Simon: Wait till I’ll kindle a match.
   (Lights one and picks up coin.)

Damer: What is that in your hand?

Simon: You should know.

Damer: Is it gold it is?

Simon: It is all I have of means in the world.  I never handled a coin before it, but my bite to be given me and my bed.

Damer: You’ll mind it well if you have sense.

Simon: It is towards the east it bade me go.  I’ll travel as far as the races of Knockbarron to-morrow.

Damer: You’ll be apt to lose it going to races.

Simon: I’ll go bet with it, and see what way will it turn out.

Damer: You to set all you own upon a horse that might fail at the leaps!  It is a very foolish thing doing that.

Simon: It might not.  Some have luck and are born lucky and more have run through their luck.  If I lose it, it is lost.  It would not keep me long anyway.  I to win, I will have more and plenty.

Damer: You will surely lose it.

Simon: If I do I have nothing to get or to fall back on.  It is some other one must take my charges.

Damer: A great pity to go lose a gold sovereign to some schemer you never saw before.

Simon: Sure you must take some risk.  You cannot put your hands around the world.

Damer: It to be swept by a trick of the loop man!

Simon: It is not with that class I will make free.

Damer: To go lose the whole of it in one second of time!

Simon: I will make four divides of it.

Damer: To go change it into silver and into copper!  That would be the most pity in the world.

Simon: I’ll chance it all upon the one jock so.

Damer: Gold!  Believe me it is a good thing to hold and a very heartbreak the time it is lost. (Takes it in his hand.) Pure gold!  There is not a thing to be got with it as worthy as what it is itself!  There is no comfort in any place and it not in it.  The Queen’s image on it and her crown.  Solid between the fingers; weighty in the palm of the hand; as beautiful as ever I saw.

Simon: It is likely it is the same nearly as any other one.

Damer: Gold!  My darling it is!  From the hollows of the world to the heights of the world there is no grander thing to be found.  My bone and my marrow!  Let me have the full of my arms of it and I’ll not ask the flowers of field or fallow or the dancing of the Easter sun!

Simon: I am thinking you should be Damer.  I heard said Damer has a full crock of gold.

Damer: He has not!  He has not!

Simon: That is what the world says anyway.  I heard it as far as the seaside.

Damer: I wish to my God it was true!

Simon: Full and brimming to the brink.  That is the way it was told.