Patsy seemed to have grown older since the autumn; he seemed like a doll out of which the sawdust was running, a poor shaking thing—­a large head afloat on a weak neck.  Tresses of white hair hung on his shoulders, and his watery eyes were red and restless like a ferret’s.  He opened his mouth, and there were two teeth on either side like tusks.  Gray stubble covered his face, and he wore a brown suit, the trousers retained about his pot-belly—­all that remained of his body—­by a scarf.  There was some limp linen and a red muffler about his throat.  He spoke of his age—­he was ninety-five—­and the priest said he was a fine-looking, hearty man for his years.  There wasn’t a doubt but he’d pass the hundred.  Patsy was inclined to believe he would go to one hundred and one; for he had been told in a vision he would go as far as that.

’You see, living in the house alone, the brain empties and the vision comes.’

That was how he explained his belief as he flopped along by the priest’s side, his head shaking and his tongue going, telling tales of all kinds, half-remembered things:  how the Gormleys and the Actons had driven the Colonel out of the country, and dispersed all his family with their goings-on.  That was why they didn’t want him—­he knew too much about them.  One of his tales was how they had frightened the Colonel’s mother by tying a lame hare by a horsehair to the knocker of the hall door.  Whenever the hare moved a rapping was heard at the front-door.  But nobody could discover the horsehair, and the rapping was attributed to a family ghost.

He seemed to have forgotten his sword, and was now inclined to talk of his fists, and he stopped the priest in the middle of the road to tell a long tale how once, in Liverpool, someone had spoken against the Colonel, and, holding up his clenched fist, he said that no one ever escaped alive from the fist of Patsy Murphy.

It was a trial to Father Oliver to hear him, for he could not help thinking that to become like him it was only necessary to live as long as he.  But it was difficult to get rid of the old fellow, who followed the priest as far as the village, and would have followed him further if Mrs. Egan were not standing there waiting for Father Oliver—­a delicate-featured woman with a thin aquiline nose, who was still good-looking, though her age was apparent.  She was forty-five, or perhaps fifty, and she held her daughter’s baby in her coarse peasant hands.  Since the birth of the child a dispute had been raging between the two mothers-in-law:  the whole village was talking, and wondering what was going to happen next.