The Golden Ocean Read Free

it?’ cried Liam in a passion. ‘It’s a huddle of cabins, is it? A claddach, perhaps? Are there no eyes in your head to see the pompous great steeple and the elegant courthouse? Though it is true,’ he said more coolly, ‘that not much of it shows from here. But there, look now, on the other side of the river—do you see in the bow of the river?—that great round of green half the size of America. Well, that is the race-course alone!’
    ‘Is it, then?’ cried Peter, astonished.
    ‘It is, too,’ replied Liam, appeased, ‘and the best race-course in Heaven is scarcely more handsome or vast.’
    ‘Oh, it’s I’ll be there first,’ cried Sean, slipping down and starting to run.
    Sean was the best runner for twenty parishes—and it was said in Ballynasaggart that if he desired a change in his victuals he had but to run at full speed to catch a snipe in the one hand and a cock in the other—and he took a great start on them. He was quite out of view for a while, although they travelled on briskly: there were some people on the road now, which was a change after the bare and mountainy country, and they were all hurrying, pressing forward with their faces towards Derrynacaol; there were donkey-carts and horsemen and nearer the town many people on foot, but never a hint of Sean did they see until they were close to the very door of the inn. He had put on the shoes well outside the town, not to disgrace his company; but they were the family shoes of a numerous clan or sept whose members differed much in size, and although they increased Sean’s outward glory they added nothing to his comfort at all and the last half-mile had flayed the hide off his spirit as he minced along on tip-toe. Indeed he was so reduced that he was glad to hobble into the stable, and all the while Peter was changing he lay on a heap of straw with his feet in the air while a compassionate ostler from Tuam pumped a jet of cool water over them.
    This changing was Liam’s idea, and he insisted upon italthough Peter was boiling to be at the fair. ‘It may very well be that you will meet with Mr FitzGerald,’ he said, ‘and you would not wish us all to be shamed with your old frieze coat: besides, there are the lords and the gentry from all the country and their ladies like peacocks for glory—it will never do to show like a scrub.’
    As he spoke he unpacked, spreading Peter’s best coat and polishing the buttons on his sleeve, breathing heavily to make them shine: so Peter made the best of it and when it was over he was glad he had done it, for not only was Liam’s satisfaction plain on his face—and it is always pleasant to please your own people—but for his own part he felt more confident and worldly: and indeed he was a creditable figure to come from an isolated parsonage at the remotest edge of the poorest diocese in the western world. His long-skirted blue coat (handed down from Cousin Spencer), his embroidered waistcoat and his buff breeches (William’s by rights, but pressed into his Majesty’s service for the occasion) were all the product of devoted cutting-down and needling and threading at home, but they looked quite as if they had come from a tailor’s hands; and his gay waistcoat, which represented seven months of loving toil on the part of Laetitia, was finer than any tailor could have produced, particularly as her affectionate zeal had carried the pattern as far as his shoulder-blades, whereas embroidery usually stops at one’s ribs. And as for his linen, that had been grown and retted and spun and woven and tented and bleached entirely at home, and Solomon had no finer linen than that of Ballynasaggart, nor finer lace (if Solomon ever wore lace, which is doubtful indeed) than that which came from the bobbins and pins of Pegeen Ban to hang in a spidery web at Peter’s throat and his wrists.
    ‘Your mother would be proud,’ said Liam, tying Peter’s hair in the black ribbon behind.
    ‘But fine clothes are a