Mrs. Pat’s roan cob had attacked and defeated the fourteen Irish miles with superfluous zeal, and there were still several minutes before the hounds could be reasonably expected on the scene.  The soda was bad, the whisky was worse.  The sound of a riddle came in with the sunshine through the open door, and our friends strolled out into the street to see what was going on.  In the centre of a ring of onlookers an old man was playing, and was, moreover, dancing to his own music, and dancing with serious, incongruous elegance.  Round and round the circle he footed it, his long thin legs twinkling in absolute accord with the complicated jig that his long thin fingers were ripping out of the cracked and raucous fiddle.  A very plain, stout young woman, with a heavy red face and discordantly golden hair, shuffled round after him in a clumsy pretence of dancing, and as the couple faced Mrs. Pat she saw that the old man was blind.  Steam was rising from his domed bald head, and his long black hair danced on his shoulders.  His face was pale and strange and entirely self-absorbed.  Had Mrs. Pat been in the habit of instituting romantic parallels between the past and the present she might have thought of the priests of Baal who danced in probably just such measures round the cromlechs in the hills above Carnfother; as she wasn’t, she remarked merely that this was all very well, but that the old maniac would have to clear out of that before they brought Pilot round, or there’d be trouble.

There was trouble, but it did not arise from Pilot, but from the yellow-haired woman’s pertinacious demands for money from Mrs. Naylor.  She had the offensive fluency that comes of long practice in alternate wheedling and bullying, and although Major Booth had given her a shilling she continued to pester Mrs. Pat for a further largesse.  But, as it happened, Mrs. Pat’s purse was in her covert coat in the dog-cart, and Mrs. Pat’s temper was ever within easy reach, and on being too closely pressed for the one she exhibited the other with a decision that contracted the ring of bystanders to hear the fun, and loosened the yellow-haired woman’s language, till unfortunate Major Booth felt that if he could get her off the field of battle for a sovereign it would be cheap at the price.  The old man continued to walk round and round, fingering a dumb tune on his fiddle that he did not bow, while the sunlight glistened hot and bright in his unwinking eyes; there was a faint smile on his lips, he heard as little as he saw; it was evident that he was away where “beyond these voices there is peace,” in the fairy country that his forefathers called the Tir na’n Oge.