ed out, she'll be as clean as amber."

The conversation flowed on to other themes.

It was nearly dark when the carman took his departure, and the smith, a
silent youth with sore eyes, caught hold of one of the grey mare's
fetlocks and told her to "lift!" He examined each hoof in succession by
the light of a candle stuck in a bottle, raked his fire together, and
then, turning to Mr. Fennessy, remarked:--

"Ye'd laugh if ye were here the day I put a slipper on this one, an' she
afther comin' out o' the thrain--last June it was. 'Twas one Connolly
back from Craffroe side was taking her from the station; him that
thrained her for Miss Fitzroy. She gave him the two heels in the face."
The glow from the fire illumined the smith's sardonic grin of
remembrance. "She had a sandcrack in the near fore that time, and
there's the sign of it yet."

The Cinderella-like episode of the slipper had naturally not entered
into Mr. Fennessy's calculations, but he took the unforeseen without a
change of countenance.

"Well, now," he said deliberately, "I was sayin' to meself on the road a
while ago, if there was one this side o' the counthry would know her
it'd be yerself."

The smith took the compliment with a blink of his sore eyes.

"Annyone'd be hard set to know her now," he said.

There was a pause, during which a leap of sparks answered each thump of
the hammer on the white hot iron, and Mr. Fennessy arranged his course
of action.

"Well, Larry," he said, "I'll tell ye now what no one in this counthry
knows but meself and Patsey Crimmeen. Sure I know it's as good to tell a
thing to the ground as to tell it to yerself!"

He lowered his voice.

"'Twas Mr. Gunning of Streamstown bought that one from Miss Fitzroy at
the Dublin Show, and a hundhred pound he gave for her!"

The smith mentally docked this sum by seventy pounds, but said, "By
dam!" in polite convention.

"'Twasn't a week afther that I got her for twinty-five pounds!"

The smith made a further mental deduction equally justified by the
facts; the long snore and wheeze of the bellows filled the silence, and
the dirty walls flushed and glowed with the steady crescendo and
diminuendo of the glow.

The ex-tinker picked up the bottle with the candle. "Look at that!" he
said, lowering the light and displaying a long transverse scar beginning
at the mare's knee and ending in an enlarged fetlock.

"I seen that," said the smith.

"And look at that!" continued Mr. F