“Norah will be warm in bed by now,” said a voice.
“If she caught the tide when it was standing,” a voice clearer and younger replied.
“If she caught the tide,” repeated the first speaker in a thoughtful tone; then after a short silence, “Does not the land look black, back from the sea?”
The youth studied the shore-line attentively, allowing his oar to trail through the water. “Mother of God! but it looks ugly,” he replied. “I hate it! I hate it more than I hate anything!”
On shore most of the women were now asleep amongst the rocks, their shawls drawn tightly over their heads and their feet tucked up under their petticoats. Maire a Crick, still awake, hummed a tune deep down in her throat, and Judy Farrel coughed incessantly. One white, youthful face was turned to the heavens, and the moon, glancing for a moment on the pale cheeks of the sleeper, caused a tear falling from the closed eyelids to sparkle like a pearl.
CHAPTER IV
RESTLESS YOUTH
I
JAMES Ryan’s cabin lay within half a mile of the sea, and his croft, a long strip of rock-bespattered, sapless land, ran down to the very shore. But this strip of land was so narrow that the house, small though it was, could not be built across, and instead of the cabin-front, an end gable faced the water. In Frosses most of the land is divided into thin strips, for it is the unwritten law that they who have no land touching the sea may not lift any sea-weed to manure their potato patches. In Frosses some of the crofts, measuring two miles in length, are seldom more than eight paces in width at any point.
All over the district gigantic boulders are strewn, huge rocks that might have been flung about in play by monstrous Giants who forgot, when their humour was at an end, to gather them up again. Between these rocks the people till for crops, plots of land which seldom measure more than four yards square, and every rock conceals either a potato patch or cornfield. It was said years ago that Frosses had twenty-one blades of grass to the square foot, but this was contradicted by a sarcastic peasant, who said that if grass grew so plentifully with them they would all be wealthy.
Fishing was indulged in, but very little fish was ever landed: Scottish and English trawlers netted the fish off-shore, and few were picked up by the peasantry, whose boats and nets were of the most primitive pattern. The nets were bad, the boats, mere curraghs, were untrustworthy, and a great deal of the fishermen’s time was usually spent in baling out water. At best fishing was for them an almost profitless trade. They had no markets and no carts to send their fish to town. For the most part the fishers used the fish themselves or traded them in kind with their neighbours.