'What are they doing now?' I asked.
And the driver replied, 'They're fittin' the rope till it. Them oul' flitters isn't fit to carry a heavy corp, lit alone the coffin, up yon brae, the crathurs, so they tie a rope till it and dhrag it up.'
The group opened out and resolved itself into its parts as it slowly climbed the hill. First came two old men bent double, each straining at a loop of rope passed over one shoulder and across their chests; behind them jolted the coffin, to which they were harnessed, over the uneven ground; next came the other two men as a relay, ready to relieve their comrades when tired; and behind them the mourners, the two old women.
I now noticed that the path was composed of three parallel lines upon the green sward. On each side was a footway, worn smooth and bare by the feet of the men and the following mourners. In the middle was vaguely outlined a strip less distinct where the grass was beaten down like a pock-marked field of oats after a rainstorm, and was thinned and straggling like the hair upon a head beginning to grow bald. That was the mark where the coffin was dragged.
'Whose funeral is it?' I asked, with a pitying sigh at this outrage upon the dead.
'Oul' Shan O'Neill's,' came the startling answer; 'he was a stone-cutter, and a gran' han' at the pothery; he cud write a pome as fast as another man cud mow a fiel' ov hay. Troth cud he!'
'But I thought his daughter kept him.'
'Holy Post-Office, how did ye come to know that?' exclaimed the driver, in surprise at the unexpected extent of my information; 'that was Kathleen, the wan dacint wan ov the whole bilin'. She kep' him till a year ago. But thin she lost ahl her money in wan ov thim banks in Australey, and the other childher' wudn't give no help, and so the oul' man come on the parish, an' he niver hel' up his head from that day out, and now they're buryin' of him.'
And so the descendant of all the O'Neills was haled at the end of a rope to a pauper's grave.