MIKE MCINERNEY. Don't you hear I am going? To Curranroe I am going.
Going I am to a place where I will get every good thing!
MICHAEL MISKELL. And is it to leave me here after you you will?
MIKE MCINERNEY [_in a rising chant_]. Every good thing! The goat and the
kid are there, the sheep and the lamb are there, the cow does be running
and she coming to be milked! Plowing and seed sowing, blossom at
Christmas time, the cuckoo speaking through the dark days of the year!
Ah, what are you talking about? Wheat high in hedges, no talk about the
rent! Salmon in the rivers as plenty as hurf! Spending and getting and
nothing scarce! Sport and pleasure, and music on the strings! Age will
go from me and I will be young again. Geese and turkeys for the hundreds
and drink for the whole world!
MICHAEL MISKELL. Ah, Mike, is it truth you are saying, you to go from me
and to leave me with rude people and with townspeople, and with people
of every parish in the union, and they having no respect for me or no
wish for me at all!
MIKE MCINERNEY. Whist now and I'll leave you ... my pipe [_hands it
over_]; and I'll engage it is Honor Donohoe won't refuse to be sending
you a few ounces of tobacco an odd time, and neighbors coming to the
fair in November or in the month of May.
MICHAEL MISKELL. Ah, what signifies tobacco? All that I am craving is
the talk. There to be no one at all to say out to whatever thought might
be rising in my innate mind! To be lying here and no conversible person
in it would be the abomination of misery!
MIKE MCINERNEY. Look now, Honor.... It is what I often heard said, two
to be better than one.... Sure if you had an old trouser was full of
holes ... or a skirt ... wouldn't you put another in under it that might
be as tattered as itself, and the two of them together would make some
sort of a decent show?
MRS. DONOHOE. Ah, what are you saying? There is no holes in that suit I
brought you now, but as sound it is as the day I spun it for himself.
MIKE MCINERNEY. It is what I am thinking, Honor.... I do be weak an odd
time.... Any load I would carry, it preys upon my side ... and this man
does be weak an odd time with the swelling in his knees ... but the two
of us together it's not likely it is at the one time we would fail.
Bring the both of us with you, Honor, and the height of the castle of
luck on you, and the both of us together will make one good hardy man!
MRS. DONOHOE. I'd like my job! Is it queer in the head you are grown
asking me to bring in a stranger off the road?
MICHAEL MISKELL. I am not, ma'am, but an old neighbor I am. If I had
forecasted this asking I would have asked it myself. Michael Miskell I
am, that was in the next house to you in Skehanagh!
MRS. DONOHOE. For pity's sake! Michael Miskell is it? That's worse
again. Yourself and Mike that never left fighting and scolding and
attacking one another! Sparring at one another like two young pups you
were, and threatening one another after like two grown dogs!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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