Egan

randparents to make you expect from him the same bubbling humour, the same fighting passions, the same unchecked sorrows,? in general, the same spontaneity of conduct ? as those ancestors of his had enjoyed in distant Ballycastle, two full generations past and gone. But all this reminiscence lay deep in Old Man Egan's blue eyes, and it never went further. No one in Plain- field had ever heard him laugh outright, or heard his voice lifted above the conversational pitch. There was a vague rumour that in his younger days, before he had settled down in Plainfield, he had been a roistering blade worthy to uphold the best of Celtic tradition in peace or quarrel, but this was wholly unconfirmed and, indeed, was whispered over the tea-cakes chiefly by widow- ladies, elderly spinsters, and large-hearted married women, by way of a contrast, and to provide the romance which no handsome widower is suffered to be without. The first of these two guaranteed instances of Old Man Egan's emotion dated from a certain night when he had been a resident of Plainfield for perhaps threeweeks; and that was more than twenty years ago. A surgeon had appeared at the door of the waiting-room of the little city hospital, hesitated, analysed his man, and walked directly to Old Man Egan, and put his hand on his shoulder. " My boy," he said (for Old Man Egan was hardly qualified as a legal voter then), " My boy, she's given you a son ? and she may live an hour, possibly two hours ? not more." ...