"Yes, indeed," said Father Taylor, with a sigh, "that little bit of paper will carry you and Mary all the way over the sea, and across a State as big as Ireland."
"Would it now?" inquired Dan, eyeing it curiously. "Well now, to tell you the truth, yer reverence, herself an' me has been havin' a bit of a chat. She thinks bad, the cratur', of lavin' the bed, an' the ould pot, an' all our little sticks o' things behind, ye know, sir, an' I do be thinkin' I'd never get my health at all out of ould Ireland; an' any way the two of us is too ould to be thravellin' off that way. An' so herself says to me—she says:—'Dan,' says she, 'I think the best way would be for ye to step down to his reverence's,' says she, 'an' give him the ordher,' she says, 'an' ax him,' says she, 'if he'll just write a line to poor Larry, an' let him know that we haven't the heart nor the strength to be lavin' our own little place. An' bid him,' says she, "ax Larry if it 'ud be all the same to him if his reverence was to keep the money for us agin we want it.'"
"To be sure, to be sure," cried Father Taylor, delighted. "You show your good sense, Dan, and so does Mary. I'll just go with you now, and change the order; and I'll let Larry know that I'll keep the money for you, and pay it out little by little as long as it lasts."
"Not at all, not at all," interrupted Dan, hastily and indignantly. "Bedad, it isn't that we want yer reverence to do for us. Sure the raison I'm afther givin' ye the ordher is for you to keep it safe, the way we'll have it for the monyement."
Old Pat Clancy lived in a small cabin immediately beneath the Rock of Donoughmor, and looked upon the ruined castle on the top as his especial property, the legends concerning them being treasured by him as jealously as though they were traditions of his own ancestors. A proud man was Pat when piloting the occasional strangers who wished to inspect the keep up the steep and slippery path which led to the ancient portcullis, and conducting them thence to the banqueting-hall, sparing the luckless pilgrim, in fact, no corner of the edifice or its surroundings, and pausing only on the mossy slope to the rear, where, his charge having duly admired "the view over three counties," he would proudly point out the precise spots where Fin-ma-coul had "wrastled" with and overthrown another "monsthrous joynt" of name unknown, the traces of the encounter being yet visible in the short turf.
"Ne'er a blade o' grass at all 'ud grow on them," Pat would cry, pointing triumphantly to the irregular hollows in the soil supposed to be the traces of the giant's mighty feet. These, by the way, occasionally varied oddly in extent; during the summertime, when most visitors were to be expected, being noticeably large, and much deeper than at other seasons.
Poor Pat's devotion to his beloved ruins was the cause of his undoing. One spring morning, when a late frost had made the grass unusually slippery, just as he was expounding to an interested audience how the Danes used to shoot "arrers through them little slits of windies in the wall beyant," his foot slipped, and after rolling for a little distance down the steep incline, he went over the precipitous side of the crag, and fell some twenty feet on to the stones below. Many bones were broken, and as surgical aid was difficult to obtain, and but of poor quality when at last secured, most of them were badly set, and the poor old fellow remained to the end of his days a cripple. How he and his wife and their last remaining child, a son born to them when Pat was already old, managed thenceforth to eke out a living would have been a marvel to their neighbours, if similar problems of existence had not been so common in the countryside. There was the pig, of course, and a few chickens, and "herself" did a day's work now and then in the fields, and escorted the visitors over the ruins, well primed and prompted by Patrick as to the "laygends and tragedies" (traditions) of those sacred precincts; and little Mike minded the sheep, and frightened crows and picked turnips for their landlord, "ould Pether Rorke beyant at Monavoe," but "Goodness knows," as the neighbours would say, shaking their heads at each other, "it was not much of a livin' the poor child 'ud make out of him—the ould villain! Didn't he let his own flesh and blood go cold and hungry—'twasn't to be expected he'd do more nor he could help for a stranger. Aye indeed, he was a great ould villain! To think of him with lashin's and lavin's of everything an' money untold laid by, an' his only son's widdy livin' down there with a half-witted lodger in a little black hole of a place that was not fit for a pig, let alone a Christian, an' the beautiful little cratur', his grandchild, Roseen, runnin' about barefut, with her dotey little hands an' feet black an' blue wid the cowld—sure what sort of a heart had the man at all?"
Old Pat was sitting alone one summer's afternoon, "herself" having gone up to Donoughmor with some Quality, and Mike not having yet returned from work, when little Roseen Rorke poked her sunny face in at the door.