SARA -- [exuberantly.] That's right, Widow Quin. I'll bet my dowry that
he'll lick the world.
WIDOW QUIN. If you will, you'd have a right to have him fresh and nourished
in place of nursing a feast. (Taking presents.) Are you fasting or fed, young
fellow?
CHRISTY. Fasting, if you please.
WIDOW QUIN -- [loudly.] Well, you're the lot. Stir up now and give him his
breakfast. (To Christy.) Come here to me (she puts him on bench beside her
while the girls make tea and get his breakfast) and let you tell us your story
before Pegeen will come, in place of grinning your ears off like the moon of
May.
CHRISTY -- [beginning to be pleased.] -- It's a long story; you'd be destroyed
listening.
WIDOW QUIN. Don't be letting on to be shy, a fine, gamey, treacherous lad the
like of you. Was it in your house beyond you cracked his skull?
CHRISTY -- [shy but flattered.] -- It was not. We were digging spuds in his
cold, sloping, stony, divil's patch of a field.
WIDOW QUIN. And you went asking money of him, or making talk of getting a
wife would drive him from his farm?
CHRISTY. I did not, then; but there I was, digging and digging, and "You
squinting idiot," says he, "let you walk down now and tell the priest you'll
wed the Widow Casey in a score of days."
WIDOW QUIN. And what kind was she?
CHRISTY -- [with horror.] -- A walking terror from beyond the hills, and she
two score and five years, and two hundredweights and five pounds in the
weighing scales, with a limping leg on her, and a blinded eye, and she a woman
of noted misbehaviour with the old and young.
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