‘It is down at the old house by the sea--the gentlefolks’ house as they call it--I have been, Mr. Durane, sir,’ she observed in a tone of suitable respect, as she sat down beside him on the great smooth top of the boulder. ‘And it is a bad way it is getting into, too--a very bad way, so it is.’ Then, after a minute--‘Was it ever as it was in the old time, when the quality was living upon Inishmaan, that you remember it?’ she went on in rather a hesitating tone, her first conversational venture not having, so far, met with any particular encouragement on the part of her neighbour. Old Durane shifted his pipe from one side of his mouth to the other, looked seaward, spat politely behind him into a fissure, then turned a bright little puckered eye upon her as if to ask her what she was driving at, and presently took up his parable. ‘Is it about Mr. Lynch Bodkin you are asking me, my good girl, if I remember him? Oh, but yes, I do remember him very well; why not? why not? He was a great man, and a good man, Mr. Lynch Bodkin--a _very_ good man! He would have ten, yes, and twelve gentlemen over from Galway or Round’stown at one time to dine with him, and it is the door of the house he would lock if they wanted to go away early, so he would. “No man has ever left my table till I choose, and no man ever shall,” he would say. “Is it to shame me you would be after, and in my own house, too? There is the red wine, and there is the white wine for you, and, if that will not do, there is the whisky wine too, and you may take your choice, gentlemen!” that is what he would say. Oh! a very good man he was, Mr. Lynch Bodkin, very. There are no such gentlemen left now--no, none at all.’ Grania listened with profound attention. It all seemed rather odd somehow. In what, she wondered, did Mr. Lynch Bodkin’s particular goodness consist? ‘And was it always drunk the gentleman would be, and the other gentlemen that were with him, too?’ she inquired in a tone of perfect gravity.