At that she called out to another man who was passing us by, and I went to walk on with him. He had a furuncle on one side of his chin; his garments were very old, both in fashion and in use; he was lean as a mountain cow.
I greeted him but he gave me glances that were surly, like a man would be grinding scissors or setting a saw—for you never met one of that kind that didn’t have the woe of the world upon him.
“How many miles is it now, sir?” I asked, very respectful then. He did not heed me. He put his hand to his ear signifying deafness. I shouted and I shouted, so you could have heard me in the four kingdoms, but I might just have been blowing in a sack for all the reason I got from him.
I went on alone and in the course of the days I fell in with many persons, stupid persons, great persons, jaunty ones. An ass passes me by, its cart burdened with a few dead sprays of larch and a log for the firing. An old man toils at the side urging the ass onwards. They give me no direction and I wonder whether I am at all like the ass, or the man, or the cart, or the log for the firing. I cannot say. There was the lad McGlosky, who had the fine hound that would even catch birds; the philosopher who had two minds; the widow with one leg; Slatterby Chough, the pugfoot man, and Grafton. I passed a little time with them all, and made poems about them that they did not like, but I was ever for walking on from them. None of them could give me a direction for the thing that was urging me except that it was “away on, away on.”
Walk I did, and it was full summer when I met Monk, the fat fellow as big as two men with but the clothes of a small one squeezing the joints of him together. Would you look at the hair of him—it was light as a stook of rye; or the face of him and the neck of him—the hue of a new brick. He had the mind of a grasshopper, the strength of a dray horse, the tenderness of a bush of reeds, and was light on his limbs as a deer.
“Look ye’re,” he said to me; he had a stiff sort of talk, and fat thumbs like a mason that he jiggled in the corners of his pockets; “look ye’re, my friend, my name is Monk.”
“I am Michael Fionnguisa,” said I.
“Well I never struck fist with a lad like you; your conversation is agreeable to me, you have a stride on you would beat the world for greatness.”
“I could beat you,” said I, “even if you wore the boots of Hercules that had wings on ’em.”
“It is what I like,” said he, and he made a great mess of my boasting before we were through. “Look ye’re, my friend, we needn’t brag our little eye-blink of the world; but take my general character and you’ll find I’m better than my ... inferiors. I accomplish my ridiculous destiny without any ridiculous effort. I’m the man to go a-travelling with.”