[FUN O' THE FORGE.]
[THE BLACKSMITH'S CHARM]
I.
The smithy in which Ned M'Grane carried on his trade was close to the roadside, about a quarter of a mile from the head of the glen. There was no house very close to it on any side, though old Peggy Hogan's cottage was not so far away but that Ned could hear Peggy's shrill "Chuck, chuck, chuck," every evening at sundown, as she called her hens and chickens home to roost. The smithy was sheltered by the big beeches which overhung the road from Rowan's demesne, and when the fire was in full glow it was as fine a place for a seanchus among the "boys" as you'd find in any corner of the broad land of Eireann; and well did the boys know that, because there was scarcely a night during the whole winter on which they didn't gather around the cheery fire in the forge, and discuss in breezy fashion and with a good deal of wit, almost every subject of interest under the sun, while they watched Ned M'Grane at his work, and openly admired the strength of his shapely arms.
Ned was as famous for his wit as for his proficiency in all the mysteries of the trade, and he could tell stories, old and new, that would draw laughter from the loneliest heart that ever beat. He was a favourite with old and young, and there wasn't a boy in the countryside who, sometime or other, didn't make a confidant of the genial blacksmith, and ask the advice which he was always willing to give. To help a man out of a scrape, to stand by a comrade in distress, to make glad a company with clean and ready wit, to resent an evil deed or to show whole-hearted appreciation of a good one, there wasn't in all Ireland a man who could out-match Ned M'Grane, the laughing, jovial, generous blacksmith of Balnagore.
One night, just a week before Shrove (no matter whether 'twas last year or the year before or ten years ago) the smithy was, for a wonder, deserted by all its usual visitors, and the smith was alone with his work and his thoughts, which latter found expression in the snatches of song he sung in the intervals between placing the piece of iron upon which he was working in the fire and the taking out of it again, to be pounded on the anvil. He was just finishing a song, the last verse of which ran like this:
"No! no! across the thundering waves the answer rings full high!
No! no! re-echoes many a heart beneath the Irish sky
The land shall wake, her exiled sons across the sea shall sail
Once more to set a coronet on queenly Grainne Mhaol."
and was giving the finishing touches to a new horse-shoe, when he heard a voice at the door say, "God bless the work," and on looking up his eyes met the open, honest, handsome face of his cousin and dearest friend and comrade, Seumas Shanley of Drumberagh.
"An' you, too, a mhic o," answered Ned M'Grane, with a welcoming smile. "You're the very man I was thinkin' about a few minutes ago, an' I'm glad you're by yourself. Any change in the plan of campaign? Is Old Crusty as determined as ever?"
"Worse than ever," said Seumas Shanley, as he picked up a piece of a broken match-box from the floor, set it blazing at the forge fire, and lighted his pipe with it. "Nannie says that he got into a tearin' rage out an' out last night when she refused again to marry Jack the Jobber, an' he won't let her leave his sight for a minute. All she could do was to send me a note with old Kitty Malone to-day. Kitty was down in it, washin', an' she says Larry has his mind made up that Nannie must marry Flanagan before Shrove. I was over with Father Martin to-day."