ed air as he leaned against the door, said to Herself:
"Well, ma'am, what do you think of that?"

"To tell you just the truth, Con," said Herself, whose countenance had
fallen as she saw the failure of her little plot, "I was thinkin' it
looked a dale better before you cocked that ould gazabo on top of it.
'Deed now it gives you the apparance of a head of cabbage that's
sproutin' up and goin' to seed. Sure you niver see the other lads
trapesin' about wid the like on them."

Con, who seemed rather cast down by this criticism, was about to reply,
when young Ned Keogh took the cap out of his hand and affected to
examine it closely, saying: "Glory be to goodness, what sort of thing
is it at all at all? Bedad it's the won'erful conthrivance--ah, tub-be
sure; _I_ see what it is. He's about growin' a pair of wings for his wit
to fly away wid. But musha good gracious, he needn't ha' throubled
himself to be gettin' them that sizable. Somethin' the bigness of a
hedge-sparrer's, or maybe a weeny white butterfly's, 'ud ha' plinty
stren'th enough for the job, if that was all they had to do." Ned meant
no harm, but his witticisms did not fall in with Con's humour, so he
snatched back the cap and went off affronted, nor did he call at the
O'Driscolls' again for some weeks.

The next time he came, however, Herself had espied him a bit down the
road, and was standing at the door to receive him with his discarded
caubeen in her hand. "You'd be better wearin' it, Con, after all," she
said, "for the eyes are scorched out of your head under the sun widout
e'er a scrap of brim." And as Con took it, he observed with glee that
she had fastened into the band a dove-coloured kittiwake's wing-feather,
a somewhat cherished possession of her own, which she used to keep over
her best picture on the wall. Thus did she seek to make amends for the
speech about the sprouting cabbage-head, which had been weighing
heavily upon her conscience.

The kittiwake's feather had to weather rain and sunshine for many a year
in Con the Quare One's old caubeen; but it is now on a room-wall again,
the Kilfoyles' this time. Con brought it to Mrs. Kilfoyle one autumn
evening in the year Mrs. O'Driscoll died. It was much longer than usual
since he had wandered into Lisconnel, illness and one thing and another
having detained him in the North for the last twelvemonth and more--all
her blackest days of childless widowhood--so that this was his first
visit since the de