"What directions is it?"
"The many drops is a man to drink!"
"No, but a good sup of it will do the little job."
"A good sup of it Tom Toole, a good sup of it, ay?" says he, unsqueezing the cork. "The elixir of youth, a good sup of it, says you, a good sup of it, a great good good sup of it!"
And sticking it into his mouth he drained the wee bottle of its every red drop. He stood there looking like a man in a fit, holding the empty bottle in his hand until Tom Toole took it from him with reproaches in his poor old eyes. But in a moment it was his very eyes he thought were deceiving him; not an inch of his skin but had the dew of fear on it, for the little old man began to change his appearance quick like the sand running through a glass or as fast as the country changes down under a flying swan.
"Mother o' God!" screamed Martin O'Moore, "its too fast backward I'm growing; dizzy, dizzy I am."
And indeed his bald head suddenly got the fine black hair grown upon it, the whiskers flew away from him and his face was young. He began to wear a strange old suit that suddenly got new, and he had grown down through a handsome pair of trousers and into the little knickerbockers of a boy before you could count a score. And he had a bit of a cold just then, though he was out of it in a twink, and he let a sneeze that burst a button off his breeches, a little tin button, which was all that ever was found of him. Smaller and smaller he fell away, like the dust in an hour glass, till he was no bigger than an acorn, and then devil a bit of him was left there at all.
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?"