ion outside McNeight's public, when what should
come familiarly round the corner but Thady himself, who had stopped
behind, foregoing his assisted passage, because the divil a fut of him
would stir out of it so long as there might be e'er a chance at all of
Judy coming back. Whereupon it recurred vividly to her mind how she had
just called him, among other things, "a great dirty, good-for-nothin'
hulk of a poltroon," and had expressed a hope that she might never again
see sign nor sight of any such a hijjis baste hobblin' anywheres on her
road; to which he had rejoined that she might go to blazes and welcome
for anythin' _he_ had to say agin it, and that bedad a crosser-tempered
ould weasel of a wizened-up ould witch wouldn't be apt to land there in
a hurry. At last, being very tired, she escaped for a while from these
fluctuations of wrath and ruth into a nook of sleep, but the bitter cold
routed her out of it soon after sunrise, and she took the road again,
cramped and numbed, in the teeth of the gusty showers that were still
stalking over the bogland.

As she went, the hills beyond Sallinbeg rose up frowning before her
through rifts in the cold white fleece trailed and knotted about their
front of harsh purple gloom, on which the streaks and patches of ravines
and fences and fields, with here and there a cabin gleaming, began by
degrees to be traced dimly as if a fragment of the countryside were
reflected on a dark thunder-cloud. But she was now thinking more about
her journey's end than about anything she saw on the way thither--the
bleak many-windowed workhouse at Moynalone that she well knew must be
presently her fate. Since she had thrown herself on her own resources,
three ha'pence was all she could command for ransom from the durance
into which self-preservation assuredly would not forbear to betray her.
Experience gave a dreary definiteness to anticipation. Once again she
would morning by morning awaken in the grim whitewashed ward to all the
old hardness and roughness of existence with a tyrannous restraint and
monotony superadded. She said to herself, it is true, that she might as
well be in one place as another, since she would not have Thady to go
along with anymore--the black-hearted, thievin' miscreant--and if she
had as much wit in her as an ould water-rat, she'd just creep away into
some dry ditch, and be done with the whole of it. Still, as she did come
short of that wisdom, the alternative continued t