“We must live, Dan; so you talk only nonsense.”
“True, neighbour; all that are not gentlemen must live. But there’s nothing in life easier than to live without their help; and I’d be proud to do it, if it were only to see them standing and standing all day, and many days, to see the shoals go by, and never a boat out to catch a fish for them. I’d go ten miles any day to see them stand idle, with all their sheds and cranes, and the new pier with the boats lying about it as if all the world was asleep. There would be easy work for a summer’s day!”
“Easy enough for them, Dan, but hard enough for us that have not our pockets full of money like them.”
“Never mind the money; where’s the money that will buy such a sunshine as this?”
“If people like the sunshine as well with bare limbs and an empty stomach, Dan, I have nothing to say to them. For my part, I begin to feel the north wind chilling, now I am growing old; and I can’t fish till I have had my morning meal.”
“O, the morning meal is the pleasantest thing in nature when it gives one no trouble; and if you would do as I do, you would have one every day in the year, without giving a triumph to them villains. Just bestir yourself to plant your potatoes, and then you are provided without more words. O, people should go to old Ireland to learn how to live!”
“I thought Ireland had been a bad place to live in.”
“Devil a bit, neighbour. It is the cheerfullest, brightest land the saints reign over,—glory to them for it!”
“Then what brought you here?”
“Just somebody told Noreen’s father that one might fish guineas in these seas; so he had us married, and sent us over; but, as I tell Noreen, there is less gold here than at Rathmullin, seeing that the sun shines one half less. But we make ourselves content, as they do in Ireland; and that a man may do all the world over—let alone a woman that has a gentle cratur like me for a husband.”