(Enter BARTLEY FALLON and MRS. FALLON.)

BARTLEY.  Indeed it’s a poor country and a scarce country to be living in.  But I’m thinking if I went to America it’s long ago the day I’d be dead!

MRS. FALLON.  So you might, indeed.

(She puts her basket on a barrel and begins putting parcels in it, taking them from under her cloak.)

BARTLEY.  And it’s a great expense for a poor man to be buried in America.

MRS. FALLON.  Never fear, Bartley Fallon, but I’ll give you a good burying the day you’ll die.

BARTLEY.  Maybe it’s yourself will be buried in the graveyard of Cloonmara before me, Mary Fallon, and I myself that will be dying unbeknownst some night, and no one a-near me.  And the cat itself may be gone straying through the country, and the mice squealing over the quilt.

MRS. FALLON.  Leave off talking of dying.  It might be twenty years you’ll be living yet.

BARTLEY (with a deep sigh).  I’m thinking if I’ll be living at the end of twenty years, it’s a very old man I’ll be then!

MRS. TARPEY (turns and sees them).  Good-morrow, Bartley Fallon; good-morrow, Mrs. Fallon.  Well, Bartley, you’ll find no cause for complaining to-day; they are all saying it was a good fair.

BARTLEY (raising his voice).  It was not a good fair, Mrs. Tarpey.  It was a scattered sort of a fair.  If we didn’t expect more, we got less.  That’s the way with me always:  whatever I have to sell goes down and whatever I have to buy goes up.  If there’s ever any misfortune coming to this world, it’s on myself it pitches, like a flock of crows on seed potatoes.

MRS. FALLON.  Leave off talking of misfortunes, and listen to Jack Smith that is coming the way, and he singing.

(Voice of JACK SMITH heard singing)

  I thought, my first love,
    There’d be but one house between you and me. 
  And I thought I would find
    Yourself coaxing my child on your knee. 
  Over the tide
    I would leap with the leap of a swan. 
  Till I came to the side
    Of the wife of the red-haired man!

(JACK SMITH comes in; he is a red-haired man, and is carrying a hayfork.)

MRS. TARPEY.  That should be a good song if I had my hearing.

MRS. FALLON (shouting).  It’s “The Red-haired Man’s Wife.”

MRS. TARPEY.  I know it well.  That’s the song that has a skin on it!

(She turns her back to them and goes on arranging her apples.)

MRS. FALLON.  Where’s herself, Jack Smith?

JACK SMITH.  She was delayed with her washing; bleaching the clothes on the hedge she is, and she daren’t leave them, with all the tinkers that do be passing to the fair.  It isn’t to the fair I came myself, but up to the Five-Acre Meadow I’m going, where I have a contract for the hay.  We’ll get a share of it into tramps to-day.