He ate off an enamelled plate that was loaded high with potatoes, coarse cabbage and a large piece of boiled bacon. A great steam rose from the plate and twisted up towards the ceiling in front of the man’s face. The man was dressed in a suit of blue dungarees, with a white muffler wound round and round his neck. He had a close-cropped bullet-shaped head, fair hair and dark eyebrows. The eyebrows were just single tufts, one over the centre of each eye. They grew long and narrowed to a single hair, like the ends of waxed moustaches. They were just like ominous snouts, and they had more expression than the dim little blue eyes that were hidden away behind their scowling shadows. The face was bronzed red and it was covered by swellings that looked like humps at a distance. These humps came out on the forehead, on the cheekbones, on the chin and on either side of the neck below the ears. On close observation, however, they almost disappeared in the general glossy colour of the brownish red skin, that looked as if there were several tiers of taut skin covering the face. The nose was short and bulbous. The mouth was large. The lips were thick and they fitted together in such a manner that the mouth gave the face an expression of being perpetually asleep. His body was immense, with massive limbs and bulging muscles pushing out here and there, like excrescences of the earth breaking the expected regularity of a country-side. He sat upright in his seat, with his large square head bolted on to his squat neck, like an iron stanchion riveted to a deck. He stared straight in front of him as he ate. He held his fork by the handle, upright, in his left hand. He rapped the table with the end of the fork, as if he were keeping time with the rapid crunching of his jaws. But as soon as he saw McPhillip, his jaws stopped moving and the hand holding the fork dropped noiselessly to the table. His face closed up and his body became absolutely motionless. McPhillip sat down at the opposite side of the table. He did not speak and he did not express recognition by any sign or movement of his body. But he knew the man quite well. They were bosom friends. The man was Gypo Nolan, McPhillip’s companion during the strike of farm-labourers, when McPhillip had killed the secretary of the Farmers’ Union. Gypo Nolan had once been a policeman in Dublin, but he had been dismissed owing to a suspicion at Headquarters that he was in league with the Revolutionary Organization and had given information to them relative to certain matters that had leaked out. Since then he had been an active member of the Revolutionary Organization and had always acted with Francis Joseph McPhillip, so that they were known in revolutionary circles as the “Devil’s Twins.” “Well, Gypo,” said McPhillip at last, “how is things?” McPhillip’s voice was cracked and weak, but it had a fierce sincerity that gave it immense force, like the force in the chirping of a tiny bird whose nest is being robbed.