“We’d give you the brush, Mrs. Alexander,” said Mr. Taylour, as he flogged solidly all round him in the dusk, “but as the other lady seems to have gone to ground with the fox I suppose she’ll take it!”
Mrs. Fennessy paid out of her own ample savings the fines inflicted upon her husband for potheen-making and selling drink in the Craffroe gate lodge without a licence, and she shortly afterwards took him to America.
Mrs. Alexander’s friends professed themselves as being not in the least surprised to hear that she had installed the afflicted Miss Fennessy (sister to the late occupant) and her scarcely less afflicted companion, the Fairy Pig, in her back lodge. Miss Fennessy, being deaf and dumb, is not perhaps a paragon lodge-keeper, but having, like her brother, been brought up in a work-house kitchen, she has taught Patsey Crimmeen how to boil stirabout à merveille.
FANNY FITZ’S GAMBLE
“Where’s Fanny Fitz?” said Captain Spicer to his wife.
They were leaning over the sea-wall in front of a little fishing hotel in Connemara, idling away the interval usually vouchsafed by the Irish car-driver between the hour at which he is ordered to be ready and that at which he appears. It was a misty morning in early June, the time of all times for Connemara, did the tourist only know it. The mountains towered green and grey above the palely shining sea in which they stood; the air was full of the sound of streams and the scent of wild flowers; the thin mist had in it something of the dazzle of the sunlight that was close behind it. Little Mrs. Spicer pulled down her veil: even after a fortnight’s fly-fishing she still retained some regard for her complexion.
“She says she can’t come,” she responded; “she has letters to write or something—and this is our last day!”
Mrs. Spicer evidently found the fact provoking.