The lid was fastened, but here an interruption occurred. The wife wanted to look at her husband for “just one other minute.” With a gesture of impatience old Oiney Dinchy, who was discussing the best means of catching flukes and tying the coffin, lifted the lid again and stood silently by, his hat drawn down well over his eyes. Mary Ryan gave vent to another outburst of grief; the coffin was again closed and lifted on the wooden bearer. An idle child was busily engaged in counting the notches.
“Seventy-seven; that’s for the man who made it,” someone was saying.
“Listen, Micky’s Jim,” whispered Mary Ryan as the youth passed her, going towards the door with a basket of pipes and tobacco.
“Well, Mary, what is it?” Jim asked.
“Was this a good year beyond the water?”
Jim went yearly to the potato-digging in Scotland, taking with him a squad of men and women from his own country, and over these he was master while they were at work.
“It was not so very bad,” said Jim cautiously. He was afraid that the old woman might ask the loan of money from him.
“Next year I have a mind to send Norah.”
“And not to make a nun of her, after all?”
Norah was piling peat on the fire, lifting them from the floor and dropping them into the flames. As she bent down Jim noticed every movement of her body and paid very little attention to the words of the old woman. Norah, having finished her task, stood upright; Jim waited eagerly for a repetition of her former movement, but seeing that she was weeping he turned his attention to the task of getting the coffin through the doorway.