to be Dermot Melody?

Darby: What letting on? Dermot is my full name, but Darby is the name I am called.

Taig: Are you a man owning riches and shops and merchandise?

Darby: I am not, or anything of the sort.

Taig: Have you teems of money in the bank?

Darby: If I had would I be sitting on this floor?

Taig: You thief you!

Darby: Thief yourself! Turn around now till I will measure your features and your face. Yourself is it! Is it personating my cousin Timothy you are?

Taig: I am personating no one but myself.

Darby: You letting on to be an estated magistrate and my own cousin and such a great generation of a man. And you not owning so much as a rood of ridges!

Taig: Covering yourself with choice clothing for to deceive me and to lead me astray!

Darby: Putting on your head a fine glossy hat and I thinking you to have come with the spring-tide, the way you had luck through your life!

Taig: Letting on to be Dermot Melody! You that are but the cull and the weakling of a race! It is a queer game you played on me and a crooked game. I never would have brought my legs so far to meet with the sooty likes of you!

Darby: Letting on to be my poor Timothy O'Harragha!

Taig: I never was called but Taig. Timothy was a sort of a Holy day name.

Darby: Where now are our two cousins? Or is it that the both of us are cracked?

Taig: It is, or our mothers before us.

Darby: My mother was a McGarrity woman from Loughrea. It is Mary was her Christened name.

Taig: So was my own mother of the McGarritys. It is sisters they were sure enough.

Darby: That makes us out to be full cousins in the heel.

Taig: You no better than myself! And the prayers I used to be saying for you, and you but a sketch and an excuse of a man!

Darby: Ah, I am thinking people put more in their prayers than was ever put in them by God.

Taig: Our mothers picturing us to one another as if we were the best in the world.

Darby: Lies I suppose they were drawing down, for to startle us into good behaviour.

Taig: Wouldn't you say now mothers to be a terror?

Darby: And we nothing at all after but two chimney sweepers and two harmless drifty lads.

Taig: Where is the great quality dinner yourself was to give me, having seven sorts of dressed meat? Pullets and bacon I was looking for, and to fall on an easy life.

Darby: Gone like the clouds of the winter's fog. We rose out of it the same as we went in.

Taig: We have nothing to do but to starve with the hunger, and you being as bare as myself.

Darby: We are in a bad shift surely. We must perish with the want of support. It is one of the tricks of the world does be played upon the children of Adam.

Taig: All we have to do is to crawl to the poorhouse gate. Or to go dig a pit in the graveyard, as it is short till we'll be stretched there with the want of food.

Darby: Food is it? There is nothing at this time against me eating my bit of a herring.

(Seizes it and takes a bite.)

Taig: Give me a divide of it.

Darby: Give me a drop of your own porter so, is in the bottle. There need be no dread on you now, of you being no match for your grand man.

Taig: That is so. (Drinks.) I'll strive no more to fit myself for high quality relations. I am free from patterns of high up cousins from this out. I'll be a pattern to myself.

Darby: I am well content being free of you, the way you were pictured to be. I declare to my goodness, the name of you put terror on me through the whole of my lifetime, and your image to be clogging and checking me on every side.

Taig: To be thinking of you being in the world was a holy terror to myself. I give you my word you came through my sleep the same as a scarecrow or a dragon.

Darby: It is great things I will be doing from this out, we two having nothing to cast up against one another. To be quit of Timothy the bogie and to get Taig for a comrade, I'm as proud as the Crown of France!

Taig: I'm in dread of neither bumble or bagman or bugaboo! I will regulate things from myself from this out.

Darby: There to be fineness of living in the world, why wouldn't I make it out for myself?

Taig: It is to the harbours of America we will work our way across the wideness of the sea. It is well able we should be to go mounting up aloft in ropes. Come on Darby out of this!

Darby: There is magic and mastery come into me! This day has put wings to my heart!

Taig: Be easy now. We are maybe not clear of the chimneys yet.

Darby: What signifies chimneys? We'll go up in them till we'll take a view of the Seven Stars! It is out beyond the hills of Burren I will cast my eye, till I'll see the three gates of Heaven!

Taig: It's like enough, luck will flow to you. The way most people fail is in not keeping up the heart. Faith, it's well you have myself to mind you. Gather up now your brush and your bag.

(They go to the door holding each other's hands and singing: "All in my hat I will cock a blue feather," etc.)

Curtain

THE FULL MOON

TO ALL SANE PEOPLE IN OR OUT OF CLOON WHO KNOW THEIR NEIGHBOURS TO BE NATURALLY CRACKED OR SOMEWAY QUEER OR TO HAVE GONE WRONG IN THE HEAD.

PERSONS [Sidenote: ALL SANE] Shawn Early Bartley Fallon Peter Tannian Hyacinth Halvey Mrs. Broderick Miss Joyce Cracked Mary Davideen, HER BROTHER, AN INNOCENT

THE FULL MOON

Scene: A shed close to Cloon Station; Bartley Fallon is sitting gloomily on a box; Hyacinth Halvey and Shawn Early are coming in at door.

Shawn Early: It is likely the train will not be up to its time, and cattle being on it for the fair. It's best wait in the shed. Is that Bartley Fallon? What way are you, Bartley?

Bartley Fallon: Faith, no way at all. On the drag, on the drag; striving to put the bad times over me.

Shawn Early: Is it business with the nine o'clock you have?

Bartley Fallon: The wife that is gone visiting to Tubber, and that has the door locked till such time as she will come back on the train. And I thought this shed a place where no bad thing would be apt to happen me, and not to be going through the streets, and the darkness falling.

Shawn Early: It is not long till the full moon will be rising.

Bartley Fallon: Everything that is bad, the falling sickness—God save the mark—or the like, should be at its worst at the full moon. I suppose because it is the leader of the stars.