Strangers at Lisconnel

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CHAPTER I

OUT OF THE WAY


To Lisconnel, our very small hamlet in the middle of a wide bogland, the
days that break over the dim blue hill-line, faint and far off, seldom
bring a stranger's face; but then they seldom take a familiar one away,
beyond reach, at any rate of return before nightfall. In fact, there are
few places amid this mortal change to which we may come back after any
reasonable interval with more confidence of finding things just as we
left them, due allowance being made for the inevitable fingering of
Time. We shall find some old people who have aged under it, and some
who, as certain philosophers would hold, have grown younger again. The
latter may be seen just beginning, perhaps, to sit up stiff on a woman's
arm, or starting for a trial crawl over mother earth; and of them we
remark that there is another little Ryan or Quigley; while the former
stay sunning themselves so inertly, or totter about so shakily, that we
notice at once how much old Sheridan, or the Widow Joyce, has failed
since last year. These babies and grandparents often associate a good
deal with one another at the stage when the old body is still capable of
"keepin' an eye on the child," and the child still resorts to all fours
if it wants to get up its highest speed. But this companionship does not
last long in any given case. Very soon the expanding and the contracting
sphere cease to touch closely. On the one hand, the world widens into
more spacious tracts for nimbler and bolder ranging over with all manner
of remarkable things growing and living upon it, to be gathered and
captured, or at least sought and chased, among pools, and hillocks and
swampy places. On the other, it shrinks to within the limits of a few
dwindling furlongs and perches, traver