were
telling me. Filled up it is and brimmed to the very brink.

_Staffy:_ His heart and his soul gone into it. He is death on that
gallon of gold.

_Delia:_ He would give leave to the poorhouse to bury him, if he
could but put in his will they should leave it down with his bones.

_Staffy:_ A man could live an easy life surely and that much being
in the house.

_Delia:_ There is no more grasping man within the four walls of
the world. A strange thing he turning to be so ugly and prone to
misery, where he was reared along with myself. I have the first
covetous person yet to meet I would like! I never would go thrusting
after gold, I to get all Lord Clanricarde's estate.

_Ralph:_ She never would, only at a time she might have her own
means spent and consumed.

_Staffy:_ The house is very racked beside what it was. The
hungriest cabin in the whole ring of Connemara would not show out so
empty and so bare.

_Delia: (Taking up a jug.)_ No sign in this vessel of anything
that would leave a sign. I'll go bail he takes his tea in a black
state, and the milk to be rotting in the churn.

_Ralph: (Handling a coat and hat hanging on a nail.)_ That's a
queer cut of a hat. That now should have been a good top-coat in its
time.

_Delia:_ For pity's sake! That is the top-coat and the hat he used
to be wearing and he riding his long-tailed pony to every racecourse
from this to the Curragh of Kildare. A good class of cloth it should
be to last out through seventeen years.

_Staffy:_ The time he was young and fundless he had not a bad
reaching hand. He never was thrifty but lavish till he came into the
ownership of the land. It is as if his luck left him, he growing
timid at the time he had means to lose.

_Delia:_ Every horse he would back at that time it would surely
win all before it. I saw the people thronging him one time, taking
him in their arms for joy, and the winnings coming into his hand. It
is likely they ran out through the fingers as swift nearly as they
flowed in.

_Staffy:_ He grew to be very dark and crabbed from the time of the
father's death. His mind was on his halfpenny ever since.

_Delia: (Looking at dresser.)_ Spiders' webs heaped in ridges the
same as windrows in a bleach of hay. What now is that there above on
the upper shelf?

_Ralph: (Taking it from top shelf.)_ It is but a pack of cards.

_Staffy:_ They should maybe be the very same that brought him
profit in his wild days. He always ha