times. The top of everythin' that's to be got, uncooked, widout
bone."

Paddy and Mick discoursed for a good while in this strain about the
dignities and amenities of a military life, and Mrs. Doherty had
not much to say on the subject. During the conversation, however,
she continued to rinse one of her aprons, and wring it dry very
carefully, and drop it back into the water, like a machine slightly
out of gear, which goes on repeating some process ineffectually. The
two friends read in her silence an omen of acquiescent conviction,
and congratulated each other upon it with furtive nods and winks.
Mick went off to the bog in high feather, believing that the
interview had been a great success, and that his mother was, as
Paddy put it, "comin' round to the notion gradual, like an ould
goat grazin' round its tetherin' stump." His hopes, indeed, were
so completely in the ascendant that he summed up his most serious
uneasiness when he said to himself: "She'll do right enough,
no fear, or I'd niver think of it, if Thady was just somethin'
steadier. But sure he might happen to git a thrifle more wit yet;
he's no great age to spake of."

But when he came home about sunsetting, his mother was feeding her
few hens outside their cabin, the end one of a mossy-roofed row,
with its door turned at right angles to the others, looking out
across the purple brown of the bog-land to the far-off hills, faint,
like a blue mist with a waved pattern in it, against the horizon.
Mick, brought up short by the group, woke out of his walking dream,
in which he had been performing acts of valour to the tune of the
"Soldier's Chorus" in Gounod's Faust, the last thing the band had
played yesterday; and he noticed a diminution in the select circle