they could not carry it any farther, and they decided to leave it
with their friends the Leprecauns. Seumas Beg gave the taps on the tree
trunk which they had learned, and in a moment the Leprecaun whom they
knew came up.

"We have brought this, sir," said Seumas. But he got no further, for the
instant the Leprecaun saw the crock he threw his arms around it and wept
in so loud a voice that his comrades swarmed up to see what had happened
to him, and they added their laughter and tears to his, to which chorus
the children subjoined their sympathetic clamour, so that a noise of
great complexity rang through all the Gort.

But the Leprecauns' surrender to this happy passion was short. Hard on
their gladness came remembrance and consternation; and then repentance,
that dismal virtue, wailed in their ears and their hearts. How could
they thank the children whose father and protector they had delivered
to the unilluminated justice of humanity? that justice which demands not
atonement but punishment; which is learned in the Book of Enmity but
not in the Book of Friendship; which calls hatred Nature, and Love a
conspiracy; whose law is an iron chain and whose mercy is debility
and chagrin; the blind fiend who would impose his own blindness; that
unfruitful loin which curses fertility; that stony heart which would
petrify the generations of man; before whom life withers away appalled
and death would shudder again to its tomb. Repentance! they wiped the
inadequate ooze from their eyes and danced joyfully for spite. They
could do no more, so they fed the children lovingly and carried them
home.

The Thin Woman had baked three cakes. One of these she gave to each of
the children and one she kept herself, whereupon they set out upon their
journey to Angus Og.

It was well after midday when they started. The fresh gaiety of
the morning was gone, and a tyrannous sun, whose majesty was almost
insupportable, forded it over the world. There was but little shade
for the travellers, and, after a time, they became hot and weary and
thirsty--that is, the children did, but the Thin Woman, by reason of her
thinness, was proof against every elemental rigour, except hunger, from
which no creature is free.

She strode in the centre of the road, a very volcano of silence,
thinking twenty different thoughts at the one moment, so that the
urgency of her desire for utterance kept her terribly quiet; but against
this crust of quietude there was