he left, looking up the river, it
seemed as if many spectral hands, borne nearer and nearer, came waving
and beckoning out of the night, to pass by and away down the river,
still beckoning and waving, carried further and further, on into the
night again. Every now and then a waft of the wind sighed in on them
along with the river, puffing about the flame and smoke, and blowing
ice-cold in their faces. When it had passed Thady always inquired: "Is
it warm at all, Jude?" and she always answered, drawing "its" folds
together with ostentatious satisfaction: "Och scaldin'."

But between whiles there was little conversation to interrupt the
monologue of the river, which seemed to find itself many voices under
the bridge. The one unceasing rustle of the main stream was frayed along
its margin into a myriad finer noises of murmuring and plashing, as the
massed foliage on a bough dwindles at its edges into more delicate
traceries of distinct sprays and leaves. Round some stones the water
whispered mysteriously, coiling in and out of gurgling recesses, and
against others it broke with a clear chiming tinkle as if elfin anvils
rang; here it droned on with a bee's hum soft and steady, and here it
chuckled and chirped, bubbling up in sudden little rapids and cascades.
At Judy's feet was a thin flat stone, which rested loosely on the top of
another, and flap-flapped, bobbing up and down as the ripple rose and
fell. Sitting idle in the firelight, warmed and fed to unwonted
contentment, Judy watched it half drowsily for a while. Presently she
said:

"That's the very way the lid of our ould kettle would be goin' at home
when it was on the boil, and me poor mother 'ud bid us keep an eye on
it--like enough to keep us out of divilmint. Och, but that was a cosy
little room of a could night. D'you mind it, Thady?"

"Ay, sure," said Thady, "but it's one while ago."

"It is that. A matter of thirty year and more, anyway, since we owned
the little shop. Sure now I remimber the day they shut it up, and put us
out of it, as plain as if it was on'y this mornin'. Grand we that was
childer thought it, because of somebody givin' us the ind of an ould jar
of sweets out of the windy to pacify us. Bedad the fightin' we had over
it was fit to ha' raised the town. But I grabbed meself a biggish lump
of peppermint twist, and would be slinkin' behind me mother to finish
it, and she talkin' at the door to ould Mrs. McClenaghan, and I heard
her sayin' her