Miss Joyce: They had a right to keep her spancelled in the asylum.  She would begrudge any respectable person to be walking the street.  She’d hoot you, she’d shout you, she’d clap her hands at you.  She is a blight in the town.

Hyacinth Halvey: There is a lad along with her.

Shawn Early: It is Davideen, her brother, that is innocent.  He was left rambling from place to place the time she was put within walls.

   (Cracked Mary and Davideen come in. 
    Miss Joyce clings to Hyacinth’s arm.)

Cracked Mary: Give me a charity now, the way I’ll be keeping a little rag on me and a little shoe to my foot.  Give me the price of tobacco and the price of a grain of tea; for tobacco is blessed and tea is good for the head.

Shawn Early: Give out now, Davideen, a verse of “The Heather Broom.”  That’s a splendid tune.

Davideen:  (Sings.)

  Oh, don’t you remember,
  As it’s often I told you,
  As you passed through our kitchen,
  That a new broom sweeps clean? 
  Come out now and buy one,
  Come out now and try one—­

   (His voice cracks, and he breaks off, laughing foolishly.)

Mrs. Broderick: He has a sweet note in his voice, but to know or to understand what he is doing, he couldn’t do it.

Cracked Mary: Leave him a while.  His song that does be clogged through the daytime, the same as the sight is clogged with myself.  It isn’t but in the night time I can see anything worth while.  Davy is a proper boy, a proper boy; let you leave Davy alone.  It was himself came before me ere yesterday in the morning, and I walking out the madhouse door.

Shawn Early: It is often there will fiddlers be waiting to play for them coming out, that are maybe the finest dancers of the day.

Cracked Mary: Waiting before me he was, and no one to give him knowledge unless it might be the Big Man.  I give you my word he near ate the face off me.  As glad to see me he was as if I had dropped from heaven.  Come hither to me, Davy, and give no heed to them.  It is as dull and as lagging as themselves you would be maybe, and the world to be different and the moon to change its courses with the sun.

Bartley Fallon: I never would wish to be put within a madhouse before I’d die.

Cracked Mary: Sorry they were losing me.  There was not a better prisoner in it than my own four bones.

Bartley Fallon: Squeals you would hear from it, they were telling me, like you’d hear at the ringing of the pigs.  Savages with whips beating them the same as hounds.  You would not stand and listen to them for a hundred sovereigns.  Of all bad things that can come upon a man, it is certain the madness is the last.

Miss Joyce: It is likely she was well content in it, and the friends she had being of her own class.