His labors completed, Moore regarded the whistle with the critical approval of an expert, and putting it to his mouth blew a shrill blast. As the result was eminently satisfactory, he bestowed the toy in the crown of his beaver and, crossing his legs comfortably, proceeded to take his ease.
His appearance was decidedly attractive. While quite a little below middle size, his wiry figure was so well proportioned that in the absence of other men nearer the ordinary standard of height, he would have passed as a fine figure of a lad. He carried himself with easy grace, but affected none of the mincing, studied mannerisms of the dandy of the period. He had a round, jolly face, a pleasing though slightly satirical mouth, an impudent nose, and a pair of fine eyes, so brightly good-humored and laughingly intelligent, that no one could have looked into their clear depths without realizing that this was no ordinary youth. And yet at the period in his career from which dates the beginning of this chronicle Tom Moore's fortunes were at a decidedly low ebb. Disgusted and angry at the ill success which attended his attempts to sell his verses to the magazines and papers of Dublin, for at this time it was the exception, not the rule, when a poem from his pen was printed and paid for, Moore gathered together his few traps, kissed his mother and sisters good-bye, shook the hand of his father, then barrackmaster of an English regiment resident in Ireland, and hied himself to the sylvan beauties of the little town of Dalky. Here he secured lodgings for little more than a trifle and began the revision of his translation of the Odes of Anacreon, a task he had undertaken with great enthusiasm a year previous. Thus it was that he chanced to be wandering through the fields on fishing bent this bright and beautiful morning in the year of our Lord 179-.
Tom Moore
A small boy, barefooted and shock-headed, came across the meadow in the direction of the schoolhouse visible in the distance on the crest of a long, slowly rising hill. He carried a bundle of books and an old slate tightly clutched under one arm, while from the hand left disengaged swung a long switch with which he smartly decapitated the various weeds which had achieved altitude sufficient to make them worthy of his attention.
Noticing Moore for the first time, the boy's face brightened and lost its crafty look of prematurely developed cunning and anxiety, as he approached with a perceptible quickening of his gait.
"Is it you, Mr. Moore?" he said, a rich brogue flavoring his utterance.
"Unless I am greatly mistaken, Micky, you have guessed my identity," admitted the young man, making a playful slap with his rod at the new-comer's bare shins, which the lad evaded with an agility that bespoke practice, at the same time skilfully parrying with his switch.
"Goin' fishin'?"
"Shooting, my boy. Don't you perceive my fowling-piece?" replied Moore, waving his fish-pole in the air.