Page:Darby O'Gill and the Good People by Herminie Templeton Kavanagh (1903).djvu/122

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HOW THE FAIRIES CAME TO IRELAND

clargyman, gripping with his bridle-hand the horse’s mane, “an’ all I have to pay it back with’d only harry you an’ make you oncomfortable, so I’ll not say the words,” he says.

“No faver at all,” says the King, “but before an hour there’ll be lyin’ on your own threshold a faver in the shape of a bit of as fine bacon as ever laughed happy in the middle of biling turnips. We borryed it last night from a magisthrate named Blake, who lives up in the County Wexford,” he says.

The clargyman had swung himself into the saddle.

“I’d be loathe to say anything disrayspectful,” he says quick, “or to hurt sensitive feelings, but on account of my soul’s sake I couldn’t ate anything that was come by dishonest,” he says.

“Bother and botheration, look at that, now!” says the King. “Every thrade has its drawbacks, but I never rayalized before the hardship of being a parish priest. Can’t we manage it some way? Couldn’t I put it some place where you might find it, or give it to a friend who’d send it to you?”

“Stop a minute,” says Father Cassidy. “Up at Tom Healey’s I think there’s more hunger than sick-

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