ell, then, let you sit down, lad, and listen
till I'm telling you the whole of it. Time was when I had a face on me
would keep a man from his sleep, and 'tis no lie I'm telling you. Tall
and fine I was, hair like a blackbird's wing, skin like new milk with the
flush of the dawn on it, eyes like a still pool in the deep of a wood.
Larry Kinsella was ever the great lad for making verses up out of his own
head. "Roses in Snow," is the silly name he would be calling me.' Then
she rocked herself to and fro and crooned in the cracked old voice she
had--

"'Faith and hope and charity,
A man has need of three!
I've the faith and hope in you,
You've charity for me!

"'With your lips and cheeks the rose,
That is blooming in the snow,
Yourself is all the miracle
A man would need to know!'

"'The proud, brazen hussy I was, God be good to us! Tossing my head,
stealing the other girls' lads the time we'd be footing it to the tune of
the Kerry Dance at the Crossroads in the full of the moon! Father
Quinn--may the angels spread his bed smooth--was always telling me to
take heed of my soul which would last me forever, and have done with the
sinful pride in the skin and the hair which would wither like grass. But
I went my ways with a scandalous come-hither in my eye, leaning over a
still pool till I'd see my bold face smiling back at me, and Larry
Kinsella stealing behind to whisper his verses in my ear.

"'Then came the sickness, the plague that shadowed five counties the way
you'd see a black cloud sailing down the sky of a June day. Nary a
village but paid its toll in death and doom. One of the first I was, and
one of the worst. Wirra, the weeks I lay on the sill of death's
door,--the gray days, the black nights.

"'Came the time when I heard Father Quinn's voice and he sitting beside
me, telling me slow and easy, the way you'd be talking to a child itself,
that Larry Kinsella was mending and calling for me. Well, I rose up,
destroyed with the weakness though I was, to be on the way to him, but
there in the bit of a glass on my wall I saw my face ... my face ...
Mary, be good to us ... _my face_! Back I fell in the black pit of
despair, praying for death itself. But it would not come to my bidding.
In the black of the night, in the gray of the dawn, the dreams that
tormented me! Larry's voice, wheedling and soft in my ear--

"'With your lips and cheeks the rose,
That is blooming in th