Part 3

"Neal Carlin was attracted by her, she was a sweet creature. 'Warm!' says she to him with a friendly tone. 'Begod, ma'am, it is a hot day,' he said, and thinks he, she is a likely person to give me my aspiration. And sure enough when he sat down beside her she asked him, 'What is your aspiration, Neal Carlin?' and he said, 'Saving your grace, ma'am, it is but to enjoy the world and to be easy in it.' 'That is a good aspiration,' she said, and she gave him some secret advice. He went home to his farm, Neal Carlin did, and he followed the advice, and in a month or two he had grown very wealthy, and things were easy with him. But still he was not satisfied, he had a greedy mind, and his farm looked a drifty little place that was holding him down from big things. So he was not satisfied though things were easy with him, and one night before he went sleeping he made up his mind, 'It's too small it is. I'll go away from it now and a farm twice as big I will have, three times as big, yes, I will have it ten times as big.' He went sleeping on the wildness of his avarice, and when he rolled off the settle in the morning and stood up to stretch his limbs he hit his head a wallop against the rafter. He cursed it and had a kind of thought that the place had got smaller. As he went from the door he struck his brow against the lintel hard enough to beat down the house. What is come to me, he roared in his pains; and looking into his field there were his five cows and his bullock no bigger than sheep--will ye believe that, then--and his score of ewes no bigger than rabbits, mind it now, and it was not all, for the very jackdaws were no bigger than chafers and the neat little wood was no more account than a grove of raspberry bushes. Away he goes to the surgeon's to have drops put in his eyes for he feared the blindness was coming on him, but on his return there was his bullock no bigger than an old boot, and his cabin had wasted to the size of a bird-cage."

Peter leaned forward, for the boys were quiet, and consumed a deal of porter. And the Highland man asked him, "Well, what happened!"

"Oh, he just went up to his cabin and kicked it over the hedge as you might an old can, and then he strolled off to another corner of the world, Neal Carlin did, whistling 'The Lanty Girl.'"

Tom Toole's friend spoke to Peter Mullane. "Did ye say it was in the Galtee Mountains that the young fellow met the lady?"

"In the Galtee Mountains," said Peter.

"To the Galtee Mountains let us be going, Tom Toole," cried the little old man, "Come on now, there'll be tidings in it!"

So off they drove, and when they had driven a day and slept a couple of nights they were there, and they came to a place where the rivers do be rushing, and there was a rowan tree, but no lady on it.

"What will we do now, Tom Toole," says the old man.

"We'll not stint it," says he, and they searched by night and by day looking for a person who would give them their youth again. They sold the chaise for some guineas and the pony for a few more, and they were walking among the hills for a thousand days, but never a dust of fortune did they discover. Whenever they asked a person to guide them they would be swearing at them or they would jeer.

"Well, may a good saint stretch your silly old skins for ye!" said one.

"Thinking of your graves and travelling to the priest ye should be!" said one.

"The nails of your boots will be rusty and rotten searching for the like of that," said one.

"It's two quarts of black milk from a Kerry cow ye want," said one; "take a sup of that and you'll be young again!"

"Of black milk," said Tom Toole's friend, "where would you get that?"

The person said he would get a pull of it in the Comeragh Mountains, fifty miles away.

"Tom Toole," said the little old man, "It's what I'll do. I'll walk on to the Comeragh Mountains to see what I will see, and do you go on searching here, for to find that young girl would be better than forty guineas worth of blather. And when I find the cow I'll take my fill of a cup and bring you to it."

So they agreed upon it and the old man went away saying, "I'll be a score of days, no more. Good day, Tom Toole, good day!" much as an old crow might shout it to a sweep.

When he was gone Tom Toole journeyed about the world, and the day after he went walking to a fair. Along the road the little ass carts were dribbling into town from Fews and Carrigleena, when he saw a young girl in a field trying to secure an ass.

"Oi----, Oi----!" the girl was calling out to him, and he went in the field and helped her with the ass, which was a devil to capture, and it not wanting. She thanked him; she was a sweet slip of a colleen with a long fall of hair that the wind was easy with.

"'Tis warm!" she said to Tom Toole. "Begod, ma'am," says he to her quickly, taking his cue, "it is a hot day."

"Where are ye going, Tom Toole," she asked him, and he said:

"I am seeking a little contrivance, ma'am, that will let me enjoy the world and live easy in it. That is my aspiration."

"I'll give you what you are seeking," and she gave him a wee bottle with red juices in it.

"Indeed, ma'am, I'm obliged to ye," and he took her by the hand and wished her Good day and Good luck, and that he might meet her again.

When he got the elixir of youth he gave over his searching. He hid the bottle in his breast and went up into the mountains as high as he could go to bide the coming of the little old man. It is a queer thing but Tom Toole had never heard the name of him--it would be some place in the foreign corners of the world like Portugal that he had come from no doubt. Up he went; first there was rough pasture for bullocks, then fern and burnt furze, and then little but heather, and great rocks strewn about like shells, and sour brown streams coming from the bog. He wandered about for twenty days and the old man did not return, and for forty days he was still alone.

"The divil receive him, but I'll die against his return!" And Tom Toole pulled the wee bottle from his breast. He was often minded to lift the cork and take a sup of the elixir of youth. "But," says he, "it would be an unfriendly deed. Sure if I got me youth sudden I'd be off to the wonders of the land and leave that old fool roaming till the day of Judgment." And he would put the bottle away and wait for scores of days until he was sick and sorry with grieving. A thousand days he was on his lonely wanderings, soft days as mellow as cream, and hard days when it is ribs of iron itself you would want to stiffen you against the crack of the blast. His skimpy hair grew down to the lappet of his coat, very ugly he was, but the little stranger sheep of the mountain were not daunted when he moved by, and even the flibeens had the soft call for him. A thousand days was in it, and then he said:

"Good evening to my good luck. I've had my enough of this. Sure I'll despise myself for evermore if I wait the tide of another drifting day. It's to-night I'll sleep in a neat bed with a quilt of down over me heart, for I'm going to be young again."

He crept down the mountain to a neat little town and went in a room in the public to have a cup of porter. A little forlorn old man also came in from the road and sat down beside, and when they looked at each other they each let out a groan. "Glory be!" says he. "Glory be," cried Tom Toole, "its the good little man in the heel of it. Where are ye from?"

"From the mountains."

"And what fortune is in it, did ye find the farm?"

"Divil a clod."

"Nor the Kerry cow?"

"Divil a horn."

"Nor the good milk?"

"Divil a quart, and I that dry I could be drunk with the smell of it. Tom Toole, I have traipsed the high and the deep of this realm and believe you me it is not in it; the long and the wide of this realm ---- not in it." He kept muttering sadly, "Not in it."

"Me good little man," cried Tom Toole, "don't be havering like an old goat. Here it is! the fortune of the world!"

He took the wee bottle from his breast and shook it before his eyes. "The drops that 'ull give ye your youth as easy as shifting a shirt. Come, now, I've waited the long days to share wid ye, for I couldn't bring myself to desart a comrade who was ranging the wild regions for the likes of me. Many's the time I've lifted that cork, and thinks I: he's gone and soon I'll be going, so here goes. Divil a go was in it. I could not do it, not for silver and not for gold, and not for all the mad raging mackerel that sleep in the sea."

The little old stranger took the wee bottle in his two hands. He was but a quavering stick of a man now; half dead he was, and his name it is Martin O'Moore.

"Is it the rale stuff, Tom Toole?"

"From herself I got it," he said, and he let on to him about that sweet spoken young girl.

"Did she give you the directions on the head of it?"

"What directions is it?"

"The many drops is a man to drink!"

"No, but a good sup of it will do the little job."

"A good sup of it Tom Toole, a good sup of it, ay?" says he, unsqueezing the cork. "The elixir of youth, a good sup of it, says you, a good sup of it, a great good good sup of it!"

And sticking it into his mouth he drained the wee bottle of its every red drop. He stood there looking like a man in a fit, holding the empty bottle in his hand until Tom Toole took it from him with reproaches in his poor old eyes. But in a moment it was his very eyes he thought were deceiving him; not an inch of his skin but had the dew of fear on it, for the little old man began to change his appearance quick like the sand running through a glass or as fast as the country changes down under a flying swan.

"Mother o' God!" screamed Martin O'Moore, "its too fast backward I'm growing; dizzy, dizzy I am."

And indeed his bald head suddenly got the fine black hair grown upon it, the whiskers flew away from him and his face was young. He began to wear a strange old suit that suddenly got new, and he had grown down through a handsome pair of trousers and into the little knickerbockers of a boy before you could count a score. And he had a bit of a cold just then, though he was out of it in a twink, and he let a sneeze that burst a button off his breeches, a little tin button, which was all that ever was found of him. Smaller and smaller he fell away, like the dust in an hour glass, till he was no bigger than an acorn, and then devil a bit of him was left there at all.

Tom Toole was frightened at the quiet and the emptiness and he made to go away, but he turned in the doorway and stretching out his arms to the empty room he whispered, "The greed, the avarice, may hell pour all its buckets on your bad little heart! May----" But just then he caught sight of the cup of porter that Martin O'Moore had forgotten to drink, so he went back to drink his enough and then went out into the great roaring world where he walked from here to there until one day he came right back to his old asylum. He had been away for twenty years, he was an old man, very old indeed. And there was the man from Kilsheelan digging potatoes just inside the gates of the sunny garden.

"Tis warm!" said the traveller staring at him through the railings, but the man from Kilsheelan only said, "Come in, Tom Toole, is it staying or going ye are?"

FELIX TINCLER

FELIX TINCLER

The child was to have a birthday tomorrow and was therefore not uneasy about being late home from school this afternoon. He had lost his pencil case, a hollow long round thing it was, like a rolling-pin, only it had green and yellow rings painted upon it. He kept his marbles in it and so he was often in a trouble about his pencils. He had not tried very much to find the pencil case because the boys 'deludered' him--that's what his father always said. He had asked Heber Gleed if he had seen it--he had strange suspicions of that boy--but Heber Gleed had sworn so earnestly that the greengrocer opposite the school had picked it up, he had even "saw him do it," that Felix Tincler went into Mr. Gobbit's shop, and when the greengrocer lady appeared in answer to the ring of the door bell he enquired politely for his pencil case. She was tall and terrible with a squint and, what was worse, a large velvety mole with hairs sprouting from it. She immediately and with inexplicable fury desired him to flee from her greengrocer shop, with a threat of alternative castigation in which a flat iron and a red-hot pick-axe were to figure with unusual and unpleasant prominence. Well, he had run out of Mr. Gobbit's shop and there was Heber Gleed standing in the road giggling derisively at him. Felix walked on alone looking in the gutters and areas for his pencil case until he encountered another friendly boy who took him to dig in a garden where they grew castor-oil plants. When he went home it was late; as he ran along under the high wall of the orphanage that occupied one end of his street its harsh peevish bell clanged out six notes. He scampered past the great gateway under the dismal arch that always filled him with uneasiness, he never passed it without feeling the sad trouble that a prison might give. He stepped into his own pleasant home, a little mute, and a little dirty in appearance; but at six years of age in a home so comfortable and kind the eve of the day that is to turn you into seven is an occasion great enough to yield an amnesty for peccadilloes. His father was already in from work, he could hear him singing. He gave his mother the sprigs he had picked from the castor-oil plant and told her about the pencil case. The meal was laid upon the table, and while mother was gone into the kitchen to boil the water for tea he sat down and tried to smooth out the stiff creases in the white table cloth. His father was singing gaily in the scullery as he washed and shaved:--

High cockalorum, Charlie ate the spinach...,

He ceased for a moment to give the razor a vigorous stropping and then continued:--

High cockalorum, High cockalee....

Felix knew that was not the conclusion of the song. He listened, but for some moments all that followed was the loud crepitation of a razor searching a stubborn beard and the sigh of the kettle. Then a new vigour seized the singer:--

But mother brought the pandy down And bate the gree....

Again that rasping of chin briefly intervened, but the conclusion of the cropping was soon denoted by the strong rallentando of the singer

... dy image, High cock--alorum, High cock--a--lee.

Mrs. Tincler brought in the teapot and her husband followed her with his chin tightly shaven but blue, crying with mock horror:

"Faylix, my son! that is seven years old tomorrow! look at him, Mary, the face of him and the hands of him! I didn't know there was a bog in this parish; is it creeping in a bog you have been?"

The boy did not blench at his father's spurious austerity, he knew he was the soul of kindness and fun.

"Go wash yourself at the sink," interposed his mother. Kevin Tincler, taking his son by the hand, continued with mocking admonishment: "All the fine copybooks of the world that you've filled up with that blather about cleanliness and holiness, the up strokes very thin and the down strokes very thick! What was it, Mary, he has let it all out of his mind?"

"Go and wash, Felix, and come quickly and have your tea," laughed Mary Tincler.

"Ah, but what was it--in that grand book of yours?"

The boy stood, in his short buff tunic, regarding his father with shy amusement. The small round clear-skinned face was lovely with its blushes of faint rose; his eyes were big and blue, and his head was covered with thick curling locks of rich brown hair.

"Cleanliness comes next to godliness," he replied.

"Does it so, indeed?" exclaimed his father. "Then you're putting your godliness in a pretty low category!"

"What a nonsense," said Mary Tincler as the boy left them.

The Irishman and his dark-eyed Saxon wife sat down at the table waiting for their son.

"There's a bit of a randy in the Town Gardens tonight, Mary, dancing on the green, fireworks! When the boy is put to bed we'll walk that way."

Mary expressed her pleasure, but then declared she could not leave the boy alone in his bed.

"He'll not hurt, Mary, he has no fear in him. Give him the birthday gift before we go. Whisht, he's coming!"

The child, now clean and handsome, came to his chair and looked up at his father sitting opposite to him.

"Holy Mother!" exclaimed the admiring parent, "it's the neck of a swan he has. Faylix Tincler, may you live to be the father of a bishop!"

After tea his father took him up on the downs for an hour. As they left their doorway a group of the tidy but wretched orphans was marching back into their seminary, little girls moving in double columns behind a stiff-faced woman. They were all dressed alike in garments of charity exact as pilchards. Gray capes, worsted stockings, straw hats with blue bands round them, and hard boots. The boys were coming in from a different direction, but all of them, even the minutest, were clad in corduroy trousers and short jackets high throated like a gaoler's. This identity of garment was contrary to the will of God, for he had certainly made their pinched bodies diverse enough. Some were short, some tall, dark, fair, some ugly, others handsome. The sight of them made Felix unhappy, he shrank into himself, until he and his father had slipped through a gap in a hedge and were going up the hill that stretched smoothly and easily almost from their very door. The top of the down hereabouts was quiet and lovely, but a great flank of it two miles away was scattered over with tiny white figures playing very deliberately at cricket. Pleasant it was up there in the calm evening, and still bright, but the intervening valley was full of grey ungracious houses, allotments, railway arches, churches, graveyards, and schools. Worst of all was the dull forbidding aspect of the Orphanage down beyond the roof of their own house.

They played with a ball and had some wrestling matches until the declining day began to grow dim even on the hill and the fat jumbo clouds over the town were turning pink. If those elephants fell on him--what would they do? Why they'd mix him up like ice-cream! So said his father.

"Do things ever fall out of the sky?"

"Rain," said Mr. Tincler.

"Yes, I know."

"Stars--maybe."

"Where do they go?"

"Oh they drop on the hills but ye can never find 'em."

"Don't Heaven ever?"

"What drop down! No," said Mr. Tincler, "it don't. I have not heard of it doing that, but maybe it all just stoops down sometimes, Faylix, until it's no higher than the crown of your hat. Let us be going home now and ye'll see something this night."

"What is it?"

"Wait, Faylix, wait!"

As they crossed from the hill Mary, drawing down the blinds, signalled to them from the window.

"Come along, Felix," she cried, and the child ran into the darkened room. Upon the table was set a little church of purest whiteness. Kevin had bought it from an Italian hawker. It had a wonderful tall steeple and a cord that came through a hole and pulled a bell inside. And that was not all; the church was filled with light that was shining through a number of tiny arched windows, blue, purple, green, violet, the wonderful windows were everywhere. Felix was silent with wonder; how could you get a light in a church that hadn't a door! then Mary lifted the hollow building from the table; it had no floor, and there was a night-light glowing in one of her patty-pans filled with water. The church was taken up to bed with him in the small chamber next his parents' room and set upon a bureau. Kevin and Mary then went off to the 'bit of devilment' in the town gardens.

Felix kept skipping from his bed, first to gaze at the church, and then to lean out of the window in his night-shift, looking for the lamplighter who would come to the street lamp outside. The house was the very last and the lamp was the very last lamp on one of the roads that led from the town and went poking out into the steady furze-covered downs. And as the lamp was the very last to be lit darkness was always half-fallen by the time the old man arrived at his journey's end. He carried a pole with a brass tube on its top. There were holes in the brass tube showing gleams of light. The pole rested upon his shoulders as he trudged along humming huskily.

"Here he is," cried Felix, leaning from the window and waving a white arm. The dull road, empty of traffic, dim as his mother's pantry by day, curved slightly, and away at the other end of the curve a jet of light had sprung into the gloom like a bright flower bursting its sheath; a black figure moved along towards him under the Orphanage wall. Other lamps blossomed with light and the lamplighter, approaching the Tinclers' lamp, thrust the end of his pole into the lantern, his head meanwhile craning back like the head of a horse that has been pulled violently backwards. He deftly turned the tap; with a tiny dull explosion that sounded like a doormat being beaten against the wall in the next street the lamp was lit and the face of the old man sprang into vague brilliance, for it was not yet utterly dark. Vague as the light was the neighbouring hills at once faded out of recognition and became black bulks of oblivion.

"Oi ... Oi ..." cried the child, clapping his hands. The old man's features relaxed, he grunted in relief, the pole slid down in his palm. As the end of it struck the pavement a sharp knock he drew an old pipe from his pocket and lit it quite easily, although one of his hands was deficient of a thumb and some fingers. He was about to travel back into the sparkling town when Felix called to him:

"Soloman! Soloman!"

"Goo an to yer bed, my little billycock, or you'll ketch a fever."

"No, but what's this?" Felix was pointing to the ground below him. The old man peered over the iron railings into the front garden that had just sufficient earth to cherish four deciduous bushes, two plants of marigold, and some indeterminate herbs. In the dimness of their shadows a glowworm beamed clearly.

"That?" exclaimed he; "O s'dripped off the moon, yas, right off, moon's wasting away, you'll see later on if you'm watch out for it, s'dripped off the moon, right off." Chuckling, he blew out the light at the end of his pole, and went away, but turned at intervals to wave his hand towards the sky, crying "Later on, right off!" and cackling genially until he came to a tavern.