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