“Well, if I were you, Peggy, I’d write them all out while I remembered them.”
“I don’t think I will do that, Alison, thank you so much, because, somehow, they’re part of me by this time. To say them properly you ought to be in an Irish cottage, Alison, with the sea breaking on the rocks just below your house, and the little hens—I say it properly now—roosting close by you, and the turkeys and the geese and the ducks, belike, all waiting for the dawn, and the bit of a calf wanting his drink of milk, and the little pigeens all snoring in their soft bed of hay. Ah, there’s no place like Old Ireland! Did you ever see real Irish moss, Alison?”
“No.”
“You don’t have it in this country,” continued Peggy. “I have looked for it and looked for it. You don’t know what the moss is in Ireland, in the damp month of February, when it fructifies, and is all over little delicate flowers, a sort of faint pink, you know; and then there’s another kind of dainty, dainty leaves, like tiny fern-leaves. I can’t tell you how beautiful it is! I wish Daddy O’Flynn would send me a box over, so that you could see for yourself.”
“When you are older, Peggy, you must go back to Ireland and see the Irish moss and all the Irish things again.”
“What’s that ye’re saying, Alison?”
“You must go back to Ireland to see——”
“Is it me to hear you talk as though it were a visit? Do you think when I’m grown up I’ll ever leave the place? Not me, it’s to live there and die there I want. The Irish shamrock and the Irish harp; and, oh, the Irish land! and—and the Irish people! Don’t talk to me, Alison, it’s me heart is broke when I think of them!” The excited child burst into tears, and Alison tried to comfort her for a few minutes.
Presently Peggy started up. “I must go to write that essay,” she said; “I can’t get round it at all, at all. Know yourself—it’s a horridly difficult thing to know yourself, isn’t it, Alison?”
“That is true; but just say what you feel, take all the things you love, those things that excite and interest you. There, perhaps I oughtn’t to say that much.”