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over Murtagh at this sight. If it had trundled itself towards him across the water's face, the portent would have seemed scarcely more startling and astounding. Perhaps, indeed, he had actually learned enough from his school-books to know that such a thing could be explained scientifically; but this did not alter its bewildering novelty in his own personal experience, or diminish his dismay. "The sun to be risin' itself up wrongways out of the say in place of goin' down. Saw you ever the like of that?" he protested to his lonely self. "Och, but it's the unnathural place altogether. Stoppin' in it is what I won't be for man or mortal. Sure if Herself knew the quareness of it, she wouldn't ax me, sorra bit of her would. And the rest of them may say what they plase. The fine fool I was to be mindin' them, troth was I."

He turned his back abruptly on the misplaced sun, which began to pursue him with quivering ruddy shafts, and before he had traversed the short lane he had firmly made up his mind that he would start for Barnadrum without delay. The promptness of his resolve much favored the chances of his acting on it, as the lapse of a few days would probably have wrought a melancholy acquiescence in his lot, whence he might have lacked energy to emerge. His first steps would now cost him but little trouble, the end of them was what bothered him, and that it well might do so could be easily understood by any one acquainted with the circumstances in which he had left home.

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like the clapper of a mill. All through the spring and early summer her theme had constantly been what a pity it was to see a fine young man like Murt wasting his time in such a poor, backward place as Barnadrum, where the most he could do was scarce worth his victuals; and thence she had gradually proceeded to how far better would be his chances if he were working on her cousins' farm in the county Louth, where they wanted another hand, since the last brother went to the States, and where they would a deal liefer employ somebody belonging to respectable people than a stranger, who might turn out a rogue on them for aught they could tell. In this view Lizzie was supported, half-heartedly, by her husband, whom she appraised as "a big, soft gǝb of good nature," and volubly by all her own kin, who were numerous among the neighbors. But the little old woman who sat in the chimney-corner never added a word to the chorus of exhortation, and Lizzie was not slow to perceive that as long as his mother kept silence, Murtagh would be urged in vain. Lizzie, indeed, seldom was slow about perceiving things into which it behooved her to pry, and she had sufficient reasons, mere fact being by no means indispensable, when she soon adopted a habit of expatiating much to her mother-in-law on the wonderful fancy that Murt had taken for Andy Loughlin's youngest daughter, Biddy. Old Mrs. Gilligan had occasionally expressed a wish that Murt might find a good wife before she herself got her death with the rheumatism and asthma, which made her health precarious. But a vague and invisible good wife was one thing, and that redheaded girl of ould Andy Loughlin's quite another. Who were the Loughlins, bedad? cock them up-and she never had any liking for that Biddy at all. So Murtagh presently learned.

with grief, that his mother had come round to everybody else's opinion about the advisability of his departure.

And the worst of it was that he knew how right they were, in a way. There really was not employment for two men on the shred of a holding, now mostly mountainy land, fit only for sheep, since Lawson the grazier had somehow come by their two best fields on their father's death. Christy could easily get on without him, and he would be far more use away earning and saving up money to buy a bit of stock, than stopping in it, and eating the worth of every hand's turn he did. Besides that he might be able to send home many an odd trifle that Herself was at a loss for in the winter. He had said something of this to Lizzie, when he was beginning to face the dreadful enterprise, whereupon she had drawn such a picture of the comfort in which his mother would abide during his absence, and the years which he would thus add to her life, that it had gone far towards evicting him. Moreover, Lizzie in a jocular, good-humored way threw out hints about the charms of Biddy Loughlin, which no doubt made it hard for him to think of leaving: and these again gave him, as the jester intended, a strong shove in the same direction. So he had at length set forth desperately from an excited village, for his long hesitation had been watched with interest by the neighbors. Some of them predicted his speedy return, notwithstanding that the price of three sheep at Ballynaughton fair had been laid out upon his travelling expenses. The consideration of that pecuniary sacrifice weighed less heavily with him than the sense that he was fulfilling those prophecies; the foreknowledge of how folk would "rise the laugh on him," while Lizzie would account with intolerable facetiousness for his untimely reappearance. Undoubtedly

much wrath and ridicule awaited him at Barnadrum.

Mur

Though all this did not now avail to dissolve the purpose which had crystallized so swiftly as he stood by the red dening sea, it did modify his proceedings, for it disposed him to travel slowly. Speed was, it is true, put out of his power by the fact that his sense of honor impelled him to make his hosts, the MacFarlanes, the utmost amends he could, lest they should have been caused any expense or inconvenience by his change of plans. tagh's desire ever was to be what his Gaelic-speaking neighbors called flahool in all his dealings, and he handed over his one-pound note to old Peter MacFarlane with an air which conveyed the impression that such things grew like leaves on the trees at Barnadrum, and that he only regretted not having happened to bring more of them along with him. But as in truth it represented considerably more than half his cash in hand, the transaction strictly limited his choice of the means by which he would recross Ireland, and quite excluded railways. Still there were, of course, possibilities of loitering on foot. Then, as at the first sizable town into which he tramped he provided himself with a pound of the dearest tea for his mother, the number of his shillings was reduced very seriously, considering the ways and days that lay before him. This seemed to prescribe haste. and he did make the first stages of his journey in immensely long forced marches, though less from dread of failing supplies than from a wish to get as quickly as might be out of that doleful region, with its strange-spoken people, and deplorable lack of boglands, or anything you could give the name of a hill.

II.

By the time that Murtagh came once more among reassuring turf-stacks his

brown, Spanish-looking visage had grown pinched and peaked, from, in a measure, much exercise and scanty fare, but chiefly from the workings of an anxious mind. Often it kept him waking distressfully as he passed the night in the shelter of some dyke or rick, where he would have been well enough content, had not concern about the future driven away his dreams. For while the smell of the turf-smoke on the air, and the gradually more home-like aspect of the country-side, seemed to whet the edge of his longing for Barnadrum, they also made him forecast more vividly the details of his reception there. He saw himself walking up the steep boreen, which runs between high furzy banks into a little settlement of cabins called the Town. He heard somebody shout: "Here's Murt Gilligan comin' along," and knew that every half-door in view would forthwith frame an amazed beholder of his approach, and that he would have to answer as best he might the awkward questions, and meet with what spirit he could muster the more or less friendly sallies of the neighbors.

That would be disagreeable enough, but graver far were the troubles he foreboded at home, where amazement and amusement would anon give place to wrath, not unreasonable, considering "the sum of money he was after as good as throwing behind the fire on them"-thus Lizzie would word it, and Christy would back her up with inarticulate sounds of contempt. About his mother's reception of him he was less clear. Glad to see him he very well knew that she would be; yet he had reason to apprehend an underlying regret in her gladness. Keen was his recollection of how on his last day at home, when she had wrung his heart by wistful, belated hints that he might yet change his mind, he had tried to cheer themselves up with ex

travagant views of the splendid things which would be coming for her by parcel post to Clonbeg office while he was away, and the others which he would return bearing one of these days. It was impossible for him to say how much she might be counting upon those promises, the fulfilment of which had now dwindled into a packet of tea. And even this was doomed to disaster by his foolish precipitancy in burdening himself with it at such an early stage of his journey.

One morning as he was coming near a small village, where he intended to get his breakfast, he passed an old country woman in a large black cloak with a wide-frilled white cap under the hood, and two or three brilliant little fringed shawls above it. A moment afterwards she laid a hand on his arm. "You're sowin' your tay, good lad," she said, and, sure enough, all along the path he had come by lay a thin, black line of his precious parched leaves. A rent in the blue paper bag had been made by a sharp stone on which he had unwarily laid down his bundle over night, in the shed a mile away; and an unlucky hole in the red cotton covering had let the tea trickle through so steadily that only a few good-for-nothing grains were left. His home-coming was bereft of its one poor triumph.

All these vexations disposed Murtagh to dawdle on his road as long as he could supply his wants, which were few and compressible. He was following the hay-harvest westward to districts whither it came later and later. Every now and then he stopped to do a day's mowing or rick-building, whereby he earned what paid his way on a further tramp. By the time he was almost on the borders of his own country, however, where he began to recognize objects familiar not only in kind but as individuals, meadows had grown rare, and the demand for labor

Nevertheless

ers proportionately small. as he plodded, lag-foot, up and down hill, with a sound of jibes and reproaches yet unuttered tingling in his ears, he formed a plan the carrying out of which hinged upon the possibility of his finding field-work. He would take up his quarters, he thought, in one of the old ruined shanties away at the back of Knocknagee, with a good long step between him and home, still not so far off but that he might with a little contriving get a glimpse occasionally, unbeknownst, to satisfy him "what way Herself was"; for that particular anxiety now predominated over all the rest. The shillings remaining to him would procure him potatoes for some weeks, he calculated, while, as the season advanced, he might make short excursions out into the country, and pick up jobs at the reaping and binding. In this manner he would be able to maintain himself apart, yet not completely severed from his family, until the weather waxed "entirely too sevare," when he might openly return, with possibly a bit of money in his pocket, and certainly, after an absence which could be de scribed as "going on for six months," in a position to put a much better face on his conduct than if he had just come ignominiously bundling back before they had well got rid of him.

Up among the grassy breadths and creases of the long hill-range there was solitude as profound as it can have been ere the days of Partholanus. It was not disturbed even by sheep, since the grazier, whose for the time being were the green herbs on a thousand acres, had removed his flocks, pending a dispute with his landlord, and the pastures lay derelict. Signs, however, clearly showed that a different state of things had existed there not so very long ago. The ruined cabin wherein Murtagh established himself was one of several that still possessed skeleton

But

rafters, though their thatch had all been snatched away by the winds; and the sites of others were marked out by walls more or less weathered down, sunken deep in weeds. Years had not yet washed off or lichened over the black traces of household fires. all around, the furrows where potatoes and oats had grown in streaks of rich peaty soil were covered with green sward. Their wave-like swell suggested a tide that had rolled in to submerge the inmates of this deserted hamlet; a kindlier fate, perhaps, than what had really befallen them, as they had in fact been "put out of it" to make room for sheep.

Thrust forth shelterless as wild birds tribe unnumbered,

That no men heed, Since their master willed the fields their hearthstones cumbered

His flock should feed.

But Murtagh, sitting in a corner. with no other company than a precarious furze-fed flame, did not feel "very lonesome whatever," because he knew himself to be within about an hour's quick trot of Lorcan's Lep, a point on the road across the moor-between Barnadrum and Loughmeena, whither folk went to Mass. Lorcan's Lep is a sharp spur of crag jutting out from a high steep bank, and overhanging the road. A tangle of thorns, briars and bracken cover it with a shaggy thicket in which a man might lurk unseen to look down on the passers-by. Amongst these every Sunday morning came the Helys' car, which for many a year had been wont to pick up old Mrs. Gilligan at Finny's Cross, whenever she could walk so far. And next day would be Sunday. Consequently Murtagh was looking forward to setting eyes on his mother before another sun went down-rightly into the sea. That sight would be vastly consoling and encouraging, and would set his heart at rest for a week to come.

Good care he took to be on the spot betimes, and the car did not fail to come by, but it did fail to bring what he desired. For in his mother's seat sat merely his sister-in-law, Lizzie Ahern-cock her up-"looking as if she thought there wasn't her match in three parishes, and she with as ugly an appearance on her as you'd aisy find anywheres, if she did but know it."

Though he had warned himself beforehand that there was only a chance of his mother, and though, had he not hoped for something better, he would have rejoiced at a sight of Lizzie's familiar face, his bitter disappointment at first blinded him to all mitigating circumstances. When, after a while, he began to make the best of it, he admitted that Herself was noways very likely to come out on such a dull, soft sort of day, and that if nobody from home had been on the car he might have thought bad of it, but he well knew Lizzie wouldn't leave his mother if anything much ailed her -most likely she just had a touch of her old enemy the bone-sickness. Moreover as Corpus Christi Day very luckily fell in the middle of that week, he would not have long to wait for another opportunity of seeing the car go by, it might be with the passenger he wanted.

On the holiday morning, therefore, he came punctually to Lorcan's Lep. It was grand weather, as fine as could be, save for a few brief dashes of rain from the quick-sailing white clouds; and Murtagh's hopes had risen high. But they were toppled over by a disappointment much more serious than Sunday's had been. It was aggravated, too, very cruelly by a mocking delusion. As the car trotted into view, Murtagh caught sight of the longed-for black cloak, and said to himself with a sigh of joyful relief: ""Tis Herself, glory be to God"; only to see next moment that the hood, in

LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXIV. 1796

stead of covering the frilled white cap on his mother's head, was drawn over the tall peak of Lizzie's fashionable bonnet, "with a hijjis big clump of pink roses stuck on the top of it."

Now this capacious heavy cloth cloak was old Mrs. Gilligan's most cherished possession. She had inherited it from her mother, after several generations' wear, and it would descend in due course to her own married daughter. Meanwhile she would as soon have thought of lending anybody the hair off her head; to do so would seem a sort of breach of trust. As Murtagh was quite aware of her feelings about the heirloom, the sight of Lizzie enveloped in its folds filled him with a dismay which coldly extinguished kindling wrath. Never, he reasoned, while she had health and strength to hinder it, would his mother have allowed Lizzie -one of the Aherns-to go trapesing off to Mass in the O'Carrolls' good hooded cloak, that he knew as well as he knew his own name. And yet if her mother-in-law had been taken very bad, Lizzie wouldn't start off and leave the crathur, he would say that for her. Hence he drew the conclusion that something still worse than any sickness must have happened, setting Lizzie free to go whither she pleased, arrayed in any garment she could lay her hands on. At that inference a billow of despair reared itself up ready to devastate his world, and he could oppose its onset only by the alternative conjecture that Lizzie and Christy, having suddenly become most base, had taken advantage of his absence to put upon his mother. In this case it might well have happened that both cloak and seat on the car had been grabbed against her will, and that she was now fretting and grieving at home, without a soul to take her part. The picture thus conjured up enjoined some prompt action, but his first panic-stricken pause had let the

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