welt."

An hour later it was discovered that a week had elapsed between the losing and finding of the farthing. No sane person would believe that a farthing could lie for a whole week on the streets of Antrim.

"Well," he said, "ye need a warmin' like that ivery day, an' ye had nown yestherday, did ye?"

On another occasion I found a ball, one that had never been lost. A boy, hoping to get me in front of my father, claimed the ball. My mother on this occasion sat in judgment.

"Where did you get the ball?" she asked the boy. He couldn't remember. She probed for the truth, but neither of us would give in. When all efforts failed she cut the ball in half and gave each a piece!

"Nixt time I'll tell yer Dah," the boy said when he got outside, "he makes you squeal like a pig."

When times were good—when work and wages got a little ahead of hunger, which was seldom, Anna baked her own bread. Three kinds of bread she baked. "Soda,"—common flour bread, never in the shape of a loaf, but bread that lay flat on the griddle; "pirta oaten"—made of flour and oatmeal; and "fadge"—potato bread. She always sung while baking and she sang the most melancholy and plaintive airs. As she baked and sang I stood beside her on a creepie watching the process and awaiting the end, for at the close of each batch of bread I always had my "duragh"—an extra piece.

When hunger got ahead of wages the family bread was bought at Sam Johnson's bakery. The journey to Sam's was full of temptation to me. Hungry and with a vested interest in the loaf on my arm, I was not over punctilious in details of the moral law. Anna pointed out the opportunities of such a journey. It was a chance to try my mettle with the arch tempter. It was a mental gymnasium in which moral muscle got strength. There wasn't in all Ireland a mile of highway so well paved with good intentions. I used to start out, well keyed up morally and humming over and over the order of the day. When, on the home stretch, I had made a dent in Sam's architecture, I would lay the loaf down on the table, good side toward my mother. While I was doing that she had read the story of the fall on my face. I could feel her penetrating gaze.

"So he got ye, did he?"

"Aye," I would say in a voice too low to be heard by my father.

The order at Sam's was usually a sixpenny loaf, three ha'pence worth of tea and sugar and half an ounce of tobacco.

There were times when Barney had no work for my father, and on such occasions I came home empty-handed. Then Jamie would go out to find work as a day laborer. Periods like these were glossed over by Anna's humor and wit. As they sat around the table, eating "stir-about" without milk, or bread without tea, Jamie would grunt and complain.

"Aye, faith," Anna would say, "it's purty bad, but it's worse where there's none at all!"

When the wolf lingered long at the door I went foraging—foraging as forages a hungry dog and in the same places. Around the hovels of the poor where dogs have clean teeth a boy has little chance. One day, having exhausted the ordinary channels of relief without success, I betook myself to the old swimming-hole on the mill race. The boys had a custom of taking a "shiverin' bite" when they went bathing. It was on a Sunday afternoon in July and quite a crowd sat around the hole. I neither needed nor wanted a bath—I wanted a bite. No one offered a share of his crust. A big boy named Healy was telling of his prowess as a fighter.

"I'll fight ye fur a penny!" said I.

"Where's yer penny?" said Healy.

"I'll get it th' morra."

A man seeing the difficulty and willing to invest in a scrap advanced the wager. I was utterly outclassed and beaten. Peeling my clothes off I went into the race for a swim and to wash the blood off. When I came out Healy had hidden my trousers. I searched for hours in vain. The man who paid the wager gave me an extra penny and I went home holding my jacket in front of my legs. The penny saved me from a "warming," but Anna, feeling that some extra discipline was necessary, made me a pair of trousers out of an old potato sack.

"That's sackcloth, dear," she said, "an' ye can aither sit in th' ashes in them or wear them in earning another pair! Hold fast t' yer penny!"

In this penitential outfit I had to sell my papers. Every fiber of my being tingled with shame and humiliation. I didn't complain of the penance, but I swore vengeance on Healy. She worked the desire for vengeance out of my system in her chimney-corner by reading to me often enough, so that I memorized the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. Miss McGee, the postmistress, gave me sixpence for the accomplishment and that went toward a new pair of trousers. Concerning Healy, Anna said: "Bate 'im with a betther brain, dear!"

Despite my fistic encounters, my dents in the family loaves, my shinny, my marbles and the various signs of total or at least partial depravity, Anna clung to the hope that out of this thing might finally come what she was looking, praying and hoping for.

An item on the credit side of my ledger was that I was born in a caul—a thin filmy veil that covered me at birth. Of her twelve I was the only one born in "luck." In a little purse she kept the caul, and on special occasions she would exhibit it and enumerate the benefits and privileges that went with it. Persons born in a caul were immune from being hung, drawn and quartered, burned to death or lost at sea.

It was on the basis of the caul I was rented to old Mary McDonagh. My duty was to meet her every Monday morning. The meeting insured her luck for the week. Mary was a huckster. She carried her shop on her arm—a wicker basket in which she had thread, needles, ribbons and other things which she sold to the farmers and folks away from the shopping center. No one is lucky while bare-footed. Having no shoes I clattered down Sandy Somerville's entry in my father's. At the first clatter, she came out, basket on arm, and said:

"Morra, bhoy, God's blessin' on ye!"

"Morra, Mary, an' good luck t' ye," was my answer.

I used to express my wonder that I couldn't turn this luck of a dead-sure variety into a pair of shoes for myself.

Anna said: "Yer luck, dear, isn't in what ye can get, but in what ye can give!"

When Antrim opened its first flower show I was a boy of all work at old Mrs. Chaine's. The gardener was pleased with my work and gave me a hothouse plant to put in competition. I carried it home proudly and laid it down beside her in the chimney-corner.

"The gerd'ner says it'll bate th' brains out on aany geranium in the show!" I said.

"Throth it will that, dear," she said, "but sure ye couldn't take a prize fur it!"

"Why?" I growled.

"Ah, honey, shure everybody would know that ye didn't grow it—forby they know that th' smoke in here would kill it in a few days."

I sulked and protested.

"That's a nice way t' throw cowld wather on th' chile," Jamie said. "Why don't ye let 'im go on an' take his chances at the show?"

A pained look overspread her features. It was as if he had struck her with his fist. Her eyes filled with tears and she said huskily:

"The whole world's a show, Jamie, an' this is the only place the wee fella has to rehearse in."

I sat down beside her and laid my head in her lap. She stroked it in silence for a minute or two. I couldn't quite see, however, how I could miss that show! She saw that after all I was