He laughed at my question, and I could see his teeth black with tobacco juice. "Greenanore!" he exclaimed. "'Derry fair is a million times bigger."
Of course I didn't believe him, for had I not been at the harvest-fair of Greenanore myself, and I thought that there could be nothing greater in all the seven corners of the world. But it was in my world and I knew more of the bigger as the years went on.
In those days the world, to me, meant something intangible, which lay beyond the farthest blue line of mountains which could be seen from Glenmornan Hill. And those mountains were ever so far away! How many snug little houses, white under their coatings of cockle lime, how many wooden bridges spanning hurrying streams, and how many grey roads crossing brown moors lay between Glenmornan Hill and the last blue line of mountain tops that looked over into the world for which I longed with all the wistfulness of youth, I did not know.
CHAPTER III A CORSICAN OUTRAGE
"When brown trout leap in ev'ry burn, when hares are scooting on the brae,
When rabbits frisk where e'er you turn, 'tis sad to waste your hours away
Within bald Learning's droning hive with pen and pencil, rod and rule—
Oh! the unhappiest soul alive is oft a little lad at school."