Tom Toole was frightened at the quiet and the emptiness and he made to go away, but he turned in the doorway and stretching out his arms to the empty room he whispered “The greed! the avarice! May hell pour all its buckets on your bad little heart! May....” But just then he caught sight of the cup of porter that Martin O’Moore had forgotten to drink, so he went back to drink his enough and then went out into the great roaring world where he walked from here to there until one day he came right back to his old Asylum. He had been away for twenty years, he was an old man, very old indeed. And there was the man from Kilsheelan digging potatoes just inside the gates of the sunny garden.
“’Tis warm!” said the traveller staring at him through the railings, but the man from Kilsheelan only said “Come in, Tom Toole, is it staying or going ye are?”
THE CHERRY TREE
THE CHERRY TREE
There was uproar somewhere among the backyards of Australia Street. It was so alarming that people at their midday meal sat still and stared at one another. A fortnight before murder had been done in the street, in broad daylight with a chopper; people were nervous. An upper window was thrown open and a startled and startling head exposed.
“It’s that young devil, Johnny Flynn, again! Killing rats!” shouted Mrs. Knatchbole, shaking her fist towards the Flynns’ backyard. Mrs. Knatchbole was ugly; she had a goitred neck and a sharp skinny nose with an orb shining at its end, constant as grief.
“You wait, my boy, till your mother comes home, you just wait!” invited this apparition, but Johnny was gazing sickly at the body of a big rat slaughtered by the dogs of his friend George. The uproar was caused by the quarrelling of the dogs, possibly for honours, but more probably, as is the custom of victors, for loot.
“Bob down!” warned George, but Johnny bobbed up to catch the full anger of those baleful Knatchbole eyes. The urchin put his fingers promptly to his nose.