for speculation about what he
should find when he opened the house door fast by; and in fact he
discovered everything and everybody just as he could have foretold. The
fire-lit room was filled with the busy weaving of the web that ruddy
gleams and russet shadows never got finished, swiftly as they glanced,
and overhead the black spaces between the rafters gloomed down like
inlets of a starless sky. There sat his great-grandmother smoking her
dudeen in her nook by the hearth, and her big cloak--a very little of
wizened old woman to a great many heavy, dark-blue folds. There, too,
knitted her grey-haired daughter Bridget, who said, as she did every
evening, "Well, Dan, so you're come in," and would have not much more to
say for herself that night except the Rosary. And his grandfather, who
had come in just before him, was lighting his pipe in the opposite
chimney-corner. A year ago his brother Nicholas would have thrust a
head, all eyes and rumpled hair, into a patch of bright flickerings, to
pore over the tattered arithmetic-book; but by this time his absence had
become a matter of course. The only at all unusual feature was Joe
Denny, the blind fiddler, who had called in on his way home and had a
drop of poteen and a farrel of wholemeal cake. Yet Joe was indeed a
tolerably common incident, and his jokes altered not. He had begun his
parting one, which was to the effect that sorra a man in the counthry of
Connaught could see clearer than himself if the night was dark enough,
when Dan's arrival interrupted him, and made him declare, taking out his
fiddle, that 'twould be a poor case if the lad didn't get e'er a tune at
all. Dan was not much in the humour for tunes, but he said, "Ay, Joe,
give us a one, man-alive," and Joe struck up with twangle and squeak.

He was playing--

"Over the hills and far away,
Over the hills and beyond the say,
Over the hills and a great way off,
And the wind it blew--"

when a thudding knock on the door seemed to beat down the shriller
sounds and stop the sliding bow. Dan went to see who it was, and found
standing on the threshold a tall, lean old man in a long, ragged coat,
with a thick, knotted blackthorn in his hand. A few hard-frozen granules
pattered in at the opened door, which admitted a glimpse of the moon,
tarnished by a thin drift of scudding cloud.

"God save all here," said the old man, who was a stranger.

"Good-evenin' to you kindly, sir," responded old Feli