By beach and bog-land

I

The Widow M‘Gurk flung down a black sod into the midst of the blossom-like pink-and-white embers and ashes on her hearth with a shock that splashed up vivid sparks in all directions, causing a pair of long-legged, panic-stricken chickens to fly higher, far less nimbly, and seek refuge from the startling shower among the rafters overhead. Her action was symbolical, for as she performed it she said: “It’s gone; there’s the whole of it. And you might as well be holdin’ your tongue till you’ve got somethin’ raisonable to say.” As a matter of fact, her niece, Minnie Walsh, had not been making any observations; but Mrs M‘Gurk had some excuse for indiscriminate censoriousness just then, seeing that she referred to the loss of nothing less than what she called “the greatest chance ever she got in her life’s len’th.” Perhaps that rather long length had really been not more productive of great chances than is usual in the lives of people who dwell on the bog-lands at Lisconnel. Yet her neighbours were disposed to consider that she had enjoyed a somewhat full share of good luck. They all remembered, for instance, the handsome legacy of half a dozen half-crowns that had once come to her from the States, and some of them would say when discussing her affairs: “And she widout a crathur to be thinkin’ of only herself.” This latter circumstance could, of course, be otherwise stated as the fact that “she had not a soul belonging to her in the wide world to be doing e’er a hand’s turn for her”; and when she was first left a childless widow, many years ago, that view had predominated. It still prevailed among most of the older inhabitants, whose children were grown up, and capable of lending a helping hand, sometimes from across the western foam; but they of a younger generation, whose long families were as yet the “burden” which the Gaelic sorrowfully calls them, would speak of her loneliness in a tone implying: “It’s well to be her.” In this opinion the widow’s proudly independent spirit helped to confirm them, her habit being to pose as a prosperous person, resentful of any sympathy which appeared incongruous with that attitude, while she adopted an extension of the principle: “Tell thou never thy foe that thy foot acheth,” in this respect treating everyone impartially as an enemy. Here, however, was a quite exceptional occurrence, upon the cruel unluckiness of which the most stoical pride could scarcely be imagined to forbear exclaiming. It came about thus.

Early in the summer, Mrs M‘Gurk’s portly yellowish hen had hatched her a clutch of eggs with such singular success that not one of the whole baker’s dozen failed to produce its chick, and had brought them up so discreetly and warily that all, save the solitary victim of a bright-eyed hawk’s swooping pounce, had come securely to a more profitable fate. Mrs M‘Gurk, furthermore, had obtained remarkably good prices—as much, sometimes, as eighteenpence a couple—for them down beyond in the town, and the consequence was that, after paying her rent at Michaelmas, and buying several parcels of tea for distribution as well as for her own use, she found herself one day possessed of two shillings, which she had no immediate occasion to spend. Now it happened that she was at this time entertaining as a guest her niece’s daughter, Minnie Walsh, who had been visiting some relations away over beyond Moyallen, and found her great-aunt’s cabin a convenient halting-place on her journey back to her home near the town of Ballytrave. Her father’s cousin, Peter M‘Gonigal, had promised to pick her up in his cart, which would be passing within a mile or so of Lisconnel on its return from leaving a couple of calves over at Letter-french; and Peter’s own destination being within an easy walk of the long-car from Ardlesh to Ballytrave, Minnie’s route lay smooth and clear. All the while she stayed at Lisconnel she kept on counting the days until she could set off, less from impatience to rejoin her domestic circle than because of a wonderful festival which was in prospect at Ballytrave. It would even be grander, she had heard tell, than the ones last autumn, and everybody had said that the like of them nobody had ever beheld—play-acting, and dancing, and the beautiful music, with a roomful of fiddlers and pipers, and a couple of big harps that were like a fairy wind through the trees, and the songs that would make you wish you couldn’t tell what, and think you were come just near to getting it somehow. And the whole of them in Gaelic, too, the very same way, people said, that they did be in the old ancient times. She wouldn’t miss it for anything at all.

Minnie Walsh was generally a silent, quiet girl, but when she spoke of this Feish, she brightened up out of a dulness which made her enthusiasm the more striking by contrast. Its glow was caught by her hearers, and often gave a livelier turn to assemblies of the neighbours, whether on the swarded edges of the bog, basking in long, honey-coloured sunbeams, or gathered closer, on rough-hewn stools and benches, about a less distant hearth-fire. Mention of the jigs and rinca-fadhas would set the young folk dancing, and their elders’ memories were stirred into another sort of activity, producing fragments of half-forgotten ditties, and familiar phrases long disused. For Lisconnel had hardly any Irish speakers in those days except Pat Ryan’s very old mother, who so seldom said anything, that her language might indeed be a matter of conjecture. She pricked up her ears one evening upon hearing her son exchange certain guttural greetings with Joe Sheridan, and she suddenly declaimed in her corner a long Gaelic ballad, relating the adventures of a Princess, a Giant, and an enchanted steed, which seemed but gibberish to some of her audience, and to the rest would have seemed so, only that it being a widely spread folk-tale, they were able to guide themselves through it by the clues of a word or name recognised here and there. At the end of it, Widow M‘Gurk sighed profoundly with a regretful satisfaction, and said: “Sure now the sound of it does me heart good. It must be a matter of fifty year since ould Kit Maher would be singin’ the very same at me poor father’s house away in Asherclogher. But, bedad, if I got a sight of a one of them reels, Minnie says is to be in it, I’d consait I was a little girsheach again, I would so.”

“And why wouldn’t you come see them?” said her grand-niece. “Me mother was biddin’ me many a time to be bringing you along, and me cousin Peter’d take the two of us just as ready as one; and he could drop you here on his way back in a couple of days as handy as anythin’.”

“Them two shillin’s I have saved would just pay me car fare goin’ and comin’,” said her great-aunt, “supposin’ I was fine fool enough to think of such a thing.”

It was from this doubtful beginning that Mrs M‘Gurk’s resolve to attend the Ballytrave Feish sprang and rapidly matured. Everything helped it on. Minnie Walsh, desirous of company on her formidable day-long journey, coaxed and cajoled, the neighbours athirst for even vicarious variety and excitement, encouraged and urged her, and above all her own wishes took her by the hand. It would be one while, she said to herself, before she got such another chance; you might think it had all happened on purpose. Her pitaties finished lifting, and her turf well saved, just at the time when a cart was going and coming that way, and she so far beforehand with the world that, as she reasoned, the journey wouldn’t cost her a penny. So the expedition was speedily determined upon, and her plans approached the brink of accomplishment without a check.

The possibility of the whole project, however, was for the time being compressed into the shape of two current coins, those marvellous seeds from which most heterogeneous crops are raised at all seasons; and since so much hinged upon her possession of them, “Sure now Mrs M‘Gurk was the very foolish woman”—as neighbours repeatedly pointed out to her—“to go put her two shillings into a pocket with a hole in it.” Yet that was exactly what she did one unlucky afternoon. She had been in the act of transferring them from a little lustre jug on the dresser to an old patchwork bag, when sounds of barking and bleating made her apprehend that the Sheridans’ young collie was molesting her kid, tethered on a grassy strip beside the bog stream. Whereupon she had slipped the shillings into her pocket, and ran down to the rescue. And, alas, as she was recrossing the stepping-stones, she had put her hand into that pocket and discovered there only one shilling and a hole very amply large enough to account for the absence of the other. From the first it seemed a sadly hopeless case. The bit of ground on which the shilling must have been dropped was, indeed, of limited extent, not many yards square; but the rough surface, shagged with tangled tussocks, furzes, heather clumps, and marsh greenery, mocked at the quest for a thing so small, and she had moreover passed the black mouths of two or three bog-holes, which might have irretrievably swallowed it up. Mrs M‘Gurk almost despaired on the spot, though she groped wildly till she was too stiff for longer stooping. But when the news of her loss spread, there was no lack of volunteers to carry on the search. A party of them, including representatives from nearly all the half-score houses of the hamlet, were to be seen at any day-lit hour diligently employed. The children especially found it a fascinating new pastime, and, fired as much by a spirit of emulation as by several promises of a halfpenny, threw themselves into the pursuit with ardent zeal and supple joints. Yet the widow drew little or no comfort from the sight of their energy. She said they might all as well be looking for it to come tumbling down out of the stars, the way Crazy Mick was looking for his wife and childer that died on him. Her neighbours’ other attempts at consolation were equally unsuccessful, Mrs Doyne’s being perhaps the most complete failure. A person of invariably dark forebodings, she now suggested that if Mrs M‘Gurk had gone, she might have been very apt to lose her life. Them long cars were terrible dangerous things. Or else the playhouse at Ballytrave might be going on fire, and everybody in it burning to ashes—the Lord have mercy on them. She was reading of that same happening on the paper not so long ago. And it would be a deal worse than losing a shilling, or two shillings, for that matter. Mrs M‘Gurk replied that if some she could name lost all the sinse they ever had, it would make no great differ; and strode indignantly away from the group of bucket-filling women, while Judy Sheridan said apologetically: “The crathur’s annoyed. Sure her heart was set on gettin’ the jaunt.”

The mishap had necessarily brought the whole scheme to an end. For as she no longer possessed the price of her return fare, how would she ever get home again to her cabin on the knock-awn’s side, her field-fleck, her turf-stack, her few hens and her old kid—all her worldly wealth? “’Deed then, ma’am, ’twould be like slammin’ a door wid the handle on the wrong side of you,” Mrs Rafferty reluctantly agreed, when talking over the disaster with her. Mrs Rafferty was to have had the kid’s milk during Mrs M‘Gurk’s absence, in return for boiling the few hens their bit of food, and the arrangement had seemed to her so advantageous that she regretted its collapse on personal grounds. But regrets, interested or otherwise, were alike futile; and now on the day but one before she should have been starting, Mrs M‘Gurk, shaking off the last twining tendril of withered hope, had gloomily faced the worst.

Having thus summarily mended her fire and snubbed her grand-niece, the Widow M‘Gurk went out of doors again, in pursuit of a white chicken, which she had espied astray at a dangerous distance when she was fetching in her turf. It gave her a long and exasperating chase over the bog before it would be captured, and as she tramped back heavily with it under her shawl, she commented to herself that the only thing she wondered at was how it had contrived not to get lost on her too. The golden beams that slanted to her from a fiery scaffolding in the west dazzled her sight, and made her stumble over stocks and stones, but in her mind she beheld nothing except the eclipse of her bit of pleasure darkening with its shadow her whole horizon. Yet at this very moment Minnie Walsh, with sunshine and glee brightening her fair hair and blue eyes, was watching at the house-door for its unforeseeing mistress, whom she greeted with: “It’s found, Aunt Bridget; glory be to goodness, it’s found.”

“Och, don’t be romancin’,” Mrs M‘Gurk said, while the chicken screeched in her excited grasp. “Who was it?” she shouted jubilantly as she mounted the steep little footpath.

“Ould Mr Rafferty brought it just after you goin’ out,” Minnie explained, as they bustled in together; “he got it down below.” And, sure enough, there on the smoke-darkened deal table gleamed a silver shilling. Mrs M‘Gurk seized it eagerly, as if grasping a friend’s hand, and then—dashed it down with a rap on the table again, pressed under a wrathful thumb. “The ould liar,” she said bitterly, “the ould liar,” and closed a mouth whose grimness was mutely very eloquent. Minnie stared at her with a pink and white face of disappointed perplexity. “Is it lettin’ on to you he was that this is me own shillin’ he’s after findin’ yonder?” Mrs M‘Gurk said, “and it wid the new pattron of the Queen on it, in the little quare crown, and 1889 on it as plain as print, when me own one’s wore that thin an smooth, you’d say she hadn’t a hair on her head, let alone anythin’ else, and 1861 just dyin’ off it. It’s fools he was makin’ of you and me.... And what’s this, to goodness?” she continued, catching sight of another coin on the table, “a sixpenny bit it is—and where might that come from, if you plase?”

“Sure, Mrs Fahy it was come wid that a little while ago,” Minnie said with much diffidence; “she said she was just after pickin’ it up on the very same place where you lost the shillin’, and she had the notion it might ha’ been two sixpennies you dropped; and says I to her I well knew it was not. But says she to me it wasn’t hers anyway, and she’d lave it wid you on chance. So I couldn’t forbid her.”

“The schamin’ thief,” said Mrs M‘Gurk, “and yourself was the quare stronseach. Just let her wait aisy till I tell her what I think of herself and her impidence and her dirty sixpennies.” In the meanwhile she relieved her feelings by hurling away the white chicken from beneath her plaid shawl, and hunting it to its roosting-place among the rafters of the inner room, whither she followed it.

Minnie stood looking out at the front door. She was cast down by the repudiation of the shilling, which had once more shattered her hopes of a travelling companion, and she perceived that her great-aunt considered her in some degree to blame for an offence whose nature she did not clearly understand. This made her view with misgivings the approach of another visitor, who now came quickly up the footpath. It was no acquaintance of hers, a tall thin girl, with a baby on her arm, and so poor-looking, even for Lisconnel, that Minnie thought her errand would be some request. But when a slender brown hand opened to disclose several dark “coppers,” Minnie was not much surprised to hear: “I’m after findin’ these four pennies down below, so I thought I had a right to be bringin’ them up here, in case it was some of the money Mrs M‘Gurk is after losin’ out of her pocket.”

“It is not,” said Minnie, “by any manner of manes. She lost nothin’ only a shillin’. You might be takin’ them away, if you plase, and thank you kindly, for it’s annoyed me aunt is.” She tried to intercept the girl, who slipped past her and laid the money on the table. “Ah, now, don’t be lavin’ them there,” said Minnie in a whisper, “she’s inside in the room this minyit, ragin’. Or, at all events, tell her yourself, the way she won’t be blamin’ me for lettin’ you. For she’s torminted already wid people bringin’ her the wrong things. I’ll call her out to you.” The girl, however, said: “Ah! not at all,” and ran swiftly away.

While Minnie stood doubting whether or no to pursue her with the pennies, Mrs M‘Gurk’s voice came through the inner door: “What talk was that you had wid Joanna Crehan, and what brought her trapesin’ up here?”

“She’s after findin’—” Minnie began to reply deprecatingly, but a peremptory injunction cut her short.

“Sling it out to her then, and bid her not throuble herself to be comin’ next or nigh my place again,” Mrs M‘Gurk shouted, with an evident desire to be overheard.

Before Minnie could have taken any steps towards executing this delicate commission, a little gossoon bolted into the house, and the jingle of something in his hand was hardly needed to apprise her of his business. “It’s entirely too bad, and so it is,” she grumbled to herself, slipping out at the door. “I’ll just go and sit the other side of the hill for a while, till they’ve done pickin’ up pinnies and shillin’s down below. Plase goodness it ’ill soon be too dark now to see a stim. But bedad there must ha’ been a quare dale of money dropped on that one little small bit of ground. I wonder how it happened at all.”

Minnie, whose imaginative powers were limited, could descry no probable explanation; but she pondered over it among the furze bushes, until the September dusk fell so greyly over their fairy golden lamps of blossoms that she thought she might safely venture back. When she went indoors she saw her great-aunt standing by the table, on which several additional coins seemed to have been deposited—more pennies, and, Minnie thought, another shilling; but the fire-light flickered on them uncertainly, and the expression of her great-aunt’s countenance was a warning notice to questioners. Mrs M‘Gurk surveyed them in silence for a few moments longer, and then she swept them together with the side of her hand, more contemptuously than if they had been potato skins. “Just wait, me tight lads,” she said, “and I’ll larn yous to be litterin’ up me house wid your ould thrash.”

II

Joanna Crehan, the girl who had left the four pennies, returned with the baby, her youngest brother, to their dwelling, which is a bit down the road on the right hand, coming into Lisconnel from Duffclane, and was the Quigleys’ before they emigrated. It stands on a flat slab of bare stone, which floors it evenly enough, and a low bank quilted with heather gives it a little shelter at the back, but it fronts the widest sweep of the bog-land just over the way. The rim of fine-textured sward is such a frequent playing and lounging place for its tenants, that their feet wear many equally bare brown patches, which grow rapidly in size during the drier summer months, and shrink slowly all the rest of the year. They were at their largest this evening, and the little Crehans were using one of them for a game of marbles, while Mrs Crehan and her second eldest daughter sat knitting on a big boulder, and her elder son lay in its long shadow neither asleep nor awake. Joanna handed her the baby, and took from her the knitting-needles with their dangling grey woollen leg, an exchange in which she acquiesced half-contentedly, being divided between her wish to continue “Mike the crathur’s” sock and to welcome “Patsy the crathur’s” greeting grin. “Where was you off to wid him?” she said to Joanna. “I never seen sight of you goin’.”

“I went to bring Mrs M‘Gurk me fourpence towards her shillin’,” said Joanna. “How many stitches had I a right to keep on me back needle?”

“Your four pinnies to Mrs M‘Gurk?” said her mother, “and what in the name of fortune bewitched you to go do such a thing as that?”

“She’s distracted losin’ it,” said Joanna, “and I’d liefer than forty fourpinnies she had it back.”

“The divil’s cure to the both of yous then,” said Mrs Crehan, “and is that all the nature you have in you? To be slinkin’ out of the house wid your pinnies to her that’s nothin’ to us good or bad, and your poor brother settin’ off to-morra to the strange place, wid ne’er a halfpenny to put in his pocket, and yourself the only one of us that has a brass bawbee to our names, or the dear knows it’s not begrudin’ him we’d be.”

“And I thought you and Mike was always so wonderful great,” put in Nannie Crehan, taking up the recital of her sister’s delinquencies, “lettin’ on you were kilt if anybody said a word agin him. And to take and give away the fourpence from him, to ould Widdy M‘Gurk, that’s as apt as not to throw them in your face. And I thought—”

“Did you ever by chance think that you hadn’t a great dale of wit?” said Joanna; “not that you need throuble yourself to be tellin’ anybody.”

Mike got up and sauntered off towards a group of people at a little distance, while silence fell on his mother and sisters, who this evening lacked spirits for vivacious altercation. Joanna sat gazing blankly across the vast floor of the bog, as it lifted up against the fading fires of the west; every minute its dark rim extinguished some bright embers. She felt intensely miserable. It was the hardest grip of the unhappiness that had been pressing on her heart almost ever since the moment a few days ago when she had seen Mike set his foot on something shining silverly from under a dandelion leaf on the bog there below the knock-awn, where they all were looking for Mrs M‘Gurk’s lost shilling.

In obedience to his warning frown she had suppressed an ecstatic shriek, supposing that he had some plan of his own about the method of announcing his find, and she had presently seen him slip it secretly into his pocket. Never would she have imagined that he did not intend to restore it; but as time slipped by, this dreadful suspicion was forced upon her. For Mike made no sign, and when she asked him about it in private, at first answered evasively, but finally told her to “hould her fool’s gab, and quit meddlin’.” The mere possibility filled her with wrath and dismay. She had always thought so much of Mike, and she had never heard tell of anybody belonging to them behaving in such a manner. What made it worse was that Mike would be travelling off next day by himself all the way to the county Roscommon, where his uncle had got him farm work. He had never left home before, and only the strong propulsion of adverse circumstances, including a father bedridden half the year, would now have thrust him out. For Mike, long the only grown son in a flock of girls, was an important and cherished possession among the Crehans, not to be parted with lightly. Everybody agreed that none of them made such a fool of him as his eldest sister Joanna, and she had indeed taken his going sadly to heart. She had fretted much over the poverty which would oblige him to start almost penniless, as after providing him with the indispensable footgear, not a spare farthing remained in the establishment except a dwindled remnant of the shilling which Mary had earned last Easter by doing jobs for Mrs O’Neill down beyond Duffclane.

But though this had been bad enough, infinitely worse was it to think of his setting forth into the wide world laden with that guilty coin. It was apt to bring ill-luck on him, she felt. And anyhow it was “no thing to go do,” a phrase wherein she acknowledged the supremacy of that law which a more philosophical mind than hers had marvelled at under the starry heavens. Various minor ingredients helped to embitter her distress. Wounded pride and affection, disappointment, and a sense that she had been made in some degree an accomplice. Partly this last consideration, and partly a vague hope that Mike might thus be shamed into right-doing, had spurred her to the desperate step of bringing Mrs M‘Gurk her fourpence. Now that the deed was done, however, she found, instead of relief, fears lest it should only confirm Mike in his felonious obduracy, or possibly draw the widow’s suspicions upon him. So she sat out a disconsolate twilight, which lingered and loitered, giving her time to finish Mike’s sock before she went indoors.

Mike himself had strolled on, and joined the little knot of men who were gathered at the front of Peter Ryan’s house. But he scarcely changed into pleasanter company, for, “Musha, good gracious,” he said to himself, “is there nothin’ in creation for people to be talkin’ about only that one’s ould shillin’?”

“Well now, that was comical enough,” Ody Rafferty was saying to Kit Ryan. “I didn’t see herself at all, and I bringin’ my shillin’; there was only the niece in it, but of course she would be tellin’ the widdy. And then you to come landin’ in a while after wid a different one, and the same lie. You’d a right to ha’ tould me what you was intindin’, the way we might ha’ conthrived it better. But the foolishness of some folks would surprise the bastes of the field. Shankin’ up to her they are wid pinnies and sixpinnies, and tellin’ her they got them all on the one bit of ground. Sure an ould blind hin ’ud have more wit than to believe the likes of that. Howane’er, it’s right enough, so long as she’s contint to be lettin’ on herself, and not callin’ us all liars and thieves of the world.”

“She kep’ the shillin’ I brought her ready enough, bedad did she,” Kit said with a rueful complacency. “‘Is that me shillin’ you’re after findin’?’ says she the minyit she seen it, with the look of an ould magpie on her. ‘To be sure it is, ma’am,’ says I. ‘What else would it be at all, unless it was another one?’ says I. ‘Yourself’s the very cliver man entirely,’ says she to me, and wid that she grabs it up. ‘I’ll take and lose it agin,’ says she, ‘the next time I want to be makin’ me fortin’.’ I wouldn’t put it past her, mind you, to be meanin’ somethin’ quare. But as for findin’ her own shillin’ among them coarse-growin’ tussocks, a body might be breakin’ his back there till the Day of Judgment for any chance of it.”

“Take care somebody isn’t after gettin’ it, all the while, and keepin’ it quiet,” said Ody.

“Och, I wouldn’t suppose there was any person in Lisconnel would be doin’ such a dirty trick on the poor ould woman,” said Peter Ryan.

“She’s as rich as a Jew anyway, wid half the counthryside runnin’ off to her wid their savin’s,” said Mike. “It’s well to be her, bedad.” He soon sauntered on, but did not attach himself to any other party, being irked by the prevalent topic of conversation.

The next morning rose still and softly tinted, with a deep band of mist all round the far away horizon. Mrs M‘Gurk got up unusually early for Sunday, and set off alone to Duffclane in time for the ten o’clock Mass, so that she got back to Lisconnel a full hour before most of her neighbours. They found her seated on a convenient flat-topped boulder by the side of the road, just at the highest point of the slight rise over which it slips down to run between the few dwellings of Lisconnel. Here the returning congregations always halt for a final gossip, before they break up, dispersing themselves into the shadowy door-ways of cabins to the right and left. She descried from afar their approach along the ribbon of road, white in the afternoon sun, and singled out among the shawls and hoods and broad-brimmed black hats the heads of nearly all the neighbours whom she especially wished to interview. The Crehans, indeed, were absent, owing to Mike’s imminent departure; however, she hoped to fall in with him and Joanna by-and-by. When everybody had come up, and all were standing or sitting about, the widow rose, and began what was evidently a set speech in substance, if not in form. Her great-niece, Minnie Walsh, observed her with some trepidation, a feeling which was more or less shared by others in her audience.

“Ody Rafferty,” she said, selecting this small old man for the object of her address, “I was thinkin’ just now of the way me poor grandfather would have me annoyed somewhiles, when I was a little girsheach, like Biddy Ryan there wid her mouth full of the red blackberries. For if ever I had e’er a pinny of an odd time, he would be biddin’ me run and plant it somewheres in the bit of garden, to see would it grow into a money-plant for me. Ragin’ I used to be, God forgive me, thinkin’ he was only makin’ a fool of me. But sure, he was right enough, poor man, and it’s meself was the fool; for here I am after droppin’ me shillin’ on the ground there scarce a week past, and here’s the half of yous coming up to me yesterday wid shillin’s, and pinnies, and all manner, that ye got growin’ in it. Bedad ’twas terrible quick goin’ to seed—for what other way could they be there? Unless it’s makin’ a fool of me ye were, and that I know right well ye wouldn’t have the impidence to be doin’. But ’deed now it’s not keepin’ the whole of the crop I’d be at all, and it not even raised on me own bit of land. So I brought your share of it along; Ody, and the other people’s too”—she drew out a little grey plaid rag of shawl, and undid a knotted corner—“This is your shillin’, Ody,” she said. “And here’s Kit Ryan’s and Mrs Fahy’s sixpinny.” She moved from one to the other of her would-be benefactors, restoring their contributions with a firmness which obviously was not to be gainsaid. Perhaps no dramatic scene at the Ballytrave festival could well have afforded her a more enjoyable moment. Ody Rafferty alone ventured upon an audible remonstrance, “Begorrah now,” he said, “if it’s not a fool you are altogether, yourself’s the proudest-minded, stubborn, steadfast ould divil of a headstrong ould woman from this to Cork, and maybe that comes to much the same thing, supposin’ you had the wit to know it.” But even he did not utter this criticism until Mrs M‘Gurk was stalking away.

She wished to find Mike Crehan, whom she conjectured to be still at home, but before she reached the Crehans’ house, she met him coming along the road with his red cotton travelling-bag. A troop of his younger sisters were withdrawing against their will, having been dissuaded by forcible arguments from accompanying him further. “It’s follyin’ me to the end of the town they’d love to be,” he had said to himself. “Keenin’ like a pack of ould banshees, and makin’ a show of me before the lads.” He would have much preferred to avoid an interview with the widow, but that seemed impossible, and he halted reluctant.

“So you’re steppin’ along, Mike,” she said. “It’s well to be the likes of you, that has the soopleness yet in your limbs. Sure now, you might tramp the whole of Ireland before you’ll come on an ould man’s mile, that wants the end in the middle. And look-a, Mike, here’s the pinnies your sister Joanna was lavin’ up at my house last night by some manner of misapperhinsion: belike you’d ha’ room for them in your pocket, and this shillin’ along wid them. They’re the handiest sort of luggage to be carryin’ after all, if they’re the hardest to get a hould on.”

A mixture of motives had incited Mrs M‘Gurk to bestow this gift. There was the need to be more than even with the Crehans on the score of Joanna’s attempted benefaction, and the desire to get rid of a coin the possession of which did but remind her of her disappointment, while to these was added an impulse of genuine benevolence towards the tall, ragged lad—in her own mind she called him “a slip of a young bosthoon”—whom she saw faring off alone into the wide, strange world, poorly enough provided for, she presumed, though she did not surmise the depths of his people’s penury. As she hurried away from him her feelings were mingled still, half-satisfied, half-regretful, and dominated by a sense that she had here definitely put off a flattering hope.

Mike’s feeling, on the contrary, was quite simple, and of such unfamiliar unpleasantness that he hailed with relief the sight of his sister Joanna waiting for him at the furze gap. He would otherwise have reprobated her for protracting the hateful farewell scenes, but, as it was, he hastily thrust two shillings into her hand, saying, “Och, Hanny, run after her the quickest you can—she’s just down the road—and be givin’ them back to her.”

Joanna looked at the shillings with eyes of puzzled wonder. “Sure it wasn’t the both of them she lost,” said she. “Where at all did you get the other from?”

“Herself,” said Mike. “Run like the mischief now when I bid you.”

“I will that, Mike jewel,” she said, and started forthwith. Delight at his act of restitution, of which she had utterly despaired, although intending to make one last appeal, superseded for the moment every other consideration; but as she caught up Mrs M‘Gurk, climbing the steep footpath, she became suddenly aware that she had a confession to make, and that it might put Mike’s good name at the mercy of a third person.

“Mrs M‘Gurk, woman dear,” she said, rushing at her perilous explanation. “Here’s your shillin’ Mike bid me be bringin’ back to you, and thank you kindly all the same, for he couldn’t be robbin’ you of it, and he’s got plinty of money along wid him. And the other’s the one you dropped on the bog, ma’am; he and I found it a day or two back, and we just kep’ it a while be way of a joke. And I hope you won’t think bad of it, ma’am. Mike was biddin’ me this minyit to not forgit to bring it to you.”

“Saints above, it is me own one sure enough this time,” said Mrs M‘Gurk. “Well, now, that was the quare luck and the quare joke. And truth to tell you, Joanna Crehan, I’m thinkin’ yourself had neither act nor part in it, whativer you may say.” Joanna’s face corroborated this conjecture so disconcertedly that Mrs M‘Gurk hastened to add: “But after all there’s no harm in a joke. Like enough I might take the notion in me head to have a bit of a one meself. Suppose I was to be lettin’ on to the rest of them I had the shillin’ lyin’ in the corner of me pocket all the while, and niver seen it, nobody could tell but that was the way it happint, and ’twouldn’t be too bad a joke at all.”

“’Twould be the greatest joke ever was, and yourself’s the rael dacint woman for that same,” Joanna declared with an enthusiasm which said little for her sense either of morals or of humour.

Then they went their several ways. As the widow opened her door, all her eager plans for the morrow were in brisk motion again, like clockwork freed from some hampering hitch. Joanna, running homeward, felt conscious of nothing except the happiness of knowing Mike to be safely quit of the crime with which she had feared that he would burden himself irretrievably. She found her mother and sisters looking out from a knoll whence the last glimpse was to be had of the dwindling road-ribbon along which Mike would presently pass from sight. Mrs Crehan was lamenting over the poor circumstances of her departing son. “The crathur,” she said, “trampin’ away wid himself into the width of the world, and ne’er a pinny to his name, any more than if he was a baste drivin’ to a fair. Not a shillin’ in his pocket has he.”

“He has not,” Joanna said, and added indiscreetly, “Glory be to God.”