“Pigs, calves, sheep and wool, hay, potatoes, and every kind of vegetable that grows,” was the answer. “I’m raising a little pig that I’m going to take to the Saturday market myself some day; and Patrick’s heifer is the best in Boyle for its age. Tim Keefe ought to give him a good price for it.”
Then she took Kathleen into the barn and showed her the heifer and the little pig, the two baby donkeys, the hens and the geese.
“If we get everything well started in the garden we will go on a picnic to Lough Gara come May-day, and you shall stay and go with us,” she said, leading Kathleen into the garden.
Such a pretty garden it was, too! Paths bordered with box led through beds of lilies and roses; and there were beds of cowslips and hollyhocks and many another sweet, old-fashioned flower.
After they had walked up and down the little paths and looked at all the buds and blossoms, they went back into the kitchen, where Kathleen washed the dishes while Bee put the bread to bake in the Irish baking-oven. This oven looks like a kettle and it stands on four feet among the burning peat with more peat heaped on the cover.
“If Mary Ellen could see, and I was going to live here always, and Father could come back and live here, too, and Danny need never go to America, this would be the prettiest farm and the best place in the whole world,” Kathleen said to herself with a long sigh.
Bee heard the sigh and asked what it meant.
“I’m wishing I could find some way to bring Mary Ellen’s eyesight back,” Kathleen told her.
“Was she born blind?” questioned Bee.
“No,” said Kathleen, “but her eyes were weak when she born, and when Grandma Barry came to live with us she said it was the smoke of the peat that had taken the sight away altogether. That was how it came about that Father made a chimney for the cottage, so that the smoke could go out instead of spreading through the room.”