IV

PADRAIG OF THE SCRIPTORIUM


Padraig sat on the side of the hill where the Good People were said to
dance rings in the turf, his chin on his folded arms, his, arms resting on
his drawnup knees--thinking. He might have been taken for a sheogue
himself had any one been there to see. His hair was like a red flame, and
his eyes were blue as the sky; his arms and legs were as brown as his
young, sharp face, and he wore but one garment, a goatskin tunic. He could
run like a hare and climb like a squirrel and swim like a salmon, for he
had lived like a savage all his life, among the Irish hills.

Before he could remember, he had lost his father, a clever tinker who
could make silver brooches and mend brass kettles and had married an Irish
colleen in a seashore village. Then pirates raided the coast, and the
Irish girl with her baby escaped only by hiding in a cellar under a ruined
house. When the boy was seven years old his mother died, and since then he
had gone from one village to another as the fancy took him. For a week or
more he might be herding goats or sheep, fishing, or cutting peat for
fires; he stayed nowhere longer than he chose and owned nothing in the
world except what he wore. Under the tunic there hung a small leather bag
with the few relics his mother had left him. He could make a fish-hook of
a bit of bone, a boat of reeds, or a snare of almost any material he could
find where he happened to be.