ssession of a skill as enviable as it was beneficent. Beside it
hammering out horseshoes appeared a tedious and aimless pursuit, and he
sometimes thumped away in a very vague dream of one of these days
finding himself more congenially employed. Now, however, it was
perfectly clear to him that if Nicholas "took off wid himself to get
scholarship," his own portion must be to stick to the anvil. For
otherwise supposing his grandfather got past his work, or anything else
happened him, there would be nobody left to look after Dan's great-aunt,
who was not very old, and his great-grandmother, who was such a
wonderful age entirely that no one could say how much longer she mighn't
live. Even the wildest of dreams are not quite easy to scare away, and
it was this chiefly that marred his content with Mr. Polymathers's
testamentary dispositions. Still, when he heard his grandfather's
doubts, and saw his brother's downcast looks, he became almost as
anxious as Nicholas himself that the neighbours might talk away the old
man's scruples and allow the will to stand.

Thus there were many eager hopes and fears lodged that evening in the
O'Beirnes' living-room, which was all throbbing with fire-light, as the
neighbours began to drop in talking out of the dark. People are apt to
speak loudly when they get their breath after a battle with snowy
blasts; and the sound of voices came strangely into the stillness close
by, where there was only a cold glimmer of candle-light, and nobody
conversing, unless we count old Bridget O'Beirne, who had slipped in to
repeat a few prayers, and say to herself with a sort of grudging
wistfulness that everybody else was getting away. Then she came back to
her world again, and mended the crumbling red-hot bank with sods out of
her apron, and shovelled up the snow-balls shaken off their visitors'
clogged brogues, that they might not melt into mud patches on the floor.

To Dan and Nicholas, looking on from opposite corners, it seemed a long
while before anything to the purpose was said. Everybody had to comment
upon the snow, and Paddy Ryan's remark was that "if it kep' on at it
that-a-way, they'd be hard enough set to get through the dhrifts be the
day of the buryin'." This caused Mrs. Carbery to remember how she "had
been at a one up in the County Cavan, where the gate into the
buryin'-ground was all blocked up, so that the whole of them had to lep
over what would be be rights a ten-fut wall. And if they did