four dollars between us, and Tobin had need of distractions. For there
was Katie Mahorner, his sweetheart, of County Sligo, lost since she
started for America three months before with two hundred dollars, her
own savings, and one hundred dollars from the sale of Tobin's inherited
estate, a fine cottage and pig on the Bog Shannaugh. And since the
letter that Tobin got saying that she had started to come to him not a
bit of news had he heard or seen of Katie Mahorner. Tobin advertised in
the papers, but nothing could be found of the colleen.

So, to Coney me and Tobin went, thinking that a turn at the chutes and
the smell of the popcorn might raise the heart in his bosom. But Tobin
was a hardheaded man, and the sadness stuck in his skin. He ground his
teeth at the crying balloons; he cursed the moving pictures; and, though
he would drink whenever asked, he scorned Punch and Judy, and was for
licking the tintype men as they came.

So I gets him down a side way on a board walk where the attractions were
some less violent. At a little six by eight stall Tobin halts, with a
more human look in his eye.

"'Tis here," says he, "I will be diverted. I'll have the palm of me hand
investigated by the wonderful palmist of the Nile, and see if what is to
be will be."

Tobin was a believer in signs and the unnatural in nature. He possessed
illegal convictions in his mind along the subjects of black cats, lucky
numbers, and the weather predictions in the papers.

We went into the enchanted chicken coop, which was fixed mysterious with
red cloth and pictures of hands with lines crossing 'em like a railroad