Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/320

308 ould there 's no goin' back to the young days—excipt while yeh sleep. An' it 's the sorry wakin' yeh have."

"That 's true," he said, to humor her.

"It is," she replied, unmollified, "but little enough yeh know of it. Yeh 'll learn whin yeh 're a dodderin' ould man with no teeth to grip yer pipe to." She nodded at a memory of her own grandfather, drowsing before the peat fire, of an evening, under the soot-blackened beams of the kitchen, with his pipe upside down in his mouth.

Beatty smiled. The talk of this old woman of the basement's underworld—with her plaintive Irish intonation and her comic Irish face and her amusing Irish "touchiness"—was as good as a play to him.

"How long have you been out?" he asked.

"Long enough to learn better. Foorty year an' more."

"Well, why did you come then?"

She turned on him. "God knows! Why did I? Why did Annie gurl? Well may yeh ask!" She tossed her head resentfully. "Beca'se roasted pitaties an' good buttermilk were too poor fer proud stummicks. Beca'se we wud be rich, as they tol' us we wud, here in Ameriky. An' what are we? The naygurs o' the town, livin' in cellars, servin' thim that pays us in the money that we came fer, an' gettin' none o' the fair words an' kindness we left behind. Sure at home they 're more neighborly to the brute beasts than y' are here to the humans." She looked out at the stifling street. "We 're strangers in a strange land, as Father