In the evening Paddy ran over the road to his cousin’s.  Western clouds were blackening and his little cousin was pulling the pig into the cabin as a man puts other sort of treasure out of danger into a safe.  Paddy listened a moment.  He could hear the castanets of the tweed weaver’s loom and the hum of his uncle’s deep voice as he sang at his work.  He ran to the rear of the cabin and up the stone steps to the little addition.  A lantern filled the room he entered with black, harp-like shadows of the loom.  While the uncle stopped treadling and held the blue-tailed shuttle in his hand, the breathless little boy told him that the field was finished.

“God grant,” said the uncle with a solemnity that put fear into the heart of Paddy, “there may be a harvest for you.”

Paddy watched his mother work ceaselessly to aid in the fight that his father and he were making against poverty.  During the month her needles would click unending wool into socks, and then on Saturday she would trudge—­often in a stiff Atlantic gale—­sixteen miles to the market in Strabane.  There she sold the socks at a penny a pair.

In spite of combined hopes, the potato plants were floppily yellow that year.  Their stems felt like a dead man’s fingers.  No potatoes to eat.  None to exchange for meal.  What were they to do?

The gombeen man told them.  As member of the county council, he said, he would secure money for the repair of the roads.  All those who worked on the road would get paid in meal.

“Let your da’ not worry,” said the fat gombeen man pompously to Paddy.  Paddy had brought the ticket that his father had obtained by a week’s work to exchange for twenty-eight pounds of corn meal.  “I’ll keep famine from the parish.  Charity’s not dead yet.”

When Paddy lugged the meal into the cabin, he found his mother lying on the bed with her face averted from the bowl of milk that some less hungry neighbor had brought in.  His father’s gaunt frame was hunched over the peat blocks on the flat hearth.  Paddy, full of desire to banish the brooding discouragement from the room, hastened to repeat the words of the gombeen man.  But he felt that he had failed when his father, regarding the two stone sack, said hollowly: 

“Charity?  Small pay to the men who keep the roads open for his vans.”

In the spring, Paddy was nine, and had to go out in the world to fight poverty alone.  His father had confided to him that they were in great debt to the gombeen man.  Paddy could help them get out.  There was to be a hiring fair in Strabane.  Paddy swung along the road to Strabane pretending he was a man—­he was to be hired out just like one.  But when he arrived at the hiring field he shrank back.  All the farm hands, big and little, stood herded together in between the cattle pens.  A man?  A beast.  One overseer for a big estate came up to dicker for the boy, and said he would give him fifteen dollars for six months’ work.  Paddy was just about to muster up courage to put the price up a bit, when a friend of the overseer came up with the prearranged remark:  “A fine boy!  Well worth twelve dollars the six months!”