"Dermod, asthor! What puts them ideas into yer head?" asked my mother. "What d'ye know abot Connel Diver and the Widow Breslin?"
"It's them two vagabonds, Micky's Jim and Dinchy's Ned, that's tellin' him these things," said my father; "but let me never catch him goin' out of the door with any of the pair of them again."
Whatever was the reason of it, I liked the company of the two youths a great deal more afterwards.
On this May evening, as I was saying, I came back from the day's work and found my mother tying all my spare clothes into a large brown handkerchief.
"Ye're goin' away beyont the mountains in the mornin', Dermod," she said. "Ye have to go out and push yer fortune. We must get some money to pay the rent come Hallow E'en, and as ye'll get a bigger penny workin' with the farmers away there, me and yer da have thought of sendin' ye to the hirin'-fair of Strabane on the morra."
I had been dreaming of this journey for months before, and I never felt happier in all my life than I did when my mother spoke these words. I clapped my hands with pure joy, danced in front of the door, and threw my cap into the air.
"Are ye not sorry at leavin' home?" my mother asked, and from her manner of speaking I knew that she was not pleased to see me so happy.
"What would I be sorry for?" I asked, and ran off to tell Micky's Jim about the journey which lay before me the next morning. Didn't I feel proud, too, when Micky's Jim, who had spent many seasons at the potato digging in Scotland, shook hands with me just the same as if I had been a full-grown man. Indeed, I felt that I was a man when I returned to my own doorstep and saw the preparations that were being made for my departure. Everyone was hard at work, my sisters sewing buttons on my clothes, my mother putting a new string in the Medal of the Sacred Heart which I had to wear around my neck when far away from her keeping, and my father hammering nails into my boots so that they would last me through the whole summer and autumn.
That night when we were on our knees at the Rosary, I mumbled through my prayers, made a mistake in the number of Hail Marys, and forgot several times to respond to the prayers of the others. No one said a word of reproof, and I felt that I had become a very important person. I thought that my mother wept during the prayers, but of this I was not quite certain.