The Rat-Pit

Two voices were speaking inside a cabin on the coast of Donegal. The season was mid-winter; the time an hour before the dawn of a cheerless morning. Within the hovel there was n...

To all souls who are sensitive to moods of any kind, whether joyful or sorrowful, there comes now and again a delicious hour when it is not night and no longer day; the timid tw...

Often a youth leaves Donegal and goes out into the world, does well for a time, writes frequently home to his own people, sends them a sum of money in every letter (which shows...

When one is leaving home every familiar object seems to take on a different aspect and becomes almost strange and foreign. The streets, houses, and landscape which you have gaze...

Outside, the women who had taken up their stand at dawn were still changing their bundles of stockings from one hand to another and sheltering them under their shawls whenever t...

A dead weight lay on Norah’s heart; the child beneath her heart was a burden. But even yet (it was now the month of August) those in Micky’s Jim’s squad did not suspect her cond...

The dance came to an end, and, worn out with their exertions, the women picked up their shawls and wrapped them round their shoulders. Then getting their bundles they went towar...

Norah travelled through the streets all day, looking for her friend and fearing that every eye was fixed on her, that everybody knew the secret which she tried to conceal. Her f...

Once a week, on Friday, Sheila took a bundle of finished shirts to the clothes-merchant’s office. Seven months after Norah’s arrival Sheila went out one day with her bundle and...

When the old woman left her, Norah sat for a while buried in thought, her scissors lying on one knee, one hand hanging idly by her side. The boy was very ill, the cough hardly l...

New potatoes were urgently needed and the potato merchant told Jim to get as many as possible dug on the first afternoon. No sooner had the squad come to the farmhouse than they...

For two days and nights the neighbours came in, prayed by the bedside, drank bowls of tea, smoked long white clay pipes and departed, only to return later and renew the same per...

In a week’s time the squad was to break up: Gourock Ellen, Annie and the two men who joined at Greenock, were leaving for Glasgow; Dermod Flynn who, despite the initial success,...

A heavy fall of rain came with the dawn, and the Clyde was a dreary smudge of grey when the boat made fast alongside Greenock Quay and discharged its passengers. Again the derri...

A year had passed; the potato season was over, but old Morrison, who was making considerable improvements in his steading, had kept the squad to work for him two months longer t...

Alec Morrison was walking along a sheltered lane towards the house, his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets, a cigarette between his lips, and his mind dwelling on several thing...

The hour was half-past ten in the forenoon. In the village (“town” the peasantry called it) of Greenanore two rows of houses ran parallel along a miry street which measured east...

A week passed; the hour was twelve o’clock on a Saturday night. The clocks were striking midnight but the streets were still crowded with people. A boat could be heard hooting o...

On the night of Norah’s arrival at the steading Alec Morrison slept well, but wakened with the dawn and sat up betimes. He was very pleased with himself and his position at the...

Micky’s Jim was telling the story of a fight in which he had taken part and how he knocked down a man twice as heavy as himself with one on the jaw. Owen Kelly, Gourock Ellen, D...

James Ryan’s cabin lay within half a mile of the sea, and his croft, a long strip of rock-bespattered, sapless land, ran down to the very shore. But this strip of land was so na...

Towards the end of the following year a great event took place in Frosses. It was reported that a registered letter addressed to “James Ryan, Esquire, Meenalicknalore” was lying...

The light on the mantelpiece grew faint, flickered and was going out; the wick, short and draggled, no longer reached the oil. The fire died down and only one red spark could be...

The address on the letter which Norah received from Sheila Carrol was “47, Ann Street, Cowcaddens,” but shortly after the letter had been written the Glasgow Corporation decided...

Several more neighbours, men, women, and children, were now coming in. With eyes fixed straight ahead they approached the corpse, went down on their knees on the wet floor by th...

For the rest of that evening, between short periods of sleep, one bright vision merged with another in front of Norah’s eyes, and in every vision the face of Dermod Flynn stood...

The May of 1903 came round, and on every twelfth day of May the young boys and girls of Donegal start for the hiring fair of Strabane. The rumour went that Dermod Flynn was goin...

They stepped on the dry and dusty Derry streets, the whole fifteen of them, with their bundles over their shoulders or dangling from their arms. Norah Ryan, homesickness heavy o...

In the morning Norah was in a raging fever. She spoke in her delirium of many things, prattling like a child about the sea and curraghs of Frosses going out beyond Trienna Bar i...

They came and went, days monotonously slow, each bearing with it its burden of sorrows and regrets, of fear and unhappiness. The life of the two women was ever the same: out of...

On the Monday of the week following Norah Ryan went to school again. She had been there for two years already but left off going when she became an adept at the needles. Master...

Time wore on and Norah lived for the most part in a world of fancy, spoke to imaginary individuals and at moments addressed Ellen as Sheila Carrol or as Maire a Glan. Sometimes...

“It is a long while now since you heard a word from me. I often intended to write to you, but my hand was not used to the pen; it comes foreign to my fingers. I am not like you,...

To Norah Ryan the days passed by, at first remorselessly slow, burdened with longings and regrets, clogged with cares and sorrows which pressed heavily on her young heart. Each...

“The clock goes faster now than it did the first night I was here,” she said. “I suppose they’ll all be goin’ to bed in Frosses now, or maybe sayin’ the rosary. Are ye tired, No...