When the early sun bronzed the bog, and streaked the dark pool below with gold, Paddy and his father began to feed the dried wavy strands of kelp between the hungry brown furrow lips. They packed the long groove near the stone fence; they rounded past the big boulder that could not be budged; last of all, they filled the short far row in the strangely shaped little field. At noon, Paddy's mother appeared at the half door of the cabin and called in the general direction of the field--it was difficult to see them, for their frieze suits had been dyed in bog water and she could not at once distinguish them from the brown earth. They were glad to come in to eat their sugarless and creamless oatmeal. In the evening Paddy ran over the road to his cousin's. Western clouds were blackening and his little cousin was pulling the pig into the cabin as a man puts other sort of treasure out of danger into a safe. Paddy listened a moment. He could hear the castanets of the tweed weaver's loom and the hum of his uncle's deep voice as he sang at his work. He ran to the rear of the cabin and up the stone steps to the little addition. A lantern filled the room he entered with black, harp-like shadows of the loom. While the uncle stopped treadling and held the blue-tailed shuttle in his hand, the breathless little boy told him that the field was finished. "God grant," said the uncle with a solemnity that put fear into the heart of Paddy, "there may be a harvest for you." Paddy watched his mother work ceaselessly to aid in the fight that his father and he were making against poverty. During the month her needles would click unending wool into socks, and then on Saturday she would trudge--often in a stiff Atlantic gale--sixteen miles to the market in Strabane. There she sold the socks at a penny a pair. In spite of combined hopes, the potato plants were floppily yellow that year. Their stems felt like a dead man's fingers. No potatoes to eat. None to exchange for meal. What were they to do? The gombeen man told them. As member of the county council, he said, he would secure money for the repair of the roads. All those who worked on the road would get paid in meal. "Let your da' not worry," said the fat gombeen man pompously to Paddy. Paddy had brought the ticket that his father had obtained by a week's work to exchange for twenty-eight pounds of corn meal. "I'll keep famine from the parish. Charity's not dead yet." When Paddy lugged the meal into the cabin, he found his mother lying on the bed with her face averted from the bowl of milk that some less hungry neighbor had brought in. His father's gaunt frame was hunched over the peat blocks on the flat hearth. Paddy, full of desire to banish the brooding discouragement from the room, hastened to repeat the words of the gombeen man. But he felt that he had failed when his father, regarding the two stone sack, said hollowly: "Charity? Small pay to the men who keep the roads open for his vans."