Not long after Mrs. Hugh had finished her cup, Mrs. Mackay arrived, alighting flurriedly from a borrowed seat on a neighbour’s car.
“So it’s home you ran, Julia,” she said, sternly. “Well, now, I wonder you had that much sense itself. Looking for you high and low we were, after the pólis had gone, that only come to get the number of our chickens—counting the feathers on them next, I suppose they’ll be—and all romancing it was about anything happening the rick. But frightened I was out of me wits, till little Joey said he seen you quitting out at the gate. So then I come along to see what foolish thing you might be about doing next.”
“She’s likely to be doing nothing foolisher than giving you a cup of tay, Bridgie,” Hugh interposed, soothingly. “And mightn’t you be frying us a few eggs in the pan, Julia? Old Nan Byrne’s just after bringing in two or three fresh ones she got back of the Quins’ rick, where our hins do be laying.”
“‘Twill be a handy place for finding them in,” Mrs. Hugh said, blandly. And both her experienced hearers accepted the remark as a sign that these hostilities were over.
Maelshaughlinn at the Fair.
From “My Irish Year.”
By Padraic Colum.
It was about horses, women, and music, and, in the mouth of Maelshaughlinn, the narrative had the exuberance of the fair and the colour of a unique exploit. I found Maelshaughlinn alone in the house in the grey dawn succeeding his adventure. “This morning,” he said, “I’m the lonesome poor fellow without father or mother, a girl’s promise, nor my own little horse.” He closed the door against a reproachful sunrise, and, sitting on a little three-legged stool, he told me the story.