ir day not thrive with the buyers and the
sellers in the fair! The curse of mildew on the tillage men, that
every grain of seed they have sowed may be rotten in the ridges, and
the grass corn blasted from the east before the latter end of harvest!
The curse of the dead on the herds driving cattle and following after
markets and fairs! My own curse on the big farmers slapping and
spitting in their deal! That a blood murrain may fall upon their
bullocks! That rot may fall upon their flocks and maggots make them
their pasture and their prey between this and the great feast of
Christmas! It is my grief every hand in the fair not to be set
shaking and be crookened, where they were not stretched out in
friendship to the fair-haired woman that is left her lone within
boards!

_Second Hag: (At door.)_ Is it a niggard you are grown to be,
McDonough, and you with riches in your hand? Is it against a new
wedding you are keeping your pocket stiff, or to buy a house and an
estate, that it fails you to call in hired women to make a right
keening, and a few decent boys to lift her through the streets?

_McDonough:_ I to have money or means in my hand, I would ask no
help or be beholden to any one at all.

_Second Hag:_ If you had means, is it? I heard by true telling
that you have money and means. "At the sheep-shearers' dance a high
lady held the plate for the piper; a sovereign she put in it out of
her hand, and there was no one of the big gentry but followed her.
There never was seen so much riches in any hall or home." Where now
is the fifty gold sovereigns you brought away from Cregroostha?

_McDonough:_ Where is it?

_Second Hag:_ Is it that you would begrudge it to the woman is
inside?

_McDonough:_ You know well I would not begrudge it.

_First Hag:_ A queer thing you to speak so stiff and to be running
down all around you, and your own pocket being bulky the while.

_McDonough:_ _(Turning out pocket.)_ It is as slack and as empty
as when I went out from this.

_Second Hag:_ You could not have run through that much.

_McDonough:_ Not a red halfpenny left, or so much as the image of
a farthing.

_First Hag:_ Is it robbed and plundered you were, and you walking
the road?

_McDonough:_ _(Sitting down and rocking himself.)_ I wish to my
God it was some robber stripped and left me bare! Robbed and
plundered! I was that, and by the worst man and the unkindest that
ever was joined to a woman or lost a woman, and that