May you have one eye and it to be squinting
May you have one tooth and it to be aching.
The second curse fell on one man—old Oiney Dinchy, who had a light foot on a good floor. When tying a restive cow in the byre, the animal caught Oiney in the ball of one eye with the point of its horn, and Oiney could only see through the other eye afterwards. The people when they saw this feared the new parish priest, but they never took any heed to the new God, and up to this day there are many good six-hand reelers in Glenmornan. And the priest is dead.
The parish priest who came in his place was a little pot-bellied man with white shiny false teeth, who smoked ninepenny cigars and who always travelled first-class in a railway train. Everybody feared him because he put curses on most of the people in Glenmornan; and usually on the people whom I thought best in the world. Those whom I did not like at all became great friends of the priest. I always left the high-road when I saw him coming. His name was Father Devaney, and he was eternally looking for money from the people, who, although very poor, always paid when the priest commanded them. If they did not they would go to hell as soon as they died. So Father Devaney said.
A stranger in Glenmornan should never talk about crows. The people of the Glen are nicknamed the "Crow Chasers," because once in the bad days, the days of the potato failure, they chased for ten long hours a crow that had stolen a potato, and took back the potato at night in triumph. This has been cast up in their teeth ever since, and it is an ill day for a stranger when he talks about crows to the Glenmornan people.
Courtship is unknown in Glenmornan. When a young man takes it in his head to marry, he goes out in company with a friend and a bottle of whisky and looks for a woman. If one refuses, the young man looks for another and another until the bottle of whisky is consumed. The friend talks to the girl's father and lays great stress upon the merits of the would-be husband, who meanwhile pleads his suit with the girl. Sometimes a young man empties a dozen bottles of whisky before he can persuade a woman to marry him.
In my own house we had flesh meat to dinner four times each year, on St. Patrick's Day, Easter Sunday, Christmas Day, and New Year's Day. If the harvest had been a good one we took bacon with our potatoes at the ingathering of the hay. Ours was a hay harvest; we grew very little corn.
Of all the seasons of the year I liked the harvest-time best. Looking from the door of my father's house I had the whole of Glenmornan under my eyes. Far down the Glen the road wound in and out, now on one side of the river and now on the other, running away to the end of Ireland, and for all that I knew, maybe to the end of the world itself.
The river came from the hills, tumbling over rocks in showers of fine white mist and forming into deep pools beneath, where it rested calmly after its mad race. Here the trout leaped all day, and turned the placid surface into millions of petulant ripples which broke like waves under the hazel bushes that shaded the banks. In the fords further along the heavy milch cows stood belly-deep in the stream, seeking relief from the madness that the heat and the gad-flies put into their blood.
The young cattle grazed on the braes, keeping well in the shadow of the cliffs, while from the hill above the mountain-sheep followed one another in single file, as is their wont, down to the lower and sweeter pastures.