“You’ll give me another sup, now, Mr. Flanagan,” she said. “It’s well I deserve it. It’s terrible dry work talking to a man like that one who won’t listen to a word you’re saying.”
Flanagan filled a large tumbler with porter and handed it to her.
“Tell me this now, Mrs. Doolan,” he said.
“What’s the matter with Molly Rahilly and the rest of them?”
“It’s green apples,” said Mrs. Doolan, “green apples that they ate in the doctor’s garden. Didn’t I see the little lady sitting in the tree and the rest of the childer with her?”
Dr. Lovaway made a somewhat similar diagnosis. He spent several busy hours going in and out of the houses where the sufferers lay. It was not till a quarter past eleven that he returned to his home and the town settled down for the night. At half-past eleven—long after the legal closing hour—Sergeant Rahilly was sitting with Mr. Flanagan in the room behind the shop. A bottle of whisky and a jug of water were on the table in front of them.
“It’s a queer thing now about that doctor,” said Flanagan. “After what Dr. Farelly said to me I made dead sure he’d be pleased to find fairies about the place. But he was not. When I told him it was fairies he looked like a man that wanted to curse and didn’t rightly know how. But sure the English is all queer, and the time you’d think you have them pleased is the very time they’d be most vexed with you.”
IV. A LUNATIC AT LARGE
It was Tuesday, a Tuesday early in October, Dr. Lovaway finished his breakfast quietly, conscious that he had a long morning before him and nothing particular to do. Tuesday is a quiet day in Dunailin; Wednesday is market day and people are busy, the doctor as well as everybody else. Young women who come into town with butter to sell take the opportunity of having their babies vaccinated on Wednesday. Old women, with baskets on their arms, find it convenient on that day to ask the doctor for something to rub into knee-joints where rheumatic pains are troublesome. Old men, who have ridden into town on their donkeys, consult the doctor about chronic coughs, and seek bottles likely to relieve “an impression on the chest.”