"Ah," said the priest, half-sadly, "you will have plenty of everything
over there, Mary, but I doubt if you will relish anything as much as
what you and Dan used to buy out of the price of your chickens.
Nothing is so sweet as what we earn for ourselves, woman dear. I fancy
the potatoes grown in your little bit of ground, and boiled in your
own black pot, taste sweeter, somehow, than all the fine dinners that
Mrs. Larry will be giving you."
"Thrue for ye, yer reverence," put in Dan, suddenly appearing in the
doorway. "'Pon me word, I wish that ould letther an' all that was in
it had stopped where it was, before it came upsettin' us that way. I'd
sooner stop where I am, so I would--I would so--there now ye have it!"
turning defiantly to his wife. "Sure it'll be the death of the two of
us lavin' the ould place, an' thravellin' off across the say among
strangers. An' what good will it do us, as I do be sayin' to herself
here, for Larry to be puttin' up a monyement for us over beyant there,
where there's ne'er a one at all that knows us?"
"To be sure, I was forgetting the monument," said Father Taylor,
laughing again. "I was to have the choosing of it, too, wasn't I? Let
me look at the letter again, Mary. Yes, here it is. 'The reverend
gentleman, whoever he is, that's parish priest in Clonkeen now'--It's
the very same reverend gentleman that used to give Master Larry many a
good box on the ear long ago when he was a little rascally lad; but I
suppose he thought I was dead and buried by this time--he wants to
have us all underground. Well, well, it's a pity I'm not to have the
choosing of that monument--I'd have picked out the finest that money
could buy."
He intended this as a joke, and Dan and Mary uttered a somewhat
melancholy, but complimentary laugh; then they looked at each other
wistfully, as though regretting that they were not in a position to
enable their pastor to gratify his artistic tastes.
Dan presently confided his troubles and difficulties anent the
changing of the order, and was desired by the priest to call in the
afternoon, when he would himself go with him to the post-office. Then
Father Taylor withdrew, feeling a little sad at the thought of losing
two such old parishioners, and a little impatient with the
over-affectionate nephew, who had so late in the day insisted on their
uprootal.
"How much more sensible it would have been," he said to himself, "how
much more truly kind, if Larry, instead of transplanting the poor old
couple in their old age, had sent them a small sum of money every
month to enable them to end their days in comfort at home." But there
was apparently nothing for it now but to take what steps he could to
help them over the difficulties of their flitting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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