Page:Darby O'Gill and the Good People by Herminie Templeton Kavanagh (1903).djvu/158

Rh giving a yell that was ten times louder than the first screech, she flung his Majesty from her down upon the hard ground. Leaping a ditch, she went galloping wildly across the meadow. The King fell flat on his back with an unraysonable joult.

That wasn’t the worst of his bad luck. If Peggy had dhropped him at any other place in the field he might have crawled off into the ditch and hid till sunset, but oh, asthore, there not ten rods away, with eyes bulging and mouth gaping, stood Barney Casey, the Man without Childher!

Barney looked from the little bundle on the ground to Peggy as she went skimming, like a big red bird, over the low-lying morning fog. Through his surprise a foine hope slowly dawned for him.

He said: “Good fortune folly you, and my blessing rest on you wherever you go, Peggy Bawn, for the throuble you’ve lifted this day; you’ve given me a Moses in the bull rushers or a Pharyoah’s daughter, but I disremember which, God forgive me for forgetting my rayligion!”

He stood for a minute slyly looking to the north, and the south and the ayst and the west. But what he saw, when he turned to look again for the baby, Rh