Page:The Land of Wonders - O Conaire.pdf/13

Rh a lullaby for seven hours on end was surely a great possession.

And he married her. If that wasn't the reason for which he married her—that or the nice little oat cakes—it surely wasn't for her comely person that he loved her. She was tall, very tall, lean and spare. Her rough, wrinkled skin was the colour of wet turf-mould. You would imagine that her skin was made for someone else—for someone far stouter than she was. There was a bag of this sallow skin under her chin that made you curious to see how far you could pull her double chin without hurting the poor woman. But that's as far as you'd get. Once she noticed you looking at the double chin you'd know by her that she could be a bit of a tartar with unmannerly people.

She had one illusion, and that was that there didn't exist a finer woman than she, and that there was never seen a man who sailed the seas as fine as her husband, if she was a judge. "If I weren't so handsome," she would say, "do you think such a man would marry me?" The poor woman! She never suspected that the fine lullaby or the oat cakes had anything to do with it.

If the Captain presented you with a gaily-coloured parrot from the Tropics you could not truthfully say he was a handsome man. He had a large aquiline nose and a prominent chin. He