_Darby:_ "Little he'd think of you," she'd say; "you without body
and puny, not fit to lift scraws from off the field, and Timothy
bringing in profit to his mother's hand, and earning prizes and
rewards."

_Taig:_ The time it would fail me to follow my book or to say off
my A, B, ab, to draw Dermot down on me she would. "Before he was up
to your age," she would lay down, "he was fitted to say off
Catechisms and to read newses. You have no more intellect beside him,"
she'd say, "than a chicken has its head yet in the shell."

_Darby:_ "Let you hold up the same as Timothy," she'd give out,
and I to stoop my shoulders the time the sun would prey upon my head.
"He that is as straight and as clean as a green rush on the brink of
the bog."

_Taig:_ "It is you will be fit but to blow the bellows," my mother
would say, "the time Dermot will be forging gold." I let on the book
to have gone astray on me at the last. Why would I go crush and
bruise myself under a weight of learning, and there being one in the
family well able to take my cost and my support whatever way it
might go? Dermot that would feel my keep no more than the lake would
feel the weight of the duck.

_Darby:_ I seen no use to be going sweating after farmers,
striving to plough or to scatter seed, when I never could come anear
Timothy in any sort of a way, and he, by what she was saying, able to
thrash out a rick of oats in the day. So it fell out I was thrown on
the ways of the world, having no skill in any trade, till there came