Delia:  (Taking up a jug.) No sign in this vessel of anything that would leave a sign.  I’ll go bail he takes his tea in a black state, and the milk to be rotting in the churn.

Ralph:  (Handling a coat and hat hanging on a nail.) That’s a queer cut of a hat.  That now should have been a good top-coat in its time.

Delia: For pity’s sake!  That is the top-coat and the hat he used to be wearing and he riding his long-tailed pony to every racecourse from this to the Curragh of Kildare.  A good class of cloth it should be to last out through seventeen years.

Staffy: The time he was young and fundless he had not a bad reaching hand.  He never was thrifty but lavish till he came into the ownership of the land.  It is as if his luck left him, he growing timid at the time he had means to lose.

Delia: Every horse he would back at that time it would surely win all before it.  I saw the people thronging him one time, taking him in their arms for joy, and the winnings coming into his hand.  It is likely they ran out through the fingers as swift nearly as they flowed in.

Staffy: He grew to be very dark and crabbed from the time of the father’s death.  His mind was on his halfpenny ever since.

Delia:  (Looking at dresser.) Spiders’ webs heaped in ridges the same as windrows in a bleach of hay.  What now is that there above on the upper shelf?

Ralph:  (Taking it from top shelf.) It is but a pack of cards.

Staffy: They should maybe be the very same that brought him profit in his wild days.  He always had a lucky hand.

Delia:  (Dusting them.) You would give your seven oaths the dust to have been gathering on them since the time of the Hebrews’ Flood.  I’ll tell you now a thing to do.  We being here before him in the house, why wouldn’t we ready it and put some sort of face upon it, the way he would be in humour with us coming in.

Ralph: And the way he might incline to put into our hand some good promise or some gift.

Delia:  (Dusting.) I would wish no gift from any person at all, but that my mind is set at this time on a fleet of white goats and a guinea-hen are to be canted out from the Spanish woman at Lisatuwna cross by reason of the hanging gale.

Staffy: That was the way with you, Delia, from the time you could look out from the half-door, to be coveting pictures and fooleries, that would shape themselves in your mind.

Delia: There is no sin coveting things are of no great use or profit, but would show out good and have some grandeur around them.  Those goats now!  Browsing on the blossoms of the bushes they would be, or the herbs that give out a sweet smell.  Stir yourself, Staffy, and throw your eye on that turf beyond in the corner.  It is that wet you could wring from it splashes and streams.  Let you rise the ashes from the sods are on the hearth and redden them with a goosewing, if there is a goosewing to be found.  There is no greater beauty to be met with than the leaping of a little yellow flame.