es between, the moral of a chain-harrow, you
couldn't mistake it. Sure it's proud of it anybody might be."

Probably Nicholas was very proud of this first heir of his invention,
diagrams, and all. Whether it ever had any successors seems doubtful;
certainly none of them arrived at his old home. But his Treatise is
still safely stowed away there in a corner of the dresser. Most likely
it is the only copy of "O'Beirne on Conic Sections" existing in Ireland;
and who would expect to find it lodged in a smoke-stained cabin on the
wild bogland between Duffclane and Lisconnel?

CHAPTER IX

BOYS' WAGES

One leaden-roofed morning in the winter after his brother Nicholas had
gone to the States, young Dan O'Beirne was in rather low spirits, and
rather out of humour. It was not unnatural that such a mood should
occasionally overtake him, since he had reached apparently a straight
and monotonous tract of road, which would have looked interminable to
the eyes of seventeen had not his household companions been now all
declining folk, whose presence brought under his constant observation
the last stages of "a long journey in December gone." Half a century or
so of smithy work, even with some unlicensed doctoring and illicit
distilling thrown in, was not by any means the future that he would have
liked his oracle to predict for him. And though he forecast it
accurately enough without the intervention of any soothsaying, this no
more helped him to avoid it than if he had been an old-world tragical
hero, whose friends were seeking by vain devices to circumvent the
promulgated decrees of his destiny. Dan, indeed, took no steps of that
sort. For him, as for most of us, the skirts of circumstance were as the
meshes of the net in which Fate holds us, and his evil star was an
object of which it seemed very hard to get a good grip. I have always
wondered myself how people set about it. At any rate, Dan continued to
walk under his; that is to say, if it were really bad luck that kept him
at the forge. Upon this point there might be differences of opinion.
Terence Kilfoyle, for instance, who dropped in to escape from a
snow-shower in the course of that morning, would not, evidently, have
taken such a view. For when Dan said something grumblingly about
Lisconnel being "a slack sort of a place, where one didn't get much
chance of doin' anythin' at all;" he replied, "Bedad now, if I'd the
fine business you and your grandfather have to be