help her out of his pay much more efficaciously than he could do
by his earnings at Kilmacrone, where work was slack and its wage
low, so that the result of a lad's daily labour sometimes seemed
mainly the putting of a fine edge on a superfluous appetite. All these
points were most clearly seen by Mick in the light of a fiercely
burning desire; but that availed him nothing unless he could set
them as plainly before some one else who was not thus illuminated.
And not far from two years back he had resolved that he would
attempt to do so no more.

The soldiers had been about in the district on the day before,
scattered like poppy beds over the bog, and signalling and firing
till the misty October air tingled with excitement. When you have
lived your life among wide-bounded solitudes, where the silence is
oftenest broken by the plover's pipe or the croak of some heavily
flapping bird, you will know the meaning of a bugle-call. Mick
and his contemporaries had acted as camp-followers from early till
late with ever intensifying ardour; one outcome whereof was that he
heard his especial crony, Paddy Joyce, definitely decide to go and
enlist at Fortbrack next Monday, which gave a turn more to the
pinching screw of his own banned wish. It was with a concerted
scheme for ascertaining whether there were any chance of bringing
his mother round to a rational view of the matter that he and his
friend dropped into her cabin next morning on the way to carry up
a load of turf. Mrs. Doherty was washing her couple of blue-checked
aprons in an old brown butter-crock, and Mick thought he had
introduced the subject rather happily when he told her "she had a
right to be takin' her hands out of the suds, and dippin' the finest
curtsey she could conthrive, and she wid the Commander-in-Gineral
of the Army Forces steppin' in to pay her a visit." Of course this