He was not more than twenty when his father suddenly died one early spring morning, and he found himself left responsible for a few acres well cropped with weeds, and sundry arrears of rent to be extracted from their produce. Whereupon he resolved to abandon the struggle, and set up on a less ambitious footing in one of the cabins at Lisconnel. So he got ready for the move by selling off his little bit of live stock, all except Rory, the old black pony, who had a very large head and a white face like a grotesque mask, and with whom he would not have parted on the most tempting terms. As for his great-aunt Moggy, when she heard of this arrangement, she resigned herself to her fate, which was obviously the Union away at Moynalone. What else should become of her, since she was past field-work, and nobody could expect Ody now to be bothered with keeping her idle, and he with scarce a penny to his name after settling with Mr. Nugent. "Ody," she reflected, "didn't mind a thraneen what way he had things in the house, and didn't care to be keepin' fowls, so what good 'ud he get out of her at all?" Moggy was a dull and rather cross-tempered old person, who had grown up in souring shade, and never had a life of her own to live, nor yet a faculty for slipping smoothly into other people's. Her slight intercourse with Ody had hitherto chiefly consisted of quarrels. In fact, only the day before his father's death, they had fallen out abusively about the broiling of some bacon, and this seemed to make her destination all the more inevitable. Therefore Moggy likewise set about her few dismal preparations, oppressed by a stunned sense that the black hour she had been dreading most of her life was now just going to strike.
On the morning of the day Ody was to flit she held a sort of carouse at her solitary breakfast over the remnant of a pound of tea which she had saved after the wake. Tea was ten prices fifty years ago, and a very rare luxury at the Three Mile Farm. As she poured it strong and black out of the badly broken teapot, the whole one being packed up, she thought that was the last time she'd ever have the chance again in this world to be wetting herself a cup of tea, and she thickened it recklessly with lumps of damp brown sugar, and swung it round in her cracked saucer to cool, and tried hard to enjoy it. She was still lingering over it when Ody came into the kitchen, which caused her, poor soul, instinctively to thrust away the betraying teapot out of sight on the black hob.
