n a more experienced traveller, he might have noticed some signs
that things were, as Judy Ahern had said, out of joint. It was
harvest-time, and the weather was not wet, though dull and chilly, but
nobody was working in the fields. Nothing seemed to move in them, as
they lay deserted, except trails of a white mist that drifted low among
the furrows, where the potato-haulms looked strangely discoloured,
speckled and blackened, as if a shrivelling flame had run through them
all, charring and strewing pale ashes. The air was full of a peculiar
odour, heavy and acrid, the very life-breath of decay. The roads were
deserted too. For miles nobody would be met, and then a small stationary
crowd of people would appear, collected it would seem without any more
purpose than cattle huddled together in a storm, and as dumb as they,
not giving so much as a "fine mornin'" to the passer-by. Other crowds
they fell in with now and again, pacing slowly along, and these always
had a heavy burden carried among them, and sometimes women keening.
Once the car-horse shied violently at some dark, long thing, that was
stretched out by the footpath, and Mrs. Duff crossed herself and said,
"God be good to us," and the driver said without looking off his reins:
"He's lyin' there since yisterday, and I seen another above about the
four-roads, and I comin' past this mornin'."

Con did not give much heed to these incidents; but one scene in his
journey impressed him strongly. It was at the small town where they
slept the night, and it happened while they waited in the broad main
street next morning for their car to pick them up, as Mrs. Duff
travelled by a rather disjointed system of lifts in vehicles that were
going her road. There were few people about, and Con was intensely
admiring a gaudy tea-chest in the window of the shop before which they
stood, when a great roar began to swell up round the corner, with a
lumbering of wheels heard fitfully through it. Presently a large crowd
came struggling into sight; a street full of men, women, and children,
surrounding a blue, red-wheeled cart, piled high with dusty-looking
white sacks. Half-a-dozen dark-uniformed policemen were trying to haul
on the horse, and keep between the cart and the crowd, whose shout
generally sounded like: "Divil a fut its to quit--divil a fut." It was a
crowd that looked as if it had somehow got more than its due share of
glittering eyes--in mistake, apparently, for other things