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."

In the spring, Paddy was nine, and had to go out in the world to fight
poverty alone. His father had confided to him that they were in great debt
to the gombeen man. Paddy could help them get out. There was to be a hiring
fair in Strabane. Paddy swung along the road to Strabane pretending he was
a man--he was to be hired out just like one. But when he arrived at the
hiring field he shrank back. All the farm hands, big and little, stood
herded together in between the cattle pens. A man? A beast. One overseer
for a big estate came up to dicker for the boy, and said he would give him
fifteen dollars for six months' work. Paddy was just about to muster up
courage to put the price up a bit, when a friend of the overseer came up
with the prearranged remark: "A fine boy! Well worth twelve dollars the six
months!"

"What do you want to know for?" asked the gombeen man, when at the end of
Paddy's back-breaking six months, Paddy and his father brought him the
fifteen dollars and asked how much they still owed. The gombeen man refuses
accounts to everyone but the priest, magistrate, doctor and teacher. "What