Page:Minnie's Bishop and Other Stories (1915).djvu/37

 what he seemed willing for. He had a decent suit of clothes to wear of a Sunday or a fair day, and nobody denied him his share of any pleasuring there might be in it—the like of a football kicking, or maybe a dance at an odd time; but the notion took him and nothing would do him only to go to America. I was against it and so was his father."

Mrs. Cassidy relapsed into silence again. She seemed to have forgotten my presence altogether. Then suddenly she looked at me and added a word of explanation—a pathetically unnecessary word.

"His name was Michael Antony, but it was Sonny we did be calling him. Well," she went on, "nothing would do him but to write to his Aunt Matilda, who's out in Pittsburgh and married to a man that went from this parish. I never seen her myself, but she was his father's sister. Sonny was always a good scholar and he was well fit to write a letter to his aunt or to any other one. We kept him to his schooling regular, only when there might be a press of work at the hay or the like of that, so as he'd be wanted at home. It was always his father's wish and my own that he'd get good learning while he could—and he got it. There wasn't a better speller than Sonny; and the way he'd write, a blind man could have read it!"

The half door of the cottage was opened and two girls came in. I looked round and recognised the Cassidys' little daughters, children of twelve and