MICHAEL MISKELL. If you have pains within in your inside there is no one
can see it or know of it the way they can see my own knees that are
swelled up with the rheumatism, and my hands that are twisted in ridges
the same as an old cabbage stalk. It is easy to be talking about
soreness and about pains, and they maybe not to be in it at all.
MIKE MCINERNEY. To open me and to analyze me you would know what sort of
a pain and a soreness I have in my heart and in my chest. But I'm not
one like yourself to be cursing and praying and tormenting the time the
nuns are at hand, thinking to get a bigger share than myself of the
nourishment and of the milk.
MICHAEL MISKELL. That's the way you do be picking at me and faulting me.
I had a share and a good share in my early time, and it's well you know
that, and the both of us reared in Skehanagh.
MIKE MCINERNEY. You may say that, indeed, we are both of us reared in
Skehanagh. Little wonder you to have good nourishment the time we were
both rising, and you bringing away my rabbits out of the snare.
MICHAEL MISKELL. And you didn't bring away my own eels, I suppose, I was
after spearing in the Turlough? Selling them to the nuns in the convent
you did, and letting on they to be your own. For you were always a
cheater and a schemer, grabbing every earthly thing for your own profit.
MIKE MCINERNEY. And you were no grabber yourself, I suppose, till your
land and all you had grabbed wore away from you!
MICHAEL MISKELL. If I lost it itself, it was through the crosses I met
with and I going through the world. I never was a rambler and a
card-player like yourself, Mike McInerney, that ran through all and
lavished it unknown to your mother!
MIKE MCINERNEY. Lavished it, is it? And if I did was it you yourself led
me to lavish it or some other one? It is on my own floor I would be
to-day and in the face of my family, but for the misfortune I had to be
put with a bad next door neighbor that was yourself. What way did my
means go from me is it? Spending on fencing, spending on walls, making
up gates, putting up doors, that would keep your hens and your ducks
from coming in through starvation on my floor, and every four footed
beast you had from preying and trespassing on my oats and my mangolds
and my little lock of hay!
MICHAEL MISKELL. O to listen to you! And I striving to please you and to
be kind to you and to close my ears to the abuse you would be calling
and letting out of your mouth. To trespass on your crops is it? It's
little temptation there was for my poor beasts to ask to cross the
mering. My God Almighty! What had you but a little corner of a field!
MIKE MCINERNEY. And what do you say to my garden that your two pigs had
destroyed on me the year of the big tree being knocked, and they making
gaps in the wall.
MICHAEL MISKELL. Ah, there does be a great deal of gaps knocked in a
twelve-month. Why wouldn't they be knocked by the thunder, the same as
the tree, or some storm that came up from the west?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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