Irish idylls Author:Jane Barlow Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. ONE TOO MANY. It may have been partly the widow M'Gurk's American windfall that turned people's thoughts thitherward, by making them realise viv... more »idly the advantages of receiving remittances from abroad ; at any rate it is certain that throughout the following winter the idea of emigration to " the States " was unwontedly in the air at Lisconnel. Not that it throve or spread there to any considerable extent, this cabin-cluster being one of those forlorn, makeshift, casual-looking little settlements wherein the inhabitant seems always to strike a terribly deep and tenacious root. Primarily, it may be, from a self-preserving instinct, for his shaggy roof and stony scrap of potato-plot form his stronghold, his first and last outpost against the ever-beleaguering wilderness and solitary places, and he clings to them with a desperation hardly conceivable by people who interpose more elaborate barriers between their lives and the sheer brute forces ofnature. Outside that screed of rough shelter he knows what ills forthwith await him, what step- motherliness of barren earth, what pitilessness of capricious skies, but there is nothing in his experience to apprise him of any counterbalancing good. All his auguries drawn from thence are of privation : solitude, silence—or uncomforting strange faces and voices—homelessness, hunger—these things promise to be his portion when once he passes beyond the reach of his fragrant blue turf smoke and his big black pot. And from such-like evils " th' ould place at home " has hitherto shielded him more or less effectually ; but furthermore it provides him with a daily ration of business and desire, a clue to guide his wanderings through the mazes of a destiny that at best seems to him sufficiently perplexing and inscrutable. For he has, a...« less