“Three ha’pence a day and nothing less,” said the girl, and a glow of pride suffused her face.
“Three ha’pence a day!” the beansho ejaculated, stooping down and pulling out the gritty sand which had collected between her toes. “Just think of that, and her only a wee slip of a girl!”
“That’s one pound nineteen shillin’s a year,” said Maire a Crick reflectively. “She’s as good as old Maire a Glan (Mary of the Glen) of Greenanore, who didn’t miss a stitch in a stockin’ and her givin’ birth to twins.”
The party set off, some singing plaintively, one or two talking and the rest buried in moody silence. It was now day, the sun shot up suddenly and lighted the other side of the bay where the land spread out, bleak, black, dreary and dismal. In front of the party rose a range of hills that threw a dark shadow on the sand, and in this shadow the women walked. Above them on the rising ground could be seen many cabins and blue wreaths of smoke rising from the chimneys into the air. A cock crowed loudly and several others joined in chorus. A dog barked at the heels of a stubborn cow which a ragged, bare-legged boy was driving into a wet pasture field ... the snow which lay light on the knolls was rapidly thawing ... the sea, now dark blue in colour, rose in a long heaving swell, and the wind, blowing in from the horizon, was bitterly cold.
“When will the tide be out again?” asked Judy Farrel, a thin, undersized, consumptive woman who coughed loudly as she walked.
“When the sun’s on Dooey Head,” came the answer.
An old, wrinkled stump of a woman now joined the party. She carried a bundle of stockings, wrapped in a shawl hung across her shoulders. As she walked she kept telling her beads.
“We were just talkin’ of ye, Maire a Glan,” said Biddy Wor. “How many stockin’s have ye in that bundle?”
“—— Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen,” said the woman, speaking in Gaelic and drawing her prayer to a close; then to Biddy Wor: “A dozen long stockings that I have been working on for a whole fortnight. The thread was bad, bitter bad, as the old man said, and I could hardly get the mastery of it. And think of it, good woman, just think of it! Farley McKeown only gives me thirteen pence for the dozen, and he gives other knitters one and three. He gave my good man a job building the big warehouse in Greenanore, and then he took two pence off me in the dozen of stockings.”
“You don’t say so!”