the quare bosthoon on her entirely, and maybe that's liker;"
a rejoinder which brought on a renewal of hostilities.

Just at this time a spell of fine weather, very bright and serene, had
been brooding over Lisconnel. It was the early spring of autumn, when
leaves and berries here and there were taking a blossom-like vividness;
the frost-touched brier-sprays seemed to have found and dipped in the
same red that had dyed the young buds and shoots of April. The air was
so still that the seeded dandelions stood day after day with their fairy
globes unbereft of a single downy dart, like little puffs of vapour
among the grasses. A soft mist rounded off all the bogland, holding in a
drowse the sunbeams that steeped it, and letting them waken to their
full golden glory at the very heart of noon. But one morning the haze
began to thicken and darken on the horizon, as if wafts of murky smoke
were blown through it, and towards evening massy shapes of black clouds
came slowly lifting themselves up, some with outlines curved like bosky
clumps of wood, some ruggedly ledged and angled like a drift of begrimed
icebergs. By sunset the far west was all a sullen gloom veined with
lurid, tawny streaks, and mottled with deeper stains. Old Peter
Sheridan, who is reputed to have "a great eye for the weather," turned
it forebodingly upon the prospect, and said the sky was "the moral for
all the world of the back of an ould brindled bull, and he'd never
known any good come of that manner of apparance."

And true for him. Before sunrise next morning Lisconnel was roused by
the reveille of a crashing thunder-peal, which preluded a violent storm.
It is seldom that one booms and rattles so loudly over our bogland, or
glares with so fierce a flame. Brian Kilfoyle, taking a rapid
observation through his door, said, "Be the powers of smoke, I never
seen the aquil of that. You might think they was after whitewashin' the
whole place wid blindin' fire. Here's out of it, sez I." And he
retreated blinking to his dark corner. At the height of it, even Andy
Sheridan, who is probably our freest thinker, felt secretly relieved to
know that his stepmother and his sisters were saying their prayers. The
arrangement seemed to give him a sense of security without claiming any
concessions from his superior strength of mind. But in the end the
perilous clouds rolled away growling and gleaming towards the mountains
and the sea, leaving only one victim behind--the Qui