Page:Darby O'Gill and the Good People by Herminie Templeton Kavanagh (1903).djvu/55

Rh “I’d have a castle like Castle Brophy, with a great picture-gallery in it. On one wall I’d put the picture of the O’Gills and the O’Gradys, and on the wall ferninst them I’d have the O’Hagans an’ the O’Shaughnessys.”

At that ideah his heart bubbled in a new and fierce deloight. “Bridget’s people,” he says agin, scowling at the bee, “would look four times as common as they raylly are, whin they were compared in that way with my own relations. An’ whenever Bridget got rampageous I’d take her in and show her the difference betwixt the two clans, just to punish her, so I would.”

How long the lad sat that way warming the cowld thoughts of his heart with drowsy, pleasant dhrames an’ misty longings he don’t rightly know, whin—tack, tack, tack, tack, came the busy sound of a little hammer from the other side of a fallen oak.

“Be jingo!” he says to himself with a start, “’tis the Leprechaun that’s in it.”

In a second he was on his hands an’ knees, the tails of his coat flung across his back, an’ he crawling softly toward the sound of the hammer. Quiet as a mouse he lifted himself up on the mossy log to look Rh