THE WORKHOUSE WARD PERSONS _Mike McInerney_ } PAUPERS _Michael Miskell_ } _Mrs. Donohoe_, A COUNTRYWOMAN THE WORKHOUSE WARD _Scene: A ward in Cloon Workhouse. The two old men in their beds._ _Michael Miskell:_ Isn’t it a hard case, Mike McInerney, myself and yourself to be left here in the bed, and it the feast day of Saint Colman, and the rest of the ward attending on the Mass. _Mike McInerney:_ Is it sitting up by the hearth you are wishful to be, Michael Miskell, with cold in the shoulders and with speckled shins? Let you rise up so, and you well able to do it, not like myself that has pains the same as tin-tacks within in my inside. _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 analyse 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 neighbour 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!