"I am not given to thinking," said he, "that the Lord would put a country the like of Ireland in a wee corner of the world, and he wanting the nook of it for thistles and the poor savages that devour them. Well, Neal Carlin came to a place where the rivers do be rushing——" he paused invitingly, "and he saw a little fairy creature with fine tresses of hair sitting under a rowan tree."
"A rowan?" exclaimed the Highland man.
Peter nodded.
"A Scottish tree!" declared the other.
"O shut your——" began the little coughing man, but again his conversation was broken, and by the time he had recovered from his spasms the company was mute.
"If," said Peter Mullane, "you'd wish to observe the rowan in its pride and beauty just clap your eye upon it in the Galtee Mountains. "How would it thrive," I ask you, "in a place which was stiff with granite and sloppy with haggis? And what would ye do, my clever man, what would ye do, if ye met a sweet fairy woman——?"
"I'd kiss the Judy," said the Highland man spitting a great splash.
Peter Mullane gazed at him for a minute or two as if he did not love him much.
"Neal Carlin was attracted by her, she was a sweet creature. 'Warm!' says she to him with a friendly tone. 'Begod, ma'am, it is a hot day,' he said, and thinks he, she is a likely person to give me my aspiration. And sure enough when he sat down beside her she asked him, 'What is your aspiration, Neal Carlin?' and he said, 'Saving your grace, ma'am, it is but to enjoy the world and to be easy in it.' 'That is a good aspiration,' she said, and she gave him some secret advice. He went home to his farm, Neal Carlin did, and he followed the advice, and in a month or two he had grown very wealthy, and things were easy with him. But still he was not satisfied, he had a greedy mind, and his farm looked a drifty little place that was holding him down from big things. So he was not satisfied though things were easy with him, and one night before he went sleeping he made up his mind, 'It's too small it is. I'll go away from it now and a farm twice as big I will have, three times as big, yes, I will have it ten times as big.' He went sleeping on the wildness of his avarice, and when he rolled off the settle in the morning and stood up to stretch his limbs he hit his head a wallop against the rafter. He cursed it and had a kind of thought that the place had got smaller. As he went from the door he struck his brow against the lintel hard enough to beat down the house. What is come to me, he roared in his pains; and looking into his field there were his five cows and his bullock no bigger than sheep—will ye believe that, then—and his score of ewes no bigger than rabbits, mind it now, and it was not all, for the very jackdaws were no bigger than chafers and the neat little wood was no more account than a grove of raspberry bushes. Away he goes to the surgeon's to have drops put in his eyes for he feared the blindness was coming on him, but on his return there was his bullock no bigger than an old boot, and his cabin had wasted to the size of a bird-cage."
Peter leaned forward, for the boys were quiet, and consumed a deal of porter. And the Highland man asked him, "Well, what happened!"