Lady Gregory

“ It is no lie at all. It is as sure as the winter's frost. You have no one to draw to but yourself.
McDonough: It is mad jealous the women of Galway were and wild with anger, and she coming among them, that was seventeen times better than their best! My bitter grief I ever to have come next or near them, or to have made music for the lugs or for the feet of wide crooked hags! That they may dance to their death to the devil's pipes and be the disgrace of the world! It is a great slur on Ireland and a great scandal they to have made that refusing! ”

“ Be whist now, or they will be angered and they hearing you outside in the fair.
McDonough: Let their day not thrive with the buyers and the sellers in the fair! The curse of mildew on the tillage men, that every grain of seed they have sowed may be rotten in the ridges, and the grass corn blasted from the east before the latter end of harvest! The curse of the dead on the herds driving cattle and following after markets and fairs! My own curse on the big farmers slapping and spitting in their deal! That a blood murrain may fall upon their bullocks! ”

“ Taig: What call had you letting on to be Dermot Melody?
Darby: What letting on? Dermot is my full name, but Darby is the name I am called.
Taig: Are you a man owning riches and shops and merchandise?
Darby: I am not, or anything of the sort.
Taig: Have you teems of money in the bank?
Darby: If I had would I be sitting on this floor?
Taig: You thief you!
Darby: Thief yourself! Turn around now till I will measure your features and your face. Yourself is it! Is it personating my cousin Timothy you are?
Taig: I am personating no one but myself. ”

“ Hyacinth Halvey: Ah, what way can I run to any place!
Cracked Mary: Stop where you are, so. In my opinion it is little difference the moon can see between the whole of ye. Come on, Davideen, come out now, we have the wideness of the night before us. O golden God! All bad things quieten in the night time, and the ugly thing itself will put on some sort of a decent face! ”

“ One door for the rich, one door for the common! Velvet carpets rolled up, the way there would no dust from the chimney fall upon them. A hundred wouldn't be many standing in a corner of that place! A high bed of feathers, curled hair mattresses. A cover laid on it would be flowery with blossoms of gold!
Taig: Muslin and gauze, cambric and linen! Canton crossbar! Glass windows full up of ribbons as gaudy as the crooked bow in the sky! Sovereigns and shillings in and out as plenty as to riddle rape seed. Sure them that do be selling in shops die leaving millions. ”

“ There's a lather of sweat on myself. That's my tin can of water!
Taig: (Holding can from him.) Get out I tell you! I wouldn't wish him to feel the smell of you on the breeze.
Darby: (Almost crying.) You are a mean savage to go keeping from me my tin can and my rag!
Taig: Go wash yourself at the pump can't you?
Darby: That we may never be within the same four walls again, or come under the lintel of the one door! (He goes out.)
Taig: (Calling after him while he takes a suit of clothes from his bag.) I'm not like yourself! I have good clothes to put on me, what you haven't got! ”

“ Delia: There is no sin coveting things are of no great use or profit, but would show out good and have some grandeur around them. Those goats now! Browsing on the blossoms of the bushes they would be, or the herbs that give out a sweet smell. Stir yourself, Staffy, and throw your eye on that turf beyond in the corner. It is that wet you could wring from it splashes and streams. Let you rise the ashes from the sods are on the hearth and redden them with a goosewing, if there is a goosewing to be found. There is no greater beauty to be met with than the leaping of a little yellow flame. ”

“ To be quit of Timothy the bogie and to get Taig for a comrade, I'm as proud as the Crown of France!
Taig: I'm in dread of neither bumble or bagman or bugaboo! I will regulate things from myself from this out.
Darby: There to be fineness of living in the world, why wouldn't I make it out for myself?
Taig: It is to the harbours of America we will work our way across the wideness of the sea. It is well able we should be to go mounting up aloft in ropes. ”

“ Damer: Striving to scare me out of my courage and my wits, the way I'll give in to go making my will.
Ralph: She would not be wishful you to do that the time your mind would be vexed.
Damer: I'll make it, sick or sound, if I have a mind to make it.
Delia: Little thanks you'll get from me if you make it or do not make it. That is the naked truth.
Damer: The whole of ye think yourselves to be very managing and very wise!
Delia: Let you go will it so to an asylum for fools.
Damer: Why wouldn't I? It is in the asylums all the sense is these times. There is only the fools left outside. ”

“ To draw to silence the whole fair did. Every person is moving towards this house.
(A murmur as of people. McDonough comes in, stands at door, looking out.)
McDonough: I squeeze the pipes as a challenge to the whole of the fair, gentle noble and simple, the poor and the high up. Come hither and cry Catherine McDonough, give a hand to carry her to the grave! Come to her aid, tribes of Galway, Lynches and Blakes and Frenches! McDonough's pipes give you that command, that have learned the lamentation of the Danes. ”

“ Cracked Mary: Raging ever and always it is, raging wild. Sure, that is a dog was in it before the foundations of the world.
Peter Tannian: Who is it now that venom fell on, whatever beast's jaws may have scattered it?
Cracked Mary: It is the full moon knows that. The moon to slacken it is safe, there is no harm in it. Almighty God will do that much. He'll slacken it like you 'd slacken lime.
Shawn Early: There is reason in what she is saying. Set open the door and let the full moon call its own!
Bartley Fallon: Don't let in the rays of it upon us or I'm a gone man. ”

“ I to be sore in the heart with walking you would make a smile of a laugh. I would not feel the road having your company; I would walk every whole step of Ireland.
I to bring you to the dance-house you would dance till you had them all tired, the same in the late of the day as in the commencement! Your steps following quick on one another the same as hard rain on a flagstone! ”

“ Damer: If I had not, why would I have been setting my mind upon eternity and striving to bring to mind a few prayers? And to have parted with my wicked dog?
Delia: Let you turn around till you will see before you the man that is the robber and the thief!
Simon: Thief yourself! You that had a plan made up to bring it away.
Damer: Delia, Delia, what was I laying down a while ago? It is the love of riches has twisted your heart and your mind. ”

“ It is my grief every hand in the fair not to be set shaking and be crookened, where they were not stretched out in friendship to the fair-haired woman that is left her lone within boards!
Second Hag: (At door.) Is it a niggard you are grown to be, McDonough, and you with riches in your hand? Is it against a new wedding you are keeping your pocket stiff, or to buy a house and an estate, that it fails you to call in hired women to make a right keening, and a few decent boys to lift her through the streets? ”

“ Staffy: You not to follow our say you will be brought to burn green ferns to boil your victuals, or to devour the berries of the bush.
Simon: I would not wish a head to follow me and leap up on the table and wrestle me, or to drink against me with its gory mouth.
Staffy: You that have not the substance of a crane's marrow, to go shrink from so small a bidding, let you go on the shaughraun or to the workhouse, where you would not take our advice.
Simon: I'll go do your bidding so. I will go bring out the crock. ”

“ Peter Tannian: It is the power of the moon is forcing the truth out of him.
Hyacinth Halvey: Every person in the town giving me out for more than I am. I got too much of that in the heel.
Shawn Early: He is talking queer now anyway.
Hyacinth Halvey: Calling to me every little minute—expecting me to do this thing and that thing—watching me the same as a watchdog, their eyes as if fixed upon my face.
Mrs. Broderick: To be giving out such strange thoughts, he hasn't much brains left around him. ”

“ They could not find your equal in all Ireland or in the whole ring of Connemara!
What way did it fail me to see the withering of the branches on every bush, as it is certain they withered the time laughter died with your laugh? The cold of winter has settled on the hearth. My heart is closed up with trouble!
First Hag: It is best for us shut the door and to keep out the noises of the fair.
McDonough: Ah, what sort at all are the people of the fair, to be doing their bargaining and clutching after their luckpenny, and she being stark and quiet! ”

“ But as I foretold, Damer has taken possession of it, turning it to be as simple as a folk-tale, where the innocent of the world confound the wisdom of the wise. The idea with which I set out has not indeed quite vanished, but is as if "extinct and pale; not darkness, but light that has become dead." ”

“ Hyacinth Halvey: There are some say it is the moon.
Shawn Early: So it is too. The time the moon is going back, the blood that is in a person does be weakening, but when the moon is strong, the blood that moves strong in the same way. And it to be at the full, it drags the wits along with it, the same as it drags the tide.
Mrs. Broderick: Those that are light show off more and have the talk of twenty the time it is at the full, that is sure enough. And to hold up a silk handkerchief and to look through it, you would see the four quarters of the moon ”

“ Hazel: I will not be forgotten! I have posterity will put a good slab over me. Not like some would be left without a monument, unless it might be the rags of a cast waistcoat would be put on sticks in a barley garden, to go flapping at the thieves of the air.
Mineog: Let the birds or the neighbours go screech after me and welcome, and I not in it to hear or to be annoyed.
Hazel: Why wouldn't we hear? I'm in dread it's too much I'll hear, and you yourself sending such news to travel abroad, that there is blood in me I concealed through my lifetime! ”

“ You to be in the house it is not an unlucky house will be in it. The Royalty of England and of Spain cannot touch upon yourself. I am prouder of you than if you wrote the wars of Homer or put down Turgesius of the Danes! You are a lad that can't be beat. It is you are the Lamb of Luck!
Staffy: What call has he or any of us to be stopping under Damer's roof and he owning but the four walls presently and a poor little valley of land? ”

“ Damer: You might never find so good a way to open Heaven to yourself with a charity. To be bringing peace to an old man that has not long to live in the world! You wouldn't think now how quiet I would sleep, and the good dreams would be going through me, and that gallon jar to be full and to make no sound the time I would roll it on the floor. ”

“ But she to have been a shameless woman as ye make her out to be, and sold from tinker to tinker on the road it is all one! I will show Galway and the world that it does signify; that it is not fitting McDonough's wife to travel without company and good hands under her and good following on the road. Play now, pipes, if you never played before! Call to the keeners to follow her with screams and beating of the hands and calling out! Set them crying now with your sound and with your notes, as it is often you brought them to the dance-house! ”

“ Bartley Fallon: Everything that is bad, the falling sickness—God save the mark—or the like, should be at its worst at the full moon. I suppose because it is the leader of the stars.
Shawn Early: Ah, what could happen any person in the street of Cloon?
Bartley Fallon: There might. Look at Matt Finn, the coffin-maker, put his hand on a cage the circus brought, and the lion took and tore it till they stuck him with a fork you'd rise dung with, and at that he let it drop. And that was a man had never quitted Cloon.
Shawn Early: I thought you might be sending something to the fair. ”

“ You have a great wrong done to the woman inside, where you left her burying bare.
Second Hag: She to be without a farthing dip for her corpse, and you after lavishing gold.
First Hag: You have a right to bruise your knees making repentance, you that lay on the one pillow with her. You to be putting curses upon others and making attacks on them! I would make no complaint, you to be naked at your own burying and at the very hour of death, and the rain falling down on your head.
McDonough: Little I mind what happens me. There is no word you can put out of your mouth can do me any injury at all. ”

“ Delia: (Shrinking back.) I would as soon nearly not get it at all, where it might bring me to the wretched state of Damer! (Dog heard barking.)
Damer: I'll go bring my poor Jubair out of this. A great sin and a great pity to be losing provision with a dog, and the image of the saints maybe to be going hungry and bare. How do I know what troop might be bearing witness against me before the gate of heaven? To be cherishing a ravenous beast might be setting his teeth in their limbs! To give charity to the poor is the best religion in Ireland. ”

“ McDonough: But I say it does signify! I will tell that out to you and the world! That might be the thought of a townsman or a trader, or a rich merchant itself that had his estate gained by trafficking, for that is a sort does be thinking more of what they can make out of the living than of keeping a good memory of the dead!
First Hag: There are worthier men than yourself, maybe, in storehouses and in shops. ”