—I give it up.
—Because there is a thigh in it, he said. Do you see the joke? Athy is the town in the county Kildare and a thigh is the other thigh.
—Oh, I see, Stephen said.
—That's an old riddle, he said.
After a moment he said:
—I say!
—What? asked Stephen.
—You know, he said, you can ask that riddle another way.
—Can you? said Stephen.
—The same riddle, he said. Do you know the other way to ask it?
—No, said Stephen.
—Can you not think of the other way? he said.
He looked at Stephen over the bedclothes as he spoke. Then he lay back on the pillow and said:
—There is another way but I won't tell you what it is.
Why did he not tell it? His father, who kept the racehorses, must be a magistrate too like Saurin's father and Nasty Roche's father. He thought of his own father, of how he sang songs while his mother played and of how he always gave him a shilling when he asked for sixpence and he felt sorry for him that he was not a magistrate like the other boys' fathers. Then why was he sent to that place with them? But his father had told him that he would be no stranger there because his granduncle had presented an address to the liberator there fifty years before. You could know the people of that time by their old dress. It seemed to him a solemn time: and he wondered if that was the time when the fellows in Clongowes wore blue coats with brass buttons and yellow waistcoats
[24]
