Conan:  I’m very sure there is surely.  The world will be a new world before to-morrow’s Angelus bell.

Flannery:  I never could believe in a bellows.

Rock:  Here now is a fair offer.  I’ll loan you this bag of notes to pay your charges to Dublin if you will change that little pigeon in the crib into a crow.

Conan:  I will do no such folly.

Rock:  You wouldn’t because you’d be afeared to try.

Conan:  Hold it up to me.  I’ll show you am I afeared!

Rock:  There it is now. (Holds up cage.)

Conan:  Have a care! (Blows.)

Rock:  (Dropping it with a shriek.) It has me bit with its hard beak, it is turned to be an old black crow.

Flannery:  As black as the bottom of the pot.

Crow:  Caw!  Caw!  Caw!

(Cats reappear and look over back of settle.)

(Music from behind.) ("O’Donnall Abu.”)

CURTAIN

ACT II

ACT II

Conan alone holding up bellows, singing: 

Conan:

“And doth not a meeting like this make amends For all the long years I’ve been wandering away Deceived for a moment it’s now in my hands—­ breathe the fresh air of life’s morning again!”

Celia:  (Comes in having listened amused at door; claps hands.) Very good!  It is you yourself should be going to the dance house to-night in place of myself.  It is long since I heard you rise so happy a tune!

Conan:  (Putting bellows behind him.) What brings you here?  Is there no work for you out in the garden—­the cabbages to be cutting for the cow....

Celia:  I wouldn’t wish to roughen my hands before evening.  Music there will be for the dancing!

(She lilts Miss McLeod’s Reel.)

Conan:  Let you go ready yourself for it so.

Celia:  Is it at this time of the day?  You should be forgetting the hours of the clock the same as the poor mother.

Conan:  It is a strange thing since I came to this house I never can get one minute’s ease and quiet to myself.

Celia:  It was hearing you singing brought me in.

Conan: I’d sooner have you without!  Be going now.

Celia: I will and welcome.  It is to bring out my little pigeon I will, where there is a few grains of barley fell from a car going the road.

Conan: Hurry on so!

Celia:  (Taking up cage.) He is not in his crib. (Looking here and there.) Where now can he have gone?

Conan: He should have gone out the door.

Celia: He did not.  He could not have come out unknown to me.  Coo, coo,—­coo—­coo.