ting parcels in
it, taking them from under her cloak._)

BARTLEY. And it's a great expense for a poor man to be buried in
America.

MRS. FALLON. Never fear, Bartley Fallon, but I'll give you a good
burying the day you'll die.

BARTLEY. Maybe it's yourself will be buried in the graveyard of
Cloonmara before me, Mary Fallon, and I myself that will be dying
unbeknownst some night, and no one a-near me. And the cat itself
may be gone straying through the country, and the mice squealing
over the quilt.

MRS. FALLON. Leave off talking of dying. It might be twenty years
you'll be living yet.

BARTLEY (_with a deep sigh_). I'm thinking if I'll be living at the
end of twenty years, it's a very old man I'll be then!

MRS. TARPEY (_turns and sees them_). Good-morrow, Bartley Fallon;
good-morrow, Mrs. Fallon. Well, Bartley, you'll find no cause for
complaining to-day; they are all saying it was a good fair.

BARTLEY (_raising his voice_). It was not a good fair, Mrs. Tarpey.
It was a scattered sort of a fair. If we didn't expect more, we
got less. That's the way with me always: whatever I have to sell
goes down and whatever I have to buy goes up. If there's ever any
misfortune coming to this world, it's on myself it pitches, like
a flock of crows on seed potatoes.

MRS. FALLON. Leave off talking of misfortunes, and listen to Jack
Smith that is coming the way, and he singing.

(_Voice of JACK SMITH heard singing_)

I thought, my first love,
There'd be but one house between you and me.
And I thought I would find
Yourself coaxing my child on your knee.
Over the tide
I would leap with the leap of a swan.
Till I came to the side
Of the wife of the red-haired man!

(JACK SMITH _comes in; he is a red-haired man, and is carrying a
hayfork._)

MRS. TARPEY. That should be a good song if I had my hearing.

MRS. FALLON (_shouting_). It's "The Red-haired Man's Wife."

MRS. TARPEY. I know it well. That's the song that has a skin on
it!

(_She turns her back to them and goes on arranging her apples._)

MRS. FALLON. Where's herself, Jack Smith?

JACK SMITH. She was delayed with her washing; bleaching the
clothes on the hedge she is, and she daren't leave them, with all
the tinkers that do be passing to the fair. It isn't to the fair
I came myself, but up to the Five-Acre Meadow I'm going, where I
have a contract for the hay. We'll get a share of it into tramps
to-day.

(_He lays down hayfork an