“ With that, the young gentleman began telling the secrets of his heart.
“It is no disease is on me,” says he, “but a terrible misfortune.”
“’Tis heart scalded I am that you have either a sorrow or a sickness, and you grand to look on and better to listen to,” says the other.
“It is in love I am,” says M‘Carthy.
“And how would that be a misfortune to a fine lad like yourself?” asks the man.
“Let you never let on!” says M‘Carthy. “The way of it is this: I am lamenting for no lady who is walking the world, nor for one who is dead that I could be following to the grave. ”

“ I’d be a decent man meself if I had the Furry Farm and it stocked....”
“He’s in a poor way now, in any case,” said Barney. “I doubt will he ever get over this rightly! That’s apt to be a leg to him all his life!”
“Well, and so, itself!” said Hughie; “haven’t I two of them lame legs? and who thinks to pity Hughie?”
“It’s another matter altogether, with a man like Mr. Heffernan,” said Barney; “what does the like of you miss, by not being able to get about, compared with a man that might spend his time walking a-through his cattle, and looking at his crops growing, every day in the week?” ”

“ In this dingy household Francie had grown up, lovely as a Dryad, brilliantly indifferent to the serious things of life, with a deplorable Dublin accent, ingenuous, unaffected and inexpressibly vulgar. She captivates men of all sorts: Roddy Lambert, who lunched on hot beefsteak pie and sherry; Mr. Hawkins, an amorous young soldier, who treated her with a bullying tenderness and jilted her for an English heiress; and Christopher Dysart, a scholar, a gentleman, and the heir to a baronetcy, who was ruined by self-criticism and diffidence. Francie respected Christopher and rejected him ”

“ The bright idea of pretending to be “kilt” occurred to the overthrown son of Vulcan, and with a fearful groan he stretched out his huge limbs and remained motionless on the broad of his back.
Sally’s sympathy for the ill-used woman prevented her from giving a thought to her husband. Great was her astonishment then when Nancy flew at her like a wild cat. “You kilt my husband,” she screamed. Sally retreated backwards, defending herself as best she could with the stool. “For God’s sake, Nancy, be quiet. Wouldn’t he have destroyed you on’y for me?” But Nancy followed up the attack like a fury. ”

“ There were tinkers with their carts of shining tins, as ugly and quarrelsome fellows as ever beat each other to death in a ditch, and there were the powerful men, 216 with the tight mouths, and the eyes that could judge a beast, and the dark, handsome women from the mountains. To crown all, a piper came into the town by the other end, and his music was enough to put the blood like a mill-race through your heart. The music of the piper, I think, would have made the beasts walk out of the fair on their hind legs, if the music of the fiddler didn’t charm them to be still. ”

“ He began planning how he could pay out Mickey.
He got himself back to the same spot, near the calves, to see what would happen. After a time, he saw Heffernan coming back, and little Barney Maguire with him. A very decent boy Barney was, quiet and agreeable; never too anxious for work, but very knowledgable about how things should be done, from a wake to a sheep-shearing. Heffernan always liked to have Barney with him at a fair.
The two of them stood near the calves, careless-like, as if they took no interest in them at all. ”

“ But no man can be wise at all times. Anyway, I was sitting on a ditch, with a lark singing over every foot of ground, and nothing before me but the glory of the day. A girl came along the road, and, on my soul, I never saw a girl walking so finely. ‘She’ll be a head above every girl in the fair,’ said I, ‘and may God keep the brightness on her head.’ ‘God save you, Maelshaughlinn,’ said the girl. ”

“ Macfarlane, complacently, as she walked by her beds, swinging a dripping watering-pot.
At the time of the blossoming of the orange lilies, James O’Brien was not at home, having had to go some twenty miles down the line on official business. The obnoxious flowers took advantage of his absence to make a gay show. When he returned, as luck would have it Mrs. Macfarlane was away, and had shut up the refreshment room, but had not locked it. No one locks doors in Toomevara unless their absence is to be lengthy. ”

“ He sat up as well as he could in the hammock-chair and said sternly—
“Am I to understand that you regard any lie as justifiable if it serves its purpose?”
“Certainly not,” said Meldon; “you are missing the whole point. I was afraid you would when you prevented me from explaining the theory of truth to you. I never justify lies under any circumstances whatever. The thing I’m trying to help you grasp is this: A statement isn’t a lie if it proves itself in actual practice to be useful—it’s true. ”

“ I am now sold fairly.’ The word was not out of my mouth when, whizz! what should fly by close to my ear but a flock of wild geese; all the way from my own bog of Ballyasheenogh, or else, how should they know me? The ould gander, who was their general, turning about his head, cried out to me, ‘Is that you, Dan?’ ‘The same,’ said I, not a bit daunted now at what he said, for I was by this time used to all kinds of bedevilment, and, besides, I knew him of ould. ”

“ Nothing in the world is mine any more, not even my mind, or my morality, or my self-respect is my own. Mr. Meldon has taken them from me, and torn them in pieces before my eyes. He has left me a nervous wreck of a man I once was. Did you say he was a parson?”
“Yes. He’s curate of Ballymoy.”
“Thank God, I don’t live in that parish! I should be hypnotised into going to church every time he preached, and then——. Hush! Can he be coming back already? I believe he is. No other man would whistle as loud as that. If he begins to illtreat me again, Mr Higginbotham, I hope you’ll try and drag him off. ”

“ Grace Kennedy and Sheela Molloy were on the road, and Rose Heffernan was talking to them. Grace Kennedy has the best wit and the best discourse of any woman within the four seas, and she said to the other girls as I came up, ‘Faith, girls, the good of the Mission will be gone from us since Maelshaughlinn came into the fair, for the young women must be talking about his coming home from the sermon.’ Sheela Molloy has the softest hair and the softest eyes of anything you ever saw. She’s a growing girl, with the spice of the devil in her. ”

“ The dealer looked at the calves again.
“Troth, I’m thinking it’s the wrong ones yous have here! Yous must have forgotten them fine three-pound calves at home!”
And Mickey began looking very anxiously at them, as he thought maybe he had made some mistake.
“Them calves,” says the dealer, slowly, “isn’t like a pretty girl, that everyone will be looking to get! And, besides, they’re no size! A terrible small calf they are!”
“Small!” said Barney, “It’s too big they are! And if they’re little itself, what harm! Isn’t a mouse the prettiest animal you might ask to see?” ”

“ Carrala Village lies in the corner of it towards Loch Ina, and Aughavanna in the corner nearest Kylemore. Aughavanna is a wreck now: if you were to look for it you would see only a cluster of walls grown over by ferns and nettles; but in those remote times, before the Great Famine, when no English was spoken in the Valley, there was no place more renowned for wild fun and fighting; and when its men were to be at a fair, every able-bodied man in the countryside took his kippeen—his cudgel—from its place in the chimney, and went out to do battle with a good heart. ”

“ Meldon went on, “why I think you’re almost certain to be a pragmatist is that you’re a politician. You’re constantly having to make speeches, of course; and in every speech you must, more or less, say something about Ireland. When you are Chief Secretary the other fellow, the man in opposition who wants to be Chief Secretary but isn’t, gets up and says you are telling a pack of lies. That’s not the way he expresses himself, but it’s exactly what he means. When his turn comes round to be Chief Secretary, and you are in opposition, you very naturally say that he’s telling lies. ”

“ At their best they have interpreted normal Irishmen and Irishwomen, gentle and simple, with unsurpassed fidelity and sympathy. But to award them the supremacy in this genre both as realists and as writers does not detract from the success won in a different sphere by Canon Hannay. His goal is less ambitious and aim is less unfaltering, but as an improvisor of whimsical situations and an ironic commentator on the actualities of Irish life he has invented a new form of literary entertainment which has the double merit of being at once diverting and instructive. ”

“ The shortcoming is, of course, trivial to those who do not suffer because of it, but want of perception of word and phrase and turn of thought means more than mere artistic failure, it means want of knowledge of the wayward and shrewd and sensitive minds that are at the back of the dialect. The very wind that blows softly over brown acres of bog carries perfumes and sounds that England does not know; the women digging the potato-land are talking of things that England does not understand. ”

“ There is no heroic figure in “Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.,” but the characters are all lifelike, and at least half-a-dozen—“Flurry” Knox, his cousin Sally, and his old grandmother, Mrs. Knox, of Aussolas, Slipper, Mrs. Cadogan, and the incomparable Maria—form as integral a part of our circle of acquaintance as if we had known them in real life. “The Real Charlotte” is a greater achievement, but the R.M. is a surer passport to immortality. ”

“ The business of the Fair had been hurried so as to leave the more time for pleasure, and by five of the afternoon every man was mad for the battle. Why, you could scarcely have moved in Callanan’s Field out beyond the churchyard at the end of the village, it was so packed with men—more than five hundred were there, and you could not have heard yourself speak, for they were jumping and dancing, tossing their caubeens, and shouting themselves hoarse and deaf—“Hurroo for Carrala!” ”

“ The King and Queen and princess were safe up in their gallery, but the officers and people of the court that were padrowling about the great bawn, when they saw the big baste coming in gave themselves up, and began to make for doors and gates; and the wolf licked his chops, as if he was saying, “Wouldn’t I enjoy a breakfast off a couple of yez!” The King shouted out, “O Gilla na Chreck an Gour, take away that terrible wolf and you must have all my daughter.” But Tom didn’t mind him a bit. He pulled out his flute and began to play like vengeance ”

“ There was one time when I was a curate in Dublin, I used to be attending one of the hospitals. People would be brought in suffering from accidents and dying, and you wouldn’t know what they were, Catholic and Protestant. I got into the way of anointing them all while they were unconcious, feeling it could do them no harm, even if they were Protestants. Well, one day I anointed a poor fellow that they told me was dying. What did he do but recover. It turned out then that he was a Protestant, and, what’s more, an Orangeman, and when he heard what was done he gave me all sorts of abuse. ”

“ An age which has witnessed the growth of Irish Agricultural Co-operation is intolerant of a novelist who for the most part represents his countrymen as diverting idiots, and therefore we prefer to represent him in this volume by “The Little Weaver,” one of those mock heroic tales in which Irishmen have excelled from his day to that of Edmund Downey. No better example could be given of his easy flow of humour in genuine Hiberno-English or of his shrewd portraiture of such simple types of Irish peasant character. ”

“ All these platitudes about lies being lies simply run off my skin. I know that your own game of politics couldn’t be played for a single hour without what you choose to describe as deceiving innocent people. ”

“ Heffernan,” says Barney, “just for the small ones of the lot?”
“Och! I dare say! don’t you?” says the dealer; “the woman that owns you it was that made you that bid, to save your word!”
Poor Mickey! and he hadn’t a woman at all! The dealer of course being strange couldn’t know that, nor why Hughie gave a laugh out of him.
But that didn’t matter. Mickey took no notice. A man that’s a bit “thick” escapes many a prod that another would feel sharp. So in all things you can see how them that are afflicted are looked after in some little way we don’t know. ”

“ But Hughie was puzzled too by the look of relief he saw on Mickey’s face. He understood nothing of what Heffernan was passing through. It’s an old saying and 250 a true one, “Them that has the world has care!” but them that hasn’t it, what do they know about it?
While Hughie was turning this over in his mind, Mickey was throwing an eye upon the calves, and then, seeing they were all right, he was bandying off with himself, when Hughie said, “Terrible dry work it is, driving stock along them dusty roads since the early morning,” and he rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth with a grin. ”