One evening in the springtime we were gathered as usual in the forge, after a good, long day's work in the fields, and Ned was very busy with plough accessories and harrow pins and other farming implements, but he was in the best of humour all the same. He joked some of us about getting married, sang snatches of songs in his big, rich voice, and laughed at some of the news we had brought him with the gay vivacity of a boy. There wasn't a subject under the sun but was debated in the forge, and Ned's witticisms remained in all our minds long after the matters debated had been forgotten.
"I wonder how many'll take the advice Father Martin gave last Sunday about the killin' o' the pigs," said Matty Reilly, as he fiddled with a lot of horse-shoe nails in a box.
"It's all very fine to be talkin'," said Jim Cassidy, "but if the people kill their own pigs, what are they goin' to pay the rent with?"
"Didn't he tell them what they could do it with?" said Jack Dunne, as he cleared the stem of his pipe with a very fine piece of wire which Ned always kept by him for that purpose; "didn't he tell them that they could pay the rent with the money they give to the shopkeepers for bad American bacon that's pisinin' their blood an' that there's no nourishment in? An' sure he said the truth. You might as well be eatin' roasted beech-leaves as some o' the bacon you'd get in shops. The divil another bit of it'll come into our house, if we were never to pay the rent."
"If you saw Peadar Byrne," said Bartle Gormley, from a corner, "when Father Martin was talkin' about the killin' o' the pigs, an' the savin' o' the money. He could only catch an odd word, an' he had the bothered ear cocked in a way that I never saw it at the readin' o' the Gospel."
"Maybe," said Ned, with a comical look, "maybe he thought there was pigs goin' for nothin', an' that he'd miss one if he didn't listen."
The discussion ended in a laugh, as all discussions usually did when Ned M'Grane had spoken, and every man started to light his pipe. Ned worked on in silence for a while, and after a long spell, during which there came no remark from him, he said, in careless fashion:
"I wonder was Jimmy Malone—Jimmy the Thrick—listenin' to Father Martin talkin' about the bacon?"
"He was then," said Bartle Gormley, "because I saw him leanin' over the seat down near the door an' whisperin' somethin' to Andy Cregan, an' whatever it was the two o' them was laughin' over it when they came out on the road."
"I know what he was whisperin' about," said Ned, "an' so well he might laugh, because the bacon he used to get above twenty years ago was better an' cheaper than ever he ate since. He wouldn't get anyone simple enough now to give him bacon for nothin'."