“But you said this morning——”
“Never mind what I said this morning,” answered the woman in a tone of mild reproof. “I’m only saying that the ground under us and around us is now sleeping.”
“The ground sleeping!” exclaimed Maire a Crick, who overheard the last words of the conversation. “I never heard such silly talk coming out of a mouth in all my life before.”
“Neither have I,” said Norah Ryan, but she spoke so low that no one, not even the beansho, heard her.
Maire a Crick sang a song. It told of a youth who lived in Ireland “when cows were kine, and pigs were swine and eagles of the air built their nests in the beards of giants.” When the youth was born his father planted a tree in honour of the event. The boy grew up, very proud of this tree, and daily he watered and tended it, and one day the boy was hung (why the song never stated) from the branches of his own tree.
“There never was a man hung either in Frosses or Tweedore,” said the woman who had just been snoring. “Never a mother’s son!”
“So I have heard,” Maire a Crick remarked, pulling her feet well up under her petticoats. “In Frosses and Tweedore there never was a tree strong enough to bear the weight of a man, and never a man with a body weighty enough to break his own neck.”
Having said this the old woman, who came from the south of Donegal, chuckled deep down in her throat, and showed the one remaining tooth which she possessed in a hideous grin.
III
ABOUT the hour of midnight the heavens cleared and the moon, hardly full, lighted up the coast of Western Donegal. On the bosom of the sea a few dark specks moved to and fro, and at intervals the splash of oars could be heard. When the oars were lifted out of the sea the water, falling from them, looked like molten silver.