A Lost Recruit

In the room the more familiar odour of turf-smoke was overborne by a crisp smell of baking, and Mrs. Doherty picked up a steaming plate which had been keeping warm on the hearth. "Isn't that somethin' like, now?" she said, setting it on the table triumphantly. "Rale grand they turned out this time, niver a scorch on the whole of them. I was afeard me hand might maybe ha' got out o' mixin' them,'t is so long since I had e'er a one for you; but sure I bought a half-stone of seconds wid the price of the little hin, and that'll make a good few, so it will, jewel avic, and then we must see after some more. Take one of the thick bits, honey."

Probably most of us have had experience of the unceremonious methods which Fate often chooses when communicating to us important arrangements. We have seen by what a little seeming triviality of an incident she may intimate that our cherished hope has been struck dead, or that the execution of some other decree has turned the current of our life away. It is sometimes as if she contemptuously sent us a grotesque and dwarfish messenger, who makes grimaces at us while telling us the bad news, which is ungenerous and scarcely dignified. So we need not wonder if Mick Doherty had to read the death-warrant of his darling ambition in a pile of three-cornered griddle-cakes. At any rate, he did read it there swiftly as clearly. Most likely he knew it all before the plate was set on the table, and his heart had already gone down with a run when he replied to his mother's commendations that they looked first-rate. As he indorsed this praise with what appetite he could, being, indeed, mechanically hungry, the uppermost thought in his mind was how he should at once let his mother understand that she had got the price she hoped for her pet hen; and after considering for a while, he said: "Did you ever notice the quare sort of lane-over the turf-stack out there's takin' on it? I question hadn't we done righter to have took a leveller bit of ground for under it. But I was thinkin' this mornin'"--of what a different subject he had been thinking!--"that next year I'd thry buildin' it agin' the back o' th' ould shed, where there does be ne'er a slant at all."

"Ay, sure that 'ud be grand," said Mrs. Doherty, much more elated than if she had heard of a large fortune; "you couldn't find an iliganter place for it in the width of this world." She felt quite satisfied that her craftily timed treat had dispelled the dreaded danger, which actually was the case in a way. But if Mick would stay at home with her, she was perfectly content to suppose that she came after a griddle-cake in his estimation. Her relief made her unusually talkative; but Mick was reflecting between his answers how he must now tell Paddy Joyce that they were never to be comrades after all.

He went out on this mission immediately after supper. The sun had gone down, and the cold clearness left showed things plainly, yet was not light. In front of the cabin-rows the small children of the place were screeching over their final romp and quarrel, as they did every evening; fowls and goats and pigs were settling down for the night with the squawks and bleats and squeals which also took place every evening; on the brown-hollowed grass-bank between Colgan's and O'Reilly's, old Morissy, the blind fiddler, was feebly scraping and twangling, according to his custom every evening, and, for that matter, all day long. Even the wisps of straw and scraps of paper blowing down the middle of the wide roadway seemed to have whirled over and over and caught in the rough patches of stone just so, as often as the sun had set. Close to the Joyces', Mick met Peter Maclean driving home a brood of ducklings. A broad and burly man, who says "shoo-shoo" to a high-piping cluster of tiny yellow ducks, and flourishes a long willow wand to keep them from straggling out of their compacted trot, does undoubtedly present rather an absurd appearance; yet I cannot explain why the sight should have seemed to prick like a sting through the wide weary disgust which Mick experienced as he stood in the twilit boreen waiting for Paddy to come out. He had scarcely a grunt to exchange for Peter's cheerful "Fine evenin'." What does it signify in a universal desert whether evenings be fine or foul? Altogether, it was a bad time; and Mick acted wisely in taking precautions against its recurrence, especially as the obstacles which had confronted him nearly two years back were now more hope-baffling than ever. For the intervening months had not brought the desirable "thrifle more wit" to his unsteady brother Thady, who, on the contrary, was developing into one of those people whose good-for-nothingness is taken as a matter of course even by themselves; and a bolt was thus, so to speak, drawn across Mick's locked door.

He set off betimes on his long ramble. It was a cloudless July morning--the noon of summer by air and light as well as by the calendar. Even the barest tracts of the bog-land, which vary their aspect as little as may be from shifting season to season, were flecked with golden furze-blossom, and whitened with streaming tufts of fairy-cotton, and sun-warmed herbs were fragrant underfoot. Mick rather hurried over this stage of his "stravade," partly because he foresaw a blazing hot day, and he wished to be among more broken ground, where there are sheltered hollows scooped in the "knockawns," and cool patches under their bushes and boulders. He entered the region of these things before his shadow had shrunk to its briefest; for not so very far beyond Kilmacrone the smooth floor of the big bog crumples itself into crusts and ridges, as if it had caught the trick from its bounding ocean; and the nearer it comes to the shore the higher it heaves itself, until at last it is cut short by a sheer cliff wall, with storm-stunted brambles and furzes cowering along the edge, fathoms above a base-line of exuberant weed and foam. The long sea-frontage of this rock-rampart is fissured by only a few narrow clefts. On the left hand, facing oceanward, the coast is a labyrinth of mountain fiords, straits, and bays, where you may see great craggy shoulders and domed summits waver in their crystal calm at the flick of a gull's dipping wing, or add to the terror of the tempest as they start out black and unmoved behind rifts of swirling mists. On the right there is the same fretwork of land and water, but wrought in less high relief--a tract of lonely strands, where shells and daisies whiten the grass, and pink-belled creepers trail, entangled with tawny-podded wrack, across the shingle. You are apt thereabouts to happen on clattering pebble-banks and curling foam when you are apparently deep among meadows and corn-land, or to come on sturdy green potato-drills round some corner where you had confidently supposed the unstable furrows of the sea. And the intricate ground-plan of the district must be long studied before you can always feel sure whether the low-shelving swarded edges by which you are walking frame salt or fresh water.

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