tably smoked and talked. From them came the sounds of
laughter and the babble of children. Each time the old man passed
through one of the radiant zones the light etched his face in profile
with touches flaming and sombre until there was a resemblance to a stern
and mournful Dante portrait.

Once a whistling lad came through the darkness. He peered intently for
purposes of recognition. "Good avenin', Mickey," he cried cheerfully.
The old man responded with a groan, which intimated that the lamentable
reckless optimism of the youth had forced from him an expression of an
emotion that he had been enduring in saintly patience and silence. He
continued his pilgrimage toward the kitchen of the village inn.

The kitchen is a great and worthy place. The long range with its lurid
heat continually emits the fragrance of broiling fish, roasting mutton,
joints, and fowl. The high black ceiling is ornamented with hams and
flitches of bacon. There is a long, dark bench against one wall, and it
is fronted by a dark table, handy for glasses of stout. On an old
mahogany dresser rows of plates face the distant range, and reflect the
red shine of the peat. Smoke which has in it the odour of an American
forest fire eddies through the air. The great stones of the floor are
scarred by the black mud from the inn yard. And here the gossip of a
country-side goes on amid the sizzle of broiling fish and the loud
protesting splutter of joints taken from the oven.

When the old man reached the door of this paradise, he stopped for a
moment with his finger on the latch. He sighed deeply; evidently he was
undergoing some lachrymose reflection. For somewhere overhead in the inn
he could hear the wild clamour of dining pig-buyers, men who were come
for the pig fair to be held on the morrow. Evidently in the little
parlour of the inn these men were dining amid an uproar of shouted jests
and laughter. The revelry sounded like the fighting of two mobs amid a
rain of missiles and crash of shop windows. The old man raised his hand
as if, unseen there in the darkness, he was going to solemnly damn the
dinner of the pig-buyers.

Within the kitchen Nora, tall, strong, intrepid, approached the fiery
stove in the manner of a boxer. Her left arm was held high to guard her
face, which was already crimson from the blaze. With a flourish of her
apron she achieved a great brown humming joint from the oven, and,
emerging a glowing and triumphant figure from the st