up, seemingly, to be illustrated works, and their pictures, mostly of
+uninteresting round and three-cornered objects, struck Lisconnel art
+critics as very feeble efforts. To be sure Mr. Polymathers called them
+_dygrims_, but that was no help to the overtaxed imagination. Only young
+Nicholas O'Beirne listened intently to the explanation which he gave of
+one of them. Nicholas was a long, thin lad, with melancholy grey eyes
+and a square forehead, whose capacity his grandfather had held in some
+esteem, since it had been discovered, years ago, that "the spalpeen
+could make out an account for four sets of shoes, and half a stone of
+three-inch holdfasts, and a dozen of staples, and two gallon of the
+crathur, and allow for a hundredweight of ould iron, all in his head,
+and right to a farthin'." Now the melancholy eyes darkened and
+brightened with excitement as Mr. Polymathers discoursed of right lines
+and angles and circles, and expounded the mysterious signification of
+certain Ah Bay Says. And he had thenceforward an unweariable pupil in
+Nicholas, companied, albeit with less ardent zeal, and at a slower rate
+of progress, by his elder brother, Dan.
+
+More general interest, however, continued to be taken in the stranger's
+classical attainments. Everybody--the O'Beirnes themselves, their
+neighbours in the cabin-row close by, now long since an untraceable
+ruin, and the people of Lisconnel proper, a couple of miles further
+on--felt uplifted by the residence among them of a man, who they boasted
+would talk Latin to you as soon as look at you. But as we never enjoy
+our own happiness fully until it has been looked at through other men's
+envious eyes, they could not here remain content with simply possessing
+this privilege, or even with dilating upon it to their less favoured
+friends down below and down beyant. They longed to make a parade of it,
+to give a demonstration of it. And the method of doing so which they
+came to consider most desirable was the bringing about of a conversation
+in Latin between Mr. Polymathers and Father Rooney, the Parish Priest.
+For if that took place they could easily imagine his Reverence riding
+home to report in the Town what a wonderful great scholar entirely they
+had stopping above at Lisconnel. Moreover, the conversation itself would
+be a rael fine thing to have the hearing of. Terence Kilfoyle, for
+instance, said that it would be as good as a Play, which, as he had
+never seen one, was to entertain unbounded expectations. And at last,
+after they had wished the wish for some weeks, a prospect of its
+fulfilment came into sight together with Father Rooney's cream-coloured
+pony jogging along through the light of a fiery-zoned July sunset, in
+which Mr. Polymathers was basking by the O'Beirnes' door. In those days
+his Reverence was a youngish man, ruddy, and of a cheerful countenance,
+a substantial load for his sturdy nag, and altogether, in his glossy
+black cloth, a figure very different from their gaunt, sad-visaged,
+shaggily-garbed old guest. He was at the time of Father Rooney's
+approach seated on a two-legged, three-legged stool, propped
+precariously against the ray-rosed cabin wall, and was teaching Dan and
+Nicholas the twelfth proposition of the second book of Euclid. Dan had
+not yet grasped it, but it all lay as clear as a sunbeam athwart
+Nicholas's brain, and he was fidgeting like an impatient horse at the
+slowness of his fellow.
+
+Several of the neighbours chanced to be about, for the forge saw a good
+deal of company in those long empty days before the potato-digging could
+begin. They all drew together into a small crowd, and closed in step by
+step to watch the first meeting between these two notable persons, much
+admiring the deftness with which old O'Beirne secured it by pronouncing
+one of the pony's shoes in need of tightening, and the felicitous
+opening he made by assuring his Reverence that "divil a bit need he be
+mindin' the delay, because Mr. Polymathers there had enough _furrin
+languages_ to keep thim all divarted, if the baste owned as many feet as
+a forty-legs, wid the shoes droppin' off ivery pair of thim. That was to
+say, in coorse, supposin' he got the chance of convarsin' a bit wid
+somebody aquil to answerin' him back iligant, the way there wasn't e'er
+a one of thim could make an offer at doin' no more than thim little
+weevils of chirpin' chuckens."
+
+Yet the interview turned out disappointingly after all. If such a thing
+had not been, of course, exceedingly improbable, one might have fancied
+that each scholar stood in awe of the other's reputation, they steered
+so clear of all recondite subjects; keeping to the merest commonplaces
+about rain and potatoes and turf--which anybody else could have
+discussed quite as knowledgably. In vain, whenever there was a promising
+pause would the bystanders nudge one another, whispering, hopefully,
+"Whist, boys--they'll be sayin' somethin' now." Only the plainest
+English followed, and at last, when Father Rooney rode on, his parting
+joke, which referred to the difficulty his pony would now find in the
+way of becoming a barefooted pilgrim, left for a wonder solemnly
+irresponsive faces behind it.
+
+Michael Ryan said, with a touch of resentment, "Ah, well, one couldn't
+maybe expec' it of thim to be throublin' thimselves talkin' fine for the
+pack of us, as ignorant as dirt, in the middle of th'ould bog."
+
+And his wife said, "'Deed, now, I wouldn't won'er meself if the raison
+was his Riverence 'ud think bad of usin' his Latin words for anythin'
+else on'y prayers and such. It might be somethin' the same as if he went
+and took his grand vistments to go dig pitaties in; and that 'ud be a
+great sin, God knows."
+
+But old Felix, who was, as we have seen, a rather touchy person,
+construed this suggestion into an implied censure on his own wishes in
+the matter, and he said, huffily--
+
+"Sorra the talk of sin I see in it at all, ma'am. 'Tis a dale liker they
+just couldn't get out wid it convanient offhand. The same way that I'd
+aisy enough bate out a shoe on me anvil there, when it's bothered I'd be
+if you axed me to make a one promiscuous here of a suddint on the
+roadside."
+
+Mr. Polymathers himself meanwhile was perhaps dimly conscious that he
+had disappointed hopes, and failed to rise duly to the occasion; and
+this may have been why he slipped indoors, and fetched out a small book
+he had never produced before, bound in a dingy greenish blue, with a
+white paper label.
+
+"D'you know what that is, sir?" he questioned, rhetorically, handing it
+to Felix O'Beirne. "It's the Calendar, let me tell you, of the College
+of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, _juxta_ Dublin. There's a print of
+the Front of the Buildings attached to the fly-leaf. I'm after pickin'
+it up this spring at Moynalone. 'Twas new the year before last, and
+comprises a dale of information relative to terms, examinations, fees,
+and so forth."
+
+"Begor, then, it looks to be a wide house," said Felix, confining
+himself to the picture as a comprehensible point. "It's apt to be an
+oncommon fine place, sir, I should suppose."
+
+"You may say that, me man," said Mr. Polymathers, emphatically. "Not its
+match in the kingdom of Ireland. The home of literature and the haunt
+of science. And it's there I'll be, plase God, next October."
+
+"Musha, and will you be thravellin' that far--to Dublin?" said Felix.
+
+"Ay will I, and would have gone last month on'y for the fever delayin'
+me till after the midsummer entrance. Me savin's amount to somethin'
+over thirty pound, so I may venture on the step, and prisint meself at
+the Michaelmas term. In short," said Mr. Polymathers, re-poising himself
+upon his rickety stool, "I might describe myself as an unmatriculated
+candidate undergraduate of the University of Dublin."
+
+"And what at all now would that be, sir, if I might be axin'?" said
+Felix, humbly, after the awe-stricken pause which followed Mr.
+Polymathers's proclamation of his style and title.
+
+"It's a necessary preliminary," said Mr. Polymathers, "to proceeding to
+the Degree of _Baccalaureatus in Artibus_, or _In Artibus
+Baccalaureatus_--the _ordo verborum_ is, I take it, immaterial, to judge
+by the transposition of initials in the case of ----."
+
+"Faix, but it's the fine Latin you can be discoorsin' now, and his
+Riverence half-ways home," said Felix reproachfully.
+
+Mr. Polymathers, glancing round a circle of deeply impressed faces, felt
+that his prestige was restored, and even began to enjoy a foretaste of
+the triumph, which had been one part of his dream through the long
+laborious years. But he was puzzled how to bring the full grandeur of
+his design clearly before this uninstructed audience, and after
+reflecting for a while in quest of concise yet adequate definitions, he
+launched out into an eloquent description of the ceremonial observed in
+conferring degrees at Dublin University. It may be surmised that many of
+the details were due to his own fondly brooding fancy. For not only did
+the highest learning in the land crowd the Hall in their academic robes,
+but the Lord Lieutenant himself took a prominent part in the
+proceedings, which were enlivened by military music and thunderous
+salutes. Mr. Polymathers nearly toppled off his tricky stool more than
+once without noticing it in his excitement as he rehearsed these
+splendid scenes, declaiming with great unction the formulas long since
+learned by all his heart, especially _Ego, auctoritate mihi concessa_,
+and the rest, until he came to his peroration: "And all this pomp and
+ceremony, mind yous, to the honour and glory of science and fine
+scholarship. It's a grand occasion, lads; it's an object any man might
+be proud to give----" Here he pulled himself up, warned by an unusually
+violent lurch that his theme was running away with him. But having by no
+means worked off his enthusiasm, he expended some of it, as a schoolboy
+might have done, in throwing a small bit of turf at a stately white hen,
+who just then sailed across the dark doorway, like a little frigate
+under the most crowded canvas. She immediately took flight with
+floundering screeches, which drowned what the old man was muttering to
+himself. However, it was only "_Admitto te--admitto te_."
+
+After these revelations Mr. Polymathers was looked up to more than ever,
+as one not only endowed with rare gifts, but destined by their means to
+scale heights of hardly realisable exaltation. "Be all accounts there
+was no knowin' what he mightn't rise to be at Dublin College," the
+neighbours said. They also often remarked that it was "a surprisin'
+thing to see a great scholar like him spendin' his time over taichin'
+thim two young O'Beirnes." If the speaker happened to be afflicted with
+a twinge of envy about those educational advantages, he was apt to say
+"thim two young bosthoons" or "gomerals." But Dan and Nicholas were
+not, in fact, any such thing. Nicholas, indeed, quickly proved himself
+possessed of what Mr. Polymathers called "a downright astonishin'
+facility at the mathematics," far out-stripping Dan, not quite to Dan's
+satisfaction, as he had always enjoyed the pre-eminence conferred by
+superior physical strength and a practical turn of mind. So well pleased
+was the old man with his eager pupil that he would have liked to do his
+teaching, "nothing for reward," but his host's hospitality, and his own
+ambition, would not permit this. Now and then he rather puzzled Nicholas
+by an apologetic tone in answering questions about his University
+career. And once at the end of a lesson he said, as if to himself: "May
+goodness forgive me if I'm takin' what he'd have done better with. But
+sure he's young--he's plenty of chances yet." However, as the time for
+his departure drew on, all his misgivings, if such he had, seemed to
+vanish away, and his thoughts became very apt to journey off blissfully
+to Dublin in the middle of the most interesting problems. Nicholas had
+to wait till they came back.
+
+Mr. Polymathers left Lisconnel on a fine autumn morning, when the air
+was so still that the flashing and twinkling of the many dewdrops seemed
+to make quite a stir in it. The sky was as clear as any one of them, and
+in the golden light the wavering columns of blue smoke rose with curves
+softly transparent. He started with a buoyant step, as well he might,
+since he was setting out on the enterprise into which he had put all the
+spirit of his youth. He felt some regret at parting from his Lisconnel
+friends, but his plans and prospects were naturally very pre-occupying,
+whereas they had the ampler leisure of the left-behind to deplore his
+flitting, which seemed likely enough to be for good. Nearly four years,
+he had explained, must elapse before the crowning height of the B. A.
+Degree could be won, and it was only just possible that he might manage
+to tramp back on a visit meanwhile, during some Long Vacation. This
+doubtful chance was cold comfort for that ardent scholar Nicholas
+O'Beirne, who grieved more than anybody else. Most ruefully did he help
+Dan to carry the candidate undergraduate's library as far as the Town;
+nor could he take more than a downcast pleasure in Mr. Polymathers's
+farewell gift to him of the raggedest _Euclid_. And as he stood
+watching the car out of sight, his eyes were as wistful as if a door
+briefly opened on glimpses of radiant vistas had been inexorably barred
+in his face.
+
+Yet after all Mr. Polymathers's absence was not to be measured by years
+or months. One evening on the threshold of December, Lisconnel was lying
+roofed over by a massy livid-black cloud, which came lumbering up and up
+interminably, and which the weatherwise estimated to contain as much
+snow as would smother the width of the world. The north wind moaned and
+keened dismally under the toil of wafting on this portentous load, and
+its breath was bitingly sharp, so that when the lads came in from the
+forge, their grandfather said, "Ah, Dan, shut over the door, for there's
+a blast sweepin' through it 'ud freeze ten rigiments as stiff as
+staties." We usually take a large view of things at Lisconnel. Dan went
+to carry out this order, but instead of doing so he suddenly shouted:
+"Murdher alive! Here's Mr. Polymathers."
+
+Through the grey gloaming came a Mr. Polymathers, very different from
+what he had been on that brilliant, hopeful morning only a few weeks
+ago, when he had stepped lightly, and held his head up as if he were
+looking a friendly fortune in the face. Now his feet stumbled and
+dragged as he fared slowly against the wind's blustering, with his eyes
+on the ground, and his movements seemingly guided more by the weight of
+the bundle he carried than by his own will. Before he came within even
+loud shouting distance, everybody felt a presentiment of disaster; but
+he had not spoken a word to justify or discredit it by the time he got
+indoors.
+
+"Musha, and so it's yourself, sir," old Felix then repeated, in a
+congratulatory tone. "Ah, but it's a hardy evenin', and it's perished
+you are, sir. Come in be the fire."
+
+"Ay, I'm back," Mr. Polymathers said slowly, after a hesitating pause,
+as if the remark had been interpreted to him by some second person, "I
+was bringin' the books, thinkin' the lad might use them--he's young
+enough. But I'm not come to stop on you," he added, speaking faster,
+"on'y just for this night. Early to-morra I must be off to Ardnacreagh,
+and try for the taichin' there again. 'Twas on'y on account of bringin'
+the books I came this way. I'll be on the road quite early."
+
+His insistence on this point made, somehow, a very melancholy
+impression on Felix; but he replied jovially: "Is it to-morra? Bedad
+then, sir, don't you wish you may slip off on us that soon, and we after
+gettin' a hould of you agin? What fools we are. Not if you was as
+slithery, ivery inch of you, as a wather-eel."
+
+The wraith of a relieved smile at this came over Mr. Polymathers's face;
+still it looked so grey and withered, and his eyes were so sunken, and
+his large, bony hands so shaky, that all with one consent refrained from
+questions which they were agog to ask; and when Mrs. Keogh by and by
+dropped in, and being an inquisitive and not very quick-witted person,
+said, "Saints among us--it's Mr. Polymathers. And how's yourself, sir?
+And are you bringing home the grand Degree?" though they all listened
+eagerly for the reply, they wished she had held her tongue.
+
+"The divil a Degree, ma'am," said Mr. Polymathers, "and niver will."
+
+There was a short silence, and then he turned round on his stool--it was
+the same from which he had made his boast in the summer sunset, but Dan
+had meanwhile mended its broken leg with the handle of a worn-bladed
+spade. "I've given up," he said to them. "I no longer entertain the
+project of becomin' a graduate, or for the matter of that an
+undergraduate of Dublin University; and if I'd done right, I'd niver
+have taken up such an idea. I've put it out of me head. But it's been in
+me mind a great while--a terrible long while."
+
+"Look you here, Mr. Polymathers, sir, are you after gittin' any bad
+thratment from any people up in thim places?" said Felix, who always
+liked better to lay a grievance on some human and possibly breakable
+head than to believe it the work of the vengeance-baffling demon
+bad-luck.
+
+"Not at all, not at all," said Mr. Polymathers, when the question
+reached him. "I've nothin' to complain of. They're very respectable
+people in Dublin, and it's a fine city. But me head's a bit giddy yet
+wid the drivin' they have in the streets, that makes one stupid. I mind
+there was a car tatterin' along, and I crossin' over the College Green,
+had me down on the stones, on'y a dacint lad gript a hould of me, and
+whirled me inside the College gates. There I was before I rightly knew
+anythin' had happened me, and I after spendin' the best part of me life
+gettin' to it. 'Twasn't the way I thought it 'ud be.... But the College
+is as grand as any notion I had of it; on'y since I've seen it, 'tis
+like a drame to me that ever I set fut in it, just a sort of drame....
+Great ancient places the squares are; I walked round the whole of them
+before I found the Hall. A couple of chaps in uniform like came axin' me
+me business, but I tould them fast enough that I was a candidate--ah,
+goodness help me.... And the Hall's a spacious and splendid apartment.
+On'y it was strange, now, to see it full of nothin' but young fellows,
+scarce oulder than the two lads there. I might, sure enough, have known
+the way it 'ud be, if I'd come to considher, but somehow it seemed to
+put me out, as if I'd no call to be there at all. There was one of them
+began pricin' me ould hat, and another of them tripped him up against a
+black marble construction with a pair of angels atop of it, that there
+is on the wall--sure they were just spalpeens. But I'll give you me
+word, when they called me up to the examiner's table, there was a young
+gintleman sittin' at it in his black gown and his cap wid the
+tassel--bound to be one of the College Fellows, and ivery sort of a fine
+scholar--and for all the age there was on him he might ha' been me son
+or me grandson.
+
+"So he handed me over a little black _Virgil_ wid the page opened where
+I was to exhibit me acquaintance wid the text. It was merely a bit of
+an oration of Queen Dido's that I've known ivery line of these forty
+years as well as I know me own name, and better. And what came over me
+is more than I can tell, but the minute I took the book in me hand, it
+seemed to me as if ivery atom of sinse and manin' slipped out of the
+words, or out of me head--I couldn't say which, and I just stood starin'
+at them and starin', till iverythin' else got whirlin' round about me,
+fit to shake the panes out of the big windows, and the pictures off the
+walls.... Belike himself persaived I was flusthered, for, 'Take your
+time,' sez he; and after a while they stood steady enough. But, the Lord
+be good to me--sorra a syllable of the sinse come back. And be that I
+well knew it was all up wid me; and I was thinkin' me father's son had
+no business to be standin' there makin' a show of meself in the middle
+of Trinity College. So the lad in the cap said again, 'Take your time,
+sir, take your time.' But I said to him, 'God help me, sir, I've taken
+very nigh all I'll get, for I declare to you, lad, I'm over seventy
+years of age. But as for your time, sir,' I said, 'I'll be wastin' no
+more of it.' And wid that I put down the book, and out I wint. I mind
+the sun in the square nearly dazzled the eyes out of me fool's head. I
+niver seen it blazin' brighter--and there was a big bell somewhere
+boomin' away, as if they'd set the heart of the world tollin'; it's
+ringin' in me ears yet.... And a couple of days after that I quit out of
+Dublin, and I've been trampin' back to this counthry, takin' me time, as
+he said--there's no hurry now about anythin'. So that was the ind of me
+University Degree."
+
+"I just wish I could git discoorsin' wid that young feller," said old
+Felix, vindictively, "himself and his tassel in his cap."
+
+"Sure, man, 'twas no fault of his," said Mr. Polymathers, "and I can
+live widout a Degree, if that's all. Me betters did before me. To tell
+you the truth, I've thought often enough as I was comin' along now, that
+I dunno how at all I'd have had the face to meet me poor father one of
+these days, and I cocked up with a _Baccalaureatus in Artibus_, and he
+wid not so much as a dacint stone over his grave to commemorate his
+name, that was the most illusthrious Polymath in the county Sligo, wid
+more larnin' in the tip of his ear than ever I got into me ould skull.
+Never a hap'orth of good was I at anythin' except the trifle of
+mathematics, but he was as great at the Classics.... I used to humbug
+meself somewhiles lettin' on I hankered after it because it would ha'
+gratified him maybe to hear of the event. But little I ever done to
+plase him, God forgive me. Let alone goin' and makin' an ould fool of
+meself up at Trinity College.... 'Twas a terrible upset to him when I
+turned again the Priesthood, after he had the money saved up for the
+seminary and all. Words about it we had, and the ind of it was he put it
+all into me brother Ned's little farm. Ned had no more fancy for larnin'
+than the bastes of the field. A trifle of it would ha' come in very
+handy sometimes for buyin' me books; howane'er it was not to be.... And
+the books there--I on'y brought them along to lave wid you for the
+youngest lad--ay, Nicholas. He has a head on his shoulders for the
+mathematics, I can tell you; he might do something yet, if he got his
+chances. They're no use to me now, and I'd as lief be shut of the sight
+of them. And to-morra I'll be off to Ardnacreagh."
+
+So the gaunt old man talked on, groping his way out of hesitating
+pauses, and straying into dreamy meditations, as if he sometimes forgot
+his story, and sometimes its hearers. They did not know what a
+life-wreck it outlined, but they saw and surmised enough to make them
+think of him as "the crathur," and speak to him with more deference
+than if he had returned in a radiant glow of success, symbolised as some
+of them had anticipated, by scarlet robes as splendid, at least, as
+Father Rooney's at High Mass. And Felix O'Beirne took occasion of a
+madly skirling gust to say, "Listen now to that, sir, and don't be
+talkin' wild of thravellin' off to-morra. If I might be sayin' so, you'd
+a dale better stay quiet where you are this minyit. And as for taichin',
+sure it's proud and thankful the two boyos 'ud be for e'er a bit more.
+There's Nicholas mopin' about like an ould hin that's lost her chuckens
+iver since you quit."
+
+Mr. Polymathers did stop quiet--very quiet--but he taught the boys no
+more. In fact, he did nothing except sit all day staring into the fire,
+as if he had lost something in it. Once after Nicholas had sat looking
+very hard at him for a long time with the ragged _Euclid_ ostentatiously
+open at a crux, he seemed to rouse up, and putting out a hand for the
+book, began an explanation. But it died away unfinished in an aimless
+muttering, which both shocked and saddened Nicholas, and the experiment
+was not repeated. Then towards Christmas time all the neighbours were
+saying that Mr. Polymathers was greatly failed to what he had been. And
+Bridget O'Beirne reported that you might as well be argufyin' wid a
+scutty wren to swally down the full of the ducks' dish as persuadin' him
+to take a raisonable bite and sup. Dr. Hamilton from the Dispensary, who
+was consulted on the case, "consaited," Bridget told inquirers, "that he
+might be after gettin' a sort of stroke like unbeknownst;" but her own
+opinion was that "he had, so to spake, lost the knot off his thread, and
+'twould be much if he didn't slip away out of it on them, afore they
+seen e'er another green laif on the bushes."
+
+It was, at any rate, more than happened. One snowy afternoon, when he
+had been busy for some time "scrawmin' a manner of letter," which
+related, he said, to the disposition of his property, Mr. Polymathers
+grew so much worse that Dan and Nicholas ran off for the Doctor and the
+Priest, and before their arrival could possibly be expected, it became
+evident that he could not wait to receive them. Bridget O'Beirne,
+deploring the hap by his bed in the small room off the kitchen, thought
+a few minutes before he went that she heard him murmuring something
+coherent, and she called to little Rosy Corcoran, "Child alive--me
+head's bothered--come in here and listen, can you make out at all what
+he's sayin'?"
+
+Rosy came reluctantly and listened. "I think," she whispered, "it's some
+sort of prayers like what his Riverence sez."
+
+"Ah, then, glory be to God for that itself," said Bridget, "there might
+be a good chance for him after all."
+
+But she had been misinformed. The words Mr. Polymathers was muttering
+over and over to himself were: _Admitto te--admitto te_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+HONORIS CAUSA
+
+
+The evening of the day after Mr. Polymathers died was a very wild
+black-and-white one out of doors all round Lisconnel, yet,
+notwithstanding the flakes in the air and under foot, the O'Beirnes had
+received some company. Not at a wake, however the purpose of their
+assembly was to discuss a serious business matter, upon which old Felix
+O'Beirne wished for friendly counsel. Hence his contemporary, old Paddy
+Ryan, had prodded little round craters in the snow with his thick stick
+all along the good step of bleak road which lay between his house and
+the forge, and with him had come on the same errand Terence Kilfoyle,
+who, although of so much junior standing, was esteemed as a man of
+notably shrewd sense and judgment. But then neither he nor the
+neighbours knew how often he took and gave Bessie Kilfoyle's advice.
+These two were present by express invitation, but another pair of
+guests, the Dooleys, would never have been asked for the sake of their
+opinion, which they were indeed encouraged to keep to themselves, and
+appeared at this domestic crisis merely by virtue of family ties. Old
+Felix had always thought little of his daughter Maggie's mental powers,
+and less ever since her marriage with Peter Dooley, who kept a shop in
+the Town, and could be described as "an ould gombeen man," if one wished
+to regard him from an unfavourable point of view, which his
+father-in-law not uncommonly did. He had been heard to say of Peter that
+"the chap was that smooth-spoken you might think he was after swallyin'
+a one of his own graisy dipts, on'y he'd liefer be chaitin' some poor
+body over the sellin' of it"--a perhaps not inexcusable preference. As
+for Peter, he contemplated humanity with a jovial cynicism, and rather
+enjoyed the society of the old blacksmith, despite the gruff sarcasms
+which sometimes made their womenkind turn the conversation
+apprehensively. _He_ had been heard to say of Felix that "It was aisy
+work runnin' down other people's business, and small blame to th' ould
+man if he had a fancy for a light job now and agin, when he would be
+tired poundin' th' ould iron at a profit you couldn't see to pick up
+widout a strong pair of spectacles." Proximity had brought to the
+consultation Mrs. Carbery and Tim O'Meara from adjacent doors; and they,
+with old ancient Mrs. O'Beirne and her daughter and the two lads, formed
+quite a large party about the fire. The business to be brought before
+them was Mr. Polymathers's Will.
+
+Now, lest it should be thought that unseemly haste was displayed in
+attending to this affair while Mr. Polymathers still lay in the little
+next room, I must explain that for special reasons the nature of the
+funeral arrangements depended upon the result of the conference; and how
+deeply important such a point would be considered at Lisconnel I need
+remind no one who has occasionally been perplexed by our propensity for
+the pinching and scraping which takes toll of a life-long penury, that a
+brief show of pomp may invest the last scene of all. This propensity is
+not seldom misconstrued into the outcome of a mere personal vanity,
+whereas it has its root in the worthier sentiment of veneration for our
+Kind. Ould Pat Murphy, who has subsisted all his life upon an
+insufficiency of pitaties, and inhabited a largish sty, never loses the
+sense that he owes something better to himself in his character of a
+human being, and he takes painful steps to ensure the ultimate discharge
+of the debt. One of these days he who has hitherto come and gone in
+unimposing guise shall be borne, on wheels if possible--but here I
+mention grandeur never even dreamed of up at remote Lisconnel--in
+unwonted state, certain to draw the gaze of every passer-by. But as if
+with a fine touch of courtesy, he so times his assertion of dignity that
+none of his fellows shall thereby be abashed nor envy-bitten. No ragged
+wayfarer shall wish to change places with him as he passes solemnly
+along, nor grudge him the unshared splendour of his sombre equipage; not
+even if it display the crowning glory of woolly black plumes to waggle
+over his head. Accordingly, when Pat has died on his humble bed, which
+is as likely as not just earth tempered with straw, under his rifted
+thatch, through which he may perhaps see the stars glimmer with nothing
+except the smoke-haze and gathering mists between, he is conveyed thence
+with whatever pomp and circumstance his savings permit, and all his
+neighbours feel that the right thing has been done.
+
+It is true that Mr. Polymathers had given no sign of any such sentiment.
+When discreetly sounded on the subject during his last days, he had
+replied: "Ah! man, it's very immaterial," in a tone of indifference as
+unmistakable as the phrase was ambiguous. And from this fact, coupled
+with his written instructions, it might, one would have thought, safely
+have been inferred that he desired no costly magnificence at his
+obsequies. Yet the point was obscured in his late host's mind by a thick
+cloud of doubts and scruples.
+
+Mr. Polymathers had died surprisingly rich, not less than twenty-five
+pounds, seven shillings and threepence having been counted awestrickenly
+out of his leathern pouch. The ground rents of all Lisconnel did not
+reach to such a figure. It had been larger still before his disastrous
+expedition to the University; but it had never undergone any diminution
+so long as he abode under Felix O'Beirne's roof. On the first Saturday
+after his convalescence he had inquired, pouch in hand: "And what might
+be the amount of me pecuniary debt to you, sir?" And old O'Beirne had
+replied: "And you spendin' your time puttin' the heighth of larnin' into
+the two lads' heads! Bedad, sir, it's debt the other way round,
+supposin' there was to be any talk about it." The same little scene,
+dwindled at last into a mere form and ceremony, had taken place on
+every succeeding Saturday. Not that Mr. Polymathers did not feel he had
+grounds for more than merely formal demur. But he was then facing the
+steep hill of his ambition, and had sometimes to stoop as he climbed.
+
+But now, when he had turned back baffled, and all his climbing was done,
+old Felix had no engrossing object to blunt a sense of many scruples
+that must be removed before he himself or his family could with honour
+derive profit from the event; as they would do if Mr. Polymathers's
+instructions were carried out. For by that document, which he had
+finished drawing up only just in time, all his property was left
+unreservedly to Nicholas O'Beirne, with the injunction that as little of
+it as possible might be expended upon "the burying." Of course it was an
+extraordinary thing that such a piece of good fortune should befall,
+such a number of pounds accrue to, anybody at all; but apart from this
+there seemed to be nothing very strange in the bequest. Everybody knew
+that Mr. Polymathers had entertained "a great opinion entirely" of
+Nicholas' abilities. Time and again he had said that the lad would be
+heard of in the world if he got his chance of some good teaching. And he
+once more expressed the same conviction, only at fuller length and in
+finer language, in the composition which had been the last effort of his
+wearied brain. "It would give me," he wrote, "the utmost satisfaction to
+think that the legacy may eventually smooth his path to the attainment
+of those University distinctions which have eluded my own grasp." And
+almost his latest moment of consciousness had been pervaded by a faint
+thrill of pleased pride at the turn of the sentence as he read it over.
+This high style was not, however, maintained throughout, and the purport
+could not be misunderstood. Furthermore, everybody knew that he had said
+he had not a relation belonging to him in this world; and that being so,
+it was natural enough for him to make a promising and favorite pupil his
+heir. At first sight, therefore, no difficulties presented themselves;
+but old Felix slept upon the matter, and by morning grave doubts had
+risen in his mind. The gist of them was that "If they took and grabbed
+the ould gintleman's bit of money, and he after dyin' all his lone up
+among them there, wid ne'er a one of his own folks near him to see he
+had his rights, it might look ugly enough agin them, and set some people
+passin' remarks he'd be long sorry to have made on him, or any of his
+name;" and that for the precluding of such animadversions it might
+behove them to provide "a buryin'" not merely decent but "very
+respectable whatever," and to expend the remainder of Mr. Polymathers's
+personality upon a headstone for his grave, and Masses for his soul. To
+set against these apprehensions were Mr. Polymathers's wishes and
+Nicholas's interests; and the longer the old man balanced them in his
+mind, the more perplexing became their tremulous poise. So at last,
+goaded by the urgent necessity for a prompt decision, he turned to seek
+it among his neighbours. He could not forbear a hope that their voices
+might be convincingly in favour of giving Nicholas his chances; still
+his strongest feeling was that it would be a relief to get the matter
+settled one way or the other.
+
+Very different in its degree of intensity was the interest with which
+his grandson Nicholas looked forward to the issue. The question to be
+decided seemed to him of almost as vital importance as if it were:
+Whether or no the sun should rise again next morning. For him at least,
+it depended upon that whether his world should loom back again in a
+dreary blankness, or waken lit with new and wondrous gleams. Nicholas's
+thirst for knowledge and love of learning were much more essentially
+part and parcel of him than his hands and eyes, and had so far found
+little except dreams and desires to thrive upon. Even before the
+memorable summer evening when the gaunt old man in the curious big hat
+had asked for the night's lodging, which lengthened into a season's
+sojourn, he had often wandered among visions of places where there were
+as many books as anybody could read--a dozen maybe--and some people in
+it with a power of book-learning--as much perhaps as his Reverence or
+the Doctor--only neither priest nor quality, but just neighbours whom he
+could question about anything that came into his head, as he used to
+question his grandfather, and Paddy Ryan, and Terence Kilfoyle, until he
+got tired of being asked, in reply: "Musha good gracious, and who could
+be tellin' you that?" an answer which had repeatedly left him a
+discouraged atom of bewilderment, symbolically environed by our
+wide-spreading bog. Since Mr. Polymathers's visit, these visions had
+grown clearer, but not under any rays of hope. His initiation into the
+elements of mathematics had pointed out the road along which he should
+travel, but had simultaneously revealed all its obstacles,
+insurmountable for him solitary and unequipped. In those days his mind
+was constantly fumbling at some insoluble problem with the sense of
+frustration that one has who gropes vainly in the dark, well knowing how
+a single unattainable match-flare would put what he is seeking into his
+hands. And no brighter prospect seemed to lie before him anywhere in his
+future.
+
+So when he suddenly learned that Mr. Polymathers had left all his
+money--sums and sums--to be spent on "getting schooling for Nicholas
+O'Beirne;" and when the sums and sums were actually counted out on the
+table, he felt as if a door into enchanted regions had majestically
+opened in a blank wall. That night he went to bed in a state of joyous
+excitement, only dashed by some pangs of self-reproach for being unable
+to feel more sorrow at the flickering out of his poor old teacher's dim
+life. He had to frame excuses for himself by recollecting how his
+great-aunt Bridget had said, "Ah, sure the crathur's better off, God
+knows. What else 'ud he do, and the heart of him broke, but quit out of
+it, if he got the chance? Ay, bedad, some people have the quare good
+luck."
+
+And when he got up with his happiness still fresh and strange in the
+morning, there was his grandfather declaring "he didn't know if they'd
+have a right to touch the bit of money at all; it might be no thing to
+go do; schoolin' or no schoolin', he wouldn't be givin' people any call
+to say the O'Beirnes were after playin' a dirty thrick." At this
+Nicholas's experience was like that of a desert traveller who should see
+a mirage of palms and pools grow swiftly before his delighted eyes into
+a substantial oasis, and then anon, or ever he could approach it,
+shimmer back, with all its sheen and shade, into mocking illusion again.
+For thus did it fare with his hopes as his grandfather talked of
+renouncing Mr. Polymathers's bequest. Moreover, the grounds which the
+old man alleged forbade his grandson, lothfully though he listened, to
+utter a word of protest, and even made him half ashamed of his vehement
+longing to do so. Nicholas had been an O'Beirne for but fourteen years,
+yet he had already entered upon his inheritance of family pride. Only he
+could not bring himself to believe that the honour of his house called
+for so prodigious a sacrifice; and he could have urged a dozen arguments
+against it, if some other person had been the legatee. As it was, all
+that delicacy would permit him to do for himself was to give piteously
+inadequate expression to his sentiments in casual remarks about the
+grandeur of getting a bit of learning, and the difficulty of
+understanding some things out of one's own head. Altogether that day was
+the longest and the most anxious that he had ever spent.
+
+Dan also, though his fortunes were not involved to the same extent as
+his younger brother's, was not easy in his mind. All day he had been
+thinking rather badly of himself, and suspecting that other people
+thought worse of him than he deserved, and the reflection was depressing
+and irritating. The news of the legacy certainly had not given him
+unmixed pleasure, as he felt that it ought to have done; but at the same
+time he was aware that he neither grudged nor envied Nicholas his good
+fortune, and that this unamiable frame of mind would nevertheless
+probably be ascribed to him, if he betrayed any dissatisfaction or
+disapproval. The truth was that he could not help feeling some
+mortification at the way in which both Mr. Polymathers and his
+grandfather assumed the forge to be his destiny and portion in life. Dan
+did not by any means despise it: he took an interest in the work, and a
+pride in the fact that farmers sent their horses thither from beyond the
+Town, so well reputed was old Felix O'Beirne's shoeing. But it did not
+follow that he wanted to be a blacksmith all his days. Even if he had
+done so, he was sixteen, and consequently of an age to resent any
+prescribed calling, especially since he knew that the selection here had
+been made as the result of an unfavourable comparison of his abilities
+with those of another person. "Dan is no fool, mind you," Mr.
+Polymathers had said once. "But for intellect you need never name him on
+the same day of the month as Nicholas," a verdict which fell with a
+slight shock upon Dan, accustomed to the precedence given by two years'
+seniority, superior strength, and a more practical turn of mind. What
+was far more serious, however, Dan secretly cherished an ambition of his
+own. It took the form of thinking that it would be a wonderfully fine
+thing if he could ever get to learn the doctoring, and be able to drive
+about on a car like Dr. Hamilton, with a name and a remedy for
+everybody's ailment. A particularly fine thing it seemed to understand
+the construction of bones and joints, a knowledge which would put it in
+his power to prevent people from coming to such grief as, for instance,
+poor Matt Haloran down at Duffclane, who must limp on a crooked leg to
+the end of his days, because the man who pulled in his dislocated ankle
+for him had made a botch of it, through not knowing rightly what he was
+about. Dan had been much impressed, too, by several cases where a few
+drops of brown stuff out of a bottle had put people to sleep when
+various aches and pains had long hindered them from closing an eye, a
+result which the neighbours were occasionally disposed to view with
+mistrust, as rather probably wrought through the agency of "some quare
+ould pishtrogues (charms)," but which to Dan's mind proved the
+possession of a skill as enviable as it was beneficent. Beside it
+hammering out horseshoes appeared a tedious and aimless pursuit, and he
+sometimes thumped away in a very vague dream of one of these days
+finding himself more congenially employed. Now, however, it was
+perfectly clear to him that if Nicholas "took off wid himself to get
+scholarship," his own portion must be to stick to the anvil. For
+otherwise supposing his grandfather got past his work, or anything else
+happened him, there would be nobody left to look after Dan's great-aunt,
+who was not very old, and his great-grandmother, who was such a
+wonderful age entirely that no one could say how much longer she mighn't
+live. Even the wildest of dreams are not quite easy to scare away, and
+it was this chiefly that marred his content with Mr. Polymathers's
+testamentary dispositions. Still, when he heard his grandfather's
+doubts, and saw his brother's downcast looks, he became almost as
+anxious as Nicholas himself that the neighbours might talk away the old
+man's scruples and allow the will to stand.
+
+Thus there were many eager hopes and fears lodged that evening in the
+O'Beirnes' living-room, which was all throbbing with fire-light, as the
+neighbours began to drop in talking out of the dark. People are apt to
+speak loudly when they get their breath after a battle with snowy
+blasts; and the sound of voices came strangely into the stillness close
+by, where there was only a cold glimmer of candle-light, and nobody
+conversing, unless we count old Bridget O'Beirne, who had slipped in to
+repeat a few prayers, and say to herself with a sort of grudging
+wistfulness that everybody else was getting away. Then she came back to
+her world again, and mended the crumbling red-hot bank with sods out of
+her apron, and shovelled up the snow-balls shaken off their visitors'
+clogged brogues, that they might not melt into mud patches on the floor.
+
+To Dan and Nicholas, looking on from opposite corners, it seemed a long
+while before anything to the purpose was said. Everybody had to comment
+upon the snow, and Paddy Ryan's remark was that "if it kep' on at it
+that-a-way, they'd be hard enough set to get through the dhrifts be the
+day of the buryin'." This caused Mrs. Carbery to remember how she "had
+been at a one up in the County Cavan, where the gate into the
+buryin'-ground was all blocked up, so that the whole of them had to lep
+over what would be be rights a ten-fut wall. And if they did, the half
+of them plumped up to their necks in a soft place on the other side, and
+came as near losin' their lives as could be thought. Bedad now, they
+were comical to behould, goodness forgive her for sayin' so, all bawlin'
+and flounderin' about like a flock of sheep stuck in a bog, on'y it was
+a white bog and black sheep, as she minded Tom Ennis, that was a quare
+codger, sayin' at the time." And this again started old O'Beirne upon
+reminiscences of remarkable buryings which had come under his own
+observation.
+
+"Comical it may have been," he said, "but I'll bet you me best brogues
+ne'er a one of yous ever witnessed a quarer buryin' than a one I seen
+down in the south some ould ages ago, when I was a slip of a lad. But
+I'll maybe ha' tould you the story, ma'am--about the flood in the
+Tullaroe River?"
+
+"Was that the time it riz up suddint and dhrownded the crathur that was
+diggin' the grave?" said Mrs. Carbery.
+
+"Sure not at all: that happint up at Lough Gortragh, and this I'm
+talkin' about was in the Tullaroe River, a dale souther of the Lough.
+Outrageous it does be in the wet saisons. So one harvest day, when it
+was flowin' over all before it, there was a walkin' funeral about
+crossin' at the ford. The way of it was, they were after hangin' a lad
+up at the jail. In those days it's very ready they were wid the hangin',
+and in a hurry over it too sometimes. Howane'er the frinds of this lad
+had got lave to be buryin' him dacint after he would be hanged; and me
+poor father, and meself, and plinty of other people were follyin'. Till
+they come to the ford, and when they seen the manner the wather was
+runnin' wild, the bearers had a notion to be turnin' back; but they made
+up their minds, and on they wint. And as sure as they did, one of the
+lads must needs slip his fut, and they right in the middle of the river,
+and down wid the whole lot of thim, like a stook of oats in a gale of
+win'; 'twas twinty wonders e'er a man of thim ever got his feet under
+him agin. Faix, now the yell every sowl let you might ha' heard
+anywheres at all; for some of thim was thinkin' the misfort'nit body was
+apt to be swep' away and mortally dhrowned to the back of bein' hung;
+and some of thim wasn't thinkin' any such a thing. But as for the
+coffin, I'll give you me word if it didn't take and set off wid itself
+floatin' away bobbin' along atop of the wather as light now, as if it
+was a lafe dhropped down from the boughs archin' over our heads--and
+wasn't that cur'ous enough? And as quare as anythin' it was to behould
+the people all peltin' along be the two wet banks of the river as hard
+as they could dhrive, and thrippin' theirselves up over the roots of the
+trees, and slitherin' into the pools, wid the coffin just skimmin' and
+swimmin' away down the sthrame ahead of them, as aisy and plisant as if
+it was a bit of a pookawn. You might ha' sworn there was ne'er a nothin'
+in it, to look at it. And he they were after hangin' a fine big man,
+'ud weigh every ounce of fourteen stone. I tould you it was a quare
+thing. So where it would be sailin' to nobody could say; very belike out
+into the bay below. But sure when it come where the river runs past th'
+ould church, the strong current that was racin' under it just gave a
+sort of lap round wid it, and washed it clane up on the flat stones at
+the gate goin' into the buryin'-ground, and left it lyin' there, same as
+if the lads had set it down off their shoulders. Bedad now it was a very
+lucky thing it so happint there was none of the polis or red coats
+about, be raison of their gettin' notice the buryin' was somewhere
+else--oncommon lucky."
+
+"It's as quare as the rest of it," said Peter Dooley, who had heard the
+story before, "that nobody among them had had the wit to put a few
+brickbats in it, or some good big lumps of heavy stones. Stones is
+plinty, and chape enough."
+
+"They're things you haven't the sellin' of then, I'll go bail," said old
+Felix. He spoke in resentment of the interruption, but Mr. Dooley took
+the speech as a flattering tribute to his business capacity, and
+acknowledged it with a good-humoured smirk.
+
+So Bridget might have spared herself the uneasiness which made her say
+hurriedly to her brother: "If you was lookin' for Mr. Polymathers's bit
+of writin', Felix, I left it lyin' convanient to you under the plate
+there on the table."
+
+"Oh, ay, bedad, that's what's been botherin' me," said the old man,
+reachin' for it, "I dunno rightly what to say to it. But sure any of
+yous that like can be readin' it, and see what he sez for yourselves."
+
+Reading was not a question simply of liking with all members of the
+company; but everybody could hold the paper and look wise, and if he
+were none the more so afterwards, that may have been only because he
+knew the contents of it beforehand. When it was Peter Dooley's turn he
+examined the signature closely, and said, "But what name's this he's put
+to it? 'John Campion' I see, but divil a sign of any Polymathers."
+
+"Ah, that was another thing was botherin' me, too," said old O'Beirne,
+rather dejectedly, "a little while ago, when Dr. Hamilton was comin' to
+see him. For th' ould gintleman tould him Campion was his name; and it
+appairs Polymathers is some discripshin of thrade, and not rightly
+called to anybody at all. So I was thinkin' he was maybe annoyed wid
+our callin' him out of his name all the while; but he said all that
+ailed it was it was a dale too good for him; and better plased he seemed
+we would keep on wid it. Oh ay, 'John Campion's' right enough."
+
+"I niver heard of any such a thrade as polymatherin'," said his
+son-in-law; "would it be anythin' in the pedlarin' line?"
+
+"Is it pedlarin'?" said old O'Beirne, "and he that took up wid larnin'
+and litherature he couldn't ha' tould you the price of a pinny loaf.
+Faix, man, if I was Maggie I'd just put a good dab of strong glue in
+your place behind the counter down-below, and stick you standing steady
+in it, for buyin' and sellin's all the notion you have in your head here
+or there. Pedlarin', sez he."
+
+"Well, at all events," said Peter Dooley, unperturbed, "he's got
+together a dacint little fortin one way or the other. Maybe he didn't
+come by it any worser; but sure that's no great odds now. And plain
+enough he sez the young chap there's to have it--that's all the one
+thing wid yourself. But, anyhow, I dunno who could aisy conthrive to be
+takin' it off you, and he lavin' no one belongin' to him. You have it
+safe enough. Grab all you can, and keep a hould of it when you've got
+it, sez I. But you're safe enough, no fear."
+
+Nicholas, watching his grandfather's face from his corner, would have
+given ten years of his life to throttle his uncle's reassuring speech
+midway.
+
+"There's no mistake, I should say, about what he was intendin'," said
+Terence Kilfoyle, in whose hands the paper was by this time; "and who'd
+be apt to know better than himself what he had in his mind so long as he
+was right in his head."
+
+"And if he wasn't, it's little likely he'd be to ha' got that written.
+Hard enough work it is, accordin' to what I can see, even when a body
+has all his wits to the fore," said old Paddy Ryan, whose acquaintances
+did as a rule get more out of breath over a letter than over a wrestling
+match or the recapture of an active pig.
+
+"Mad people do be surprisin' cute some whiles, mind you," said Mrs.
+Carbery. "There was a deminted body used to be up at our place--Daft
+Jimmy they called him--and if you axed him the time of day he'd tell you
+to the minyit, exacter than any clock that ever sthruck, and he belike
+not widin a mile of e'er a one."
+
+"It seems a sight of money to be layin' out on larnin'," pursued old
+Paddy; "I dunno where you'd be gettin' the vally of it that-a-way,
+onless he was larnin' everythin' twyste over, same as you put two coats
+of whitewash on a wall if you're after mixin' a drop more than you want.
+You might do it then."
+
+His friends' arguments and illustrations had apparently a depressing
+effect upon old Felix, and he said with impatience, "Weary on it,
+man-alive! Sure there's no doubt about what he was manin', at all at
+all. The question is, have we any call to be takin' him at his word, and
+spendin' it away from aught 'ud do him a benefit--the buryin' and Masses
+and such?"
+
+"That might be a diff'rint thing," said Mrs. Carbery.
+
+"I'd scarce think it," said Terence Kilfoyle, "considherin' he'll say no
+more to make it so. The job's out of his hand, and 'ill stay the way he
+left it."
+
+"He might ha' changed his mind afore now, for anythin' we can tell,"
+said Mrs. Carbery.
+
+"'Deed, then, he might so, the poor man, Heaven be his bed," said Mrs.
+Dooley.
+
+"You could ax the priest about it," Tim O'Meara said diffidently, out of
+the melancholy muteness which it was his habit to maintain.
+
+"That's as much as to say it should go for Masses," said old Felix,
+clutching at any shred of definite opinion, "for it's on'y in the nathur
+of things his Riverence 'ud be recommindin' thim."
+
+But Tim shrank away from the shadow of responsibility, protesting, "Och,
+not at all, not at all. I wasn't as much as sayin' anythin'."
+
+The old man tossed up his chin disgustedly, and meditated gloomily
+during a brief pause.
+
+"There's no denyin'," he said then, "that poor Mr. Polymathers had a
+won'erful great opinion of himself over there." He nodded towards
+Nicholas's corner, and used this periphrasis with a sense that he had
+taken a precaution against perilously arousing the boy's vanity. "Times
+and agin last summer he was sayin' to me the lad 'ud do credit to us yet
+if he had his chances. A pity it 'ud be, he said, if he didn't iver git
+to school, or maybe College itself. And gave him his books and all. But
+sure, I dunno would that make it look any the better for us if we was to
+be grabbin' his bit of money, and we the on'y people he had to see he
+got fairity after he was gone. Ne'er a word have I agin schoolin' and
+College if there would be no doubtin' over the matter; but there's some
+things you can't stand too clear of, like the heels of a kickin' horse.
+It might have a quare, bad apparance, rael mane; and long sorry I'd be
+for that. What 'ud you say, now?"
+
+He looked slowly round the flickering room, but met with no response
+from old or young; all silent, from his mother, asleep in her
+elbow-chair by the hearth, to his grandson Nicholas, very wide awake, in
+a nook beyond her. Then his eyes travelled across to the opposite
+corner, and as they lit there upon his other grandson, he specialised
+his question into, "What 'ud _you_ say, Dan?"
+
+Dan, thus abruptly called upon, was intensely conscious that two eyes
+shining out of the shadow over against him had fixed him with an
+unwavering gaze. And it is hard to say how he would have answered their
+urging if at the same moment Mr. Dooley at his elbow had not been loudly
+whispering to Mrs. Dooley--
+
+"Colleges? Sure that's just talk he has be way of an excuse for keepin'
+it. A great notion he has of spendin' it on Colleges. He knows better,
+bedad."
+
+Mr. Dooley, who was rather like several sorts of rodent animals in the
+face, wore a smile at his own penetration.
+
+"I dunno but it might look ugly," Dan suddenly said.
+
+He was staring straight before him, yet he knew somehow, as if by a
+sixth sense, that the shining eyes opposite ceased their watch with an
+angry flash; and he had scarcely spoken before he would have given
+anything to call back his irrevocable speech.
+
+His grandfather's puzzled will closed on the opinion with a vice-like
+grip, as if at a touch given to a powerful spring. Indecision was with
+him an unwonted mood, from which it was an irresistible relief to
+escape, even at some cost. And nobody who knew him could suppose that
+his mind, once made up, would alter.
+
+"Begorrah, Dan, I believe it's true for you," he said. "'Twould be no
+thing to go do, and divil a bit of me 'ill do it. Whatever's over from
+the buryin' and bit of a grave-stone may go for Masses; sorra a penny of
+it a one of the O'Beirnes 'ill touch."
+
+So Nicholas lost his chances, which seems a pity when one considers how,
+for the sake of bringing them to him, old Mr. Polymathers, dazed and
+enfeebled and hope-bereft, came tramping on that long, long journey, day
+after weary day, under the scowling wintry sky, and against the
+ruffling blasts, back again across the breadth of Ireland. The road was
+all strewn for him with the wreckage of his shattered dream, and the one
+gleam of consolation that lighted him on the way had been the thought
+that his savings might now give a help to the lad up at Lisconnel. This
+had often been in his mind when he set off, shivering in the bleak
+morning, and when he stopped to shift his over-heavy bundle, and when he
+roused himself painfully from the bewildering lethargies that fell upon
+him. But he had reckoned without the pride of the O'Beirnes.
+
+It was a pity, too, that the affair should have led to an estrangement
+between the two brothers, which set in as tacitly as a black frost, for
+neither of them ever said a word to the other about Dan's intervention.
+This silence left him in the thorny grip of misgivings as to the motives
+with which Nicholas might be charging him. That he had done it on
+purpose to spoil Nicholas's chances out of spite was one of these. And
+although Dan knew very well that he had spoken from an altogether
+different impulse, he was conscious of having had feelings which seemed
+to give him a cruelly clear insight into the possible workings of
+Nicholas's mind. "Consaitin' that it was because I was invyin' him,
+that's what he's thinkin' agin me," he said to himself as the days went
+by, and he perceived, or fancied, that Nicholas in his disconsolate
+moping about had no other aim than to keep away from wherever Dan might
+be.
+
+But Dan's unhappiness took an acuter phase in a fortnight or so, when
+Nicholas began to resume his mathematical studies. There lies just
+opposite the O'Beirnes' front door a low turf bank, gently sloping, and
+mostly clothed with short, fine grass, but liable to be cut into brown
+squares, if sods are wanted for roofing a shed, or for spreading a green
+layer of scraws under new thatch. This had been done on a rather large
+scale in the past autumn, and the boys had been in the habit of
+utilising the smooth, bare patches as tablets whereon to trace with
+pointed sticks, or any handy implements borrowed from the forge, the
+figures and diagrams occurring in Mr. Polymathers's scientific lectures.
+Nicholas now, albeit he had buried both teacher and hope, began once
+more to draw his circles and triangles and polygons on the soft mould,
+as it grew damply and darkly through the wearing snow coverlid.
+Sometimes in the excitement of demonstrating involved relations between
+AB's and BC's he would for a while forget his disappointment almost as
+completely as he did the wet-winged winds that had been flapping and
+wheeling about the house ever since the thaw set in. His obliviousness
+could not, however, ensure him against the effects of cold shower-baths,
+and before long his geometrical drawing was done to the accompaniment of
+a hollow-sounding cough, which made Dan remember a time some years ago
+when Nicholas had been so seriously ill with pleurisy that voices had
+said at their door, "Ah, the crathur, he'll scarce last the night. Dr.
+Hamilton has no opinion of him at all. 'Deed, now, his poor
+grandfather's to be pitied, losin' such a fine young lad." And he also
+remembered having occasionally heard his great-aunt say that Nicholas
+took after his poor mother, and would never comb a grey head. Now,
+therefore, the figure of Nicholas sitting out on the bank in a vibrating
+mist of rain, with his feet in a puddle, and his hair flickering in damp
+strands about his thin face, became for Dan an ominous and saddening
+spectacle.
+
+But while he was ruefully contemplating it one day, a happy idea struck
+him. He would get Nicholas some clean white paper to draw his _dygrims_
+on. "And then belike he'd be contint to sit in be the fire, instead of
+to be catchin' his death scrawmin' out there in the mud under teems of
+rain." Grand writing-paper was to be had at Isaac Tarpey's, down in
+Ballybrosna, and Dan at this time happened to be in possession of a
+whole shilling, which he dedicated more than willingly to the purchase.
+
+Isaac Tarpey presided over the Ballybrosna Post-office, which was in
+some respects a singularly complete establishment, as not only was the
+raw material for a letter kept in stock there, but the letter itself
+could, for a consideration, be written on the premises by the postmaster
+in person. It is true that Isaac did not supply more than the barest
+necessaries of scribes, the bread and water, so to speak, of stationery,
+the very plainest pens and paper and ink. He kept his ink in a single
+moderate-sized jar, out of which he measured penn'orths and ha'p'orths
+into the various receptacles brought by customers who came to demand "a
+sup" or "a drain." On these sales his profits were certainly enormous,
+not less than cent. per cent., but then the consumption of that article
+was extremely small in Ballybrosna. It took a long while to reach the
+sediment at the bottom of the jar, and Isaac's letter-writing, done at
+the rate of thruppence a-piece, probably was a more lucrative branch of
+his business, though the correspondence of the Town was not large enough
+to put his services in frequent requisition. Partly on this account, and
+partly because he was by nature a strong conservative, Mr. Tarpey set
+his face sternly against the spread of education. He was distressed by
+the appearance of any symptoms of it among the neighbouring youth, even
+when it took the form of an inquiry for his limp paper and skewer-like
+pens. In fact, the diffusion of penmanship was what he most seriously
+deprecated and discountenanced. "The Lord knows," his main argument ran,
+"the foolery them spalpeens 'ill be gabbin' permiscuis would sicken you,
+widout givin' them the chance to be sittin' down aisy and invintin' it."
+His wife once suggested that "the crathurs might be more sinsible like,
+when they were takin' time to considher themselves." But Isaac said,
+"Pigs may fly."
+
+At the time when Dan came for his paper the office was occupied by Norah
+Fottrell, engaged in dictating a letter to her sweetheart, Stevie Flynn,
+away in Manchester. The composition still looked discouragingly brief,
+despite Isaac's big, flourishing hand, yet Norah's ideas had already
+run so short that she was staring in quest of more up among the cobwebby
+rafters over her head.
+
+"You might say," she said, after a pause, "that I hope he's gettin' his
+health where he is."
+
+"I've said that twyste before," Isaac objected severely.
+
+"Och, murdher, have you?" said Norah, reverting to the rafters with a
+distracted gaze.
+
+"Couldn't you tell him the price your father got for the last baste he
+sould?" said Isaac.
+
+"Bedad, I might so," said Norah; "'twas on'y thirty shillin', but it 'ud
+take up a good bit of room. And look-a, Mr. Tarpey, couldn't we lave the
+rest of the page clane? As like as not the bosthoon wouldn't be
+botherin' his head spellin' out the half of it."
+
+The adoption of this course expedited Norah's love-letter to a happy
+close. But when Dan took her place at the counter Isaac assured him, not
+without satisfaction, that "they were cliver and clane run out of all
+their writin' paper, barrin' it might be a sort of butt-ind of loose
+sheets left litterin' at the bottom of the drawer, and they that thick
+wid dust you could be plantin' pitaties in them, forby gettin' mildewed
+lyin' up in the damp so long."
+
+It was not so much compunction at Dan's disappointed countenance as an
+irresistible hankering after a good bargain that ultimately led the
+postmaster to sweep this uninviting remnant together, and fix upon it
+the price of sixpence. The charge was exorbitant, considering the small
+quantity and damaged state of the goods, yet Dan carried off his little
+packet quite contentedly, announcing that he would step over again for
+another sixpenn'orth next week, when, as Isaac reluctantly admitted, a
+fresh supply of stationery would have arrived.
+
+As Dan left the office he passed an unknown gentleman, tall, with a
+shrewd sallow face, dark, peaked beard, and alert grey eyes, who had
+been leaning against the door while the bargain was struck. The stranger
+was Mr. Alfred B. Willett, of New York, a wealthy engineer, who on his
+way home from Europe had been visiting his friend Dr. Hamilton of
+Ballybrosna. His curiosity now was roused by Dan's evident eagerness to
+acquire materials for the drawing of diagrams, the pursuit striking him
+as so strangely incongruous with the aspect of the brown-faced stalwart
+ragged youth, that he stepped inside when the place was empty to make
+inquiries on the subject. The post-master's information was to the
+effect that "the O'Beirnes above at the forge had always had the name of
+bein' very dacint respectable people up to then, and he'd never before
+seen any of the young ones settin' themselves up to be askin' after such
+things. He hoped it mightn't be a sign that the old man was goin'
+foolish, and lettin' the lads get past his control. But sure enough we
+must all of us put up wid growin' good for nothin' sometime, unless we
+happint to ha' never been worth anythin' to begin wid. And he wished he
+had a penny ped him for every one of that sort he'd met in the coorse of
+his life."
+
+This cynical disquisition was not very enlightening. However next week
+when Dan slipped over again for his second sixpenn'orth, Mr. Willett it
+chanced was there too, having called to report on the excessive
+thickness and other undesirable peculiarities of some ink lately
+supplied to him. It had been, in fact, composed of "the sidimint"
+artfully diluted with a drop of vinegar; but Isaac Tarpey said it was
+"thick wid the stren'th was in it," and set about uncorking his fresh
+jar with an affronted air, when his customer persisted in pointing out
+that its adhesive properties were less valuable in ink than in glue.
+Meanwhile Mr. Willett fell into a conversation with Dan, which ended in
+his engaging the lad to accompany him as guide on a shooting expedition
+next day. The arrangement turned out satisfactorily, and was repeated
+more than once, with the consequence that Dan and the stranger talked
+about many things in the course of several long tramps, until one
+evening the latter, sitting on a stone wall after a steep pull uphill,
+made Dan an offer which caused the most familiar objects to seem unreal,
+because a marvellous dream was coming true among them. For Mr. Willett
+proposed to take Dan home with him, and have him taught whatever he most
+wished to learn. "You're a smart lad, Dan," he said, "and I reckon
+you'll make more of that in the States than in this country."
+
+"Ah! the doctorin'," said Dan, turning as red as the young sorrel
+leaves, and letting his darling wish slip out in his surprise as
+involuntarily as he would have blinked at a flash of lightning. But next
+moment he remembered Nicholas, and fell silent; Nicholas, who had not
+looked him in the face since that snowy evening weeks ago. The dream
+seemed to stop coming true.
+
+"There's no need to make up your mind in a hurry," said Mr. Willett,
+"you can be thinking it over between this and Monday."
+
+Dan did think it over deeply that night and the next day and the day
+after. He thought how fine, if rather fearful, it would be to go on such
+a journey; and what a splendid thing to learn the doctoring business,
+and some day come home again able to cure everybody of anything that
+ailed them. "For out in the States, like enough, they had all manner of
+contrivances the people over here had never taught Dr. Hamilton," whose
+skill was occasionally baffled. He imagined the neighbours' surprise
+when he came driving up on his car; if possible he would be driving a
+little blue-roan mare like Farmer Finucane's Rosemary, with whom he had
+made friends in the course of many shoeings. He thought he would be
+sorry to miss seeing them all for so long; and yet it would certainly be
+very pleasant, in a way, to get to a place where things were a bit
+different sometimes, not like here where when you were getting up in the
+morning you knew what was bound to be happening all day just as well as
+you did when you were going to bed that night. And next he thought that
+such days would be coming to Nicholas, while he himself was away seeing
+and learning "all manner of everything;" and that if he had held his
+tongue that time, maybe Nicholas would have got his chance with Mr.
+Polymathers's money, instead of its all being spent away on nothing. And
+he thought that it wasn't his fault, for what else could he say when he
+was asked all of a minute, except the first thing that came into his
+head? And he wondered how it would be if anything happened to his
+grandfather. Nicholas wasn't over-strong, and too young altogether
+besides. And then he thought again that Mr. Willett was cleverer than
+anybody he had ever seen, and more good-natured; it was a pleasure to go
+about with him; and people were great fools to give up their chances.
+Maybe Nicholas might get another some day. And maybe Mr. Polymathers had
+been mistaken in thinking that he was the one best worth teaching.
+
+All these things Dan thought, and the result of his cogitations was that
+on the Monday he stole a sheaf of Nicholas's most complicated
+cobweb-like diagrams from their hiding-place in the wall, and brought
+them with him when he went by appointment to meet his patron off beyond
+Knockfinny. And when Mr. Willett said to him: "Well, Dan, what about the
+States and the doctoring?" he replied inconsequently by holding out the
+sheets of paper with the explanation: "It's me brother, Nicholas, sir,
+does be doin' them mostly out of his own head."
+
+Mr. Willett looked at them for some minutes with interested
+ejaculations. "Upon my word," he then said, "if these were done out of
+his own head, he must have about as much mathematics located in it by
+nature as a spider."
+
+"Aren't they good for anythin' at all then, sir?" said Dan, not knowing
+exactly what he hoped and feared.
+
+"Good? They're astonishing," said Mr. Willett. He asked some questions
+about Nicholas's age, schooling, and so forth; after which he said: "You
+must take me to see this brother of yours, Dan. I expect he'll have got
+to come right along with us."
+
+But Dan stared round and round the spacious brown-purple floor they were
+standing on, and after a far-off flight of wild fowl, and up at the sky,
+where the clouds travel without let or hindrance, before he answered
+hesitatingly: "The two of us couldn't ever both go, sir. How could we
+be lavin' the forge and all on me ould grandfather? And Nicholas never
+makes any great hand of the work."
+
+"Ah! is that the way the land lies?" said Mr. Willett, as if half
+impatient, and half amused, but not best pleased. He looked hard at Dan,
+and thought he saw how matters stood, "You've no mind to leave the old
+grandfather and the rest of the concern, but you think it would be more
+in the other lad's line."
+
+As a matter of fact Dan was at that particular moment feeling strongly
+how easily he could have reconciled himself to the separation, and how
+entirely it would be the making of him to do so. But he did not gainsay
+Mr. Willett's statement. To himself he said, "He's a right to have his
+chances; and the one of us is bound to stop in it"--a mode of expressing
+his sentiments which showed that he had much need of culture; and aloud:
+"Nicholas always had a powerful wish to be gettin' some larnin'; and I'm
+a fool to him at the geomethry anyway."
+
+The upshot of it all was that when some six weeks later Mr. Alfred B.
+Willett sailed for New York, Nicholas O'Beirne accompanied him, and Dan
+O'Beirne remained at Lisconnel. It was on a gleamful April day that they
+set out, with soft gusts roaming all around, as if they had come from
+very far off, and were eagerly exploring the strange places, and many
+light clouds flitting by swiftly above, as if they had a long journey
+before them, and were in a joyous flurry over it. Dan spent the
+slow-paced hours in the forge, where he hammered loud and long, and
+seldom looked across the threshold. The pleasantest thought in his mind
+was the remembrance of a short conversation which he had had with
+Nicholas while they were tying up Mr. Polymathers's old books at the
+kitchen-door just as the grey chink in the east filled with rose-light,
+and the earliest breeze came over the bog waving the withered grasses.
+Dan had said to Nicholas: "Sure I wouldn't be grudgin' you e'er a bit of
+good luck, lad." And Nicholas had replied: "And never did."
+
+After Nicholas's departure many days bad and good rose on Lisconnel, but
+few of them brought any tidings of the absent. Letters passed now and
+then, laggard and uninstructive as such letters must be, and they grew
+rarer and briefer as time went on. Perhaps a dozen years had gone by,
+when Dan one day received simultaneously an American newspaper and a
+parcel. The newspaper was marked with large blue chalk crosses at a
+paragraph which related how the degree of D.Sc. had been conferred.
+_Honoris Causa_ upon Mr. Nicholas O'Beirne by the University of
+Sarabraxville. And in the parcel, more astonishing still, was a
+brown-covered book, lettered on the back: _A Treatise on Conic Sections,
+by Nicholas O'Beirne_. By this time Dan had been left alone at the
+forge; but he was courting Mary Ryan, Mick Ryan's daughter, so he
+naturally conveyed to her this remarkable news. It produced a profound
+impression. Old Paddy her grandfather was with difficulty brought to
+realise the fact that "they were after makin' a doctor of young Nicholas
+O'Beirne, him that went out to the States the year before the Famine."
+And when he had got the idea into his head, it seemed to act like a
+swivel-joint, and set him nodding to the tune of: "Well tub-be sure;
+glory be to God; young Nicholas O'Beirne."
+
+"I wish to goodness he'd come over and cure Mick, poor man," said Mick's
+wife. "For he hasn't been worth pickin' up off the road ever since he
+was bad with the fever last year, and he might as well be dhrinkin' so
+much ditch-wather as the ould stuff Dr. Carson's givin' him."
+
+"Ah but it's not the medical doctorin' Nicholas has gone to," said Dan,
+the shadow of a shadow crossing his face, "there'd be diff'rint letters
+for that." And he proceeded to read out the report of the degree
+conferred _honoris causa_ upon the distinguished young Irishman, Mr.
+Nicholas O'Beirne, whose recent contributions to the study of the higher
+mathematics had roused so much interest in scientific circles.
+
+"Ay, true for you, Dan," said Mary; "you don't hear them callin' Dr.
+Carson an Honory-causy."
+
+Dan's shred of Latin had grown rustier than the oldest iron in his
+stock, but was not yet utterly worn away. "The manin' of that," he
+explained, "would be, _be raison of honour_, and I should suppose,
+they've gave it to him for the sake of what all he's after doin'."
+
+"Bedad then, Dan," said Mrs. Mick, "some one had a right to be givin'
+you an Honory-causy yourself, considherin' the cure you're after makin'
+on Mr. Finucane's ould mare, and everybody of the opinion she'd never
+stand on four feet again to the ages' ind."
+
+"Och blathers, ma'am," Dan said, modestly, "sure anybody wid the sight
+of their eyes might aisy enough ha' seen what ailed the crathur. That
+was no great comether. And look at what Nicholas is after doin'; he's
+wrote a book, no less."
+
+The "Treatise on Conic Sections" created an even stronger sensation than
+the news of the honorary degree, especially among those who had letters
+enough to spell out the familiar name on the title-page. Dan's Mary was
+not one of these scholars, but she found another page to admire, saying
+that the circles "drew in and out of aich other like a lot of
+soap-bubbles, had an oncommon tasty look, and so had all them weeny
+corners, wid the long bames between, the moral of a chain-harrow, you
+couldn't mistake it. Sure it's proud of it anybody might be."
+
+Probably Nicholas was very proud of this first heir of his invention,
+diagrams, and all. Whether it ever had any successors seems doubtful;
+certainly none of them arrived at his old home. But his Treatise is
+still safely stowed away there in a corner of the dresser. Most likely
+it is the only copy of "O'Beirne on Conic Sections" existing in Ireland;
+and who would expect to find it lodged in a smoke-stained cabin on the
+wild bogland between Duffclane and Lisconnel?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+BOYS' WAGES
+
+
+One leaden-roofed morning in the winter after his brother Nicholas had
+gone to the States, young Dan O'Beirne was in rather low spirits, and
+rather out of humour. It was not unnatural that such a mood should
+occasionally overtake him, since he had reached apparently a straight
+and monotonous tract of road, which would have looked interminable to
+the eyes of seventeen had not his household companions been now all
+declining folk, whose presence brought under his constant observation
+the last stages of "a long journey in December gone." Half a century or
+so of smithy work, even with some unlicensed doctoring and illicit
+distilling thrown in, was not by any means the future that he would have
+liked his oracle to predict for him. And though he forecast it
+accurately enough without the intervention of any soothsaying, this no
+more helped him to avoid it than if he had been an old-world tragical
+hero, whose friends were seeking by vain devices to circumvent the
+promulgated decrees of his destiny. Dan, indeed, took no steps of that
+sort. For him, as for most of us, the skirts of circumstance were as the
+meshes of the net in which Fate holds us, and his evil star was an
+object of which it seemed very hard to get a good grip. I have always
+wondered myself how people set about it. At any rate, Dan continued to
+walk under his; that is to say, if it were really bad luck that kept him
+at the forge. Upon this point there might be differences of opinion.
+Terence Kilfoyle, for instance, who dropped in to escape from a
+snow-shower in the course of that morning, would not, evidently, have
+taken such a view. For when Dan said something grumblingly about
+Lisconnel being "a slack sort of a place, where one didn't get much
+chance of doin' anythin' at all;" he replied, "Bedad now, if I'd the
+fine business you and your grandfather have to be puttin' me hand to, I
+wouldn't call the Queen me aunt."
+
+In those times the district around our bogland was more thickly
+inhabited than it is at present, and the blacksmith's jobs were
+proportionately plentier. Nowadays the forge is liable to long spells
+of silence, but Dan, who as young Dan has been superseded, philosophises
+over them, and talks no more about chances. On this occasion his remarks
+were overheard by his grandfather, perhaps because the old man had begun
+to have thoughts of chances which made him sensitive to signs of
+discontent in his assistant. And by and by when Terence had gone, he
+said, "Terence said a very sinsible word; a lad might aisy get a worse
+start in life, ay indeed he might so, if it was twyste as slack. But
+anyhow there's them here that 'ud be hard set to make a shift for
+themselves if the two of us was out of it; and I'm apt to be quittin'
+before Biddy at all events." To which Dan replied, "Why what talk was
+there of quittin'?" and the subject ceased out of the conversation.
+During the subsequent silence Dan thought, among other things, that it
+was "aisy for his grandfather to be talkin';" but in this he made a
+mistake. For old O'Beirne remembered vividly that he had once had his
+own restless ambitions, and his chances, too, of realising them, in
+times when he did more stirring things than merely forge pike-heads.
+Therefore he guessed what lent an unnecessary vehemence to his
+grandson's hammering, and if he could have thought of any consolatory
+remark, he would have made it. But it only occurred to him to say that
+the days would soon be len'thenin' now, anyway; and even to himself this
+seemed cold comfort. Dan replied, "Och, they're plinty long enough," and
+sent a thick swarm of fiery bees flitting up the dark-throated chimney.
+
+That evening when Dan closed the broad-leaved forge doors, he shut
+himself out into a world as black and white as moonlight on turf and
+snow could make it. Though the morning's flutter of snow had left but a
+meagre sprinkling on that great bogland, the moonbeams touching every
+scattered flake, seemed to gather it all up widely in one stark spectral
+gleam. Far away towards the horizon this dulled off into a shadowy zone
+of mist, where the wind was muttering and moaning to itself, dimly heard
+across the hushed floor of the night. Beyond that Dan was aware
+wistfully of regions unknown, with all their possibilities fascinating
+and mysterious. But he had small scope for speculation about what he
+should find when he opened the house door fast by; and in fact he
+discovered everything and everybody just as he could have foretold. The
+fire-lit room was filled with the busy weaving of the web that ruddy
+gleams and russet shadows never got finished, swiftly as they glanced,
+and overhead the black spaces between the rafters gloomed down like
+inlets of a starless sky. There sat his great-grandmother smoking her
+dudeen in her nook by the hearth, and her big cloak--a very little of
+wizened old woman to a great many heavy, dark-blue folds. There, too,
+knitted her grey-haired daughter Bridget, who said, as she did every
+evening, "Well, Dan, so you're come in," and would have not much more to
+say for herself that night except the Rosary. And his grandfather, who
+had come in just before him, was lighting his pipe in the opposite
+chimney-corner. A year ago his brother Nicholas would have thrust a
+head, all eyes and rumpled hair, into a patch of bright flickerings, to
+pore over the tattered arithmetic-book; but by this time his absence had
+become a matter of course. The only at all unusual feature was Joe
+Denny, the blind fiddler, who had called in on his way home and had a
+drop of poteen and a farrel of wholemeal cake. Yet Joe was indeed a
+tolerably common incident, and his jokes altered not. He had begun his
+parting one, which was to the effect that sorra a man in the counthry of
+Connaught could see clearer than himself if the night was dark enough,
+when Dan's arrival interrupted him, and made him declare, taking out his
+fiddle, that 'twould be a poor case if the lad didn't get e'er a tune at
+all. Dan was not much in the humour for tunes, but he said, "Ay, Joe,
+give us a one, man-alive," and Joe struck up with twangle and squeak.
+
+He was playing--
+
+    "Over the hills and far away,
+    Over the hills and beyond the say,
+    Over the hills and a great way off,
+    And the wind it blew--"
+
+when a thudding knock on the door seemed to beat down the shriller
+sounds and stop the sliding bow. Dan went to see who it was, and found
+standing on the threshold a tall, lean old man in a long, ragged coat,
+with a thick, knotted blackthorn in his hand. A few hard-frozen granules
+pattered in at the opened door, which admitted a glimpse of the moon,
+tarnished by a thin drift of scudding cloud.
+
+"God save all here," said the old man, who was a stranger.
+
+"Good-evenin' to you kindly, sir," responded old Felix from his fireside
+corner; "and wudn't you be steppin' widin?"
+
+"I'm on'y axin' me way to the place below there--Ballybrosna beyond
+Duffclane," said the old man; "it's the road I must be steppin', for I'm
+more than a thrifle late."
+
+But he came slowly forward into the room as if lured by the fire, at
+which he looked hungrily. He stooped and limped very much, and when he
+took off his black caubeen, the sharp gleam of his white hair seemed to
+comment coldly on those infirmities.
+
+"I'm widin a mile or so of it, or maybe less, by now, I should suppose,"
+he said.
+
+"Faix, then, it's the long mile," said the fiddler. "Put half a dozen to
+it, and you'll be nearer; and bedad it's aisier work doin' that in your
+head than on your feet. Be the same token I must be leggin' it, or
+they'll consait I'm lost at our place." And he stepped out darkly into
+the veiled moonlight.
+
+"Wirrasthrew and weary on it," the old man said to himself; and then to
+the others, "Is it that far as he says?"
+
+"Ay is it, every inch," said old O'Beirne. "And too long a thramp for
+you altogether, sir, if I might make so free."
+
+"For the matther of that," said the ragged old man, proudly, "I've
+walked the double of it, and more, times and agin, widout so much as
+considherin'. But your road's a bit heavy to-night, wid the snow--and
+could."
+
+"That's the worst of the roads," said the little old woman, peering
+suddenly out of her corner; "the longer you walk them, the longer
+they'll grow on you, till you begin to think there's no ind to them. And
+after that, the best conthrivance is to keep off of them clivir and
+clane, the way I do. Then they're no len'th at all."
+
+"Ah, ma'am, but 'twouldn't be very handy if the young folk took to
+thryin' that plan," the old man said. "_We_'re bound to keep steppin'
+out."
+
+A short silence followed this remark, because the hearers felt uncertain
+whether he meant the pronoun for a jest. To evade the difficulty, old
+O'Beirne bade Dan fetch a mug for a drop of poteen, and meanwhile said
+to the stranger:
+
+"Sit you down, sir, and take a taste of the fire. Where might you be
+thravellin' from this day?"
+
+"I was livin' over at Innislone," said the old man, sitting down on a
+creepy stool.
+
+"Musha, then, you didn't ever come that far all on ind--sure it's miles
+untould."
+
+"'Twas the day afore yisterday I quit. Last night I slep' at Sallinbeg,
+and this mornin' I met a man who loaned me a grand lift in his cart."
+
+"I used to know a man lived at Innislone," said old O'Beirne, "be the
+name of Brian English. He come by here of an odd while after the stuff."
+
+"Ay, bedad, and a very dacint ould crathur he was. Meself's one of the
+Dermodys--young Christie they call me--but ould Christie that was me
+poor father's dead this while back. Thank you kindly, lad," the old man
+said to Dan, who now handed him a little delft mug half full of whisky.
+"Why, you're nigh as long a fellow as meself. Are you good at the
+wrestlin'?"
+
+"Och, I'm no great things whatever," Dan replied with becoming modesty.
+
+"There's not many heavy weights in the parish 'ud care to stand up to
+me," said this young Christie, holding the mug in a gaunt tremulous
+hand. "Faix, it's noways forrard they've been about it since the time I
+come near breakin' Rick Tighe's neck. I've noticed that. Begorrah, now,
+ivery sowl thought I had him massacred," he said, with a transient gleam
+of genuine complacency. "You might have heard tell of it, belike?"
+
+"It 'ud ha' happint before my recollections, sir, maybe," said Dan,
+looking at him perplexedly, "if 'twas apt to ha' been a longish while
+ago."
+
+"'Twasn't long to say," said the old man. He drank the spirits
+lingeringly, in slow sips, and seemed to sit up straighter as he did so.
+Then he set down the empty mug on the table, and said, "_Boys' wages_."
+
+But he had scarcely uttered the words when he perceived that he had
+thought aloud irrelevantly, and made haste to cover the slip. "I'd
+better be gettin' on wid meself," he said, rising, "Thank you, kindly.
+That's an iligant fire you have." He looked at it regretfully, but
+turned resolutely towards the door, still open, and framing the broad
+dim whiteness out away to the bounding curtain of gloom. "It's a grand
+thing," he said defiantly, "to have all the world before you."
+
+The sentiment was not accepted without qualification.
+
+"That depinds," said old O'Beirne. "Somewhiles I question wud you find
+anythin' in it better than a warm corner and a pipe of 'baccy, if you
+thramped the whole of it. And you might happen on a dale worse. What do
+you say, mother?"
+
+She was knocking ashes out of her pipe-bowl against the wall, and nodded
+in assent.
+
+"It's no place for people that can keep shut of it," she said.
+
+"If you've ne'er a chance of gettin' into it," said Dan, "I dunno what
+great good it does you bein' there afore or behind."
+
+"Or if you knew there was nothin' left in it you wanted to be goin'
+after," said his great-aunt, half to herself.
+
+"Well, whatever way you look at it," said the strange old man, "I've a
+notion I've a right to be gettin' somethin' more out of it be now than
+boys' wages. Ay, it's time I was. Boys' wages; the lyin' spalpeen."
+
+"If you axed me, sir," said old O'Beirne, "I'd say 'twas time somebody
+else would be gettin' the wages. Isn't there any childer to be earnin'
+for you? Haven't you e'er a son, that you need be thrampin' the counthry
+that fashion, let alone talkin' about all the world, wild like?"
+
+"I've a son, troth have I, if that was all," said the old man, turning
+away, angrily.
+
+"Then it's that much better off than me you are. The only one I had, he
+took and died on me, himself, and his poor wife a couple of days after
+him--God be good to them--when the lad there wasn't scarce the height of
+that stool, and a less size on his brother, that's away now in the
+States gettin' all manner of a fine edication. Very dacint poor childer
+they always was, too; but it was a bad job."
+
+"He might ha' done worse agin you than that," said Christie Dermody, "be
+the powers he might." He had retreated as far as the door, but now he
+faced round, and stood on the edge of the thin snow, leaning his right
+shoulder against the post, and looking in at the other old man by the
+fire. "He might ha' fooled you for years and years, and made a
+laughin'-stock of you wid everybody about the place--and me wid ne'er a
+thought of any such a thing--he might so, and bad luck to him....
+'Foostherin' about and consaitin' to be doin' a fair day's work, when
+he's the creep of a snail on him, and the stren'th of a rat.' That's
+what I heard Tim Reilly sayin' and I goin' home on the Saturday night.
+But if I come creepin' after him, the young baste, he'd maybe ha' raison
+to remimber it.... And himself and the wife lettin' on there was nothin'
+like me; and he callin' me to come into his room--I heard him plain
+enough all the while, no fear, but I wudn't be lettin' on. There's
+ne'er a hap'orth ailin' him. Troth he may call till he's choked afore
+iver I'll come next or nigh him. And sendin' the little girl slutherin'
+to say her daddy wanted me. I tould her want might be his master. Sure
+they're all the one pack, and the widest width there is in this world
+I'll be keepin' between them and me. Shut of them I'll be for good and
+all--and I'll make me fortin' yet, and no thanks to him. What talk have
+they of ould men? Boys' wages. Good-night to you all."
+
+To those in the room it seemed as if he dropped away back into the wan
+dusk behind him, and next moment they saw him in motion a few paces
+distant, limping fast, and gesticulating as though he were still
+carrying on his monologue.
+
+"That old crathur's asthray in his mind, I misdoubt," said old O'Beirne,
+"and I wouldn't won'er if he was after gettin' bad thratement among his
+own people."
+
+"Goodness pity him," said his sister Bridget. "It's a cruel perishin'
+night, and snowin' thicker. Where'll he get to at all? And carryin'
+nought but an old stick. We'd better ha' kep' him."
+
+"Sure we couldn't ha' stopped him anyhow," said the blacksmith, "no
+more than one of them flustherin' blasts goin' by. When a body's took up
+wid onraisonable notions, you might as well be hammerin' could iron as
+offerin' to persuade him diff'rint. But he'll maybe turn in at the
+Gallahers'."
+
+They watched him until the dark imprints of his receding steps in the
+thin snow-sheet could no longer be distinguished, and then Dan closed
+the door, shutting out the wide world and the fortune seeker. "Things is
+quare and conthrary," he said to himself.
+
+Some two hours afterwards they were all sitting round the fire still. It
+was nearly nine o'clock, which is late in Lisconnel, but they found it
+hard to detach themselves from the cordial grasp of the warm glow.
+Bridget, however, had put by her needles, and begun to tell her beads,
+when another knock broke in upon them.
+
+"He's come back belike," said old O'Beirne; but when Dan opened the
+door, the person who stood there, though likewise tall and gaunt and
+ragged, had grizzled black hair, and was not more than middle-aged. His
+face was hollow-cheeked and drawn, and his eyes glittered while he
+shivered and panted. The night had grown wilder as the moon sank low,
+and the snow went past the door like rapid wafts of ghostly smoke. This
+newcomer stumbled into the room without ceremony, as if half blinded,
+and said breathlessly--
+
+"Did any of yous be chance see an ould man goin' this road to-day? An
+ould ancient man, somethin' lame; be the name of Christie Dermody?"
+
+"Ay, sure enough, himself was in it not so long ago," said old O'Beirne.
+"If it hadn't been you, 'twas very apt to ha' been him come back."
+
+In the man's face one trouble seemed to be relieved by another at the
+tidings.
+
+"Glory be to goodness, then, that I've heard tell of him at last," he
+said. "But God help the crathur, what's to become of him streelin' about
+this freezin' night? The snow's as dhry as mail-dust. Perished he'll be.
+Och, he's the terrible man to go do such a thing on us. What way did he
+quit? It's me ould father, sir, that's over eighty years of age."
+
+"And is he after strayin' away on you?" said old O'Beirne.
+
+"Follyin' him since yisterday mornin' I am," said the other, "when it's
+in me bed I should be be rights, for I'm that distroyed wid the could
+on me chest I've scare a bit of breath in me body. But sure what matter
+if I can come be the crathur agin. Is it that a-way he went, did you
+notice?"
+
+"You're bound to wait till the flurry of the win's gone by," said old
+O'Beirne, for his visitor pointed out into a shrieking whirl, shrilling
+higher and fiercer. "Sorra a minyit you'll lose, for you couldn't stir a
+step in that or see a stim. Sit you down a while. What was it set him
+rovin'?"
+
+"Did he say anythin' agin us? Anythin' of bein' thrated bad?"
+
+"Well, I wouldn't say he seemed altogether satisfied in himself," said
+old O'Beirne, remembering his suspicions. "Somethin' he said of bein'
+made a fool of, and tould lies to----"
+
+"And gettin' boys' wages," said Dan.
+
+"Ay, ay, wirrasthrew, that was the very notion he had, goodness help us.
+What will we do at all wid him? You see, sir, me father's a won'erful
+proud-minded man; he is that. And a great big man, and as strong as ten
+he was, ontil he got rael ould entirely. So it's cruel bad he thinks of
+not bein' able for everythin' the way he used to be; and he won't let on
+but he is, be no manner of manes he won't. 'Deed no, he sez he's as good
+a man as ever he was in his life."
+
+"Belike now he's of the opinion the sun doesn't dhrop down out of the
+sky of an evenin'," said little old Mrs. O'Beirne, with sarcasm. "What
+does the ould body expec'?"
+
+"I dunno, ma'am, I dunno. Sure it's agin nathur and raison. There's
+meself gettin' as grey as a badger, and noways that supple as I was. But
+me father's a terrible cliver man. You'd niver get the better of an
+argufyment wid him, for he wouldn't listen to a word you'd be sayin'. So
+you see the way of it was, the two of us is workin' this great while on
+Mr. Blake's lan', that's a dacint man enough; and it might be three year
+ago, he sez to me one Saturday night--for be good luck 'twas me and not
+me father he'd mostly be payin'--sez he to me, 'Look it here, Ned, it's
+the last time I'll be givin' man's wages to your father, for bedad an
+infant child 'ud do as much as he any day of the week. So I'll put him
+on boys' wages,' he sez, 'that'ill be three shillin's, and every penny
+as much as he's worth,' sez he. And sure I knew it was the truth he was
+sayin', but 'twould break me father's heart.
+
+"So nought better could I do on'y to make out 'twas he would be gettin'
+the man's wages, and meself the boy's. Diff'rint raisons I conthrived,"
+he said, with some natural pride in the details of his strategy, "but
+mostly I let on 'twas because of me bein' such a fool about the horses
+they couldn't trust me wid any except the ould ones. Anyway me father
+was contint enough; faix, some whiles he seemed a bit set up like,
+considherin' he had the pull over me, and he'd be sayin' what at all 'ud
+we do without him, and I such an omadhawn. Niver a cross word we had
+until last week I got laid up wid this mischancy could and the pain in
+me chest, so sorra a fut could I go to me work; and I well knew the
+whole thing 'ud come out, if he went when I didn't. Bedad I dhramed it
+all the night asleep and awake, till I was fairly moidhered in me head."
+
+"Tub-be sure," said old O'Beirne, "that's the worst of lettin' on. If
+anythin' goes crooked, it's like the bottom bursted out of a sack of
+mail; you're carryin' about nothin' at all before you know what's
+happint you."
+
+"Well, we done the best we could, me wife and me, to dispersuade him off
+of goin' on Saturday. Bad wid the could too, we said he was; but och not
+a fut of him but would go. So Barney McAuliffe was tellin' me wife, when
+the men was payin' in the yard, me father he ups and says to Mr. Blake:
+
+"'Beg pardon, sir, but you're after givin' me no more than me son's
+money, and it's meself was workin' this week, not him.'
+
+"And Mr. Blake sez, just goin' off in a hurry, 'What are you talkin'
+about, man? Whethen now, you don't suppose I've been payin' you full
+wages, that hasn't done a stroke of work worth namin' this half-dozen
+year? That'ill have to contint you till Ned's back agin.'
+
+"And Barney sez my father had ne'er a word out of him, but just went
+home dazed like. And me wife sez when he come in, he sits down on the
+form be the door, and niver opens his lips. So she knew right well what
+ailed him, and she said iverythin' she could think of--how it's
+disthroyed we'd be on'y for him now I was laid up, and the won'erful man
+he was, and this way and that way. But niver a word he heeded, nor near
+the fire he wouldn't come, and had her heart-scalded seein' him sittin'
+there in the draught of the door. And I meself was tired callin' him to
+come in and spake to me, and I lyin' in bed, but next or nigh me he
+niver come, not even for little Maggie that he always thought a hape
+of. And the next mornin' if he wasn't quit out of it early, afore
+anybody knew, in the bitter black frost, and a quare threatinin' of
+snow. So then as soon as I heard tell, I up wid me and come after him.
+Troth, I left the wife frettin' wild, the crathur, thinkin' I'd get me
+death; but what else could I do? And now I must be steppin' on again.
+Och no, thank you, lad, if I took a dhrop of spirits, I'd be choked wid
+coughin'. But you might just set me on the right road."
+
+"I'll go along wid him," said Dan, aside to his grandfather, "and if I
+can bring him, or the both of them, back here, I will. It's my belief
+he's as bad as he can stick together."
+
+So Dan and old Dermody's son went out into the night. A lull in the wind
+had come, and the light of the moon, hung near the horizon's rim,
+flickered out dimly ever and anon as the edge of the drifting mist
+lapped up wave-like and touched her. It was piercingly cold. Ned Dermody
+leaned heavily on Dan as they walked, only till he fetched back his
+breath, he said, but it was slow in coming. They had not gone many
+hundred yards, yet vast tracts of solitude seemed to have folded round
+them, before Dan caught sight of something that somehow startled and
+shocked him--a group of boulders by the road, with a shadow under one of
+them strangely like a human form. A few paces further on he became aware
+that it really was a man--the old man--sitting huddled up under the big
+glimmering stone. Thus far had he carried his forlorn quest after
+Fortune, and mutiny against Fate. His snaggy stick lay at a little
+distance, a black line on the snow, and the sight of that made Dan's
+heart stumble. But Ned Dermody shouted out hoarsely and loud: "Be the
+Lord it's himself," and, as Dan afterwards used to tell, "took a flyin'
+lep at him, as if he'd a mind to ha' lep over the world."
+
+"Musha now, and is it there you would be sittin' to catch your death of
+could?" he began, in a tone of gleeful reproach, shaking the old man by
+the shoulder. "Goodness forgive me for sayin' so, but it's yourself's
+the pernicious ould miscreant. Fine thrampin' over the counthry I've had
+after you--forby givin' us the greatest fright altogether. Sure I give
+you me word the whole of them at home was runnin' in and out of the
+house on Sunday mornin' like so many scared rabbits about a bank. And
+ne'er a man-jack of them, you persaive, had the wit to find out where
+you was off to till meself riz out of me bed to go look. And now,
+man-alive, git up wid yourself and come along, for it's mortal could
+here, and there's tons' weight of snow this instiant minyit ready to
+dhrop down on our heads. Come along. Sure it's niver disthressin'
+yourself you'd be about ould Blake and his wages? Musha sure Norah and
+meself was sayin' on'y on Saturday night that there wasn't many
+stookawns like me had fathers to be bringin' them home shillin's every
+week as regular as the clock, and givin' prisints to the childer, and
+all manner. There's little Maggie frettin' woful to be missin' you out
+of it. Don't be keepin' me standin' on me feet, there's a good man, for
+it's quare and bad I've been, and the doctor was sayin' he couldn't tell
+what ruination mightn't be on me if I didn't mind what I was at. And
+here's the dacint lad waitin' to show us the road. We're just comin'
+along this instant, boyo. Look-a-daddy, 'twas all a mistake, and we'll
+settle it up next week, when we're both workin' agin. Very belike Mr.
+Blake didn't rightly know what he was sayin'. Wake up and come along....
+Daddy darlint, don't you hear what I'm tellin' you? It's raisin' your
+wages they'll be after Lent, I wouldn't won'er, raisin' them a shillin'
+belike--rael grand it'ill be--God Almighty!"
+
+He stood up suddenly and looked towards Dan, but at neither him nor
+anything else. The moon began to shine clearer in a chink between two
+straight leaden bars, and the great white bog seemed to grow wider and
+stiller under the strengthening light. The very wind had forsaken them,
+and gone off keening into the far distance. It seemed to Dan that even a
+flake fluttering down would have been some company, but not a single one
+was in the air. He felt himself seized by a nameless panic, such as had
+not come over him since he was a small child a dozen years ago.
+
+"What's the matter at all?" he said futilely to Ned Dermody, knowing
+well enough.
+
+"Gone he is," said Ned, "the life was vexed out of him among us all.
+He's gone. And it's follyin' him I'd liefer be, on'y for them crathurs
+at home."
+
+But in another moment he came staggering against Dan, and clutched his
+arm, saying wildly: "Ah, lend me a hand--for pity's sake--a hand for a
+minyit. Don't let go of me." And he leant such a heavy dead weight on
+him that all Dan could do was to let it slip down and down as softly as
+might be, until the snowy earth took it from him.
+
+Ned had followed in spite of the crathurs at home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+CON THE QUARE ONE
+
+
+Among the unfamiliar faces that show themselves now and then at
+Lisconnel, some make no second appearance, never coming our way again,
+but passing out of our ken as utterly as if their route lay along a
+tangent, or the branch of an hyperbola, or other such unreverting line.
+We seldom, it is true, get proof positive, as in the case of the
+Dermodys, father and son, that they will no more return. Generally their
+doing so any day may be supposed possible as long as anybody remembers
+to suppose it. But some come back at more or less regular intervals,
+like periodic comets, so that if a certain time elapses without bringing
+one of them, the neighbours say they wonder what's took him at all,
+while some reappear erratically enough to preclude any calculations upon
+the subject. Of this latter class was Con the Quare One, who, after his
+first arrival, on a summer's evening, now more than a quarter of a
+century since, became a rather frequent visitor, usually stopping for a
+few days at least, before he resumed his travels. It was conjectured
+that these were very extensive, though perhaps less so than Mad Bell's.
+But it was even more difficult to obtain a satisfactory report of them
+from him than from her. Mrs. M'Gurk said he was "so took up with his own
+notions, that he mostly knew no better where he'd been, or what he'd
+been doin', than a baste drivin' home from a fair; you might as soon be
+axin' questions of one as the other; though when Con chose to give his
+mind to it, he knew what he was about as well as anybody else. Sure if
+you wanted to know which way he was after comin', as likely as not he'd
+talk about nothin' on'y the sorts of clouds he'd been watchin' goin' by
+over his head; and 'twould take a cliver body to tell from that what
+road he might ha' had under his feet." This incommunicativeness made him
+a disappointing guest sometimes by the firesides, where he was finding a
+night's lodging; though he might eke out his conversation with a little
+twangling on his fiddle, in which the melody would be quite as vague as
+his narratives. As for his own earlier history, he never gave any clear
+account of it, probably having none to give, and the neighbours'
+speculations upon this point were somewhat wide of the mark, which was
+not surprising, as what stray hints he did let fall could be very
+deviously construed. The opinion most commonly received held that he had
+"took and run off from home, and he but a gossoon, be raison of doin'
+some quare bit of mischief, and had a mind yet to be keepin' out of his
+people's way; though, like enough, they weren't throublin' their heads
+about him be now;" a theory which was not entirely in accordance with
+facts.
+
+Con was not, I believe, an especially quare one at his first start in
+life, begun under the thatch of a little whitewashed cottage, dotted
+down among grass-fields beside a clear, brown river, which kept his
+mother busy exhorting him and his half-dozen brethren to not be falling
+in and drowning themselves on her. Her days were haunted by
+apprehensions of that catastrophe, which, however, was not included in
+the plot of her life's drama. Con's chosen bugbear was the bridge which
+bestrode the river close by, and beneath the arch of which he had once
+happened to be while a cart passed overhead. For the lumbering rumble
+had been an appalling experience, which he shuddered to repeat. Yet he
+lacked the moral courage to rouse his elders' derision by an avowal, so
+he followed, and did not let on, whenever their wading and dabbling
+brought them into the hollow-sounding shade. Despite this daily anxiety,
+Con spent his earliest years light-heartedly enough, with no stinting of
+pitaties--none at least that reached the childer--and ample scope for
+sports and pastimes. But when he was still very small, his grandmother,
+lately widowed and on her way to a new abode, stopped a night with her
+married daughter, and begged that she might bring home one of the
+grandchildren with her, "just to take the could edge off her
+lonesomeness," a request which could not well be refused. And Con seemed
+the appropriate person to go, as the old woman considered that "the dark
+head of hair he had on him was the moral of his poor grandfather's afore
+it turned white." Therefore the swiftly running mysteriously murmuring
+river flowed away out of his life, and with it vanished all the faces
+and voices and comradeship that had made up his world.
+
+At first he fretted for them rather persistently, but after a time
+adapted himself to circumstances, and contented himself with the
+grass-bordered, hedge-muffled lane, which had become the scene of his
+adventures, fraternizing with the reserved fawn-coloured goat and
+demonstrative terrier, who alone took an intelligent interest in them.
+For his grandmother was satisfied with the sense of having him "playin'
+around handy," and could not be counted company.
+
+But after nearly a twelvemonth had passed, Con seemed one day to be
+seized with a fresh fit of homesickness. It was a brilliant late summer
+morning, yet to old Mrs. Quin's perplexity, he continued to sit on his
+little stool, with his slice of griddle-cake half-crumbled in his lap,
+and answered her suggestions that he should finish his breakfast, and
+run out to play, by irrelevant requests for his own ould mammy. He
+wanted her cruel bad, he said, and there was nothin' ailed him, and he
+wouldn't like to look for blackberries along the hedge--or to throw
+stones for Bran--or even to be given a whole ha'penny to go buy himself
+a grand sugarstick down at the shop--he only wanted his mammy. Such was
+his attitude and refrain all that day and the next. After which his
+grandmother said to her neighbour, Judy Ahern, that she couldn't tell
+what had come over the child, and he had her fairly distracted
+listening to him.
+
+And Mrs. Ahern said: "Maybe he might be gettin' somethin'; there's a
+terrible dale of sickness about. But he doesn't look very bad to say.
+Arrah now, Con avic, why wouldn't you run out and play a bit this lovely
+mornin'? Wantin' your mammy? Sure that's foolish talk, and she nobody
+can tell how far away this minyit. It's just a notion you have....
+'Deed, ma'am, I dunno, but maybe you'd a right to let him home to her,
+or else he might get frettin' and mopin' himself into the fever. He's a
+poor little crathur; the face of him this instant isn't the width of a
+ha'penny herrin'."
+
+"And he so continted," said Mrs. Quin, "until he took his fantigue. Rael
+quare it is."
+
+"Most things do be quare and ugly these times," said Mrs. Ahern,
+"Goodness help us all. There's poor Mrs. Duff thravellin' off to-morra,
+to go stay wid her brother at Gortnakil. Very belike she'd take him
+along; and he'd be aisy landed home, once he'd got that far."
+
+And on the morrow Con did actually set off with Mrs. Duff, feeling half
+appeased and half compunctious, as people do when they get what they
+have clamoured for; sorry a little to lose sight of Bran, staring
+open-mouthed after him down the lane; and relieved through all by a
+vague sense that he was going whither his heart-strings pulled. If he
+had been a more experienced traveller, he might have noticed some signs
+that things were, as Judy Ahern had said, out of joint. It was
+harvest-time, and the weather was not wet, though dull and chilly, but
+nobody was working in the fields. Nothing seemed to move in them, as
+they lay deserted, except trails of a white mist that drifted low among
+the furrows, where the potato-haulms looked strangely discoloured,
+speckled and blackened, as if a shrivelling flame had run through them
+all, charring and strewing pale ashes. The air was full of a peculiar
+odour, heavy and acrid, the very life-breath of decay. The roads were
+deserted too. For miles nobody would be met, and then a small stationary
+crowd of people would appear, collected it would seem without any more
+purpose than cattle huddled together in a storm, and as dumb as they,
+not giving so much as a "fine mornin'" to the passer-by. Other crowds
+they fell in with now and again, pacing slowly along, and these always
+had a heavy burden carried among them, and sometimes women keening.
+Once the car-horse shied violently at some dark, long thing, that was
+stretched out by the footpath, and Mrs. Duff crossed herself and said,
+"God be good to us," and the driver said without looking off his reins:
+"He's lyin' there since yisterday, and I seen another above about the
+four-roads, and I comin' past this mornin'."
+
+Con did not give much heed to these incidents; but one scene in his
+journey impressed him strongly. It was at the small town where they
+slept the night, and it happened while they waited in the broad main
+street next morning for their car to pick them up, as Mrs. Duff
+travelled by a rather disjointed system of lifts in vehicles that were
+going her road. There were few people about, and Con was intensely
+admiring a gaudy tea-chest in the window of the shop before which they
+stood, when a great roar began to swell up round the corner, with a
+lumbering of wheels heard fitfully through it. Presently a large crowd
+came struggling into sight; a street full of men, women, and children,
+surrounding a blue, red-wheeled cart, piled high with dusty-looking
+white sacks. Half-a-dozen dark-uniformed policemen were trying to haul
+on the horse, and keep between the cart and the crowd, whose shout
+generally sounded like: "Divil a fut its to quit--divil a fut." It was a
+crowd that looked as if it had somehow got more than its due share of
+glittering eyes--in mistake, apparently, for other things.
+
+As the cart came crawling past where Mrs. Duff and Con stood, a furious
+rush so tilted it over that the horse fell, breaking a shaft, and some
+of the topmost sacks tumbled off, dropping with dull thuds, like dead
+bodies, upon the damp cobblestone pavement. Con saw a little cloud of
+white dust rise up over each as it dumped down, and melt away on the
+air, making him wonder to himself: "Is it smokin' hot they are?" But in
+another moment they were hidden for a while by a wild wave of the crowd,
+which threw itself tumultuously upon them. One of the sacks burst,
+spilling the soft flour in flakes, and round it the jostling and
+writhing grew fiercest. The faces that got nearest to it looked hardly
+the whiter for their smears and powdering.
+
+A young woman, all black eyes and elf locks, with a baby wrapped in her
+shawl, crouching low and making a desperate long arm, grasped a covetous
+handful, which spirted away wastefully between her clenched fingers. She
+moistened some of this in a puddle as she knelt, and held the paste to
+her baby's mouth. But its head was drooping wearily aside, and its lips
+did not move when she touched them. "Ait it up, me heart's jewel," she
+said; "ait it up, mother's little bird. 'Deed, then, but you're the
+conthrary little toad. It's breakin' me heart you'll be roarin' when
+I've ne'er a bit to give you, and sleepin' dead, when I've the chance to
+feed you." She was beginning to shake it, but a young man who stood
+behind her put his hand on her shoulder, saying: "Whisht, whisht, you
+crathur, for God's sake. It's done wid wantin' and cryin', and a good
+job for it too, the Lord knows." Then the girl shrieked again and again,
+and the people about her said from one to the other: "It's her child's
+starved on her." And an old man caught up the little body, and held it
+high over his head, shouting, "Boys, boys--look yous at that. There's
+the way Henderson's cartin' off the childer's bit of food to make his
+fine fortin in England." And the crowd shouted back through a surge of
+curses: "Divil a fut will he this day."
+
+A very little old woman seized hold of an outlying sack and tried to
+lift it, a ludicrously impossible feat, at witnessing which a cripple
+leaner than his crutches laughed boisterously, saying, "Och, good luck
+to you, granny. You're makin' a great offer at it entirely. Is it often
+you do be liftin' up the Hill of Howth? More power to your elbow." And
+the crowd yelled with laughter too.
+
+At this moment there was a prodigious clatter of hoofs on the stones,
+and round the corner whirled a squadron of hussars, all in their blue
+and yellow like a flight of macaws, coming to the rescue of Mr.
+Henderson's sacks. But Con saw scarcely more than the first confused
+onset, for somebody snatched him up and hurried him into a dark passage.
+The last sight he had of the fray was of a glossy black horse plunging
+frantically back from a cloud of the flour flung into his face, and
+rearing higher and higher, until he fell over with a terrific scrambling
+crash. Con particularly noticed the white gloves of the rider, and
+thought to himself, "He's been grabbin' the flour too." And the women
+about him said, "Och, murdher, the baste--the man's apt to be kilt!"
+
+When Mrs. Duff and Con emerged again all was quiet in the street--two or
+three women had even stolen back, and were scraping up the white
+patches--and he was driven away on a car for what seemed to him a vast
+length of time. But at last, as he peered listlessly out on glimpses of
+the dreary, strange road caught between the shawled heads of two other
+passengers, his eyes suddenly fell on something delightfully familiar.
+It was a grey ruined mill which stood by the river, not many hundred
+yards from his home. All at once he seemed to be set down in the middle
+of his old life as if he had never left it, only with a charming
+freshness superadded. A delicious feeling came over him as he watched
+the clear, sky-glinting loops unwind themselves in the grass while the
+car jogged along. There were the big stones over the edges of which the
+brown water broke into dancing crests of crystal bubbles when the river
+was full, and the deep pools under the hollow banks where they had seen
+the trout that was the size of a young whale, and the twisted wild
+cherry tree from beneath which the eddies sometimes twirled away bearing
+fleets of frail, snowy petals. And Johnny and Katty and the rest might
+all come into view paddling round any corner. When the car stopped at
+the gap through which you got into the field just behind his cottage, he
+was almost beside himself with joy, as his fellow-travellers, who were
+less elated, lifted him down and handed him his bundle, and bade him
+run straight in to his mother like an iligant child.
+
+He did run down the steep little footpath at the top of his speed, and
+round the corner of the house, and in through the open door. The room
+looked very dusk to him coming in from the mellow afternoon sunshine,
+and the first thing he noticed was that the fire had gone out. The
+hearth was a blackness sprinkled with white ashes, which made him think
+of the flour spilt on the dark ground. Next he saw his mother sitting on
+a stool by the hearth with her head leaned against the wall, and his
+father's old caubeen hanging on its nail above, a very unusual sight at
+that hour. Con rushed at her head-foremost, saying, "Och, mammy darlint,
+I'm come home this long way, and they was fightin' wid all the soldiers
+and spillin' the flour, and his horse rared up on his hind legs till he
+fell off his feet. And where's daddy if he isn't workin'? And musha what
+for is Nannie and Johnny in bed?" He pulled her shawl because she did
+not look round at him, and immediately she dropped down prone on the
+floor as heavily and helplessly as he had seen the white sacks fall. She
+had in truth been dead for hours, but Con ran out screaming that he was
+after killing his mammy, and nothing would persuade him otherwise.
+Vainly the neighbours averred that "the crathur was starvin' herself
+this great while to keep a bit for the childer, let alone her heart
+bein' broke frettin' after her poor husband and little Pat, who were
+took from her wid the fever, both of them the one day." Con's mind was
+shut fast into the dreadful moment when he had pulled her shawl and she
+had fallen down, and therein it abode, sorely afflicted, until a spell
+of brain fever intervening let it loose into a region of vaguer and more
+varied dreams.
+
+And when he had struggled through this illness, nobody well knew how or
+why, he woke up to find his world swept very bare. Father, mother, and
+all his brethren, except little Katty, were vanished out of it, and as
+it came looming back to him thus depeopled, its aspect was immeasurably
+desolate. Nor did his loss end here, for from this time dated the
+springing up among his neighbours of a suspicion that he was not all
+there, a suspicion which developed into an accepted article of belief,
+the more readily, perhaps, because nobody remained for whom such a fact
+would have had a personal bitterness, the old grandmother having slipped
+away out of her lonesomeness before his recovery. It would not be easy
+to explain how it was that Con grew up into that privileged and
+disfranchised person who is spoken of as "a crathur," and whose
+proceedings are more or less exempt from criticism. People often said of
+him that he had plenty of sense _of his own_, and the remark was to some
+extent explanatory, as a certain singularity in his way of viewing
+things even more than an occasional inconsequence and flightiness in his
+sayings and doings tended to establish the reputation for eccentricity
+which followed him closely as a shadow, and set an impalpable barrier
+between himself and his kind. As he advanced in life this was
+strengthened by his increasing fondness for his own society, but he did
+not take to his solitary wanderings until after his sister Katty married
+young Peter Meehan and emigrated to New York. It was suggested to him
+that he should accompany them, but he sat looking meditative for a
+while, and then said, "How far might it be from this to the States?"
+
+"I dunno rightly," said his informant, "but a goodish step it's apt to
+be, for people's better than a couple of weeks sailin' there, I'm
+tould."
+
+Con meditated a little more before he put another question. "Would you
+be widin hearin' out there of the folk talkin' foolish?" he inquired.
+
+"Why, tub-be sure, man, what 'ud hinder you that you wouldn't hear them
+talkin' same as anywheres else?"
+
+"Bedad, then," said Con, "it seems a long way to be thravellin' to a
+counthry as close as that. Sure, if you take out for a stravade over the
+bog here, you'll be throubled wid nothin' the len'th of the day on'y the
+curlew, or maybe a couple of saygulls skirlin'--raisonable enough. I'll
+be apt to stay where I am."
+
+Con, who was a person of many moods, happened to be in an unusually
+cynical one just then; however, he adhered to his resolution, and when
+his sister had gone he adopted a life of long tramps. Somebody had given
+him an old fiddle, and this he carried with him, though chiefly as a
+sort of badge, as his performances were but feeble, and he could turn
+his hand to many other things when he found it necessary to do so. His
+rovings had gone on for several years before they led him to Lisconnel.
+In those days he was a strange, small figure, who wore a coat too large
+for him, and a hat set so far back on his head that its brim made a sort
+of halo to frame his face, which had a curious way of looking fitfully
+young and old, with a shining of violet blue eyes and a puckering of
+fine-drawn wrinkles. A small boy and a little old ancient man would seem
+to change places half a dozen times in the course of a single
+conversation. Even his hair was a puzzle, regarded as an indication of
+age, because its black had become streaked with white in such a fashion
+that its apparent hue varied according to what came uppermost in
+accidents of ruffling and smoothing. A neighbour once said of him that
+he was the living moral of a little ould lepreehawn that they were after
+making a couple of sizes too big by mistake; and my own impression is
+that further opportunities for observing specimens of the race would be
+likely to bear out this statement.
+
+The summer evening on which he was first seen at Lisconnel had followed
+a very fine day. In the heart of its golden afternoon Mrs. O'Driscoll
+trusted her youngest son Terence out on the bog with his brothers and
+sisters and some other children, the eldest of whom, Johanna Harvey, the
+Ryans' orphan niece, was credited with wit enough to keep the party out
+of the holes. They wandered off rather more widely than usual, along the
+foot of the hill, lured on by a sprinkling of dainty white mushrooms,
+which they found, generally with yells, studded here and there. At last
+they sat down on a bank to peel their delicate, pink-quilted buttons,
+all of them except Terence, who was not yet of an age to have acquired a
+taste for mushrooms. He had been carried most of the way, still he had
+toddled further than he was accustomed to do, and his unwonted exertions
+led him to curl himself up behind a sun-smitten rock and fall asleep
+with a quietness which presently brought upon him the fate of out of
+sight out of mind. After a while, however, Johanna did bethink herself
+of him, and was just on the point of wondering aloud where little
+Terence had gone to, when her cousin Thady turned her thoughts into a
+different channel by suddenly saying, "What was there in it before the
+beginnin' of everythin'?"
+
+Thady was a small, anxious-looking child, whose pale and peaky face his
+mother often likened regretfully to a hap'orth of soap after a week's
+washing. He had spent a surprisingly considerable part of his six years
+in metaphysical speculations, and was always disposed to make a personal
+grievance of the difficulties in which they constantly landed him. His
+tone was now rather peremptory as he repeated, "What was there in it
+before the beginnin' of everythin'?"
+
+"Sure, nothin' at all," said his elder brother Peter, to whom the answer
+seemed quite simple and satisfactory. But Johanna looked as if she had
+caught sight of some distant object which provoked hard staring.
+
+"Then what was there before the beginnin' of nothin'?" pursued Thady.
+
+"Dunno," said Peter, indifferently, "unless it was more nothin'."
+
+"Sure not at all; that wouldn't be the way of it," Johanna said,
+dreamily, yet with decision. "If there was nothin' but nothin' in it,
+there'd ha' been apt to not be e'er an anythin' ever. Where'd it ha'
+come from? Don't be tellin' the child lies, Peter. Why, for one thing,"
+she said, her tone sharpening polemically and taking a touch of triumph,
+"there was always God Almighty in it, and the Divil. Maybe that's what
+you call nothin'."
+
+Peter evaded this point, saying, "Well, anyway, those times, if there
+was just the two of them in it, and no harm to be doin', let alone any
+good people to know the differ, it's on'y a quare sort of Divil he'd
+get the chance of bein'. I wouldn't call him anythin' _much_."
+
+"He wouldn't be so very long, you may depind," Johanna pronounced.
+"Musha, sure the Divil couldn't stay contint anywhile at all till he'd
+take to some manner of ould mischief 'ud soon show you the sort of
+crathur he was--it's his nathur. I should suppose the first thing he'd
+go do 'ud be makin' all the sorts of hijjis roarin' great bastes and
+snakes and riptiles that he could think of, and the disolit black wet
+bogs wid the could win' over them fit to cut you in two when you're
+sleepin' out at night," said Johanna, whose ten years of life had
+brought her into some rough places before her adoption by her Aunt
+Lizzie Ryan, "and the workhouses--bad luck to the whole of them--where
+there's rats in the cocoa, and mad people frightenin' you, and the cross
+matrons, and the polis, and the say to dhrownd the fishin'-boats in, and
+dirty ould naygurs that put dacint people out of their little
+places----"
+
+"If it had been me," said Peter, "I'd ha' been very apt to just hit him
+a crack on the head when I noticed what he was at, and bid him lave thim
+sort of consthructions alone."
+
+"I dunno the rights of it entirely," Johanna admitted, "but it's a
+cruel pity he ever got the chance to be carryin' on the way he's done."
+
+"Ah, sure it can't be helped now at all events," said Peter, who was for
+the time being not inclined to quarrel seriously with the scheme of
+things, as he basked on the warm grassy bank, where the wild bees were
+humming in the thyme, happily remote from the grim House and the hungry
+sea.
+
+"Belike it can't," said Johanna; "but 'twould be real grand if it could.
+Suppose I was out on the hill there some fine evenin', and I not
+thinkin' of anythin' in partic'lar, and all of a suddint I'd see a
+great, big, ugly, black-lookin' baste of a feller, the size of forty,
+skytin' away wid himself along the light of the sky over yonder, where
+the sun was about goin' down, and his shadder the len'th of an awful
+tall tree slippin' streelin' after him, till it was off over the edge of
+the world like, and that same 'ud be just the Divil, that they were
+after bundlin' out of it body and bones, the way he wouldn't get
+meddlin' and makin' and annoyin' people any more. So wid that I'd take a
+race home and be tellin' you all the iligant thing was after happenin'.
+And in the middle of it who'd come landin' in but me father and mother,
+and little Dan. And then, if it isn't the grand cup of tay I'd be
+makin' her, ay begorra would I, and a sugarstick to stir it wid."
+
+Johanna's vision of the millennium was broken in upon querulously by
+Thady. "Sure I know all about God Almighty and the Divil," he said
+comprehensively, "I was on'y axin' what was in it before the beginnin'
+of everythin', and you're not tellin' me that."
+
+"There's a dale of things little spalpeens like you wouldn't be tould
+the rights of at all," said Peter, loftily, being rather annoyed at the
+interruption. He would have liked to hear some further details about the
+felicity to be inaugurated by that exquisite cup of tea. "Go on
+romancin', Han."
+
+But Johanna, who felt that this assumption of superior knowledge was an
+uncandid subterfuge, and yet had not magnanimity enough to disclaim it
+on her own part, remained uneasily silent for a moment, and then only
+said: "Sure it's time we was gettin' home." This they accordingly
+proceeded to do, and had gone most of the distance before it occurred to
+anybody that little Terence O'Driscoll was not with them. Then, after a
+superficial and unproductive search among the scattered stones and
+bushes, they thought it expedient to run back in a fright, and report
+that the child had gone and got lost, unless by any odd chance he'd come
+home along wid himself.
+
+Thus it was that when Terence wakened from his nap, he found himself
+deserted, and thrown completely upon his own resources. As he had not
+been quite three years in amassing these, they were on the whole but
+scanty. In fact, he was helplessly unable to realise a world with
+nothing in it except endlessly swelling up slopes of furzy grass, no
+Molly nor Micky for him to trot after, and to carry him wherever they
+were going, whenever he intimated the desirability of that step by
+abruptly plumping down on the way. So he set off in a great hurry to
+escape from such a wilderness. He still walked with a wobbling stagger,
+and his long frock of whity-brown homespun kept on tripping him up,
+which retarded his progress. But he was not at all long in mentally
+reaching the precincts of a wild panic which rose up and seized him in a
+grip never to be quite forgotten, though only a few desperate minutes
+ensued before he stumped blindly against Con's legs. It was so
+unutterable a relief to have come on somebody who could hear him roar,
+that Terence ceased roaring immediately, and let Con pick him up
+without demur. The appearance of Molly or Micky would, no doubt, have
+been more satisfactory, but this stranger man might serve well enough at
+a pinch to carry him home, which it was inconceivable that anybody of
+such a size could be unable or unwilling to do. As for Con, the
+inference he drew from Terence's dimensions was that his family and
+friends were probably not far to seek; and he recognised the shrewdness
+of the conjecture when he presently espied a shawled figure coming
+swiftly towards him over the edge of a slope, with the amber of the
+sunset glowing behind her, and her long shadow sliding on far below her,
+as if it were in an even greater hurry than herself.
+
+Mrs. O'Driscoll's head was among the golden sunbeams, but her heart had
+gone down to the very bottom of the blackest and deepest hole in the
+bog. For towards that dreadful goal she had seen a small form toddling
+ever since the other children came home alarmingly late with the news
+that Terence had got lost on them, and they couldn't find a bit of him,
+high ways or low ways. She was so overjoyed at her rescue that her
+delighted gratitude cast a sort of glamour around Con, which never
+wholly faded away. Ever after the appearance of his queer figure called
+up in her mind a dim reminiscence of the moment when she had seen it for
+the first time come into view, laden with what she well knew was Terence
+sitting bolt upright in a manner that betokened him to have experienced
+neither drowning nor any other disaster.
+
+As Con put the child into her arms, where it seemed to fit into a niche
+specially designed for it, he said: "Sure now, ma'am, when I seen him
+stumpin' along his lone, and he about the heighth of a sizable boholawn
+(ragweed), sez I to meself there was apt to be somebody lookin' after
+him. For bedad it seems to me mostwhiles the littler a thing is the more
+people there'll be consaitin' they can't get on widout it; and that's
+lucky, belike, or else it might aisy get lost entirely, like a
+threepenny bit rowled away into a crack. But if you come to considher,"
+Con said, hurrying on lest his allusion to the coin should be construed
+as a hint that he thought of payment for his services, "most people's
+lookin' out for somebody, or else somebody's lookin' out for them. It's
+on'y a few odd ones like meself that makes no differ here or there. I
+won'er now is the raison that it's after losin' ourselves we are in a
+manner--I've I've me notions about that. For first I think I dunno if
+anythin's rightly lost that nobody's lookin' to find, and then I think I
+dunno but you might as well say you couldn't find anythin' you weren't
+after losin' and lookin' for, and that's not the truth be no manner of
+manes."
+
+"And you after findin' the child," said Mrs. O'Driscoll.
+
+"Sure not at all, ma'am," said Con, modestly, deprecating not the
+statement but the implied praise. "Small thanks to me for that, when the
+woful bawls of it you might have heard a mile o' ground. You could as
+aisy ha' missed a little clap of thunder, if a one was be chance comin'
+tatterin' along between the furzes, wid the head of it bobbin' up now
+and agin, and makin' all the noise it could conthrive. Troth it's the
+quare bawls _I_ might be lettin' these times afore the rest of them 'ud
+hear me, for if it's lost I am, I'm strayin' a terrible long while;
+they're apt to disremimber they ever owned me. I do be thinkin', ma'am,
+that if you forgit what you've lost, 'tis maybe all the one thing as if
+you'd found it; and after that agin I do be thinkin' maybe 'twould be
+liker losin' it twyste over. It's quare the diff'rint notions there is
+about most things. And a good job too, or else what would you be
+considherin' in your mind, when you was thrampin' around? 'Deed now if
+you couldn't be supposin' they were this way and that way, and argufyin'
+over them wid yourself in your own mind, 'twould be like as if you took
+and swallied down a lump of 'baccy instead of chewin' it, and what sort
+of benefit or plisure 'ud you git out of that?"
+
+This was Con's first bit of philosophising at Lisconnel, and it was not
+his last by many, as the place became one of his favourite resorts. His
+liking for it was perhaps partly due to the fact that its inhabitants
+received him on more equal terms than were generally accorded to him
+elsewhere; and this again may be largely attributed to the influence of
+Mrs. O'Driscoll. For her grateful feelings towards the restorer of
+Terence made her loth to recognise any deficiencies in him, and her
+neighbours, soon perceiving that she seemed vexed if Con was spoken of
+as cracked or crazy or "wantin' a corner," were ready enough to modify
+their language, and even their judgment, in accordance with her view.
+Still it was convenient to distinguish him from another resident Con,
+about whom there were no very striking features. Therefore her little
+Rose having been heard to say that she was "after seein' Con, not Con
+Ryan, but the quare one," they caught up and applied the epithet, which
+in Lisconnel is regarded as a safely colourless term, not likely to hurt
+the most sensitive feelings.
+
+Con, on his part, formed the highest opinion of Mrs. O'Driscoll, and
+often took counsel with her about perplexing points which had presented
+themselves to him in the course of his meditations. In one practical
+matter, however, he showed an obstinacy that did not further her in her
+wish to uphold him on a footing with quite sensible people. This was his
+fancy for adorning the band of his broad-brimmed caubeen with a garnish
+of feathers and flowers. Mrs. O'Driscoll disapproved of the freak,
+rightly judging that it often created irrevocable first impressions, and
+fixed his standing at a glance. In this age and clime the Seven Sages
+could hardly maintain among them a reverend aspect, under the frivolity
+of a single flaunting blossom, much less the gaudy bunches and fantastic
+plumes upon which Con recklessly ventured. So at last, having hinted and
+remonstrated ineffectually, she contrived somehow to find time and stuff
+among her laborious days and scanty stores, and fashioned for him a
+round cloth cap of a severely plain design, which she thought would
+give no scope for any unseemly appendages. Upon being presented with
+this headgear, Con dutifully assumed it, and went about wearing it for a
+day or two in a depressed frame of mind. Then he appeared in the morning
+at the O'Driscolls', cheered, and crested with a remarkably long
+gannet's feather stuck upright in the crown of his cap, through which he
+had bored a hole to admit of the insertion. He was resolved to brazen
+out the matter, so he presently took off his cap, and twirling it round
+with an unconcerned air as he leaned against the door, said to Herself:
+"Well, ma'am, what do you think of that?"
+
+"To tell you just the truth, Con," said Herself, whose countenance had
+fallen as she saw the failure of her little plot, "I was thinkin' it
+looked a dale better before you cocked that ould gazabo on top of it.
+'Deed now it gives you the apparance of a head of cabbage that's
+sproutin' up and goin' to seed. Sure you niver see the other lads
+trapesin' about wid the like on them."
+
+Con, who seemed rather cast down by this criticism, was about to reply,
+when young Ned Keogh took the cap out of his hand and affected to
+examine it closely, saying: "Glory be to goodness, what sort of thing
+is it at all at all? Bedad it's the won'erful conthrivance--ah, tub-be
+sure; _I_ see what it is. He's about growin' a pair of wings for his wit
+to fly away wid. But musha good gracious, he needn't ha' throubled
+himself to be gettin' them that sizable. Somethin' the bigness of a
+hedge-sparrer's, or maybe a weeny white butterfly's, 'ud ha' plinty
+stren'th enough for the job, if that was all they had to do." Ned meant
+no harm, but his witticisms did not fall in with Con's humour, so he
+snatched back the cap and went off affronted, nor did he call at the
+O'Driscolls' again for some weeks.
+
+The next time he came, however, Herself had espied him a bit down the
+road, and was standing at the door to receive him with his discarded
+caubeen in her hand. "You'd be better wearin' it, Con, after all," she
+said, "for the eyes are scorched out of your head under the sun widout
+e'er a scrap of brim." And as Con took it, he observed with glee that
+she had fastened into the band a dove-coloured kittiwake's wing-feather,
+a somewhat cherished possession of her own, which she used to keep over
+her best picture on the wall. Thus did she seek to make amends for the
+speech about the sprouting cabbage-head, which had been weighing
+heavily upon her conscience.
+
+The kittiwake's feather had to weather rain and sunshine for many a year
+in Con the Quare One's old caubeen; but it is now on a room-wall again,
+the Kilfoyles' this time. Con brought it to Mrs. Kilfoyle one autumn
+evening in the year Mrs. O'Driscoll died. It was much longer than usual
+since he had wandered into Lisconnel, illness and one thing and another
+having detained him in the North for the last twelvemonth and more--all
+her blackest days of childless widowhood--so that this was his first
+visit since the departure of his earliest friend.
+
+"Could you be keepin' it somewheres safe for me, ma'am?" he said,
+showing the soft grey feather to Mrs. Kilfoyle, who was sitting by the
+fire with her sons and her future daughter-in-law, and Ody Rafferty's
+aunt, and the Widow M'Gurk. "I'll be wearin' it no more. 'Twas she
+herself stuck it in for me, but sure I knew well enough all the while
+she'd liefer I wouldn't be goin' about wid such things on me head, and
+sorra a bit of me will agin."
+
+"Whethen now but yourself's the quare man, Con," said Ody Rafferty's
+aunt, "to be takin' up wid that notion these times, when ne'er a differ
+it'ill make to her. There might ha' been some sinse in it, if you'd done
+it to plase her, but now you're more than a trifle too late wid that. A
+day after the fair you are. Sure she'll never set eyes on you or your
+old caubeen agin," she said, as if announcing some unthought-of
+discovery of her own, "no matter what ould thrash you might take and
+stick in it. You might be wearin' a young haystack on your head for
+anythin' she could tell."
+
+"That may be or mayn't be," said Con. "But at all evints the next body
+that goes there out of this countryside 'ill be very apt to bring her
+word. Discoorsin' together they'll be of all the news, and as like as
+not he--or it might be she--'ill say to her--'I seen Con the Quare One
+goin' the road a while back, and he wid ne'er a thraneen of anythin' in
+his hat, good or bad; the same way the other boys are; lookin' rael
+dacint and sinsible.' Belike she might be axin' after me herself, and
+that 'ud put it in the other body's head. Yourself it may be, Moggy.
+Faix now, I wouldn't won'er a bit if it was, for there must be a
+terrible great age on you these times. Sure you looked to be an ould,
+ould woman the first day I ever beheld you, and that's better than a
+dozen year ago."
+
+"Troth then there's plinty of oulder ould people than me, let me tell
+you," protested Moggy, who was about ninety, "that you need be settlin'
+I'm goin' anywheres next. Musha cock you up. And your own hair turned as
+white as sheep's wool on a blackthorn bush."
+
+She seemed so much put out by Con's statement and inference that young
+Thady Kilfoyle, always a good-natured lad, sought to soothe her.
+
+"Sure there's no settlin' any such a thing, and for the matter of goin',
+the young people often enough get their turn as fast as anybody else.
+It's meself," he said, "might be sooner than you bringin' news of yous
+all, and Con's ould caubeen, and everythin' else to Heaven the way he
+sez."
+
+"I dunno if you've any call to be talkin' that fashion," said the Widdy
+M'Gurk, disapprovingly, "as if you could be walkin' permisc-yis into
+Heaven widout wid your lave or by your lave. Maybe it isn't there any of
+us'ill be bringin' our news."
+
+"Might you know of e'er a better place then, ma'am?" said Con.
+
+"Heard you ever the like of that?" said Ody Rafferty's aunt, not
+unwillingly scandalised, "I should suppose nobody, unless it was a born
+haythen, 'ud know of any place better than Heaven."
+
+"That's where she is then," said Con, stroking his feather. "For the
+best place ever was is none too good for her, God knows well."
+
+"And thrue for you, man," said the Widdy M'Gurk. "But she's one thing,
+and we're another. It's not settin' ourselves up we should be to have
+the same chances."
+
+"Ah, well, sure maybe we're none of us too outrageous altogether," said
+Mrs. Kilfoyle, looking hopefully round at her company. "And if they can
+put up wid us at all at all, they will. We'll get there yet, plase God.
+And anyway I'll be takin' good care of your feather, Con. Ay will I so;
+same as if it was dropped out of an angel's wing."
+
+"So good-night to you kindly, ma'am," said he. "I'll be steppin' back to
+Laraghmena. I on'y looked in on you to bring you that, and give you news
+of Theresa. And I question will I ever set fut agin in Lisconnel."
+
+He did not, however, leave it quite immediately. A little later, when
+Brian Kilfoyle was escorting Norah Finnegan home, they saw him sitting
+on the bank near the O'Driscolls' roofless cabin. Its mud walls were
+fast crumbling into ruin. Already the little window-square had lost its
+straight outline, and would soon be as shapeless as any hole burrowed in
+a bank. Con sat with his back turned to it until the dusk had muffled up
+everything in dimness, and then he stole an armful of turf-sods from the
+nearest stack, and groped his way in through the deserted door. The
+shadows within were folded so heavily that he could scarcely more than
+guess where the hearth had been. One of Con's peculiarities was a
+strange horror of a fireless hearth. At the sight of its hoarily
+sprinkled blackness he always felt as if he were standing on the verge
+of some frightful revelation; a vague reminiscence, no doubt, from the
+scene of his life's tragedy, all distinct memory of which had been
+blurred away by his illness. Now he piled and crumbled his sods with
+practised skill, and set them alight in well-chosen places. But he
+stayed only for a minute or so, till the little fluttering flames had
+fairly taken a hold, and were sending golden threads running along the
+netted fibres. Then he groped his way out again, and returned to his
+seat on the bank. Presently, as he watched, he saw a red light
+beginning to flicker through window and door, and growing steadier and
+stronger. When it was at its brightest, he got up and turned away.
+"That's the very way it would be shinin'," he said, "and I comin' along
+the road to see Herself and Himself and the childer--God be good to them
+all, wherever they may be. And that's the notion of it I'll keep in me
+mind."
+
+And Con the Quare One came no more to Lisconnel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+MAD BELL
+
+
+Not so very long before the sound of Con the Quare One's fiddle ceased
+to enliven Lisconnel any more, Mad Bell's singing had begun to be heard
+there occasionally, as it has been at intervals ever since she arrived
+with her two housemates, Big Anne and the Dummy, and took up her abode
+in the last of the cabins that you pass on the left hand, going towards
+Sallinbeg. Perhaps Lisconnel should not reckon her among its residents,
+so much of her time is spent on the tramp as an absentee. Still, she
+sometimes has tarried with us for a long while, and she is understood to
+have some property in the house-furniture, so it seems natural to
+consider the place her home.
+
+From the first it appeared obvious to all that the dementedness which
+characterised the little wizened yellow-faced woman was of a much more
+pronounced type than Con the Quare One's. Any attempt to spare people's
+feelings by ignoring the fact would have been very futile, and it was
+therefore lucky that the three new-comers, Mad Bell herself included,
+were quite content to accept the situation. The neighbours were at first
+inclined to commiserate Big Anne, who was pronounced to be "a dacint,
+sinsible, poor woman," for the oddities of her household, the
+incalculable flightiness of Mad Bell, and the impenetrable silence of
+the Dummy. But to their condoling remarks she was wont to reply in
+effect--"Ah sure, ma'am, that's the way I'm used to them, the crathurs.
+Why, if Mad Bell said anythin' over-sinsible, or poor Winnie said
+anythin' at all, it's wond'rin' I'd be what was goin' to happin us
+next." And Big Anne evidently looked upon this as an uncomfortable frame
+of mind. At first, too, they speculated much about the circumstances
+which had brought the curious trio together beneath one thatch, and
+found it especially hard to conjecture how the daft little vagrant had
+come into possession of sundry tables and chairs. All its members,
+however, being incommunicative persons, no satisfactory elucidation of
+these points was arrived at in Lisconnel.
+
+The coalescence of Big Anne's and the Dummy's fortunes is a simple
+history enough. Anne Fannin, while yet a youngish woman, was left alone
+in the world to do for herself in her little wayside cabin. Without a
+dowry to recommend her rough-hewn features and large-boned ungainliness,
+she never had any suitors, and she found it as much as she could
+contrive to make out her single living by means of her "bit of poultry"
+and her pig. Nevertheless, when her nearest neighbours--the
+Golighers--died, leaving their daughter Winnie, "who had niver got her
+speech, the crathur," to live on charity or the rates, what else was a
+body to do except take her in? Anne would have put this question to you
+with a sincere want of resource. So Winnie Goligher transferred to Anne
+Fannin's house, herself and all her worldly goods, which consisted of
+the clothes she had on, and a prayer-book, and a lame duck, and
+thenceforward the two "got along the best way they could."
+
+Mad Bell's history has more complications in it. They began one pleasant
+April day when she was only a slip of a lass, who had taken a little
+place at the Hunts' farm near her home, for the purpose of saving up a
+few pounds against her marriage with Richard McBirney. She had been
+given an unexpected holiday, and was running home across the fresh,
+spring-green grass-fields, thinking to take her people by surprise, when
+she came to a hedge-gap whence you look down into a steep-banked lane.
+And at the foot of the bank Richard McBirney was sitting with his arm
+round her sister Lizzie's waist.
+
+To a dispassionate observer this transference of his attentions might
+have seemed a matter of small moment. Most of their acquaintances, for
+example, were just as well satisfied that he should court Eliza as
+Isabella. But the sight turned all the current of her life awry. For it
+set her off rushing away from it across the same sunny green fields, and
+she never came home again. Nor ever again would she settle down quietly
+anywhere. She had a strong, clear voice and a taste for music, and this
+led her to take to singing ballads about the country at markets and
+fairs. The harder she was thinking about fickle Richard McBirney, the
+louder and shriller she sang. A very few years of such wandering
+shrivelled up her plump "pig-beauty," so that in her little sallow,
+weather-beaten face her own mother would scarcely have recognised pretty
+Isabella Reid. Then, after a long spell of illness in a Union
+infirmary, she began to grow noticeably odder and stranger in her looks
+and ways; until at length the children shouted "Mad Bell" as she passed,
+and that became her recognised style and title.
+
+Such, briefly, had been her experience of life, when one September
+evening she came by chance to Big Anne and the Dummy's door. She had got
+a very bad cold, and felt hardly able to drag herself along between the
+berried hedges, and was so hoarse that she could with difficulty ask for
+the night's lodging, which they granted without demur. Their times had
+been unusually bad of late. In fact, their room was looking several
+sizes larger than they were accustomed to see it, because they had sold
+any articles of furniture for which "e'er a price at all" could be
+obtained. But to whatever accommodation this bareness permitted they
+made Mad Bell kindly welcome, the crathur being sick and crazy, and she
+stayed with them for three or four days. By that time, finding herself
+recovered, she resumed her journey, setting off early in the morning
+with the abruptness and absence of circumlocution which, as a rule,
+distinguished her proceedings. A friendly nod and grimace she made serve
+for announcement of departure and leavetaking all in one. As her
+hostesses watched her out of sight down the road, Big Anne said--
+
+"Well, now, I never seen that quare little body in this counthry before,
+and we're very apt to not set eyes on her agin. God be good to us all,
+but the likes of her is to be pitied. She's worse off than the two of
+us. But bedad, Winnie, if thim hins there don't prisintly take to layin'
+a thrifle, it's in a tight houle we'll be ourselves. I dunno what's
+bewitchin' them. And the sorra an ould stick have we left in it that man
+or mortal 'ud give us the price of a pullet's egg for--and small blame
+to him, unless he was as deminted as herself that's quittin'."
+
+Mad Bell's tramp that day was all along a sequence of lonesome winding
+lanes, where few dwellings were dotted among the green and gold of the
+fields. The bustle of the harvest, its reaping and binding, was over in
+them, and they lay without stir or sound. In some of them the stooks
+were still encamped, but some were smooth stubble, empty, except where a
+flock of turkeys filled it with dark, bunchy shapes. She walked steadily
+on the whole day without any adventure, but when the dew was beginning
+to fall through the twilight she came to a short, shady reach of lane,
+at the end of which stood, in a green nook, a small, prim white cottage
+with two peaked windows and a door to match. That, at least, is how it
+would under ordinary circumstances have presented itself to a passer-by.
+Just then, however, nobody would have noticed anything about it except
+the fact that out of the open door thick coils of woolly black smoke
+were rolling and rolling, stabbed through every now and again by thrusts
+of flame, which even in the lingering daylight gleamed strongly fierce
+and red. The house was evidently on fire. As Mad Bell drew nearer, she
+became aware of a wheaten-coloured terrier standing in front of it; and
+when he saw her he began to bark vehemently. She was used to being
+barked at, though not in this way, for howls were interspersed, and it
+was clearly meant not for a menace but an appeal. No other live creature
+was visible about the place, until she had come quite close to the
+surging door, when a small gossoon jumped up out of the ditch on the
+opposite side of the road and rushed across to her.
+
+"What 'ill I do at all, then?" he said, whimperingly, catching hold of
+her shawl. "If them childer's burnt up widin there, Mr. Wogan 'ill be
+in a fine way. It's for killin' the whole of us he'll be. And it wasn't
+me set it afire. Sorra the match was I meddlin' wid, I could swear it. I
+wasn't out of it any time, gettin' a few ripe berries to pacify them
+childer, agin they would be wakin' and roarin', and when I come back,
+there it is all a smother of smoke. Divil a thing else was I doin' on'y
+mindin' them childer, and not meddlin' wid the matches, and goin' after
+a couple of blackberries. And Mr. Wogan himself's away to
+Ballymacartrican wid his boxes in the ass-cart. And all of them goin' to
+quit out of it to-morra, if it wasn't for them childer bein' burnt up
+inside--or maybe it's smothered they are. It's as unhandy as anythin'.
+It went afire of itself. And he'll be ragin'."
+
+He bawled all this louder and louder in competition with the clamour of
+the dog, who kept on jumping up at each alternately, and evidently
+considered his remarks better entitled to a hearing. But Mad Bell merely
+replied, "Whisht gabbin', and hould that," thrusting, as she spoke, her
+little handkerchief bundle into his arms. And thereupon, making a sudden
+dive, she vanished among the flame-sheathing smoke.
+
+Scarcely had she disappeared when an empty donkey-cart came round the
+turn of the lane, led by a rather dejected-looking middle-aged man,
+whose countenance, nevertheless, had for some time back been gradually
+clearing up at every wind of the way that brought him nearer to this
+particular point of view. But as he caught sight of the black smoke
+drifting and rolling, his aspect of reasonable melancholy changed to one
+of a despair that could not have been wilder if the reek of hell-mouth
+had blown into his face. He dropped the bridle, and hurled himself down
+the road like the distracted body that he well might be. For a
+twelvemonth ago he had lost his wife and both his elder children in one
+week, and his pair of two-year-old twins were now all that stood between
+himself and world-wide desolation. At the front door his frantic rush
+was met and baffled by a choking puff, which sent him fleeing round in
+hopes that entrance might be more possible through the back; and on the
+way he came face to face with the wrathful visages of his son and
+daughter, whom Mad Bell was carrying in the disregardful manner that
+betides a cumbrous load snatched up in a mortal hurry. She had escaped
+by the back door.
+
+If the most radiant of guardian angels, in snowy plumes and golden
+tresses, had restored his children to him with a befitting speech, poor
+Matthew Wogan could not well have been more joyfully relieved from his
+terror than he was when this odd little yellow-faced woman, with a red
+handkerchief wisped round her head, and a singed grimness generally
+pervading her, handed over to him Minnie and Tom, casually remarking,
+"Bedad, it's the big heavy lumps they are." Minnie and Tom both were
+crying and coughing loudly, because the smoke had got into their eyes
+and throats, which they resented; and when their father returned with
+them to the front of the house, this noise was swelled by the gleeful
+yap-yapping of the terrier and the voices of a few other people who had
+appeared upon the scene--a matronly looking woman and two or three
+sun-burnt harvestmen. From Mrs. Massey's observations it could be
+gathered that she had been minding the Wogan twins by deputy, and
+further that she entertained the gloomiest views about the mental and
+moral qualities of her son little Larry, who replied to her
+animadversions with over-reaching protestations about matches and
+theories of spontaneous combustion. While they wrangled in the
+background, the young men inspected the conflagration, which proved to
+be less extensive than it looked, though undoubtedly serious enough to
+have soon put the sleeping children past waking, if rescue had not come.
+A heap of blankets and other bedding, that smouldered and blazed near
+the front door, was the source of the most stiffling smoke; and when it
+had been subdued by many buckets of water, everybody began to drag what
+bits of the furniture they could out of harm's way. There was not much,
+because, as Wogan explained, he had sent "the marrow of it" to his
+sister at Ballymacartrican; and the legs of the largest table were
+charred so badly that it collapsed with a crash "the instiant minyit it
+set its four feet on the ground," as Mrs. Massey said. However, there
+were two smaller ones not much the worse, and three or four chairs, and
+a couple of stools, and some pots and pans, and a small clothes-horse,
+and a wagging clock, whose round white face glimmered through the dusk
+like a fallen moon as it lay flat on the grass. All these things made a
+little crowd on the plot of sward by the door.
+
+"And what will you be doin' wid them now?" said Mrs. Massey. "There's
+my place below you'd be welcome to stand them in as long as you plase.
+'Deed would you, sir. The dear knows I'm not throubled wid too many
+sticks of furnitur'. That's a very handy-sized washin'-tub Larry's after
+carryin' out for you. I was noticin' to-day ours has a lake in it this
+long while back that dhrips over everythin'. I must get himself to thry
+mend it."
+
+"That's a _lovely_ table," suddenly said Mad Bell, who had hitherto made
+no remarks. "A rael grand one it is," she repeated, in a wistful sort of
+way, smoothing the leaf fondly with her hand.
+
+"And very welcome you'd be to have it in a prisint, ma'am, if you've
+e'er a fancy for it; ay, or for the matter of that to the whole lot of
+them altogether," said Matthew Wogan, who, with his arms full of the
+smoky twins, felt a weight of gratitude which he would gladly have
+expressed in deeds. "Little vally there is on them--it's a small thing
+after what you're after doin' for us. I wouldn't like to be payin' away
+me bit of money from the childer, or else--But if I auctioned them
+things off the way I was intindin' it's on'y a thrifle of a few
+shillin's they'd be bringin' me. Welcome you are to them, ma'am."
+
+"Sure what use at all 'ud such a thing be to the likes of her?" put in
+Mrs. Massey. "It's on'y annoyed you'd be, woman, wid tables and chairs.
+And she thrampin' about, you may depind, wid ne'er a place to be
+bringin' them to, if she had them twyste over, let alone any way of
+movin' them. It's very convanient we are, just round the turn of the
+road."
+
+"She might take the little cart and the ould ass along," said Matthew
+Wogan, looking at his equipage, which was straying towards them
+intermittently as the beast grazed the green border of the lane.
+"They're no use to me now. Then there'd be nothin' delayin' her that she
+couldn't be cleanin' out of it wid them right away--You needn't throuble
+yourself to be liftin' the little stool, Mrs. Massey. What wid fire and
+water, that'll be no place to sleep in," he said, pointing to the still
+smoking door. "The Mahonys 'ud take us in for to-night, and to-morra
+early we're off to me sister's and next day to Queenstown. 'Twill be a
+grand thing for the childer to be settled near their uncle Tom, that's
+doin' right well in New Jersey, in case anythin' happint me. So I'd as
+lief be shut of all that collection, supposin' they'd be any benefit to
+this crathur."
+
+"Saints bless us, but you're givin' away all before you, Mr. Wogan,"
+said Mrs. Massey, with a discomfited laugh.
+
+"Have you e'er a house you could be puttin' them in?" one of the
+harvestmen asked of Mad Bell.
+
+"Ay, bedad," she said. And with that she picked up a chair, and dumped
+it down into the cart, which had come to a halt at the door.
+
+This promptitude on her part seemed to settle the question. Without more
+ado the rest of the salvage was loaded in, all except the handy-sized
+washing-tub, which by means of an adroitly taken up position Mrs. Massey
+contrived to have overlooked and left behind, when Mad Bell drove away
+with her newly acquired property.
+
+On through the gloaming she drove, till the white dust flakes gathered
+up by the wheels grew damp and fragrant with dew, and till the moonlight
+was glimmering among the golden sheaves silverly, and till live embers
+were fanned out of the ashes low in the east. The small hours had a
+frosty chill, and old Ned's short steps were leisurely, and his halts
+for refreshment frequent; still Mad Bell continued to sit with serene
+patience. She was retracing her route of the day before, but at so much
+slower a rate of progress that the sun had been up for more than an hour
+when she stopped in front of Big Anne and the Dummy's little house. They
+were disturbed at their breakfast by the sound of the arrival, and when
+they came to the door, saw their visitor in the act of depositing a
+second chair upon the ground beside the cart.
+
+"Whethen now and is it yourself back agin?" said Big Anne. "And what at
+all have you got there?"
+
+"Inside they're goin'," said Mad Bell, pointing to the cart-load with an
+elated air. "It's a dale handier to have some chairs and tables."
+
+This was a fact which Big Anne might well have admitted, considering
+that she had just been squatting on her heels to eat her plate of
+stirabout. However, she only continued her perplexed catechism: "Where
+at all was you after bringin' them things from, and who might be ownin'
+them?"
+
+"Out of a house burnin' down," said Mad Bell.
+
+"Och between us and harm. What house is it then? And how did it get
+burnin'?"
+
+"Sure it's aisy enough settin' a house on fire," said Mad Bell with a
+grin, which to Big Anne who at this time was not familiar with her
+manners, looked rather sinisterly significant. "Flarin' up rael strong,"
+she said, pushing towards her, as if in confirmation of the statement,
+the little wooden clothes-horse, whose rails were blackened and charred.
+
+"Aisy it may be," Big Anne said, looking aghast at it, "but dreadful
+divilment it is to do such a thing, wid the misfort'nit people very apt
+to lose their lives, let alone everythin' else."
+
+"There was nobody in it on'y the couple of fat little childer," said Mad
+Bell.
+
+"The saints be among us all, woman," said Big Anne, "what sort of talk
+have you? It's not streelin' about the counthry you are, wid them ould
+sticks of furnitur', and lavin' the little childer in the house blazin'
+up? The Lord pity the crathurs, what 'ud become of them if they was left
+thataway? Burnt to cinders be now very belike."
+
+"Stufficated," said Mad Bell, with a complacent nod.
+
+Big Anne and the Dummy stared at one another in great horror. The Dummy
+could express her feelings only by crossing herself and gasping; but
+Big Anne spoke volubly: "May God forgive me for openin' me lips to the
+likes of you. Och but you're the unnatural wicked woman to go do such a
+thing, if you was twyste as cracked and crazy itself. Git along out of
+this, yourself and your ould cart, afore the polis comes after you. Och
+the misfort'nit little crathurs. And don't be offerin' to darken our
+doors agin wid the ojis sight of you."
+
+"Gimme a hand wid liftin' in them two tables," said Mad Bell. Whereupon
+Big Anne whisked away from her, and banged the door in her face.
+
+Mad Bell, however, did not appear to be discouraged by this reception.
+She finished unloading the cart of all except the tables, which she
+found unwieldy single-handed. Then she unharnessed old Neddy, and went
+and seated herself on the low wall beside the house. She was seemingly
+quite content with the situation. But to the two women indoors it was a
+dreadful experience. Their minds were firmly persuaded that the daft
+little woman had designedly set fire to some dwelling, and made off with
+what household gear she could lay hands on, leaving the hapless children
+to perish amid the flames. It shocked and enraged them that their
+premises should be infested by the presence of such a criminal, and that
+her ill-gotten goods and chattels should be brought to their very
+threshold, not to speak of her outrageous proposal to harbour them under
+their roof. Big Anne declared that wid the legs of them chairs and
+tables glimpsing through the door, as if they were on'y turned out to be
+airin' a bit, she and the Dummy seemed as good as a pair of murderers.
+
+Every now and then they went to the door and peered out, and the
+incendiary always greeted them with cheerful nods. On these occasions
+Big Anne sometimes said: "Oh, very well, me good woman. Just you sit
+brazenin' there till the patrol comes round this way, and then if I
+don't give you in charge as sure as the sun's shinin' crooked over our
+heads.--Begone out of that, and take them things out of litterin' about
+our place." Or she would remark loudly to her companion: "Just stop a
+minyit, Winnie, till I sling me ould shawl over me head, and run down to
+the barracks. It's not very long they'll be puttin' her out of it, and
+bundlin' her into jail, instead of to be sittin' there, wid ne'er a
+spark of shame in her, annoyin' dacint people." But neither mode of
+address produced any effect. The morning sunbeams still slanted down on
+the small pile of furniture, and old Neddy went on munching the blades
+off which they were drying the dew, and Mad Bell continued to sit upon
+the wall, as if placidly waiting for events.
+
+Such was the posture of affairs until towards noon, when an outside-car
+came trotting quickly down the lane. On one side of it sat a
+black-whiskered man in his best clothes, with each hand tightly grasping
+a small, fat, wrigglesome child. And the three were Matthew, Tom, and
+Minnie Wogan. On catching sight of Mad Bell, he made the driver pull up.
+
+"Well, ma'am," he called to her, "so you're after gettin' home. Bedad
+it's the fine long step you've took th'ould donkey; one while he'd be
+doin' it. And you're about gettin' in the few things? Very welcome she
+is to the whole of them," he continued to Big Anne, who had now emerged.
+"And begorrah nobody else had a better right to any trifle might be
+saved out of it. She'll ha' tould you, ma'am, the way the place was set
+on fire on me last night--some little divil of a spalpeen playin' wid
+matches it seems. But anyhow, there it was in blazes, and me galloppin'
+home like a deminted cow, consaitin' these two imps of the mischief here
+would be smotherin' inside it. And, troth, if herself over there hadn't
+them fetched out safe into the yard, when it was as much as your life
+was worth to put your head in at the door, for the stiflin' of the
+smoke. I dunno how she conthrived it. Maybe the crathur isn't altogether
+over sinsible," he said in a confidential tone; "but if she'd had all
+the wit ever was thought of, she couldn't ha' done better be the
+childer. So it's kindly welcome she is to the bits of furniture, and the
+ould baste. And dhrivin' on we must be. Good mornin' to yous all."
+
+Mad Bell listened to this praise with the same equanimity as to Big
+Anne's threats and reproaches. But when the car had trotted on, she came
+up to her, saying just as before, "Gimme a hand wid liftin' in thim
+tables;" and Matthew Wogan, jogging down the long lane, may have caught
+the last glimpse of one of them as it vanished in at the doorway.
+
+Thus it was that Mad Bell came to be domiciled with Big Anne and the
+Dummy in the pauses between her wanderings. The arrangement seemed
+equitable in view of her substantial contribution to the plenishing of
+the house. The donkey-cart, likewise, was found very serviceable,
+enabling them to turn a penny occasionally by fetching and carrying. And
+the coalition worked well upon the whole. But after a few years of such
+prosperity that they were seldom without a bit of food in the house, and
+sometimes had bacon on Sunday, things took a turn for the worse. Old Ned
+died under the burden of his many years, and a sort of murrain among the
+fowl cut off several promising pullets in the heyday of their youth.
+Then arose difficulties about "rint," while their landlord, who was new
+to the property, had a natural zeal for sweeping it clear of encumbering
+tenants. And the end of it was that the three women transferred
+themselves to Lisconnel, where they became not the least respected of
+its inhabitants.
+
+But these particulars about their antecedents were never learned by the
+neighbours there; and the joint ownership of the furniture still
+presents itself as one of our unsolved problems. Another of them was
+propounded somewhat later, when Mad Bell returned from an unusually long
+ramble, during which she had crossed the Liffey by the spacious
+O'Connell Bridge, and had heard the boom of the big College bell, and
+with her wizened-lemon face had half-scared the smallest-sized children
+in villages round about Dublin. For she was wearing an elaborately
+fantastic piece of headgear, which moved everybody's curiosity so
+strongly that it cannot have been for want of wondering if we failed to
+find out how she had come thereby. Strangely incongruous it did
+undoubtedly look; yet the stages by which it had descended from its
+stand in the milliner's show-room and alighted upon the head of the
+little wandering-witted tramp, were much fewer than might have been
+supposed probable.
+
+One blustery March morning when Mrs. M'Bean was on her way along by the
+low sea-wall to buy a bit of bacon at Donnelly's shop in Kilclone, the
+east wind did her the shrewd turn of whisking off her hat and dropping
+it into the water. It was a most shabby old black straw, rusty and
+battered, and torn, yet Mrs. M'Bean, a labourer's wife, who had nothing
+at all handsome about her, seemed to think it worth a serious risk. For
+she mounted on the broad wall-top, and thence made so unwary a snatch
+that she overbalanced herself and splashed headlong into the heaving
+high-tide, where she would very soon have perished beneath the cold
+olive-gray swell, had not the brothers Denny, fishing for bass hard by,
+noticed the perilous accident, and pulled timely to the rescue.
+
+When they disembarked her, gasping and dripping, at the nearest
+landing-place, she was understood to say, "Sure me heart's broke," a
+remark which Police-sergeant Young, who formed one of the group gathered
+by the disaster, considered sufficient grounds for marching her off to
+the handiest J. P. on a charge of attempted suicide. Mrs. M'Bean
+vehemently repelled the accusation. She explained that she had said her
+heart was broke only "because she had lost her ould hat, and every
+thread of a rag on her had been dhrenched and ruinated with the salt
+water. How could she go for to do such a sin as destroy herself, she
+urged, and she wid a houseful of little childer waitin' for her at home,
+the crathurs?" Her arguments proved convincing, and the charge was
+summarily dismissed, not without strictures upon Sergeant Young's
+excessive zeal, by which he, recking nothing of Talleyrand's maxim, felt
+himself puzzled and aggrieved.
+
+The incident, however, brought some more agreeable consequences to Mrs.
+M'Bean, as the J. P.'s ladies, commiserating her half-drowned plight,
+sent her that same evening a goodly bundle of cast-off clothes, over
+which her eyes grew gleefully bright in her careworn face. At one of the
+articles included they widened with almost awe. This was an enormous hat
+made of white fluffy felt, with vast contorted brims, and great blue
+velvet rosettes and streamers. Its fabric was very stout and
+substantial, and withal quite new, for its original owner had speedily
+found it so stiff and heavy that to wear it gave her a headache and a
+crick in her neck. Mrs. M'Bean, for her part, could not entertain the
+idea of carrying anything so sumptuous upon her grizzled head; and when
+she tried it on her eldest daughter, it totally extinguished and nearly
+smothered the child. So she stowed it away in a corner, where it
+remained unseen for several weeks.
+
+But next month, on the afternoon of Easter Day, Mrs. M'Bean had two
+visitors over from Ballyhoy: Annie Cassidy, elderly and rather grim,
+with her young friend Nelly Walsh.
+
+"Nelly's bound to be havin' bad luck this year of her life," Annie
+observed in the course of conversation, "for not a new stitch has she
+put on her to-day, and it Easter. That's an unlucky thing, accordin' to
+the sayin'."
+
+"Ne'er a bit am I afraid of me luck," averred Nelly, cheerful and
+threadbare, not to say ragged. But Mrs. M'Bean was pricked by a sudden
+thought up the ladder to the little attic aloft, whence she creaked down
+again, bringing with her the great white hat. "There, Nelly," she said,
+"just clap that on your head, and then nobody can pass the remark that
+you didn't get the wear of somethin' new, any way."
+
+Nelly took the hat, which struck her nearly dumb with admiration, but as
+she tried to catch a glimpse of it in the shred of looking-glass on the
+wall, her delighted expression waxed so eloquent that Mrs. M'Bean was
+impelled to say: "You're to keep it, girl alive, if you've e'er a fancy
+for it. Sure it's fitter for you than the likes of me, that 'ud look a
+quare old scarecrow if I offered to go about in such a thing." She had
+not at first intended this generosity, her worldly goods being so few
+that she could not lightly part with even a very unpromising possession.
+
+Nelly, on her side, could hardly believe in her high fortune, when,
+after some polite demur, she found herself carrying off the splendid
+hat. To wear it on an ordinary walk would have seemed profane, so she
+held it under her old shawl all the way home to her cabin on the shore
+at the foot of the Black Banks, a good step beyond Ballyhoy. But when
+she reached the door, she could not forbear the pleasure of making her
+entrance in the glory of her new adornment. Her reception was altogether
+disappointing. For her mother's and grandmother's voices rose up shrill
+and shriller, demanding what at all hijjis gazabo she'd got on her.
+Billy, her eldest brother, said: "Musha, she's put a pair of blinkers on
+her like an ould horse;" and Larry, his junior, remarked with terse
+candour, "Och, the fright." More mortifying still, Joe Tierney, her
+sweetheart, who had called to conclude arrangements about the morrow's
+holiday, said in a disgusted tone: "Tare and ages! I hope to goodness,
+Nelly, you're not intindin' to make that show of yourself at the circus
+to-morra. Bedad, I niver seen such a conthrivance; you might as well be
+walkin' alongside some sort of deminted musharoon." This rather aptly
+described the effect of the huge white brim upon Nelly, who was small
+and short of stature; but it hurt her feelings badly.
+
+The only upholder of the hat was Annie Cassidy, who is fond of
+controverting the opinions of other people, and who despises men. She
+said: "Don't be lettin' them put you out of consait with it, Nelly; it
+suits you lovely. Sure if anyone doesn't think your app'arance is good
+enough for them, you needn't throuble them wid your company. Circuses,
+to my mind, is thrash--to be watchin' folks figurandyin' on a pack of
+ould horses' backs. There's a lot of us goin' over to-morra to Rathbeg,
+where they've merry-go-rounds you can ride in yourself, and all manner,
+if you'd just step down to the Junction station and come along wid us on
+the early train."
+
+"'Deed then I might," said Nelly; not that she had the least intention
+of doing any such thing, but because, being somewhat of a belle, she was
+unaccustomed to uncomplimentary criticisms and much affronted by them.
+Furthermore, for the same reason, she escorted Annie home, and stayed so
+long talking, that Joe before she returned had to go off about his
+milking, which annoyed him a good deal.
+
+However, he had quite forgotten his vexation next morning, as he hurried
+through his early tasks with a day's pleasuring before him. He worked at
+the Kellys', whose land is bounded north and south by the Junction lane
+and the sea; and as he walked about the fresh April fields he was in
+view of Howth, dark pansy-purple against the eastern amber, confronting
+the sweep of the Dublin mountains, outlined in wild hyacinth-coloured
+mist, across the dancing silver of the bay. The calves had been fed so
+expeditiously that Joe found he could spare time to stop at the starred
+bank under the hedge and pick a bunch of primroses, some of which
+Nelly's mother would proudly keep in a jam-pot on the window-stool,
+while Nelly herself might like to wear a few at the circus, brightening
+up her brown-striped shawl.
+
+But when he was compressing a thick sheaf of the cool soft stalks in one
+hard hand, he chanced to look up, and saw what thrilled him with dismay.
+Bobbing along over the jagged edge of the wall, a short way down the
+lane went a gleaming white object, which he at once recognised as
+Nelly's new hat. He ran aghast to look through the gate, and despite
+intercepting road-curves and obstructive hedges, the hat it unmistakably
+was, making for the Junction station. So Nelly, intending a serious
+quarrel, had thrown him over and joined the Rathbeg party. A pleasure,
+hoarded in anticipation for many a month, shrivelled into dead leaves
+suddenly like fairy gold, as he perceived how certainly this must be the
+case.
+
+His first angry impulse was a resort to Haskin's Public at Portbrendan,
+where he might spend his spoilt holiday taking drinks and making bets in
+the society of some cronies. What hindered him from immediately acting
+upon it was a compunctious forecast of the concern which would prevail
+in his family, if he absented himself contrary to expectation. "There's
+me mother's never aisy," he reflected, "unless she's persuadin' herself
+some of us are kilt on her." This made him resolve to postpone
+Portbrendan till after breakfast, and he turned lothfully homewards. As
+he passed along the Kellys' yard-wall, he relieved his feelings by
+tossing his nosegay over it at the place where he heard the grunting of
+their pigs, who on that occasion fared almost as delicately as Marvel's
+rose-lined fawn.
+
+It was early still when he reached his cabin, one in the Walshes' row;
+and he sat down listlessly on a bank, to wait for nothing in particular.
+Presently Mrs. Walsh, senior, came by with a twinkling can of water.
+"Och, there you are, Joe," she said: "Nelly's been lookin' out for you
+this good while."
+
+"Whethen it's quare lookin' out she had," said Joe, "and she took off
+wid herself to ould Annie Cassidy--bad manners to her for her
+interfarin'."
+
+"What's the lad talkin' about at all?" said Mrs. Walsh, standing amazed;
+"Nelly's widin there this instiant of time, readyin' herself up."
+
+"Maybe you'll tell me," said Joe, "that I didn't see her streelin' down
+the Junction lane afore I was lavin' Kellys'."
+
+"And maybe _you_'ll tell _me_," said Nelly's grandmother, "that she
+wasn't just now callin' to me they were wantin' wather. It's a fine bawl
+she'd ha' had to let out of her, if I was to be hearin' her, and she up
+beyond Kellys'."
+
+"There she was anyway," Joe said, doggedly. "Wouldn't I know that dad
+fetched-lookin' ould new caubeen she's stuck on her a mile o' ground?"
+
+"You great gomeral," said Mrs. Walsh. "If that's all you might aisy
+enough ha' seen the big hat goin' the road--but have you the notion it's
+growin' on Nelly's head? Why, you omadhawn, you hadn't quit ten minyits
+last night, and Nelly was just after gettin' back, when who should come
+by but poor Mad Bell. Och now the raggedy objick the crathur was, wid
+nothin' over her misfort'nit head but an ould wisp as full of houles as
+a fishin'-net. So little Larry sez, jokin' like, 'Look here, Nelly,'
+sez he, 'you'd a right to be lettin' Mad Bell have a loan of your grand
+nappy hat to keep the sun out of her eyes.' But belike Nelly'd took a
+turn agin the thing wid the way they'd all been makin' fun of it; for
+sez she, 'Will you have it, Bell?' sez she, houldin' it out to her. And
+if she did, Mad Bell grabbed it in her two hands--it's not often she'll
+have a word for anybody--and no more talk about it, but cocked it on,
+and tied it firm under her chin wid the sthramers, as tasty as you
+plase. Musha good gracious, to see the len'th she drew the bow out on
+aich side of her bit of a yeller face, and the nod she gave her ould
+head when she'd got it done. So that's what's gone wid the hat. Goodness
+guide us, if she wasn't the poor crazy-witted body she is, 'twould be a
+sin to let her go makin' such a show of herself; but sure no one 'ud
+think to mind anythin' the likes of the crathur might have on her, the
+saints may pity her. Ay, bedad, them kind of quare consthructions do be
+fit for nothin' unless Quality and mad people," old Mrs. Walsh
+continued, without malice, soliloquising, as Joe had caught up the can,
+and was hurrying it with prodigal splashes towards his sweetheart's
+door.
+
+The circus, with its flaring lights and whirl of tinselled prancing
+marvels, was so rapturous an experience to Nelly that she had not a
+regret for her discarded hat, which at this time was moving on beneath a
+soft dappled sky, between greening hedges, westward along quiet roads
+and lanes. It found shelter for the night under the ley of a tall
+hayrick near Santry, thus ending the first stage of Mad Bell's tramp
+home to the wide brown bogland of Lisconnel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+A FLITTING
+
+
+Among the latest of the strangers that have visited Lisconnel were some
+who came at a time when the neighbours stood rather in need of
+distraction. For the summer following Mrs. Kilfoyle's death was, between
+one thing and another, a drearyish season with us. That little old woman
+had left a great gap; and then there were many long spells of gloomy bad
+weather, which seemed to beat people's troubles down upon them as the
+damp drove the turf-reck back through their smoke-holes into the dark
+rooms, where they could scarcely see how dense the blue haze was
+growing. Stacey Doyne's marriage also had removed something young and
+pleasant, and at times, when the thatch dripped without and within,
+neighbours were apt to talk about her in tones of commiseration, and
+say, "Sure, her poor mother's lost entirely." So that towards autumn
+the diversion of some new residents' arrival happened opportunely
+enough. It was made possible by the fact that Big Anne had given up her
+holding and entered into partnership with the widow M'Gurk, thus leaving
+her late abode empty for another tenant, who appeared much sooner than
+any one might have anticipated from the aspect of the cabin.
+
+Except as a fresh topic of conversation, however, the strangers gave
+small promise of proving an acquisition to the community. Lisconnel did
+not like their appearance by any means, and further acquaintance failed
+to modify unfavourable first impressions. These were mainly received in
+the course of the day after their arrival, which took place on a night
+too black for anything beyond a shadowy counting of heads, and a
+perception that the bulk of the new-comers' household stuff had jogged
+up on one donkey, and must therefore be small. A portion of Big Anne's
+furniture had remained behind her in the cabin, owing to certain arrears
+of rent. Her heart was scalded, she said, wid the prices she'd only get
+for her early chuckens, and they the weight of the world, if you'd feel
+them in your hand; and poor Mad Bell, that 'ud mostly bring home a few
+odd shillin's wid her, was away since afore last Christmas, and might
+never show her face there agin, the crathur; and the poor Dummy gone,
+that was great at the knittin' if she got the chance--a bit of narration
+which would look funny enough in anybody's rental. Mrs. Quigley, who
+went to the door with the offer of a seed of fire, found it shut, and a
+voice inside called, "as onmannerly as you plase," "No, we've got
+matches;" whereupon another voice, further in the interior, quavered,
+"Thank'ee kindly, ma'am." So she departed little wiser than she had
+come. But daylight showed that the party consisted of an old man, and
+his son, and his son's wife, and her sister, and three small children,
+besides some cochin-china fowl, and a black cat with vividly green eyes.
+This much was apparent on the surface. Also that the old man was frail,
+bent, shrivelled, and civil spoken, that the son was "a big soft gomeral
+of a fellow," that both the women were sandily flaxen-haired, with
+broad, flat cheeks and light eyes, and that two of the children
+resembled them, while the third--a girl a trifle older--was a
+dark-haired, disconsolate-looking little thing, "wid her face," Mrs.
+Brian said, "not the width of the palm of your hand, and the eyes of
+her sunk in her head." As for the fowl, there could be no doubt that
+their "onnathural, long, fluffety legs were fit to make a body's flesh
+creep," and the cat looked "as like an ould divil as anythin' you ever
+witnessed, sittin' blinkin' atop of the turf-stack."
+
+Other less self-evident facts came out by degrees--more slowly than
+might have been expected, as the strangers were generally close and
+chary of speech. They came from the north, where their affairs had not
+prospered--in fact, they had been "sold up and put out of it," as the
+young man divulged one day to Brian Kilfoyle. They were a somewhat
+intricately connected family, by the name, predominantly, of Patman. The
+sister-in-law was Tishy M'Crum, which seemed simple enough, but the two
+light-haired boys were Greens, Mrs. Patman having been a widow, while
+the little girl was the child of a wife whom Tom Patman had already
+buried; for though he looked full young to have embarked upon matrimony
+at all, this was his second venture. "And it's a quare comether she must
+ha' been after puttin' on him," quoth Mrs. Quigley, "afore he took up
+wid herself, that's as ugly as if she was bespoke, and half a dozen year
+oulder than the young bosthoon, if she's a minyit." It is true that at
+the time when Mrs. Quigley expressed this unflattering opinion she and
+her neighbours had been exasperated by an impolite speech of Mrs.
+Patman, who had said loudly in their hearing, "Well, for sartin if I'd
+had a notion of the blamed little dog-hole he was bringin' us into,
+sorra the sole of a fut 'ud I ha' set inside it;" and had then proceeded
+to congratulate herself upon having prudently left "all her dacint bits
+of furniture up above at her mother's, so that she needn't be bothered
+wid cartin' them away out of a place that didn't look to have had ever
+e'er a thing in it worth the throuble of movin', not if it stood there
+until it dropped to pieces wid dirt." Mrs. Quigley rejoined (to Judy
+Ryan) that "it would be a great pity if any people sted in a place that
+wasn't good enough for them, supposin' all the while they was used to
+anythin' a thraneen better--maybe they might, in coorse, and maybe they
+mightn't. It was won'erful to hear the talk some folks had, and they wid
+every ould stick they owned an aisy loadin' for Reilly's little ass."
+But Judy Ryan, with a flight of sarcastic fancy, hoped that Mrs. Patman
+and her family "were about goin' on a visit prisintly to the Lady
+Lifftinant, because it was much if they'd find any place else where
+there'd be grandeur accordin' to their high-up notions."
+
+Skirmishes such as this, however, were a symptom rather than a cause of
+the Patmans' unpopularity. That sprang from several roots. For one
+thing, both the women had harsh, scolding voices, and it was even
+chances that if you passed within earshot of their cabin you would hear
+them giving tongue. Their objurgations were, as a rule, addressed to the
+young man or the old, the latter of whom soon grew into an object of
+local compassion as "a harmless, dacint, poor crathur," while his son
+came in for the frank-eyed looking-down-upon which is the portion of an
+able-bodied man, shrew-ridden through sheer supineness and
+"polthroonery." But what Lisconnel often said that it "thought badder
+of" was the stepmotherly treatment which seemed to be the lot of the
+little girl Katty. Of course the situation was one which, under the
+circumstances, would have made people believe in such a state of things
+upon the slenderest evidence. Still, even to unprejudiced eyes, it was
+clear that Katty's rags were raggeder than those of her small
+step-brothers, and that she crept about with the mien of a creature
+which has conceived reasonable doubts respecting the reception it is
+likely to meet in society. When the autumn weather began to grow wintry,
+little Katty Patman, "perishin' about out there in the freezin' win',"
+became a spectacle which was viewed with indignant sympathy from dark
+doorways whence she received many an invitation to step in and be
+warmin' herself. Her hostesses opined that she was fairly starved just
+for a taste of the fire, and didn't believe she was ever let next or
+nigh it in her own place. Often, too, the consideration that she had no
+more flesh on her bones than a March chucken led to the bestowal of a
+steaming potato or a piece of griddle-bread; but the result of this was
+sometimes unsatisfactory to the giver, Katty being apt to dart away with
+her refreshments, which she might presently be seen sharing among Bobby
+and Stevie, for whom she entertained a strong and apparently
+unreciprocated regard.
+
+"I wouldn't go for to be sayin' anythin' to set her agin them," Mrs.
+Brian Kilfoyle remarked on some such occasion. "But, goodness forgive
+me! I've no likin' for them two little brats. I'd misthrust them."
+
+"Ah, sure they've no sinse," said Biddy Ryan. "Where'd they git it? And
+the biggest of them, I'd suppose, under four year ould."
+
+"Sinse!" said Mrs. Quigley. "Bedad, then, if sinse was all that ailed
+them, the pair of them is as 'cute as a couple of young foxes. I mind
+on'y a day or so after they'd been in it, I met the laste one on the
+road, and I comin' home wid be chance a sugarstick in me basket. So,
+just to be makin' friends like, I gave it a bit for itself, and a bit
+for the other that I seen comin' along. Well, now, ma'am, if it had took
+and ate up the both of the bits, I'd ha' thought ne'er a pin's point of
+harm--'twould ha' been nathural enough to the size of it. But I give you
+me word, when it seen it couldn't get the two of them swallied down
+afore its brother come by, what did it go do but clap the one of them
+into a crevice in the wall, and cover it under a blackberry laif. And
+wid that down it squats, and begins sayin', 'Creely-crawly
+snail--where's the creely-crawly snail I'm after huntin' out of its
+houle?'--lettin' on to be lookin' for somethin' creepin' in the grass.
+And a while after it come slinkin' back, when it thought nobody was
+mindin', to poke the bit out of the wall where I was gatherin'
+dandelions under the bank. So while it was fumblin' about, missin' the
+right crevice, sez I, poppin' up, thinkin' to shame it, 'Maybe the
+crawly snail's after aitin' it on you,' sez I. 'Och, yis; I seen it,'
+sez the spalpeen, as brazen as brass. 'Gimme 'noder bit instid.' There's
+a schemin' young rapscallion for you!"
+
+"They're too like their mother altogether to plase me," said Judy Ryan.
+"The corners of their eyes do be as sharp as if they were cut out wid a
+pair of scissors. Not that I'd mind if they'd e'er a sthrake of
+good-nathur in them; but I misdoubt they have. The little girl, now, is
+as diff'rint as day and night."
+
+"If _she_ takes after her father, she's a right to want the wit
+powerful, misfort'nit little imp," said Mrs. Brian. "For if he isn't a
+great stupid gomeral and an ass, just get me one. Why, if he was worth
+the dust blowin' along the road, he'd purvint of his own child bein' put
+upon."
+
+"Och, they have him _frighted_," said Mrs. Quigley, with scornful
+emphasis. "They won't let him take an atom of notice of her, they're
+that jealous. Sure, if he gets talkin' to her outside the house there,
+one of them 'ill let a bawl and send him off to be carryin' in turf or
+wather. I've seen it times and agin."
+
+"If he'd take and sling it about their ears some fine day he'd be doin'
+right, and it might larn them to behave themselves," said Judy.
+
+"But the ould man would disgust you," pursued Mrs. Quigley, "wid the
+romancin' he has out of him about his son Tom. You'd suppose, to listen
+to him, that the omadhawn's aquil never stepped. He'll deive you wid it
+till you're fairly bothered. Troth, he thinks the young fellow's doin'
+somethin' out of the way if he just walks down the street, and expec's
+everybody to stand watchin' him goin' along. It's surprisin' the foolery
+there does be in people."
+
+"Och, murdher, women alive!" said Ody Rafferty, whose pipe went out at
+this moment, "there's no contintin' yous at all. It's too cute they are,
+and too foolish they are. Musha, very belike they're not so much off the
+common if you'd a thrifle more exparience of them; there's nothin' to
+match that for evenin' people. Bedad, now, there's some people _I_ know
+so well that I can scarce tell the one from the other."
+
+Lisconnel, however, generally declined to fall in with Ody's
+philosophical views, and the Patmans, whether suspected of excessive
+cuteness or folly, remained persistently unpopular. There was only one
+exception to this rule. The widow M'Gurk has a certain fibre of
+perversity in her which sometimes twists itself round unlikely objects,
+for no apparent reason save that they are left clear by her neighbours,
+and this peculiarity renders her prone upon occasion to undertake the
+part of Devil's Advocate. When, therefore, she had once delivered
+herself of the opinion that the newcomers were "very dacint folks," she
+did not feel called upon to abandon it because it stood alone. As
+grounds for it she commonly alleged that they were "rael hard-workin'
+and industhrious," which was obviously true enough, since Mrs. Patman
+and her sister might constantly be seen tilling their little field with
+an energy far beyond the capacity of its late tenant. Her neighbours'
+unimpressed rejoinder, "Well, and supposin' they are itself?" did not in
+the least disconcert the widdy, nor yet their absence of enthusiasm when
+she stated that it was "a sight to behould Tishy M'Crum diggin' over a
+bit of ground; she'd lift as much on her spade as any two strong men."
+As for little Katty, "she'd never seen anybody doin' anythin' agin the
+child; it might happen by nature to be one of those little _crowls_ of
+childer that 'ud always look hungry-like and pinin', the crathurs, if
+you were able to keep feedin' them wid the best as long as the sun was
+in the sky." In short, something more than talk was usually needed to
+put the widow M'Gurk out of conceit with any notion she had taken up.
+Perhaps the comparative aloofness of her hillside cabin helped to
+maintain the Patmans at their original high level in her estimation. At
+any rate they had not sunk from it by the time that they had been nearly
+three months in Lisconnel, and when Mrs. Patman and her sister were on
+terms of the very glummest civility with all the other women in the
+place. Even towards the widow M'Gurk they were tolerant rather than
+expansive. She said "they had done right enough to not be leppin' down
+people's throaths."
+
+One morning not long after Christmas, the widow, being bound on an
+errand down below, called in at the Patmans' with a view to possible
+commissions. Meal was wanted, and, while Tishy M'Crum stitched up a rent
+in the bag, Mrs. M'Gurk noticed where little Katty, who had been "took
+bad wid a could these three days," rustled uncomfortably among wisps of
+rushes and rags in an obscure corner. Fever made her bold and
+self-assertive, for she was wishing nothing less than that her daddy
+would get her an orange--"An or'nge wid yeller peel round it"--Katty
+laid stress upon this point--"like the one her mammy got her a long time
+ago. And daddy'd be a good daddy and get her another now. And she'd keep
+a bit for Bobby and Stevie and all of them--a big yeller or'nge."
+Katty's eyes blazed with excitement as she reiterated these extravagant
+desires.
+
+"She's got an oncommon fancy for a one," said her daddy, looking
+wistfully from the child to his wife.
+
+"They have them down below," suggested the widow, "pence apiece."
+
+Mrs. Patman's hand was slipping towards her pocket. "If it was just for
+wunst," she had begun, when Tishy tweaked her sleeve viciously and
+interpolated a rapid whisper, "It wont _be_; there'll be no ind to it if
+you begin humourin' them," so the sentence was badly dislocated. "She'll
+do a dale better widout any such thrash," Mrs. Patman concluded, and
+walked off to throw sods on the fire.
+
+Just then the widow became aware that old Joe Patman was grimacing at
+her from a corner fast by in a way that might have startled her had she
+not been familiar with such modes of beckoning. But when she obeyed his
+summons, what she saw did astound her outright, for Joe was stooping low
+over a leathern pouch which he had drawn from a wall-cranny, and which
+seemed to contain marvellous depths of silver money, with here and there
+a golden gleam among it, as he warily stirred it up, circling a hurried
+forefinger. She had only the briefest glimpse ere he shoved back the
+pouch and thrust a sixpence into her hand, muttering, "Git her the
+orange--don't be lettin' on for your life."
+
+As she turned away with a reassuring nod, she perceived that Tishy
+M'Crum was standing unexpectedly near, and looking towards them over the
+top of the meal-bag. Tishy was bitting off a loose end of thread, which
+gave her a determined and ferocious expression, but whether she could
+have seen anything or not the widow felt uncertain. She thought not.
+
+About ten days after this Mrs. M'Gurk was roused at a very early hour by
+a thumping on her door. When she opened it she found some difficulty in
+recognising her visitor, as the dawn had scarcely done more than dim a
+few stars far away in the east, which is an ineffective form of
+illumination. "Whethen, now, Joe Patman, is it yourself?" she said,
+peeringly. "And what's brought you out at all afore you can see a step
+or a stim? Is the little girl took worse?" For Katty's illness still
+continued, and had grown rather serious.
+
+"Sure, no," said the old man; "Katty's just pretty middlin'. But it's
+waitin' I've been the len'th of the mornin', till 'twould turn broad
+daylight, before I'd be disturbin' of you, ma'am, to tell you the quare
+sort of a joke they're after playin' on me down yonder."
+
+"Saints above, man, what talk have you of jokin' at this hour of the day
+or night?" said Mrs. M'Gurk, feeling the unseasonableness acutely as a
+bitter gust came swooping up the slope and indiscriminatingly ruffled
+the rime-dusted grass-tufts and her own grizzled locks.
+
+"Och, bejabbers, it's a great joke they have agin me whatever," said old
+Patman, who was shivering much, with cold partly, and partly perhaps
+with amusement. "You see the way of it was, last night, no great while
+after we'd all gone asleep, I woke up suddint, like as if wid the crake
+of a door or somethin', but, whatever it might be, 'twas slipped beyond
+me hearin' afore I'd got a hould of me sinses rightly. So I listened a
+goodish bit, and somehow everythin' seemed unnathural quiet, till I
+heard Katty fidgettin', and I went over to see would she take a dhrink
+of wather. The Lord presarve us and keep us, ma'am, if all the rest of
+them hadn't quit--quit out of it they have, and left us cliver and
+clane."
+
+"Ah, now, don't be romancin' man," said the widow, remonstrantly. "What
+in the name of the nation 'ud bewitch any people to go rovin' out of
+their house in the middle of the black night, wid the frost thick on the
+ground?"
+
+"Quit they are," said the old man. "Tom's gone, and the wife, and every
+man-jack of them. They've took the couple of chuckens I noticed Tishy
+killin' of yisterday. Begorrah, I believe they've took Tib the cat, for
+ne'er a sign of it I see about the place, that would mostly be sittin'
+cocked up atop of the dresser. Goodness guide us, sorra a sowl there is
+in the house but the two of us, me and the child, and she's rael bad.
+It's a quare ould joke."
+
+"It 'ud be the joke of a set of ravin' mad people," said the widow.
+
+"But the best of it is," he went on, "do you mind, ma'am"--he looked
+round him suspiciously and lowered his voice--"the leather pouch you
+might ha' seen wid me the other day?"
+
+"Whoo!" said Mrs. M'Gurk, "are they after takin' that on you? Sure, man,
+I thought you had it unbeknownst."
+
+"Aye, it's took," old Patman said, "but how she grabbed it I dunno,
+onless, I was thinkin', be any chance you mentioned somethin' about it?"
+
+"Divil a bit of me did," the widow averred, with truth, which her hearer
+accepted. "And how much might you have had in it at all?"
+
+"Troth, I couldn't be tellin' you," he said; "I never thought to count
+it. 'Tis just for a pleasure to meself I keep it. This long while back
+I've put ne'er a penny in it, but when we used to be livin' up at
+Portnafoyle I'd slip in the odd shillin's now and agin, and sometimes
+I'd think 'twould be handy for buryin' me, and other times I'd think I'd
+give it to Tom as soon as I'd gathered a thrifle more, on'y some way the
+thought of partin' wid it 'ud seem to go agin me, and since poor Tom
+made a match with Martha M'Crum 'tis worse agin me it goes. 'Tis that
+good-for-nought weasel of a slieveen Tishy's after conthrivin' it on me,
+I well know, and bad luck to her," quoth the old man, with a sudden
+spasm of resentment. "Tom 'ud never play such a thrick--I mane it wasn't
+he invinted the joke; he doesn't throuble himself wid much jokin'; he's
+too sinsible, and steady, and perspicuous, and oncommon set on me and
+the child, all the while. There's no better son in Ireland. Och, but the
+rest of them mane no harm wid it; they're just schemin' to dhrop in
+prisintly and be risin' a laugh on me."
+
+Steps which were promptly taken to verify old Joe Patman's strange story
+proved it to be correct in every particular. The only fresh fact which
+investigations brought to light was the presence of a five-shilling
+piece lying on the dresser, where Joe had overlooked it in the early
+dusk. All the other inmates, chuckens and cat included, had disappeared,
+and with them most of the few movables, the old man and the sick child
+being left as forlorn fixtures. Lisconnel at large was neither slow nor
+circumlocutory in forming and expressing its opinion as touching the
+nature of the joke, a firm belief in which old Joe resolutely opposed to
+his troubles as they thickened around him. For no tidings came from the
+absentees, nor were any heard of them, while Katty's fever ran so high
+that it seemed likely her grandfather would be at small further charges
+on her account--a prospect which, however financially sound for a
+capitalist of five shillings or under, none the less filled his soul
+with grief. Then, one night, when Katty was at her worst, a great gale
+came rushing and roaring across the bog, and when the day broke it
+discovered the Patmans' brown thatch-slope interrupted by a gaping
+crevasse, over which a quick-plashing rain-sheet quivered.
+
+The widow M'Gurk had less spare room than heretofore at her disposal now
+that she harboured a co-tenant, with a slight accession of tables and
+chairs. Yet she made out a dry corner for the child and her grandfather,
+who accepted these quarters in preference to any others, because the
+widow, whatever may have been her private views, was prevented by a
+mixture of contrariness and magnanimity from joining in the general
+denunciation of her former allies, compromising as were the
+circumstances under which they had elected to take their departure. In
+her society, therefore, he was not obliged to overhear trenchant
+criticisms upon his Tom's behaviour, and could dilate, at least
+uncontradicted, upon those gifts and graces in the young man, which
+recent events had certainly placed in some need of exposition.
+
+Other disquieting voices there were, however, which he could not dodge,
+and they spoke louder every day. For his five shillings were melting,
+dwindling--had vanished; and Lisconnel, with the best will in the world,
+could ill brook a burden of two incapables more laid upon its winter
+penury. No word on the subject had reached the old man's outer ears; but
+as Katty struggled slowly and fractiously towards convalescence, it
+became clearer in his mind that unless something happened, she must,
+when well enough to be moved, seek change of air away at the big House.
+Perhaps this prospect was now more constantly before him than even the
+thought of Tom's filial virtues, as he sat drearily on the bank by the
+widow M'Gurk's door. He might often be seen to shake his head
+despondently, and then he was probably saying to himself: "Belike he
+thought bad of me, keepin' the bit of money unbeknownst."
+
+By that time he had abandoned the joke theory, and fixed his hopes upon
+the arrival of a letter to explain the mysterious nocturnal flitting,
+and say whither they had betaken themselves after passing through
+Duffclane, the furthest point to which the detective forces of the
+district had tracked the party. Young Dan O'Beirne, whose work brought
+him daily up from down below to the forge a long way on the road toward
+Lisconnel, had safely promised to convey this letter so far whenever it
+came; and on many a day the neighbours nodded commiseratingly to one
+another as they saw "the ould crathur, goodness may pity him, settin'
+off wid himself" in quest of it. The prompt January dusk would have
+already fallen before he struggled up the Knockawn, to be greeted by the
+widow in the tone of marked congratulation which our friends sometimes
+adopt when all reason for it is conspicuously absent: "Well, man alive,
+there wouldn't be ere a letter in it this day anyway."
+
+"Och tub-be sure, not at all," he would answer cheerfully, "I wouldn't
+look to there bein' e'er a one sooner than to-morra. I hadn't the notion
+of expectin' a letter whatever. 'Twas just for the enjoyment of the bit
+of a walk I went."
+
+"Why tub-be sure it was. But be comin' in, man, for you're fit to dhrop,
+and be gettin' your ould brogues dhried. Och man, you're dhrownded
+entirely; 'tis a mighty soft evenin' it's turnin' out."
+
+"And here's Katty lookin' out for you this great while," Big Anne would
+say, "she's finely this evenin', glory be to goodness."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+A RETURN.
+
+
+Affairs were much in this posture, when the widow M'Gurk was one day
+perplexed by the occurrence of two small incidents. In the first place,
+as she was starting on an expedition to the Town she saw at a little
+distance something run across the road which looked uncommonly like the
+Patmans' black cat Tib. Lisconnel owns no other cats for which she might
+have mistaken it; still, as she was puzzled to think how the creature
+should have hidden itself away for more than a fortnight, she concluded
+that she had been deceived by some fluttering bird or glancing shadow.
+In the next place, she happened in the Town upon one Larry Donnelly, who
+in the course of conversation remarked: "So you've that young Patman
+back wid yous agin. What took him to be leggin' off wid himself that
+way?"
+
+"And what put that in your head at all?" said the widow. "Light nor
+sight we've seen of him, or a one of them, or likely to. It's off out of
+the counthry he is belike, and he after robbin' his ould father, that's
+niver done talkin' foolish about him, and lavin' his innicent child to
+go starvin' into the Union--bad luck to him." She found a free
+expression of her sentiments rather refreshing after the restrictions
+under which she was placed at home.
+
+"Well now," said Donnelly, "I'd ha' bet me best brogues I seen that chap
+a couple of nights ago streelin' along the road down about our place;
+but 'twas darkish enough, and I might aisy be mistook."
+
+The widow pondered much over this statement on her homeward way, but had
+the forbearance to say nothing about it. She was still undecided whether
+or no she would communicate it to anybody, when, next morning, on her
+way for a can of water, she saw the black cat, unmistakable this time,
+run across the road, and, as on the day before, make off over the bog
+towards the little river. Widow M'Gurk stood staring after it for a few
+minutes, and came to a resolution. Then she looked about her, and was
+aware of Andy Sheridan's head leaning against his doorpost. Of Andy her
+opinion was, as we have seen, rather low, but she could descry no other
+person available for her purpose, so she called to him: "Andy, lad, I'm
+goin' after me two pullets that's strayed on me; come and be givin' me a
+hand." Andy lounged over to her goodnaturedly, and they turned into the
+bog, where Ody Rafferty presently joined them. The widow thought her
+fowl might be among the broken ground, where the stream runs at the back
+of the Knockawn, and the three went in that direction. It was a mild
+soft grey morning, and they met with neither stir nor sound, till they
+came abruptly upon a grassy hollow, shut in by furzy banks, and fronted
+by the running water, and then the widow, who alone had been expecting
+the unexpected, uttered a suppressed screech, and said: "Och, boys dear,
+goodness gracious guide us!"
+
+What they saw was the figure of a man in a long great-coat, "crooched
+all of a hape" under the bank. Near him were ranged in a row half a
+dozen oranges, strikin' up a wonderful golden glow. A small grimy scrap
+of paper was spread out near them, covered with several piles of
+shillings and pennies, and a silver thimble. Beside these Tib the black
+cat sat severely tucked up, apparently dissatisfied, and irked by the
+situation. At the widow's exclamation the man raised his head, and was
+seen to be Tom Patman, looking haggard and dazed, and as hollow-eyed as
+little Katty herself. Widow M'Gurk and Ody and Andy stood in a line
+facing him.
+
+"Whethen now, Tom Patman," said Ody, "and what might _you_ be doin' wid
+yourself?"
+
+"I'm sittin' here," said Tom.
+
+"Och musha, tell us somethin' we don't know then. Sittin' there you are,
+sure enough, but what the mischief are you after, might I politefully
+ax? or what you mane _by_ it at all at all?"
+
+"I'm sittin' here," said Tom again, "and starvin' I am; and sittin' and
+starvin' I'll be morebetoken till the ind of me ould life. Sure what
+else 'ud I be doin', and meself to thank for it, wid niver a sowl left
+belongin' me in the mortal world, nor a place to be goin' to?"
+
+"Well tub-be sure," said Mrs. M'Gurk, "if that talk doesn't bate all
+that iver I heard! And himself after trapesin' off as permisc-yis as an
+ould hin that won't sit on her eggs, and lavin' his own flesh and blood
+behind him as if they were the dust on the road. And then he ups and
+gives chat about niver a sowl bein' left him."
+
+"'Twas Tishy--bad cess to her," said Tom. "Och, but it's the
+mischievious ould divil-skins is Tishy M'Crum, and it's herself stirred
+up Martha, that wouldn't be too bad altogether if she'd be let alone,
+till the two of them had me torminted wid tellin' me th' ould man had
+pots of money he'd niver spend as long as he had us to be livin' on; and
+that we'd all do a dale better if some of us slipped away aisy widout
+risin' a row, and left him for a bit, while we'd be sellin' Martha's
+things, and seein' about gettin' into a dacint little place, instid of
+the whole of us to be starvin' alive up at Lisconnel, that's nothin'
+more than a bog bewitched; and he after lettin' us be sold up, they
+said, and all the while ownin' mints of money, so that we'd no call to
+be overly partic'lar about lavin' him to make a shift along wid the
+child, if 'twas a convanience; on'y he'd be risin' a quare whillabaloo,
+if he knew we were goin' off anywheres. Troth, I couldn't tell you all
+the gabbin' they had day and night--and showin' me the place he kep' his
+bag hidden in, and this way and that way. Och bedad themselves 'ud
+persuade the hair on your head it grew wrong side out, if they'd a mind
+to it."
+
+"They might so," said Ody, "supposin' I was great gomeral enough to be
+mindin' a word they'd say, or the likes of them." In his subsequent
+reports of the interview, Ody always alleged that he had replied: "Aye,
+very belike, supposin' it grew on the head of an ass," which was
+certainly neater. But Ody Rafferty's repartees, like those of other
+people, are occasionally belated in this way.
+
+"So the ind of it was," Tom went on, "nothin' else 'ud suit them except
+gettin' all readied up for us to be slinkin' out in the evenin' late.
+Faith, I'd twenty minds in me heart agin quittin' little Katty, and she
+that bad. Howane'er they swore black and white that me father'd be
+spendin' all manner of money on her when he got us out of it, and we
+were to be writin' for them to come after us as soon as we were settled,
+and iverythin' agreeable--so I went along. But if I did, ma'am, sure
+when they'd got the bits of furniture sold, the on'y notion they had was
+to be settin' off to make fortins in the States, and ne'er a word about
+Katty and th' ould man. Och they had me disthracted; outrageous they
+were; and that ould thief of the world, Tishy, allowin' me sorra a
+penny, so as I mightn't ha' been bound to stop wheriver they was. But
+one day they thought they had me asleep in the room-corner, and the two
+of them was colloguin' away at the table, so all of suddint Tishy whips
+out me poor father's bag, that I knew the look of right well, when he
+used to keep his 'baccy in it, and down she slaps it, and it jinglin'
+wid money. 'What's that for you?' sez she, and: 'The laws bless us,' sez
+Martha, 'is it after takin' that you are? And what's to become of them
+crathurs up at Lisconnel?' 'Och blathers,' sez Tishy, 'you needn't be
+lettin' on you didn't well know all this while I had it. Sure th'ould
+one might ha' plinty more hidden away on us. Anyway, I left them
+somethin' to get along wid,' sez she."
+
+"The five shillin's," said the widow. "Och but that one's a caution."
+
+"Rael hard-workin' and industhrious she is," observed Andy.
+
+Tom resumed his narrative: "'Them two'll do as well inside as out,' sez
+Tishy. 'I'll just be countin' the bit of silver,' sez she. But bedad I
+was fairly past me patience, and up I leps, and I grabbed a hould of the
+little bag. Och it's a quare fright I gave them that time, and they not
+thinkin' I was mindin', rael terrified they were," said Tom, sitting up
+more erect, and recalling this rare experience with evident complacency.
+"And 'Lave that, you omadhawn,' sez Tishy, wid the look of a divil on
+her,' what foolery are you at now?' 'You thievin' miscreant,' sez I to
+her, 'it's shankin' off to the polis I'll be, and layin' a heavy charge
+agin you for robbin' and stealin', and you after lavin' the innicent
+child there and th' ould man to starve widout a penny to their names,'
+sez I. 'Faugh!' sez she, 'for that matter the fever's liker to have took
+her off agin now wid no throuble to be starvin', and maybe a good job
+too for iverybody.' And 'Be this and be that,' sez I, 'if I thought
+there was e'er a fear of it, 'tis wringin' your ugly neck round I'd be
+this instiant.' 'Let go of that bag,' sez she, sweepin' up some of the
+shillin's that was spilt. 'The polis,' sez I, 'and a heavy charge, if
+there's another word out of your hijjis head.' 'I vow and declare,' sez
+Martha, 'I believe 'twould be the chapest thing we could do wid him, to
+let him take it and go. Sure he'd be divil a ha'porth more use for an
+immigrant than the ould cat there I was ape enough to bring along to
+pacify the childer.' So then Tishy gave some more impidence, but the
+last ind of it was we come to an agreement that I'd take the note and
+the silver, and they'd keep what bits of gould was in it, and they'd go
+off wid themselves wheriver they plased at all, and I'd thramp straight
+back here to be lookin' after the child and th' ould man. Ay, bedad, we
+settled it up civil enough. And afore I went Martha handed me out th'
+ould thimble, and bid me bring it to Katty. ''Twas her mother's,' sez
+she, 'I was keepin' for her; and thick it is wid houles be the same
+token; but don't say I'd be robbin' it off her.' And they tould me to
+take Tib along, or else they'd be lavin' her to run wild; so I put her
+in the basket. Begorrah, I believe Bobby had a notion to be comin' wid
+me and the cat, for he was lettin' sorrowful bawls the last thing I
+heard of him.
+
+"So away I come wid the best of me haste; och I knocked the quare
+walkin' out of meself entirely. And I stopped at the last big place I
+was passin' to get Katty the oranges. And I was thrampin' it all the
+night after, till just when there was a sthrake of the mornin' over the
+bog, I come into Lisconnel. But och wirra wirra--the roof's off of the
+house--och the look of the black houle wid the rafters stickin' thro'
+it, and ne'er a breath of smoke, till me heart was sick watchin' to see
+might there be an odd one; and the door clap-clappin'. Sure be that I
+well knew the child was dead, and me father quit out of it, or maybe
+buried himself, and I after lavin' them dyin' and starvin'. So for
+'fraid somebody'd be comin' out and tellin' me, off I run away into the
+bog, till I was treadin' here in the could wather. And then I tumbled
+th' ould cat out of the basket, that was scrawmin' and yowlin' disp'rit,
+and I took and slung the basket into the sthrame--there's the handle
+among them rushes--and down I sat under the bank. I dunno how many
+nights and days it is at all--but here I'll stop; niver a fut I'll stir
+to be lookin' for bite or sup, or lettin' on I'm in it--and anybody may
+take the bit of money and welcome; I'd as lief be pickin' up the dirt on
+the road--for I'll just give me life a chance to ind out of the world's
+misery and disolation."
+
+"Now, may goodness forgive you," said the widow M'Gurk, "it's a poor
+case to want the wit. Troth, and yourself's the quare ould
+child-desertin', mane-spirited, aisy-frighted slieveen of a young
+bosthoon; but what sort of a conthrivance is it you have on you at all
+at all be way of a head that you couldn't have the sinse to considher
+the roof blowin' off a body's house 'ud be raison enough for them to be
+quittin' out of it, and no signs of dyin' in the matter? D'you think the
+win' was apt to be waitin' till there happened to be nobody widin, afore
+it got scatterin' the thatch? God help us all, you've little to do to be
+squattin' there talkin' about disolations and miseries, wid the two of
+them this instiant minyit sittin' be the fire up at my place, and sorra
+a hand's turn ailin' them, forby Katty's a thrifle conthrary now and
+agin, thro' not bein' entirely strong yet."
+
+"And bedad at that hearin'," reports of the occurrence used to proceed
+from this point, "the lep he gathered himself up wid, and the rate he
+legged it off--musha, he was over the hill while we were pickin' up his
+things for him. And as for th' ould cat that he tripped over, it rowled
+three perch of ground before it got a hould of its four feet."
+
+"Sure we were sittin' there as quite as could be consaived"--the
+conclusion of this precipitate rush was thus recounted--"when all of a
+suddint we couldn't tell what come bouncin' in at the door, as if it had
+been shot out of the inds of the earth, and had us all jumpin' up and
+screechin', till we seen it was on'y Tom Patman, and he in such a takin'
+you might suppose he thought somethin' 'ud swally up ould Joe and the
+child on him before he could get at them."
+
+Lisconnel's opinion was divided as to whether Tom would actually have
+stayed and starved in his hiding-place had he not been discovered. Mrs.
+M'Gurk thought it likely enough. "The cat goin' back and for'ards that
+way," she said, "gave her an idee there was somethin' amiss in it, and
+that was why she took Andy along. 'Deed and she got a quare turn when
+first she spied the chap croochin' under the bank--she couldn't tell but
+he might ha' been a corp."
+
+Brian Kilfoyle's view was: "Divil a much! Sure if he'd had e'er a notion
+to be doin' anythin' agin himself, there was plinty of deep bog-houles
+handy for him to sling himself into, and have done wid it." Whereupon
+Mrs. Sheridan crossed herself and said deprecatingly: "Ah, sure, belike
+the crathur wouldn't have the wickedness in him to go do such a thing."
+Her husband didn't know but he might. "Them soft sort of fellers 'ud
+sometimes stick to anythin' they took into their heads, the same as a
+dab of morthar agin a wall." And Ody Rafferty supposed the fact of the
+matter was, "that if be any odd chance they got a notion of their own,
+they mistook it for somebody else's."
+
+On one point, however, the neighbours, Mrs. M'Gurk not excepted, were
+practically unanimous, the utter flagitiousness, namely, of Tishy
+M'Crum. There was a tendency to begrudge her the trivial merit of having
+voluntarily left behind her the five-shilling piece. For this marred
+that perfect symmetry of iniquity which is so pleasant to the eye when
+displayed by people of whom we "have no opinion." Only Mrs. Brian said
+it was a mercy she had that much good nature in her itself. But even she
+added that the fewer of them kind of folks she saw comin' about the
+place, the better she'd be pleased, and she hoped they'd got shut of
+them for good and all.
+
+This aspiration seemed the more likely to be fulfilled, when within a
+week or so the Patmans heard from the family of Tom's first wife, who
+held out prospects of work for himself, and a home for Katty and his
+father--a proposal which was gladly accepted. Their departure left as
+the single trace of their sojourn in Lisconnel, Tib the cat, which
+remained behind, a somewhat unwelcome bequest to the widow M'Gurk.
+Indeed, I fear the creature became a source of some annoyance to her,
+because Andy Sheridan contracted a habit of addressing it by the name of
+Tishy, and bestowing upon it the same laudatory epithets with which the
+widow had been wont to justify her admiration for the energetic sisters.
+
+It was on a hushed February morning that the Patmans finally departed.
+The smell of spring was in the air, and filmy silvery mist had begun to
+float off the dark bogland in vanishing wreaths, soft and dim as the
+frail sloe-blossom, already stolen out over the writhen black branches
+up on the ridge. A jewel had been left in the heart of every groundling
+trefoil and clover-leaf, and the long rays that twinkled to them were
+still just tinged with rose. Here and there a flake of gold seemed to
+have lit upon the clump of sombre green furze-bushes, by which
+neighbours in a small knot stood watching the three generations of
+Patmans dwindle away down the road with its narrow dewy grass-border,
+threading the vast sweep of sky-rimmed brown. Father and son walked,
+while little Katty bobbed along, balanced in a swaying donkey-pannier.
+The widow M'Gurk, who felt a good deal of concern about the destiny of
+her late lodgers, hoped "they were goin' to dacint people, for there
+wasn't as much sinse among the three of them as you'd put on a fourpenny
+bit." And Mrs. Quigley thought "'twould be hard to say which the young
+man or ould one was the foolishest; for the blathers ould Joe talked
+about Tom, and the gaby Tom made of himself over the child, now that he
+had his own way wid her, was past belief."
+
+"And I can tell you," said Ody Rafferty, "there's folks goin' about that
+you'll want all the wits you iver had, and maybe a thrifle tacked on, to
+get the better of rightly."
+
+"Augh, I question will they iver do any great things, goodness help
+them," said Mrs. Sheridan. "'Twill be much if he keeps them outside the
+House."
+
+"Well, anyway," said Biddy Ryan, "I'd liefer be in their coats, for
+fortin or no fortin, than like them two ugly-tempered women, settin' off
+to the dear knows where, after robbin' and plunderin' all before them."
+
+"Thrue for you, then, Biddy," said Mrs. Brian, turning away from her
+wide outlook, "we're none so badly off, when we're stoppin' where we
+are, instid of streelin' about wid the notion of such black villinies
+in our minds. For sure enough," she said, as she faced round towards the
+grey-peaked end-walls, and smoke-plumed thatch of Lisconnel, "the
+world's a quare place to get thravellin' thro', take it as you will."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+GOOD LUCK
+
+
+Although Laraghmena is no great distance from Lisconnel as the crow
+flies, but little intercourse takes place between the two hamlets. For
+the crow's flight would be over a rugged mountain ridge, sinking into a
+trackless expanse of bog, which often spreads rough and wet walking
+before wayfarers who have to experience it at closer quarters than those
+who merely throw down a flapping shadow as they pass. And round by the
+road is a good long tramp, not to be lightly undertaken. So it does not
+happen half a dozen times in the year, perhaps, that anybody comes from
+thence to Lisconnel, and our visits thither are fewer still. The
+neighbours say that the people up there do be very poor entirely, and
+are wont to use a commiserating tone when speaking of them. But their
+knowledge of the locality and its inhabitants is by no means intimate,
+and would be even less so, were it not that Theresa Joyce and her
+brother Mick, the remnant of Mrs. Kilfoyle's family, are now living
+there, which makes a connecting link.
+
+Laraghmena is scattered rather wildly over the slopes of a grey mountain
+that shoulders the sea at the point where its foam comes nearest to
+Lisconnel. Some of the cabins stand so low along the shore that the
+shingle knocks clatteringly at their doors when the tide is full and
+rough; and other some are perched so high up on the hillside that they
+constantly disappear from view behind a curtain of the pale mists which
+haunt its summit, creeping to and fro. When one of these little white
+dwellings, with its field-fleck beside it, emerges from the clouds, you
+feel as if the slightly improbable had happened, since at such a height
+you would have expected nothing but the appropriate rocks and swampy
+patches. There was once a French princess who would no doubt have
+wondered why on earth any people should choose to live and farm in such
+unchancy places. Rather than that she would have ploughed herself up a
+little bit of the rich green land which spreads in broad tracts round
+about, with sometimes sheep nibbling over it, and here and there a few
+deer. But the views of this young lady are represented as having been so
+far in advance of her age that she seems hardly possible as an
+historical personage, and withdraws into the myth-mists. To that region
+certainly belongs the ancient chronicle in which we read how the Irish
+Nemedians, revolting against the intolerable deal of cream and butter
+and wheaten meal exacted from them by their oppressors, the Fomorians,
+those ferocious African pirates, emigrated to Hellas, in hope of better
+things, but were at last driven back home to escape the heavier yoke of
+the Athenians, who compelled them to: "Dig clay in the valleys, and
+carry it in leathern bags to the top of the highest mountains, and the
+most craggy rocks, in order to form a soil upon those barren places, and
+make them fruitful, and able to bear corn." That history should repeat
+itself is, of course, to be recognised as merely a commonplace fact; but
+a myth reproducing itself in the shape of events happening visibly
+before our eyes, is a rarer phenomenon. And it seems to be occurring
+whenever a string of Laraghmenians come plodding up their winding
+mountain-path under the burden of heavy creels filled with earth, or
+oftener with slippery brown sea-wrack and leathery weed. For it is in
+this way that whatever scanty foothold their starveling crops may find,
+has been fashioned and maintained in the stony little fields. Year by
+year, as the blustery days of late autumn darken into winter, the
+steep-ledged path is wetted all along with sea-water, and bestrewn with
+dark trails and tough tawny pods out of the dripping creels, until it
+grows as sharply ocean-odorous as the beach, while the many bare feet
+are continually toiling slowly up and quickly pattering down it. Yet
+their efforts are rewarded by only meagre and stunted growths; so
+intractable is the material upon which they are expended. Micky Joyce
+has been heard to declare, as he took a despondent bird's-eye view of
+his holding, that "you might as well be thryin' to raise crops in the
+crevices of the stone walls."
+
+However, as we were just now shown, these dwellers at Laraghmena have
+another resource to fall back upon. In fact, they have nothing less than
+the wide sea as a supplement to their bit of land. The queer small boats
+hauled up on the strand, and the dark-brown net festooning the rafters,
+betoken that, as does also the bit of salt-fish hung against the wall,
+pallid and juiceless, a shadowy, wraith-like looking viand. But the
+bounty of the sea has limits; it does not yield up its stores for
+nothing, but takes as well as gives. And it helps itself sometimes on a
+liberal scale. Some years ago, for instance, it took poor Thady Joyce
+and several of his companions, who had gone off in a couple of luggers
+after the herrings. The event is remembered with awe at Laraghmena,
+because in that wild March gloaming Con the Quare One had met Thady
+himself face to face stepping up the winding path, and had given him
+good evening, and asked him how he had got all dripping wet, just at the
+very time when the unlucky lad must have been lying drowned miles and
+miles from there, among the surges of Galway Bay. Other such toll has
+often been levied since then; for the curraghs and pookawns in which
+Laraghmena goes to sea are frail craft to cope with the billows come
+rolling, maybe, from the fogbanks of Newfoundland, and blasts that have
+cooled their breath among hills of ice before they sweep across the
+Atlantic. Now and then a boat comes to grief even on the short voyage
+made for the purpose of cutting wrack from the shelves of the black-reef
+that lies a bit off the shore. So, on the whole, the inhabitants of
+Laraghmena may be considered to pay dearly for their supplies of fish
+and seaweed; and we at Lisconnel, though we live beyond reach of such
+things, and have few substitutes for them, are not far wrong in speaking
+of the people up there as "rael poor entirely."
+
+Yet they themselves would not by any means have it supposed that they
+"think bad," as they call it, of their fortunes and habitation. On the
+contrary, whatever their private opinion may be, they are disposed to
+uphold the merits of the place in public, and to prove themselves sudden
+and quick in resentment of any outsiders' disparaging criticism. The
+most deadly insult that can be offered to a Laraghmenian as such, is an
+allusion to the libellous report which has somehow become current to the
+effect that his Riverence at Drumroe, the nearest parish, always sends
+over a special messenger on Saturday night to remind them of the
+morrow's Mass; the innuendo being that Laraghmena's out-of-the-way
+situation, and general want of culture, preclude its inhabitants from
+knowing the day of the week. This is why an innocent-seeming remark such
+as, "Well, boys, it's Tuesday this mornin'," has been known to set
+blackthorns whirling wildly.
+
+Something of the sort occurred at Sallenmore fair, one day in last
+September, when Matt Doyne and Andy Sheridan from Lisconnel fell in with
+their acquaintances, Larry Sullivan and Felix Morrough, from Laraghmena.
+After they had fought as long as seemed good to them, they exchanged
+what news they had. The most important piece was that Larry and Felix
+were presently setting off to the States. They were rather urgent in
+advising the other two lads to join their party; but Andy said that
+everything would go to sticks at home if he was out of it, and Matt
+averred that his mother would be of the opinion she was lost and kilt
+entirely, if he so much as mentioned any such an idea. "And herself wid
+your brother Terence at home to be keepin' her company," objected Felix.
+"Sure there's me mother wid ne'er another crathur in the world, you may
+say, but meself, and she's never done this last six months persuadin' me
+to go along."
+
+"Then it's the quare woman she must be, bedad," said Matt, "unless it's
+yourself's the quare bosthoon on her entirely, and maybe that's liker;"
+a rejoinder which brought on a renewal of hostilities.
+
+Just at this time a spell of fine weather, very bright and serene, had
+been brooding over Lisconnel. It was the early spring of autumn, when
+leaves and berries here and there were taking a blossom-like vividness;
+the frost-touched brier-sprays seemed to have found and dipped in the
+same red that had dyed the young buds and shoots of April. The air was
+so still that the seeded dandelions stood day after day with their fairy
+globes unbereft of a single downy dart, like little puffs of vapour
+among the grasses. A soft mist rounded off all the bogland, holding in a
+drowse the sunbeams that steeped it, and letting them waken to their
+full golden glory at the very heart of noon. But one morning the haze
+began to thicken and darken on the horizon, as if wafts of murky smoke
+were blown through it, and towards evening massy shapes of black clouds
+came slowly lifting themselves up, some with outlines curved like bosky
+clumps of wood, some ruggedly ledged and angled like a drift of begrimed
+icebergs. By sunset the far west was all a sullen gloom veined with
+lurid, tawny streaks, and mottled with deeper stains. Old Peter
+Sheridan, who is reputed to have "a great eye for the weather," turned
+it forebodingly upon the prospect, and said the sky was "the moral for
+all the world of the back of an ould brindled bull, and he'd never
+known any good come of that manner of apparance."
+
+And true for him. Before sunrise next morning Lisconnel was roused by
+the reveille of a crashing thunder-peal, which preluded a violent storm.
+It is seldom that one booms and rattles so loudly over our bogland, or
+glares with so fierce a flame. Brian Kilfoyle, taking a rapid
+observation through his door, said, "Be the powers of smoke, I never
+seen the aquil of that. You might think they was after whitewashin' the
+whole place wid blindin' fire. Here's out of it, sez I." And he
+retreated blinking to his dark corner. At the height of it, even Andy
+Sheridan, who is probably our freest thinker, felt secretly relieved to
+know that his stepmother and his sisters were saying their prayers. The
+arrangement seemed to give him a sense of security without claiming any
+concessions from his superior strength of mind. But in the end the
+perilous clouds rolled away growling and gleaming towards the mountains
+and the sea, leaving only one victim behind--the Quigley's little goat,
+who had been struck dead by a lightning flash, to the sorrow of her
+owners, and the awe of all Lisconnel in contemplation of the black and
+white body stretched out still on her wide grazing-ground.
+
+The storm, however, seemed to have broken up the fair weather, and the
+days that followed it were blustery and rainy. On the next of them Larry
+Sullivan and Felix Morrough were seen passing through Lisconnel,
+evidently equipped for a journey. Larry, who had parted from no near
+friends, was apparently in good spirits; but Felix looked so much cast
+down that his contemporaries refrained from any references to the days
+of the week, and the pair went on their way unmolested amongst the
+lengthening shadows. They reported the storm to have been terrific
+altogether up at Laraghmena. The Widdy Bourke's thatch was set in a
+blaze, "and it was a livin' miracle that the whole of them wasn't
+frizzled up like a pan of fryin' herrin's."
+
+It may have been ten days or so after this that a good many of the
+neighbours had dropped in one evening at Mrs. Doyne's. She had been
+ailing of late, and old Dan O'Beirne had stepped up from the forge to
+prescribe for her, and cheer her with accounts of how finely young Dan
+and her daughter Stacey were getting on at their place down below in
+Duffclane. The rest of the party had assembled merely for company and
+conversation. It included members of nearly all our families--Kilfoyles
+and Quigleys and Ryans and Raffertys and the Widdy M'Gurk and Big Anne.
+Presently Judy Ryan, who was looking out of the door, had an
+announcement to make.
+
+"Whethen now, and who might yous be when you're at home? There's two
+women comin' along the road from Sallinbeg ways, I dunno the looks of at
+all, I should say; but the rain's mistin' thick between me and them.
+Carryin' bundles they are. If they're not any of the Tinkers we're right
+enough. One of them's a little ould body, and the other's a good size
+bigger. Strangers they are. Och, mercy on me, have I eyes in me head at
+all? How strange she is! Sure it's Theresa Joyce herself. But we haven't
+seen her this great while, and who she has along wid her I couldn't be
+tellin' you. A feeble sort of crathur she looks to be, accordin' to the
+way she's foostherin' along."
+
+When these two travellers arrived at the Doynes' door, nobody failed to
+recognise Theresa Joyce, notwithstanding the estrangement of a long
+absence; and she hastened to introduce her unknown companion, who kept a
+tight clutch on her arm, as if afraid to let go, and looked at nobody's
+face, but seemed to listen from one to the other. She was, it appeared,
+the widow Morrough from Laraghmena, who had been struck blind by the
+lightning in the great storm Friday was a week--the sight of her eyes
+clean destroyed with one flash as she was throwing a bit of food to the
+fowl at her door. And the last child she had belonging to her set off
+the next morning to the States. And now she herself was going into the
+Union down at Moynalone, for what else could she be doing, that couldn't
+see her hand before her face? So Theresa was bringing her down, and they
+thought they might have got as far as Duffclane against night; but the
+creature wasn't well used yet to walking in the dark, so they were slow
+coming, and they'd hardly do it.
+
+Such was the outline of Mrs. Morrough's history up to date, and its
+rehearsal had at once the effect of arousing a sympathetic bustle about
+her, which did not subside until she sat a wet and wayworn guest, in the
+most comfortable hearth-corner, and had been provided with a cup of the
+tea that Mrs. Doyne had made herself in her character of an invalid. She
+now sat on one side of the blind woman, and stirred her tea for her, and
+on the other Dan O'Beirne shook his head in regretful confirmation of
+the opinion pronounced by the Drumroe doctor, which was reported to be
+that mortal man couldn't do her a thraneen of good. Meanwhile Theresa
+Joyce, who was likewise bedrenched and weary, found a seat in the
+opposite corner, where her nearest neighbours were Ody Rafferty, and her
+niece-in-law, Mrs. Brian Kilfoyle, with her daughter Rose.
+
+"Well, Theresa, it's the long while since you've stepped over to see
+us," Ody said, starting the conversation, "and it's the soft evenin'
+you've chose to be comin'. Your shawl's dhreeped. Take it off, and I'll
+give it a shake above the fire. Bedad, Theresa, the two of us has been
+wearin' the dusty male-bags on our heads since the time I seen you
+first. As black as a sloe you was; but now it's liker the blossom it's
+turned."
+
+"And time for it," said Theresa. "Sure I'm over sivinty year of age now,
+any way, every day of it--and the long days there was among them, God
+knows."
+
+"But wid all that, ne'er a one of them was long enough for you to be
+findin' a man to your mind in it," said Ody. "And I declare to goodness
+I dunno but maybe it's the very sinsible woman you were for that same.
+Sure meself was a great while afore ever I thought of axin' Biddy, and
+for anythin' I can tell I might ha' done better if I'd held me tongue a
+bit longer and then said nothin', as the sayin' is. I was ould enough to
+know me own mind any way. But, musha, for that matter, Rose there 'ill
+prisintly be settin' up to think she's ould enough to know hers, and
+it's twinty chances if she has as much wit as you."
+
+"And why would she," said Theresa, "or anybody be wishin' it to her? Oh,
+let that alone. There's a dale of diff'rint sorts of wit, and no raison
+why one of them shouldn't be as good as another. Look at her
+grandmother, me sister Bessy, it's plinty of paice and comfort she had
+wid her marryin'."
+
+This was quite true, as although she had been rather early widowed, and
+her only daughter had married an emigrant, her son and his wife had
+taken such care of her, and made so much of her, that the neighbours had
+never thought of calling her the widdy, a title reserved for a woman
+left struggling alone; and she had remained Mrs. Kilfoyle to the end of
+her days.
+
+"And look at the poor crathur there, what she's come to," said Ody,
+instancing the tragical figure of the widow Morrough.
+
+"Ah, the saints may pity her," said Theresa. "But the likes of such bad
+luck happins few people married or single, thank God."
+
+"It's a quare unnathural young villin her son must be," said Mrs. Brian,
+"to skyte off and lave her that-a-way. Sorra the bit he can be good
+for."
+
+"'Deed, now, Norah woman, that's the very notion is disthressin' me,"
+said Theresa, "for I dunno but it's after usin' him ill, I am. You see
+the way of it was the poor sowl--poor Mrs. Morrough--had the great dread
+of the say upon her, be raison of her husband and her father gettin'
+dhrowned at the fishin', so she'd always the fear in her mind of the
+same thing happ'nin' her couple of boys. Howane'er, the eldest of them
+went off to California a good few years back, and was doin' pretty
+middlin' well out there the last she heard of him, but that's a long
+while ago now; about gettin' married he was. But Felix, the lad she had
+at home wid her until the other day, often enough he was bound to be on
+the wather, after the fish and the sayweed, if he was to get his livin'
+at all. And disthracted she was seem' him goin' out in their ould boat,
+that's laiks enough in her to sink the biggest ship ever set sail, and
+herself wid scarce the width to hould a sizable flounder. Sez I to Felix
+one wild evenin', when we was argufyin' wid him, that sure the little
+loadin' he could be puttin' in her 'ud never be worth losin' his life
+for. But sez he to me, the bit of food they'd put in their mouths was
+littler agin, and yet they might be losin' their lives for want of it.
+And ne'er a word had I to say to that. But one night last winter he was
+as nearly lost as anythin' in a squall, and after that his mother would
+be tormintin' herself worse than she was before. So she set her heart
+entirely on gettin' him to take off to the States, and be out of the way
+of fishin' and dhrowndin'. She'd ha' gone wid him herself, on'y they
+said she was too ould, and spoilin' his chances she'd be. A long while
+it was before he'd hear any talk of it. The whole summer she was
+persuadin' him; but at last he made up his mind he would. 'Twas no
+notion of his own to be lavin' her, I'll say that for him."
+
+"Whethen now, but that was as curious a plan as ever I heard tell of for
+keepin' a person from dhrowndin'," said Ody; "to be sendin' him off over
+the rowlin' says, sailin' goodness can tell you how many hunderds and
+tousands of miles. What was she dhramin' of at all at all to go do such
+a thing?"
+
+"Ah, but sure it's a diff'rint sort of sailin'," said Theresa. "Why,
+they say one of them big stamers 'ud carry a couple of our little boats
+along wid her, and you'd scarce notice she had them on board. Terrible
+safe they must be if they're that size."
+
+"And morebetoken," said Mrs. Brian, "there's such a sight of ships
+comin' and goin' between this and the States, wouldn't you think that
+agin now they'd ha' got a kind of track line, crossin' over, as if it
+was a manner of road they was follyin' that nothin's apt to happen them
+on, and not sthrayin' about permisc-yis in the storms?"
+
+"_Thrack?_" said Ody, shrilly. "Bedad, then, its the quare thrack, and
+the quare places it brings them into. D'you know that, for one thing,
+they go slap through the Bay of Bisky?"'
+
+"And is that an ugly bay?" said Mrs. Brian.
+
+"You may call it that. I wouldn't be sayin' so to herself over there,"
+said Ody, with much careful mystery. "For it might be on'y discouragin'
+the crathur worse than she is already. But it's the place where the
+Seven Oceans of the World meet. Ay, indeed, ma'am--but don't be lettin'
+on to her. I was spakin' to a man who had a brother went through it, and
+he said the ragin' and tearin' of them all flowin' together 'ud terrify
+the sinses out of King Solomon. They had the great big stamer he was in
+whirlin' round and round and round, the same as if it was a float on one
+of its own paddlewheels, he couldn't tell how many days and nights.
+Thracks, how are you. It's a very ready one there is in it to the bottom
+of the say."
+
+"Still a good few people gets through it safe enough," said Theresa,
+"ay, and comes back through it of an odd while."
+
+"But how many's lost in it that you never hear tell of?" said Ody. "And
+besides that, the man I was talkin' to tould me his brother was never
+right in his head after the tossin' he got. It's a poor case to be
+landin' ravin' mad in a sthrange counthry, supposin' you get there
+itself. But me own notion is that if people's well off, they've a right
+to stop where they are, and if they're misfort'nit, they've a chance any
+way of better bad luck stayin' at home."
+
+Ody stated his own notion authoritatively, and Theresa looked depressed
+by the dilemma in which it seemed to place the emigrant.
+
+"'Deed, now, maybe it's a bad turn I'm after doin' the two of them," she
+said; "but poor Mrs. Morrough, many a time she sez to me it 'ud be the
+greatest comfort to her at all to get quit of the fear she was in
+continyal wheniver he went out wid the ould boat. Sure she might be a
+bit lonesome, she'd say, but after all what great company was he to her
+when half the time she would be drowndin' him under the rowl of the say,
+like his poor father and grandfather? And wid the most he could do it's
+hard set he was to make what 'ud keep him. So she'd planned she'd be
+able to conthrive well enough wid her hins and her spriggin' work, till
+Felix could be sendin' her over a thrifle. A very cliver woman she was
+at the spriggin'; the handkercher corners she'd work was rael iligant.
+Pence a-piece she got for them, and I've known her finish a dozen in
+three days.
+
+"Och, but I got a turn on the Friday mornin' when I stepped down to her
+place to see what way they were after the storm, and there she was
+sittin' crouched up in a corner, and screechin' to me to know who was
+comin' in, and I standin' before her eyes in the middle of a sun-bame.
+And 'Glory be to God,' sez she, 'that it's yourself, for you'll have the
+sinse to give me a hand wid endeavourin' to keep the knowledge of what's
+after happenin' me from Felix, the way he won't be purvinted of goin'
+to-morra. Sorra a fut would he if he knew aught ailed me; and then sure
+he might stay at home for good and all; and dhrownded he'll be, and
+meself'ill go deminted.' And sure I thought it was maybe no thing to be
+doin', and so I said to her. But it seemed the heart of her was to be
+broke altogether if anythin' 'ud hinder him gettin' out of it. And then
+I was mindin' the father and grandfather of him, the way they went, and
+me brother, poor Thady, and I couldn't tell but I might ha' raison to
+think bad of biddin' him stay; and if he did, sure perhaps he couldn't
+be keepin' her at all, and she so helpless; it's better able he might be
+to help her out in the States. And sorry I'd ha' been to disappoint the
+crathur of the first wish she'd took a thought of sittin' in the dark of
+her misfortin. So the ind of it was I settled I'd stop wid her for that
+day, and thry could we let on there was nothin' amiss when Felix come
+in, that was out somewhere since early in the mornin' before the storm
+began.
+
+"But 'deed now it was the quare conthrivin' we had after he'd come home.
+And where'd he been but off down to Drumroe gettin' her an iligant big
+taypot for a keepsake? So the sorra a stim of it, in coorse, could she
+see; and I done me best biddin' her look at the grand gilt handle, and
+the wrathe of pink roses on it, and she'd say the same thing after me;
+but sure its noways very aisy to fall into an admiration of a taypot
+you've never set eyes on; and I misdoubt the poor lad thought she wasn't
+so much plased with it as he expected. And then he'd be walkin' in and
+out, and axin' for this and that he was to put in his bundle; and she
+could on'y be tellin' him where to look for them, instid of readyin'
+them up for him herself. And the pair of socks she'd promised him she
+couldn't get to finish--rael fretted she was wid it all. Howsome'er one
+way or the other we made a shift, till poor Felix went off in the grey
+of the mornin' wid ne'er a notion of anythin'. Sez he to her: 'You'll be
+seem' me steppin' in agin one of these days;' and sez she: 'Ay will
+I--as sure as I'll see the sun shinin';' so he consaited she was well
+enough contint--but the two of them was thinkin' diff'rint things.
+
+"Ne'er a word of it we said to anybody before Felix was gone, or else
+somebody 'ud ha' been safe to ha' tould him, for there's plinty of
+people couldn't be goin' about widout tellin' everythin' they hear any
+more than a wasp could fly widout buzzin' its wings. And then we got the
+docther to her, but he couldn't do e'er a hand's turn. Sure what could
+anybody do agin the lightnin', that's a sort of miracle, you may say,
+unless it was wid another one?"
+
+"And I dunno has people any call to be settin' themselves up to thry do
+them," said Mrs. Brian. "We'd better lave the like to Them that
+understands the nathur of such things."
+
+"Ah, I should suppose we'd a right to be thryin' whativer we get the
+chance to," said Theresa, "and that's little enough, the Lord knows.
+Plinty of things there is kep' up out of the raich of our meddlin' wid
+them."
+
+"Ay bedad, or else it's the quare regulatin' we'd be givin' them now and
+agin--we would so," said Ody, regretfully. "Och, but there's an odd few
+good jobs I'd give more than a thrifle to be puttin' me hand to this
+minyit if I could get a hould of them."
+
+"And that's the way it is, I'm afeared, wid the lightnin'-blindin',"
+said Theresa. "Howane'er, up at Laraghmena we'd ha' done the best we
+could for her, if she'd ha' been contint to ha' sted there; we'd ha'
+conthrived among us all to keep her well enough. But not a bit of her
+would for all we could do or say. She wouldn't be a burden on the
+neighbours she said. You see she's proud in her mind, the crathur,
+that's what it is, goodness help her."
+
+"And when a body has that sort of a notion," said Ody, "you might as
+aisy crack an egg ind-ways as get it out of their head."
+
+"So that's the way of it," said Theresa. "But if you could be tellin' me
+whether it's wrong I done or right, you know more than meself. Felix 'ud
+be for killin' me if he knew, that's sartin, and small blame to him I
+was thinkin' part of the while comin' along. For bad work there's apt to
+ha' been, sure enough, in anythin' that inds in landin' a body in the
+Union."
+
+The blind woman in her corner across the hearth seemed to have caught
+the last word, for she abruptly said, "Ay, ay, it's there I'm goin', and
+the first of the Morroughs iver wint on the rates, or the Conroys
+aither. But I'm not takin' their name along wid me; troth no; sorra the
+Ellen Morrough 'ill they find in it."
+
+"Sure not at all, woman dear," said Theresa. "Why, Mrs. Doyne, it's
+great work the two of us had this day comin' along the road, plannin' a
+fine name for Mrs. Morrough to have in the Union', for she sez it's none
+any dacint poor people own she'll be bringin' into it. So we've settled
+she's to be Mrs. Skeffington Yelverton. That's an iligant soundin' one,
+isn't it, ma'am?"
+
+Everybody expressed admiration, and a forlorn glimmer of complacency at
+the arrangement passed over even the sorrowful countenance of Mrs.
+Skeffington Yelverton herself, as she sat in her ragged old wisp of a
+shawl. She was holding under it her grand new delft teapot, whose
+beauties she should never see; though by this time much fingering had
+made her familiar with the outlines of its raised pink-rose wreath. Then
+Theresa Joyce said, "We ought to be steppin' on wid ourselves, if we're
+to get to Duffclane before dark. The evenin's took up a bit. I see the
+sky there turnin' like goulden glass agin the windy-pane." But the
+neighbours protested against their setting forward again; and it was
+agreed that they should sleep the night at the Kilfoyles'.
+
+When this point had been decided, Mrs. Morrough said, "Would that be
+the say--the rustlin' I hear outside there?"
+
+Upon this people looked ruefully at her and at each other, as if the
+question had given them a glimpse into the darkness in which she was
+sitting.
+
+"Ah, no, ma'am," said Mrs. Doyne, "that's on'y the sedge-laves in the
+win' round the big pool just back of the house. Few days of the year
+there is, summer or winter, but they'll be shoosh-sooin' that way. A
+dhrary sort of noise it is to my mind. I do be tired listenin' to it in
+the night sometimes."
+
+"Sure there's ne'er a dhrop of say-wather nearer us, ma'am, than the
+place you're after quittin' out of," said Judy Ryan, "it's the quare
+whillaloo it 'ud have to be risin' before we'd hear it that far."
+
+"Well, well," said the blind woman, "yous are the very lucky people, I'm
+thinkin', all of yous, that see the shinin' of the sun, and live beyond
+the sound of the say."
+
+Her remark was followed by a short silence, during which her hearers
+were, perhaps, questing for consolatory rejoinders rather than
+congratulating themselves upon their own luckiness. It was Big Anne who
+broke the pause, saying, with the best intentions, "Ah, sure, ma'am
+dear, plase God, _you_ won't be so, and _we_ won't be so;" a sentiment
+which apparently did not meet with the approval of Ody Rafferty, as he
+frowned bushily at her and said in a testy undertone, "Musha, good
+gracious, woman, what talk have you out of you at all?"
+
+Just at this moment sounds, the nature of which could not easily be
+mistaken, rose up close by--shouts and laughter and thumps and trampling
+of feet. People who ran quickly to the door were in time to see a knot
+of youths fall confusedly out of the house over the way--the
+Quigleys'--obviously, to judge by their subsequent proceedings, for the
+purpose of continuing a scuffle with ampler elbow room. But it was only
+for a very brief space that their wrestling and skirmishing among the
+puddles held anybody's attention. That was speedily diverted to the far
+more extraordinary and astonishing behaviour of their visitor, Mrs.
+Morrough. For she suddenly sprang up off her chair, exclaiming, "Saints
+above--it's Paddy--that's Paddy's voice--him that I haven't set eyes on
+for nine year next Easter--and there's Felix yellin' too! The both of
+them's come back, glory be to God!" And so saying out of the house she
+ran, and across the road as straight as a dart, she who not an hour
+before had been led gropingly in, and would have put her foot among the
+glowing hearth-sods, if her guides had not pulled her away.
+
+The neighbours could at first look on in only mute amazement, but in any
+case the two boys and she were for some time so intricately entangled
+that any attempt to elicit any explanation would have been futile. When
+at last questions and answers were possible, no very lucid account of
+the matter was forthcoming. To the many voices that demanded: "Is it
+seein' you are, woman alive? Is it seein' you are?" all Mrs. Morrough
+could answer was: "Ay, bedad am I, and as well as iver I done in me
+life--praise be to goodness. Sure I dunno what way it was, but me sight
+came back to me all of a flash, the same as it went, just the very
+minyit I was hearin' the lads shoutin'. Och, Paddy, avic, but you're the
+grand man grown; and Felix, och now, to be seein' you agin, and
+everythin' else as clear as clear. It's meself's the lucky woman this
+day--glory be to God and Mary."
+
+In short, the marvellous restoration of her sight is to this day a
+miracle, very freshly in remembrance at Lisconnel and Laraghmena, where
+the inhabitants know little about paralysed optic nerves, and might
+perhaps continue to wonder none the less even if they knew more. Beside
+it the unexpected reappearance of the two young Morroughs seemed almost
+a commonplace incident, though Paddy's fine new suit and gold
+watch-chain were, indeed, very exceptional things at Lisconnel. His
+story ran that he had prospered highly of late out in California, having
+made enough to set him up grandly on a good bit of land in the old
+country, and give Felix a fair start, and keep the old mother in comfort
+all the rest of her life. With which objects in view they had landed at
+Queenstown, he and his wife, a girl belonging to very respectable,
+decent people in the county Wicklow. "So next mornin', walkin' along the
+Quay, who should I see but me gintleman there, and another chap along
+with him, and both of them lookin' as wild as if they'd been caught. And
+says I to Sally, 'You bet, that's Felix from our place at home;' and
+right I was, and just slick in time to stop him goin' on board." Paddy
+had then left his wife with her family in Wicklow, where he had seen a
+promising farm; and he and Felix were now on their way to fetch their
+mother thither.
+
+"And it's in the quare consternation you'd ha' been," said Theresa
+Joyce, "if you'd landed up at Laraghmena, and found her quit out of it
+the way she was."
+
+"And that would ha' happint us," said Felix, "if it hadn't been for
+young Dan Ryan in there just now passin' the remark that we couldn't
+expec' Father Martin to be sendin' us notices all the way to the County
+Cork, and supposin' I'd very belike missed the right day for the stamer
+be raison of it. For if we hadn't got fightin' and tumblin' out of the
+house, you might aisy ha' gone along wid yourselves, and niver known we
+were in the place at all. 'Twas great luck entirely."
+
+Fortune, in truth, had seemingly taken Mrs. Morrough and her affairs
+into the highest favour. Even the luck-insurance of a trivial loss was
+not wanting to her, as in her hasty exit she had dropped her new teapot,
+which broke into many pieces on Mrs. Doyne's floor. So that, as has been
+said, she never beheld it in its beauty. But the very skies had cleared
+above her head, swept by a waft of wind that scattered the clouds faster
+and further than a drift of withered leaves, and the sinking sun
+broadened in splendour before the eyes that had lost sight of him
+through ten interminable days. The wet stones on the road glistened like
+jewels, and the shallowest pools between them held unfathomed deeps of
+blue, when the Morroughs set off for Laraghmena, where they intended to
+sleep the night, and bid their friends farewell. "And if it's themselves
+won't be in the fine astonishment when they set eyes upon you, woman
+dear!" said Theresa Joyce, "for if you'd been twenty year away
+thravellin' the world crooked and straight, you couldn't ha' come back a
+diff'rinter crathur from what you were, and we settin' out this woeful
+mornin'. Little notion you had what was comin' to you, and it all the
+while runnin' up your road, so to spake, like the sun racin' the shadows
+on a windy day. 'Deed now, I'd be goin' along wid you to hear what
+they'll say to it, but I'm ould you see, and ivery step I've thramped I
+have the feel of in ivery bone of me body; so I'll stop this night up at
+Brian's."
+
+"And bedad, ma'am, it's well off you are, if you've the feel of nothin'
+worse in them," said the querulous voice of old Peter Sheridan, whose
+acquaintances describe him as being "terrible gathered up with the
+rheumatism this great while," so great, in fact, that everybody except
+himself has by this time become accustomed to his condition.
+
+For the most part, however, they were rather pleased faces that watched
+the three strangers out of sight, the last long beams from the sunset
+making blink the eyes of nearly all Lisconnel. The west dispread its
+fiery golden bloom wider every moment as the swelling scarlet disc
+wheeled lower, burning with orbed flame a hollow path through the
+kindled haze. One laggard cloud, a great, soft nest of snow, drifted
+into the heart of it, and out of it again, flushed and glistering, and
+sailed on, a radiant shape, to meet and eclipse the misty white
+ghost-moon, faint and dim in the east. Far away over the level bog the
+light was stealing about in streams like water spilt on a floor.
+
+"Well now, I declare," said Mrs. Brian, "it does one's heart good to see
+a bit of luck like that happenin' to a body."
+
+"Ay, does it," said Judy Ryan, "the crathur to be gettin' back her sight
+just in the right minyit of time to see her son comin' home to her. Sure
+now one might take a plisure in plannin' such a thing, if one had the
+managin' of them."
+
+"Ah, dear, but I wish somebody 'ud be conthrivin' a bit of good luck for
+us then," said Mrs. Quigley.
+
+"Maybe there's plinty more where that's comin' from," suggested Brian
+Kilfoyle, hopefully.
+
+"It's apt to stay there, then," quoth Mrs. Quigley, "for any signs I can
+see."
+
+"Ay, ma'am, that's me own notion," said Peter Sheridan, bitterly; "I'm
+thinkin' we'll have to be goin' there, wheriver it is, and lookin' after
+it for ourselves, if it's good luck we're a-wantin'."
+
+"And I dunno what better we could be doin'," said Theresa Joyce, "than
+goin' where it is, when we get the chance. Ah, there's the last of the
+sun," she said, as a quivering red shaft shot up suddenly, and trembled
+away into nothing on the air. "Ay, for sure, he goes down a great way
+off out on the bog; the crathur 'ud ha' been plased to see it. 'Deed no,
+I dunno anythin' better we could be doin' than goin' after our good
+luck."
+
+So all through that gathering twilight Mrs. Morrough and her two sons
+were journeying away with their high fortune to Laraghmena. They were
+still on the road long after the clear moon had filled the air with
+shimmering silver, and sent their shadows stretching darkly far over the
+frosted grass. But Lisconnel had gone to seek, for the time being, its
+good luck in the land of dreams.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+This book contains inconsistent use of "'ill" contracted with the
+previous word.  See Page 29: "The lads 'ill be" and Page 87: "the
+Union'ill be shut."  These have been left as in the original.
+
+There are also some inconsistent spellings in the dialect that have been
+left alone. For instance, iligant and illigant.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Strangers at Lisconnel, by Barlow Jane
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