had been scantily dosed to me at school gradually taking substance
under my eyes. School and home seemed to recede from us and
their influences upon us seemed to wane.

We crossed the Liffey in the ferryboat, paying our toll to be
transported in the company of two labourers and a little Jew with a
bag. We were serious to the point of solemnity, but once during the
short voyage our eyes met and we laughed. When we landed we
watched the discharging of the graceful threemaster which we had
observed from the other quay. Some bystander said that she was a
Norwegian vessel. I went to the stern and tried to decipher the
legend upon it but, failing to do so, I came back and examined the
foreign sailors to see had any of them green eyes for I had some
confused notion.... The sailors' eyes were blue and grey and even
black. The only sailor whose eyes could have been called green
was a tall man who amused the crowd on the quay by calling out
cheerfully every time the planks fell:

"All right! All right!"

When we were tired of this sight we wandered slowly into
Ringsend. The day had grown sultry, and in the windows of the
grocers' shops musty biscuits lay bleaching. We bought some
biscuits and chocolate which we ate sedulously as we wandered
through the squalid streets where the families of the fishermen
live. We could find no dairy and so we went into a huckster's shop
and bought a bottle of raspberry lemonade each. Refreshed by this,
Mahony chased a cat down a lane, but the cat escaped into a wide
field. We both felt rather tired and when we reached the field we
made at once for a sloping bank over the ridge of which we could