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There was nothing in the world to hinder Mick from enlisting except just the unreasonableness of his mother, and that was an unreasonableness so unreasonable as to verge upon hat her neighbours would hare called “quare ould conthrariness.” For, though a widow woman, and therefore entitled to occupy a pathetic position, its privileges were defined by the opinion that “she was not so badly off intirely as she might ha’ been.” Mick’s departure need not have left her desolate, since she had another son and daughter at home, besides Essie married in the village, and Brian settled down at Murghadeen, here he was doing well, and times and again asking her to come and live with him. Then Mick would have been able to help her out of his pay much more efficaciously than he could do by his earnings at Kilmacrone, where work was slack and its wage low, so that the result of a lad’s daily labour sometimes seemed mainly the putting of a fine edge on a superfluous appetite. All these points were most clearly seen by Mick in the light of a fiercely burning desire; but that availed him nothing unless he could set them as plainly before some one else who was not thus illuminated. And not far from two years back he had resolved that he would attempt to do so no more.

The soldiers had been about in the district on the day before, scattered like poppy beds over the bog, and signalling and firing till the misty October air tingled with excitement. When you have lived your life among wide-bounded solitudes, where the silence is oftenest broken by the plover’s pipe or the croak of some heavily flapping bird, you will know the meaning of a bugle-call. Mick and his contemporaries had acted as camp-followers from early till late with ever intensifying ardour; one outcome whereof was that he heard his especial crony, Paddy Joyce, definitely decide to go and enlist at Fortbrack next Monday, which gave a turn more to the pinching screw of his own banned wish. It was with a concerted scheme for ascertaining whether there were any chance of bringing his mother round to a rational view of the matter that he and his friend dropped into her cabin next morning on the way to carry up a load of turf. Mrs. Doherty was washing her couple of blue-checked aprons in an old brown butter-crock, and Mick thought he had introduced the subject rather happily when he told her “she had a right to be takin’ her hands out of the suds, and dippin’ the finest curtsey she could conthrive, and she wid the Commander-in-Gineral of the Army Forces steppin’ in to pay her a visit.” Of course this statement required, as it was intended to require, elucidation, so Mick proceeded to announce: “It’s himself’s off to Fortbrack a-Monday, ‘listin’ he’ll be in the Edenderry Light Infantry; so the next time we set eyes on him it’s blazin’ along the street we’ll see him, like the boys we had here yisterday.”

“Ah! sure now, that’ll be grand,” said Mrs. Doherty, unwarily complaisant; “we’ll all be proud to behold him that way. ‘T is a fine thing far any young man who’s got a fancy to take up wid it.”

“Och, then, bedad it is so!” said Mick, with emphasis, promptly making for the opening given to him.

“Bedad it is,” said Paddy.

“There’s nothin’ like it,” said Mick.

“Ah, nothin’ at all,” said Paddy.

Mrs. Doherty made no remark as she twisted a dripping apron into a sausage-shaped roll to wring the water out.

“How much was it you were sayin’ you’d have in the week, Paddy, just to put in your pocket for your divarsion like?” inquired Mick, with a convenient lapse of memory.

“Och, seven or eight shillin’s anyway,” said Paddy, in the tone of one to whom shillings had already become trivial coins; “and that, mind you, after you’ve ped for the best of aitin’ and dhrinkin’, and your kit free, and no call to be spendin’ another penny unless you plase. Sure, Long Murphy was tellin’ me he was up in the town awhile ago, on a day when they were just after gettin’ their pay, and he said the Post-Office was that thick wid the soldier lads sendin’ home the money to their friends, he couldn’t get speech of a clerk to buy his stamp be no manner of manes, not if he’d wrecked the place. ‘T was the Sidmouth Fusileers was in at that time; they’re off to Limerick now.”