CHAPTER VII
A RIDE WITH THE POSTMAN
“My blessing go high, my blessing go low,
My blessing go with you wherever you go.”
It was Mary Ellen’s sweet Irish way of saying good-bye to the peddler when he went away the next day; and he replied heartily, “If I should travel over the whole of Ireland between sun-up and sun-down, I’d hear no better word.”
At the cross-roads he met the postman in his red jaunting-car, riding toward the thatched cottage at the foot of the hill, and he stopped to pass the time of day with him.
“Give the two little girls a ride,” said the peddler. “If ’tis to the National School you are going, with a letter for the teacher, this way is as short as the other, and ’tis a lonely life the two children lead,—a mile from any other house, and never another child to play with.”
“’Tis a letter for Jerry, himself, that I have, and ’twill take me by the cottage, anyway,” answered the postman; and looked the letter over, thinking that it was probably from Grandmother Barry’s daughter, Hannah Malone, as the postmark was “Kilkenny.”
He found the great-grandmother crooning an old Gaelic milking tune over her wheel, instead of the spinning song which she usually sang; and Grandmother Barry greeted him with, “Ah, Larry O’Day, this is just such a morning as the one when you and I went with the rest on the pilgrimage to ‘Tobar N’alt,’ the holy well in County Sligo, to cure us of our rheumatism.”
The postman laughed. “That was forty years ago, and I’d forgot all about it,” he said, throwing out a letter from the pack. “It’s a dozen pilgrimages to holy wells that I’ve made since then,” he went on, “and there’s not a heartier man for his age, than myself, in all Ireland.”