"'Stoop to yer work, ye idle cub; ye slack for hours on end.'
'I've eaten far too much the day. A full sack cannot bend.'"
—From Farmyard Folly.
About a week after, on the stroke of eleven at night, I was washing potatoes for breakfast in a pond near the farmhouse. They were now washed always on the evening before, so that the pigs might get their meals a little earlier in the morning. Those same pigs were getting fattened for the Omagh pork market, and they were never refused food. When they grunted in the sty I was sent out to feed them, when they slept too long I was sent out to waken them for another meal. Although I am almost ashamed to say it, I envied those pigs.
Potato-washing being the last job of the day, I always thought it the hardest. I sat down beside the basket of potatoes which I had just washed, and felt very much out of sorts. I was in a far house and a strange man was my master. I felt a bit homesick and I had a great longing for my own people. The bodily pain was even worse. My feet were all blistered; one of my boots pinched my toes and gave me great hurt when I moved. Both my hands were hacked, and when I placed them in the water sharp stitches ran up my arms as far as my shoulders.
I looked up at the stars above me, and I thought of the wonderful things which I had read about them in the book picked up by me in my bedroom. There they were shining, thousands upon thousands of them, above my head, each looking colder and more distant than the other. And nearly all of them were larger than our world, larger even than our sun. It was so very hard to believe it. Then my thoughts turned to the God who fashioned them, and I wondered in the way that a man of twelve wonders what was the purpose behind it all. Ever since I could remember I had prayed to God nightly, and now I suddenly thought that all my prayers were very weak and feeble. Behind His million worlds what thought would He have for a ragged dirty plodder like me? Were there men and women on those worlds, and little boys also who were very unhappy? Had the Son of God come down and died for men on every world of all His worlds? These thoughts left me strangely disturbed as I sat there on the brink of the pond beside my basket. Things were coming into my mind, new thoughts that almost frightened me, and which I could not thrust away.
As I sat the voice of Bennet came to me.
"Hi! man, are ye goin' to sit there all night?" he shouted. "Ye're like the rest of the Donegal cubs, ye were born lazy."
I carried the potatoes in, placed them beside the hearth, then dragged myself slowly upstairs to bed.
"Ye go upstairs like a dog paralysed in the hindquarters," shouted my boss from the kitchen.