He chanced one day to overtake on the road to Collooney one Margaret
Rooney, a woman he used to know in Munster when he was a young man.
She had no good name at that time, and it was the priest routed her
out of the place at last. He knew her by her walk and by the colour
of her eyes, and by a way she had of putting back the hair off her
face with her left hand. She had been wandering about, she said,
selling herrings and the like, and now she was going back to Sligo,
to the place in the Burrough where she was living with another woman,
Mary Gillis, who had much the same story as herself. She would be
well pleased, she said, if he would come and stop in the house with
them, and be singing his songs to the bacachs and blind men and
fiddlers of the Burrough. She remembered him well, she said, and had
a wish for him; and as to Mary Gillis, she had some of his songs off
by heart, so he need not be afraid of not getting good treatment, and
all the bacachs and poor men that heard him would give him a share of
their own earnings for his stories and his songs while he was with
them, and would carry his name into all the parishes of Ireland.
He was glad enough to go with her, and to find a woman to be
listening to the story of his troubles and to be comforting him. It
was at the moment of the fall of day when every man may pass as
handsome and every woman as comely. She put her arm about him when he
told her of the misfortune of the Twisting of the Rope, and in the
half light she looked as well as another.
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