thematics, I can tell you; he might do something yet, if he got his
chances. They're no use to me now, and I'd as lief be shut of the sight
of them. And to-morra I'll be off to Ardnacreagh."

So the gaunt old man talked on, groping his way out of hesitating
pauses, and straying into dreamy meditations, as if he sometimes forgot
his story, and sometimes its hearers. They did not know what a
life-wreck it outlined, but they saw and surmised enough to make them
think of him as "the crathur," and speak to him with more deference
than if he had returned in a radiant glow of success, symbolised as some
of them had anticipated, by scarlet robes as splendid, at least, as
Father Rooney's at High Mass. And Felix O'Beirne took occasion of a
madly skirling gust to say, "Listen now to that, sir, and don't be
talkin' wild of thravellin' off to-morra. If I might be sayin' so, you'd
a dale better stay quiet where you are this minyit. And as for taichin',
sure it's proud and thankful the two boyos 'ud be for e'er a bit more.
There's Nicholas mopin' about like an ould hin that's lost her chuckens
iver since you quit."

Mr. Polymathers did stop quiet--very quiet--but he taught the boys no
more. In fact, he did nothing except sit all day staring into the fire,
as if he had lost something in it. Once after Nicholas had sat looking
very hard at him for a long time with the ragged _Euclid_ ostentatiously
open at a crux, he seemed to rouse up, and putting out a hand for the
book, began an explanation. But it died away unfinished in an aimless
muttering, which both shocked and saddened Nicholas, and the experiment
was not repeated. Then towards Christmas time all the neighbours were
saying that Mr. Polymathers was greatly failed to what he had been. And
Bridget O'Beirne reported that you might as well be argufyin' wid a
scutty wren to swally down the full of the ducks' dish as persuadin' him
to take a raisonable bite and sup. Dr. Hamilton from the Dispensary, who
was consulted on the case, "consaited," Bridget told inquirers, "that he
might be after gettin' a sort of stroke like unbeknownst;" but her own
opinion was that "he had, so to spake, lost the knot off his thread, and
'twould be much if he didn't slip away out of it on them, afore they
seen e'er another green laif on the bushes."

It was, at any rate, more than happened. One snowy afternoon, when he
had been busy for some time "scrawmin' a manner of letter," which
related, he said, to