s, which at first used to make him red and
uncomfortable. He has half come to believe in the secret hoard his
wife says old Jim is accumulating.

Meanwhile, the land is as poor as ever, for James has no money to
spend in the necessary drainage that should make it dry and sweet. His
share scarcely pays for his keep, and his money for clothes and books
and tools is little indeed. His shabbiness is another offence to Mrs.
Patrick. She has declared to some of her intimates that she will force
James yet to take his face out of her house, and go live on his money
elsewhere. She expresses her contempt to her husband for his brother's
selfishness in holding his share in the farm, when he must be
already, as she puts it, 'rotten with money.' Patrick is too much
afraid of his wife to tell her now what he has so long kept a secret
from her.

But James, in his high attic, looks upon the mountains and the sky,
and shakes off from him with a superb gesture the memory of her
taunts.

XII

THE MAN WHO WAS HANGED

It was outside the town of Ballinscreen, on the country side of the
bridge over the Maeve, that Mr. Ramsay-Stewart was shot at in the
League days, and that the shot struck a decent boy, Larry Byrne, a
widow's only son, and killed him stone dead. The man that fired the
shot would rather have cut off his right hand than hurt an innocent
creature like Larry,--but there, when you go meddling with sin and
wickedness, as often as not you plunge deeper into it than you could
ever have foreseen. Anyhow the old women, who turn out everything to
show the Lord's goodness, said it was plain to see that Larry was
fitter to go than his master, and that was why the shot glanced by Mr.
Stewart's ear to lodge in the poor coachman's brain as he leant
forward, whipping up his horse with all his might, to get out of reach
of that murderous shower of shot.

Now a few months later all you comfortable people that sit reading
your newspapers by an English fire, and thinking what a terrible place
Ireland must be to live in, were comforted by the news that the man
who shot Larry Byrne was swinging for it in the county jail at
Ballinscreen. But you never made such a mistake in your born lives.
That man was out on the mountains in the bleak, bitter winter weather,
was in hiding all day in the caves up there in the clouds on top of
Croghan, and by night was coming down to the lonely mountain
farmhouses to beg what would keep the life in h