After a long while his monologue paused.  He stood up slowly, saying that he had to leave us for a minute or so, a few minutes, and, without changing the direction of my gaze, I saw him walking slowly away from us towards the near end of the field.  We remained silent when he had gone.  After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim: 

“I say!  Look what he’s doing!”

As I neither answered nor raised my eyes Mahony exclaimed again: 

“I say...  He’s a queer old josser!”

“In case he asks us for our names,” I said “let you be Murphy and I’ll be Smith.”

We said nothing further to each other.  I was still considering whether I would go away or not when the man came back and sat down beside us again.  Hardly had he sat down when Mahony, catching sight of the cat which had escaped him, sprang up and pursued her across the field.  The man and I watched the chase.  The cat escaped once more and Mahony began to throw stones at the wall she had escaladed.  Desisting from this, he began to wander about the far end of the field, aimlessly.

After an interval the man spoke to me.  He said that my friend was a very rough boy and asked did he get whipped often at school.  I was going to reply indignantly that we were not National School boys to be whipped, as he called it; but I remained silent.  He began to speak on the subject of chastising boys.  His mind, as if magnetised again by his speech, seemed to circle slowly round and round its new centre.  He said that when boys were that kind they ought to be whipped and well whipped.  When a boy was rough and unruly there was nothing would do him any good but a good sound whipping.  A slap on the hand or a box on the ear was no good:  what he wanted was to get a nice warm whipping.  I was surprised at this sentiment and involuntarily glanced up at his face.  As I did so I met the gaze of a pair of bottle-green eyes peering at me from under a twitching forehead.  I turned my eyes away again.

The man continued his monologue.  He seemed to have forgotten his recent liberalism.  He said that if ever he found a boy talking to girls or having a girl for a sweetheart he would whip him and whip him; and that would teach him not to be talking to girls.  And if a boy had a girl for a sweetheart and told lies about it then he would give him such a whipping as no boy ever got in this world.  He said that there was nothing in this world he would like so well as that.  He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery.  He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world; and his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him.

I waited till his monologue paused again.  Then I stood up abruptly.  Lest I should betray my agitation I delayed a few moments pretending to fix my shoe properly and then, saying that I was obliged to go, I bade him good-day.  I went up the slope calmly but my heart was beating quickly with fear that he would seize me by the ankles.  When I reached the top of the slope I turned round and, without looking at him, called loudly across the field: