He went out on this mission immediately after supper. The sun had gone down, and the cold clearness left showed things plainly, yet was not light. In front of the cabin-rows the small children of the place were screeching over their final romp and quarrel, as they did every evening; fowls and goats and pigs were settling down for the night with the squawks and bleats and squeals which also took place every evening; on the brown-hollowed grass-bank between Colgan’s and O’Reilly’s, old Morissy, the blind fiddler, was feebly scraping and twangling, according to his custom every evening, and, for that matter, all day long. Even the wisps of straw and scraps of paper blowing down the middle of the wide roadway seemed to have whirled over and over and caught in the rough patches of stone just so, as often as the sun had set. Close to the Joyces’, Mick met Peter Maclean driving home a brood of ducklings. A broad and burly man, who says “shoo-shoo” to a high-piping cluster of tiny yellow ducks, and flourishes a long willow wand to keep them from straggling out of their compacted trot, does undoubtedly present rather an absurd appearance; yet I cannot explain why the sight should have seemed to prick like a sting through the wide weary disgust which Mick experienced as he stood in the twilit boreen waiting for Paddy to come out. He had scarcely a grunt to exchange for Peter’s cheerful “Fine evenin’.” What does it signify in a universal desert whether evenings be fine or foul? Altogether, it was a bad time; and Mick acted wisely in taking precautions against its recurrence, especially as the obstacles which had confronted him nearly two years back were now more hope-baffling than ever. For the intervening months had not brought the desirable “thrifle more wit” to his unsteady brother Thady, who, on the contrary, was developing into one of those people whose good-for-nothingness is taken as a matter of course even by themselves; and a bolt was thus, so to speak, drawn across Mick’s locked door.