talk
to them, now he ran to the other side of the garden when they were
coming home from school; but there was no place in the garden where he
could hide himself from them, unless he got into the dry ditch. The
school children were very naughty children; they climbed up the bank,
and, holding on to the paling, they mocked at him; and their mockery
was to ask him the way to "Hill Cottage;" for his mother had had the
name painted on the gate, and no one else in the parish had given their
cottage a name.

However, he liked the dry ditch, and under the branches, where the wren
had built her nest, Ulick was out of his mother's way, and out of the
way of the boys; and lying among the dead leaves he could think of the
barges floating away, and of his tall father who wore a red coat and
let him pull his moustache. He was content to lie in the ditch for
hours, thinking he was a bargeman and that he would like to use a sail.
His father had told him that the boats had sails on the Shannon--if so
it would be easy to sail to the war; and breaking off in the middle of
some wonderful war adventure, some tale about his father and his
father's soldiers, he would grow interested in the life of the ditch,
in the coming and going of the wren, in the chirrup of a bird in the
tall larches that grew beyond the paling.

Beyond the paling there was a wood full of moss-grown stones and trees
overgrown with ivy, and Ulick thought that if he only dared to get over
the paling and face the darkness of the hollow on the other side of the
paling, he could run across the meadow and call from the bank to a
steersman. The steersman might take him away! But he was afraid his
mother might follow him on the next barge, and he dreamed a story of
barges drawn by the swiftest horses in Ireland.

But dreams are but a makeshift life. He was very unhappy, and though he
knew it was wrong he could not help laying plans for escape. Sometimes
he thought that the best plan would be to set fire to the house; for
while his mother was carrying pails of water from the back yard he
would run away; but he did not dare to think out his plan of setting
fire to the house, lest one of the spirits which dwelt in the hollow
beyond the paling should come and drag him down a hole.

One day he forgot to hide himself in the ditch, and the big boy climbed
up the bank, and asked him to give him some gooseberries, and though
Ulick would have feared to gather gooseberries for himsel