LITMIR.BIZ

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had a loaf in hers; but she was not watching her pot.

      I got accustomed to the gloom of the house and I could see that her eyes were fixed on something beyond the pot, beyond the chimney corner and beyond the house itself. They had a long, sorrowful look in them. For a while she seemed unconscious that we were in the room with her. Her husband roused her.

      "Do you not see," he said, "that his reverence is here? Will you not give him a chair the way he'll be able to take an air of the fire? He's wet through so he is."

      Mrs. Cassidy's courtesy overcame the weakness that was on her. She stood up and bowed to me with that air of quiet, unassertive dignity which the west of Ireland peasant possesses in common with the best-bred members of the English aristocracy. Neither squalor, on the one hand, nor the surroundings of the smart set, on the other, can rob a woman of this great-lady manner if it is born in her.

      Having bowed, Mrs. Cassidy drew forward a chair and wiped the seat of it with her apron.

      "It's pleased I am to see your reverence," she said, "either now or at any other time."

      I sat down. John Cassidy gave me a meaning glance, and then said he was going out to see whether the young heifer had broken down the wall which separated her field from the potato patch. It is, I know, the habit of young heifers to break walls. The young of all species do it. I have heard of young girls—but their doings are no concern of mine. They may break all the walls of all the conventions without interference from me.

      Nor do I think that John Cassidy cared much whether his heifer had broken her wall or not. The potatoes had long since been dug. The ground in which they grew would suffer no harm by the incursions of a young heifer. He was making an excuse to escape, so that I should be left alone to speak to Mrs. Cassidy the word which might do her good and help to remove the weakness that was on her.

      For some time Mrs. Cassidy and I sat in silence, one on each side of the fire. I looked at her and noted a slovenliness in her attire that was new to me. She used to be a neat, trim woman, even when she was going about the business of cleaning her house and feeding her pig.

      I noticed that the hens wandered unchecked about the floor of the room. They pecked and scratched among the ashes on the hearth. They sprang up on the dresser, where plates and jugs stood in rows. They were free with all that was in the house. This was not Mrs. Cassidy's way with hens. In the old days an intruding fowl, unless it were a chicken in delicate health, was ruthlessly driven from the door. Now Mrs. Cassidy was apathetic.

      It is only very good friends who can sit opposite each other without speaking. Silence is usually embarrassing to civilised people. I confess that our long silence began to embarrass me, and it came as a relief when Mrs. Cassidy began to speak. Her words fell from her slowly and scarcely seemed to be addressed to me. It was rather as if she spoke a monologue, telling to the brooding spirit of her home the tale of her sorrow.

      "It was three years ago that the fancy first took him. Before that he was always contented enough."

      I knew she was speaking about her boy—her son, who had gone to America.

      "His name," she added, "was Michael Antony; but it was Sonny we called him."

      I waited, for I had nothing to say. There are scores of these sonnies, whose names are really something else. The mother love that cleaves to the pet name is the same for all of them; so is the heartbreak for the mother.

      "I don't rightly know," she went on, "how the notion of America came to him first. You'd think he was contented enough. It wasn't that his father was hard on him. The lad had no more to do than what he seemed willing for. He had a decent suit of clothes to wear of a Sunday or a fair day, and nobody denied him his share of any pleasuring there might be in it—the like of a football kicking, or maybe a dance at an odd time; but the notion took him and nothing would do him only to go to America. I was against it and so was his father."

      Mrs. Cassidy relapsed into silence again. She seemed to have forgotten my presence altogether. Then suddenly she looked at me and added a word of explanation—a pathetically unnecessary word.

      "His name was Michael Antony, but it was Sonny we did be calling him. Well," she went on, "nothing would do him but to write to his Aunt Matilda, who's out in Pittsburgh and married to a man that went from this parish. I never seen her myself, but she was his father's sister. Sonny was always a good scholar and he was well fit to write a letter to his aunt or to any other one. We kept him to his schooling regular, only when there might be a press of work at the hay or the like of that, so as he'd be wanted at home. It was always his father's wish and my own that he'd get good learning while he could—and he got it. There wasn't a better speller than Sonny; and the way he'd write, a blind man could have read it!"

      The half door of the cottage was opened and two girls came in. I looked round and recognised the Cassidys' little daughters, children of twelve and fourteen years of age, with school satchels over their arms.

      "Norah Kate," said Mrs. Cassidy, "your dinner's waiting for you and Susan's along with it. Will you sit down now and eat it? And, before you do, let Susy hoosh the hens out of the house. It's too bold those same hens is getting."

      The children did as they were bidden, without speaking. Doubtless they shouted and laughed elsewhere, in the school playground or on the roadside. Here at home they were silent. It may have been my presence that awed them; but I think that even the merriest child would have found it hard to laugh in the house where Mrs. Cassidy ceaselessly mourned for Sonny, whose real name was Michael Antony.

      When Mrs. Cassidy spoke again the hens had been driven forth and the two girls were sitting at the table, with a bowl of boiled potatoes between them.

      "It was a month, or maybe a little more, before the answer came back from his aunt; but when it did come I was glad to see it. What she said was that it would be no use for Michael Antony—his name was Michael Antony, though it was Sonny we always called him—that it would be no use for him to go to America. The times was bad out there, she said, and little likelihood of their getting better. Let the boy stay where he is, she said, where he has a living to get without working the flesh off his bones. Let him not go there, she said, or else he'd be sorry for it after. Well, you'd think that would have contented him and put the notion of America out of his head—and so it did seemingly."

      The hens, grown bold by long impunity, had made their way into the house again; but Mrs. Cassidy was roused now.

      "Norah Kate," she said, "will you and Susy put them hens out and yourselves along with the hens! Don't you see I'm talking to his reverence?"

      Mrs. Cassidy, like most good women, had small respect for her daughters. Sonny, I imagine—had Sonny remained at home might have sat out the visit of a bishop. His mother would have considered his presence an honour to the highest ecclesiastic; but daughters, even though their fathers spoil them, never stand so high as sons in the opinion of a good mother. Norah Kate and Susy knew their place. They went out, driving the hens before them. Mrs. Cassidy took the loaf out of the pot oven and set it on the table to cool. Then she sat down again on her stool and went on with her story:

      "Seemingly he was contented enough and had given up the notion of America when he seen that his aunt was against him going. It was well pleased we were. His father gave him a calf for his own and I took care that he didn't want for a shilling in his pocket, so as he wouldn't be ashamed before his comrades—and them maybe spending more or less in the town after a football kicking or the like.

      "Well, for as much as six months there wasn't a word out of him about America, and we thought he was settled down for good. Then one day, all of a sudden, he walked in on us, the same as it might be you walking in this minute: 'I'm off to America, to-morrow,' says he. 'I've sold the young bullock'—it was a young bullock the calf was by that time—'and I have my passage booked; and there's no use your talking, for my mind's made up.'

      "I knew well enough it was no use talking, for Sonny was always terrible stubborn once his mind was made up. He wouldn't change, not if the King of England was to go down on his knees to him. He went the next morning, sure enough."

      "He'll be back some day," I said

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