er all you
can."

The boat edged up into the wind. Peter, flat on his stomach, grasped the
buoy and hauled it on board. The fore-sheets beat their tattoo on the
deck. The boom swung sharply across the boat.

Ten minutes later we were leaning together across the boom gathering in
the mainsail.

"What became of the boys?" I asked.

"Is it Anthony O'Flaherty's boys? The last of them went to America
twenty years ago. But sure that was before you came to these parts."

XVI ~~ AN UPRIGHT JUDGE

No one knows how the quarrel between Peter Joyce and Patrick Joseph
Flanagan began. It had been smouldering for years, a steady-going feud,
before it reached its crisis last June.

The Joyces and Flanagans were neighbours, occupying farms of very poor
land on the side of Letterbrack, a damp and lonely hill some miles from
the nearest market town. This fact explains the persistence of the feud.
It is not easy to keep up a quarrel with a man whom you only see once
a month or so. Nor is it possible to concentrate the mind on one
particular enemy if you live in a crowded place. Joyce and Flanagan saw
each other every day. They could not help seeing each other, for their
farms were small. They scarcely ever saw anyone else, because there
were no other farms on the side of the hill. And the feud was a family
affair. Mrs. Joyce and Mrs. Flanagan disliked each other heartily and
never met without using language calculated to embitter the feeling
between them. The young Joyces and the young Flanagans fought fiercely
on their way to and from school.

The war, which has turned Europe upside down and dragged most things
from their familiar moorings, had its effect on the lives of the two
farmers on the side of Letterbrack. They became better off than they had
ever been before. It must not be supposed that they grew rich. According
to the standard of English working men they had always been wretchedly
poor. All that the war did for them was to put a little, a very little,
more money into their pockets. They themselves did not connect their new
prosperity with the war. They did not, indeed, think about the war at
all, bring fully occupied with their work and their private quarrel.
They noticed, without inquiring into causes, that the prices of the
things they sold went up steadily. A lean bullock fetched an amazing sum
at a fair. Young pigs proved unexpectedly profitable. The eggs which the
women carried into town on market days coul