“Throwing open her door, she said, ‘What would ye wish for most in the world, Andy dear. Tell me an’ your wish’ll come true,’ says she. A peddler was crying his wares out in the lane. ‘Lanterns, tin lanterns!’ cried the peddler. ‘I wish I had one of thim lanterns,’ says Andy, careless and bendin’ over to get a coal for his pipe, when, lo and behold, there was a lantern in his hand.
“Well, so vexed was Peggy that one of her fine wishes should be wasted on a palthry tin lantern that she lost all patience with him. ‘Why, thin, bad scran to you,’ says she—not mindin’ her own words—‘I wish the lantern was fastened to the ind of your nose.’
“The word wasn’t well out of her mouth till the lantern was hung swinging from the ind of Andy’s nose in a way that the wit of man couldn’t loosen. It took the third and last of Peggy’s wishes to relayse Andy.”
“Look at that now,” cried a dozen voices from the admiring crowd. “Darby said so from the first.”
Well, after a time people used to come from miles around to see Darby, and sit undher the shtraw-stack beside the stable to adwise with our hayro about their most important business—what was the best time for the settin’ of hins and what was good to cure colic in childher, an’ things like that.
Any man so parsecuted with admiration an’ hayrofication might aisily feel his chest swell out a bit, so it’s no wondher that Darby set himself up for a knowledgeable man.
He took to talking slow an’ shuttin’ one eye whin he listened, and he walked with a knowledgeable twist to his chowldhers. He grew monsthrously fond of fairs and public gatherings, where people made much of him; and he lost every ounce of liking he ever had for hard worruk.
Things wint on with him in this way from bad to worse, and where it would have inded no man knows, if one unlucky morning he hadn’t rayfused to bring in a creel of turf his wife Bridget had axed him to fetch her. The unfortunate man said it was no work for the likes of him.
The last word was still on Darby’s lips whin he rayalised his mistake an’ he’d have give the worruld to have the sayin’ back agin.
For a minute you could have heard a pin dhrop. Bridget, instead of being in a hurry to begin at him, was crool dayliberate. She planted herself at the door, her two fists on her hips an’ her lips shut.
The look Julius Sayser’d trow at a sarvant girl he’d caught stealing sugar from the rile cupboard was the glance she waved up and down from Darby’s toes to his head and from his head to his brogues agin.
Thin she began an’ talked steady as a fall of hail that has now an’ then a bit of lightning an’ tunder mixed in it.
The knowledgeable man stood purtendin’ to brush his hat and tryin’ to look brave, but the heart inside of him was meltin’ like butther.
Bridget began aisily be carelessly mentioning a few of Darby’s best known wakenesses. Afther that she took up some of them not so well known, being ones Darby himself had sayrious doubts about having at all. But on these last she was more savare than on the first. Through it all he daren’t say a word—he only smiled lofty and bitther.
’Twas but natural next for Bridget to explain what a poor crachure her husband was on the day she got him, an’ what she might have been if she had married aither one of the six others who had axed her. The step for her was a little one thin to the shortcomings and misfortunes of his blood relaytions, which she follyed back to the blaggardisms of his fourth cousin, Phelim McFadden.
Even in his misery poor Darby couldn’t but marvel at her wondherful memory.
By the time she began talking of her own family, and especially about her Aunt Honoria O’Shaughnessy, who had once shook hands with a bishop, and who in the rebellion of ninety-eight had trun a brick at a Lord Liftinant, whin he was riding by, Darby was as wilted and as forlorn-looking as a roosther caught out in the winther rain.
He lost more pride in those few minutes than it had taken months to gather an’ hoard. It kept falling in great drops from his forehead.
Just as Bridget was lading up to what Father Cassidy calls a pur-roar-ration—that being the part of your wife’s discoorse whin, afther telling you all that she’s done for you, and all she’s stood from your relaytions, she breaks down and cries, and so smothers you entirely—just as she was coming to that, I say, Darby scrooged his caubeen down on his head, stuck his fingers in his two ears, and making one grand rush through the door, bolted as fast as his legs could carry him down the road toward the Sleive-na-mon Mountains.
Bridget stood on the step looking after him too surprised for a word. With his fingers still in his ears, so that he couldn’t hear her commands to turn back, he ran without stopping till he came to the willow-tree near Joey Hooligan’s forge. There he slowed down to fill his lungs with the fresh, sweet air.
’Twas one of those warmhearted, laughing autumn days which steals for a while the bonnet and shawl of the May. The sun from a sky of feathery whiteness, laned over, telling jokes to the worruld an’ the goold harvest-fields and purple hills, lasy and continted, laughed back at the sun. Even the blackbird flying over the haw-tree looked down an’ sang to those
