puttin' me hand to, I
wouldn't call the Queen me aunt."

In those times the district around our bogland was more thickly
inhabited than it is at present, and the blacksmith's jobs were
proportionately plentier. Nowadays the forge is liable to long spells
of silence, but Dan, who as young Dan has been superseded, philosophises
over them, and talks no more about chances. On this occasion his remarks
were overheard by his grandfather, perhaps because the old man had begun
to have thoughts of chances which made him sensitive to signs of
discontent in his assistant. And by and by when Terence had gone, he
said, "Terence said a very sinsible word; a lad might aisy get a worse
start in life, ay indeed he might so, if it was twyste as slack. But
anyhow there's them here that 'ud be hard set to make a shift for
themselves if the two of us was out of it; and I'm apt to be quittin'
before Biddy at all events." To which Dan replied, "Why what talk was
there of quittin'?" and the subject ceased out of the conversation.
During the subsequent silence Dan thought, among other things, that it
was "aisy for his grandfather to be talkin';" but in this he made a
mistake. For old O'Beirne remembered vividly that he had once had his
own restless ambitions, and his chances, too, of realising them, in
times when he did more stirring things than merely forge pike-heads.
Therefore he guessed what lent an unnecessary vehemence to his
grandson's hammering, and if he could have thought of any consolatory
remark, he would have made it. But it only occurred to him to say that
the days would soon be len'thenin' now, anyway; and even to himself this
seemed cold comfort. Dan replied, "Och, they're plinty long enough," and
sent a thick swarm of fiery bees flitting up the dark-throated chimney.

That evening when Dan closed the broad-leaved forge doors, he shut
himself out into a world as black and white as moonlight on turf and
snow could make it. Though the morning's flutter of snow had left but a
meagre sprinkling on that great bogland, the moonbeams touching every
scattered flake, seemed to gather it all up widely in one stark spectral
gleam. Far away towards the horizon this dulled off into a shadowy zone
of mist, where the wind was muttering and moaning to itself, dimly heard
across the hushed floor of the night. Beyond that Dan was aware
wistfully of regions unknown, with all their possibilities fascinating
and mysterious. But he had small scope