to be somebody lookin' after
him. For bedad it seems to me mostwhiles the littler a thing is the more
people there'll be consaitin' they can't get on widout it; and that's
lucky, belike, or else it might aisy get lost entirely, like a
threepenny bit rowled away into a crack. But if you come to considher,"
Con said, hurrying on lest his allusion to the coin should be construed
as a hint that he thought of payment for his services, "most people's
lookin' out for somebody, or else somebody's lookin' out for them. It's
on'y a few odd ones like meself that makes no differ here or there. I
won'er now is the raison that it's after losin' ourselves we are in a
manner--I've I've me notions about that. For first I think I dunno if
anythin's rightly lost that nobody's lookin' to find, and then I think I
dunno but you might as well say you couldn't find anythin' you weren't
after losin' and lookin' for, and that's not the truth be no manner of
manes."

"And you after findin' the child," said Mrs. O'Driscoll.

"Sure not at all, ma'am," said Con, modestly, deprecating not the
statement but the implied praise. "Small thanks to me for that, when the
woful bawls of it you might have heard a mile o' ground. You could as
aisy ha' missed a little clap of thunder, if a one was be chance comin'
tatterin' along between the furzes, wid the head of it bobbin' up now
and agin, and makin' all the noise it could conthrive. Troth it's the
quare bawls _I_ might be lettin' these times afore the rest of them 'ud
hear me, for if it's lost I am, I'm strayin' a terrible long while;
they're apt to disremimber they ever owned me. I do be thinkin', ma'am,
that if you forgit what you've lost, 'tis maybe all the one thing as if
you'd found it; and after that agin I do be thinkin' maybe 'twould be
liker losin' it twyste over. It's quare the diff'rint notions there is
about most things. And a good job too, or else what would you be
considherin' in your mind, when you was thrampin' around? 'Deed now if
you couldn't be supposin' they were this way and that way, and argufyin'
over them wid yourself in your own mind, 'twould be like as if you took
and swallied down a lump of 'baccy instead of chewin' it, and what sort
of benefit or plisure 'ud you git out of that?"

This was Con's first bit of philosophising at Lisconnel, and it was not
his last by many, as the place became one of his favourite resorts. His
liking for it was perhaps partly due to the fact that it