on the roulette man, and the trick-o'-the-loop man, and breaking the nose of
the cockshot-man, and winning all in the sports below, racing, lepping,
dancing, and the Lord knows what! He's right luck, I'm telling you.

PHILLY. If he has, he'll be rightly hobbled yet, and he not able to say ten
words without making a brag of the way he killed his father, and the great
blow he hit with the loy.

JIMMY. A man can't hang by his own informing, and his father should be rotten
by now. [Old Mahon passes window slowly.]

PHILLY. Supposing a man's digging spuds in that field with a long spade, and
supposing he flings up the two halves of that skull, what'll be said then in
the papers and the courts of law?

JIMMY. They'd say it was an old Dane, maybe, was drowned in the flood. (Old
Mahon comes in and sits down near door listening.) Did you never hear tell of
the skulls they have in the city of Dublin, ranged out like blue jugs in a
cabin of Connaught?

PHILLY. And you believe that?

JIMMY -- [pugnaciously.] Didn't a lad see them and he after coming from
harvesting in the Liverpool boat? "They have them there," says he, "making a
show of the great people there was one time walking the world. White skulls
and black skulls and yellow skulls, and some with full teeth, and some haven't
only but one."

PHILLY. It was no lie, maybe, for when I was a young lad there was a
graveyard beyond the house with the remnants of a man who had thighs as long