er, whose back was laden with a great rush basket, he used to pad in
his bare feet down the mountainside to the Dungloe harbor--down where the
hills give the ocean a black embrace. Father and son would wade into the
ocean that was pink and lavender in the sunset. Above them, the white
curlews swooped and curved and opened their pine wood beaks to squawk a
prayer for dead fish. But the workers did not stop to watch. Their food
also was in question. They must pluck the black seaweed to fertilize their
field.

When the early sun bronzed the bog, and streaked the dark pool below with
gold, Paddy and his father began to feed the dried wavy strands of kelp
between the hungry brown furrow lips. They packed the long groove near the
stone fence; they rounded past the big boulder that could not be budged;
last of all, they filled the short far row in the strangely shaped little
field. At noon, Paddy's mother appeared at the half door of the cabin and
called in the general direction of the field--it was difficult to see them,
for their frieze suits had been dyed in bog water and she could not at once
distinguish them from the brown earth. They were glad to come in to eat
their sugarless and creamless oatmeal.

In the evening Paddy ran over the road to his cousin's. Western clouds were
blackening and his little cousin was pulling the pig into the cabin as a
man puts other sort of treasure out of danger into a safe. Paddy listened a
moment. He could hear the castanets of the tweed weaver's loom and the hum
of his uncle's deep voice as he sang at his work. He ran to the rear of the
cabin and up the stone steps to the little addition. A lantern filled the
room he entered with black, harp-like shadows of the loom. While the uncle
stopped treadling and held the blue-tailed shuttle in his hand, the
breathless little boy told him that the field was finished.

"God grant," said the uncle with a solemnity that put fear into the heart
of Paddy, "there may be a harvest for you."

Paddy watched his mother work ceaselessly to aid in the fight that his
father and he were making against poverty. During the month her needles
would click unending wool into socks, and then on Saturday she would
trudge--often in a stiff Atlantic gale--sixteen miles to the market in
Strabane. There she sold the socks at a penny a pair.

In spite of combined hopes, the potato plants were floppily yellow that
year. Their stems felt like a dead man's fingers. No potat