FOR COMPANY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XL, Issue 12399, 12 October 1903, Page 3

FOR COMPANY.

DiXNv Betiek,. stepping over from B&ihlashin %to Cloehranbeg, a : few: perches short of the Silver Lane, met with Joe Hedican, leading his sorrel mare, and said to him, "What at all ails you?" "Is it what ails me?" said Joe. "Sure, what else?" said Dinny, " and the mare in a lather and a thrimble, and yourself comin' along as unstuddy as a thing on wires.' Lookin' fit to drop down, you are." "And why wouldn't we have a right to be?" said Joe: "and ourselves after seem' what we won't either of us be the better for till the day we're waked." "Bedad, then, that's the plisant talk for me to be hearin', wkl the light darkenin' before me every minyit," said Dinny. "And so it's wakia' the ould mare you'll be, says you? Well, now, i never heard the- like of that. But, to be sure, I'm not very long in the County Donegal. I hope you'll send me word of the buryin'. It's a comical notion, if you come to consider it." Ho laughed, upon consideration, with much noise; but as the mare rolled her eyes wildly at him, and Joe only shook his head the more, he withdrew abruptly from their unsympathetic' countenances, though he persisted, in his guffaw. When he had gone half-a-dozen yards ha faced round and shouted: "Might you happen to know is the Garveys' boat in yet?" Joe, however, was just mounting, and plunged off at full speed, without seeming to hear. "Fine floundheriu' and bouhcin' about he has, and be hanged to him, himself and his ould garron," Dinny said with indignation. "If I thought the Garveys were apt to be stoppin' out late, I'd lave it till to-morra, and turn back now; but I couldn't tell I mightn't lose the job wid delayin'." -i This was not the risk he chose to run, and ho presently; reached the entrance of the high-banked, winding boreen, whence he glanced back in hopes that some fellowtravellers • might be catching him up. Nothing, however, moved on the lonely moorland road behind him, except the gallop of Jo« Hedican's; horse, hurling itself in the wrong direction. : So he went forward without the prospect of any company. ; The Silver Lane twists through a sea of softly-heaped mounds, scantily clad with bent, grass, pale and dry, and dark, harshtextured furzes. These are rooted in almost pure sand, silvery-hued, yet under strong sunbeams yielding dim golden glimmers, that give a faint purple to the shadow in its curves and folds. But the touch of this March evening's twilight left it all cold, white and gray. It lies deep and powdery on the narrow roadway, so that a man has not even the sound of his own footsteps to reassure him, should he be disposed to feel lonesome and apprehensive. Dinny Breen was feeling both, as he passed the second sharp turn of the lane, and came to a place where a crevice-like path pierced the sandlull on his left. Here he noticed many huge hoof-prints, some of them impressed with violence upon, the low buttresses of the banks, which, in the ordinary course of things, no horse would have trodden. " Hereabouts it is they seen whatever it was. frightened them," ho said to himself, "and set the mare prancin' and dancin'. Between us and harm—look where she flounced right across the road, and scraped herself un agin the furze bush; her hair's thick on it." He was hastening on, longing and dreading to be round the next corner, when he heard close by a sound, such a homely, commonplace one, that he experienced hardly a moment of panio before ; out of the little bypath ran a very small boy, swinging a large tin can. As a general rule, Dinny would have seen nothing particularly attractive about the black-headed, bare-footed, flannelpetticoated gossoon, and would probably have allowed him to pass on unaccosted ; but in the present oiroumstances he could have desired no better company*' for an innocent child is the most efficacious safeguard possible when uncanny things are about. Another encouraging reflection also occurred to «him immediately: "'Twas that now, and divil a thing else, scared the two of them— the little brat skytin' by, clattorin' his can, and the light shinin' off it on a suddint." Still, this view of the matter, though plausible and rational, was not certain enough to justify him in letting slip the chance of an escort, and he therefore set about engaging the child in conversation. Ho did so rather clumsily, for lack of tine familiarity with children's society which would have enabled him to fill up the gap between thirty odd and five years old with appropriate small talk. .

"Is ifc.goin' for water you are, sonny?" he said, .

She sent me to the well again," said the gossoon, stopping Ida trot, ancTpointing up the path to a tangle of briars and long grass ; in.asHght. hollow. r . , , ."And is it gone dry on you?" said Dinny, looking at the empty can. The reply was a turning of it uoside down to show a crack running several inches round the bottom rim. " I can put the top of me littlest finger through it," tho gossoon said and preyed; "it won't hould a sup at all. And the big jug's broke, too.'' "That's a bad job," said Dinny. "There's nothin' she can be sendin' now, unless the black kettle itself, that's' as much as I can,do to lift when it's empty inside, let alone fullit's the size of meself, bedad," averred Dinny's protector. "Sure then, she couldn't ax you to be earryin' that. Is it far you come ?" Dinny inquired, anxiously. "I dunno," said the gossoon, "but it's a terrible ould • baste of a kettle for always wantin' to be filled. I hate the sight of it sittin' there on the fire, wid the dirty ould lid thryin' to lep off it and then me aunt does be bawlin' to me to run out and bring the water beforo it's boiled dry. I'm sick and tired of gpin' up the lane, wid the heavy can pullin' out the arm of me all the way back, fit. to destroy me, Katty Lyons says it is. And a while ago I was givin' it a couple of clumps agin a stone, where I seen a weeny crack comin'; and maybe that's what biggened it. But you needn't let on. I tould you, or I'll be kilt. Sorra a sup it'll hould." He dropped some small handfuls of the fine sand into the can, and holding it up watched the grains sift slowly out. This experiment he repeated more than once, and Dhiny, albeit in a hurry, looked on with patience. I But at last he suggested: "Mightn't she be J mad, if you're too long dclayin'?" " She does be mad most whiles," his companion said philosophically. "I don't so much nijnd if she won't be sendin' me back wid the ugly ould kettle." However, he began to walk on, rattling a couple of cockle-shells, that had remained in the can. Dinny accompanied him closely, and meekly waited when he occasionally stopped to pick up pebbles, or explore rabbitholes, or start. sand avalanches and cascades by tugging at the colourless roots of the grasses in tho slithery banks. It was a. slow progress, and the dusk had grown perceptibly grayer by the time that Dinny emerged from between them, at a place where the road branches, on tho right towards Cloehranbcg, on the left towards the great bog of Greilish. " And what way are you goin', avict" Dinny inquired, with loss anxiety now, having left behind the Silver Lane', which he knew to be the most perilous stage of his journey. '

The child pointed to a small cabin standing opposite, a stone's throw back from the road, a reply that somewhat surprised Dinny. For. even through the gathering dimness the place looked quite ruinous and deserted, with rifted roof, and rank' weeds peering in at frameless windows. '" Site's soreechin' to me," said the gossoon, and darted off, making for the door. Dinny heard nothing but 'the cockle-shells clattering in the can. "There's no sort of people," ho said to himself, " would be livin' in the likes of that, unless it was tinkers. He was the quare little imp—himself and the big kettle." further on he overtook the Widow McNulty, who was going his way, and as they walked on together he casually asked of her how the Silver Lane had come by its had name. "For," he said, " since I come to this parish I met wid many that do be afeared of it, but what's wrong wid it 1 never happened to hear tell." "Sure it was before my time," said Mrs. McNulty, " there used to be a woman livin' in the ould empty house you seen at this end of it, and a little, boy belongin' to her, that she gave bad thratcment to. Himtin' him off she was continual, to fetch her big cans full of water out of the well near the far end of the lane, that you might, have noticed goin' by. So one day she sent him wid a great heavy lump of a kettle, he couldn't rightly lift, and thryin' to fill it, the crathur overbalanced himself and foil in and was got clhrowned dead. And ever since then it. does be walkin' there now aiiu agin, and folks say there's no worsor had luck goin' than for a body to see a sight of it, or so much as to hear the clink of the can—well, man alive, what's took you at all?" ''Tho Lord have mercy on mo this day," said Dinny, "and I just after walkin' alongside of it, and talkin' to it the length of the boreen."

And thenceforward neither of them had any breath to spare for conversation until they at last reached distantstill cruelly ciisinnt—Clochranbeg.— Barlow, in the Pilot.