ers'
ejaculatory piety would have done credit to a revival meeting.

"Well, well, I'll say nothing for her but that she's quare!" said the
old landlady, hurrying in from her hens to attend to these rarer birds
whom fortune had sent to her net.

Mrs. Pat's roan cob had attacked and defeated the fourteen Irish miles
with superfluous zeal, and there were still several minutes before the
hounds could be reasonably expected on the scene. The soda was bad, the
whisky was worse. The sound of a riddle came in with the sunshine
through the open door, and our friends strolled out into the street to
see what was going on. In the centre of a ring of onlookers an old man
was playing, and was, moreover, dancing to his own music, and dancing
with serious, incongruous elegance. Round and round the circle he footed
it, his long thin legs twinkling in absolute accord with the complicated
jig that his long thin fingers were ripping out of the cracked and
raucous fiddle. A very plain, stout young woman, with a heavy red face
and discordantly golden hair, shuffled round after him in a clumsy
pretence of dancing, and as the couple faced Mrs. Pat she saw that the
old man was blind. Steam was rising from his domed bald head, and his
long black hair danced on his shoulders. His face was pale and strange
and entirely self-absorbed. Had Mrs. Pat been in the habit of
instituting romantic parallels between the past and the present she
might have thought of the priests of Baal who danced in probably just
such measures round the cromlechs in the hills above Carnfother; as she
wasn't, she remarked merely that this was all very well, but that the
old maniac would have to clear out of that before they brought Pilot
round, or there'd be trouble.

There was trouble, but it did not arise from Pilot, but from the
yellow-haired woman's pertinacious demands for money from Mrs. Naylor.
She had the offensive fluency that comes of long practice in alternate
wheedling and bullying, and although Major Booth had given her a
shilling she continued to pester Mrs. Pat for a further largesse. But,
as it happened, Mrs. Pat's purse was in her covert coat in the dog-cart,
and Mrs. Pat's temper was ever within easy reach, and on being too
closely pressed for the one she exhibited the other with a decision that
contracted the ring of bystanders to hear the fun, and loosened the
yellow-haired woman's language, till unfortunate Major Booth felt that
if he could get her off