"Still John was often uneasy about his wife. More than once, when she went with him to the shore, he'd see one or two seals walloping nearer than he liked; and once, when he took up his gun to fire at a great bottle-nosed one that was asleep on the sandbank, she made him swear never to do so: 'For who knows,' she says, 'but it's one of my relations you'd be murdering?' And sometimes she'd sit melancholy-like, watching the waves, and tears would roll down her little cheeks; but John would soon kiss them away.
[Illustration: "Biddy" The Lunatic of Kylemore]
"Poor fellow! much as he loved her, he knew she was a sly little devil; for when he'd be lamenting bitterly how cute the fish were grown, or anything that way, she'd come up and sit down by him, and lay her soft round cheek close to his, and take his hand between hers, and say, 'Ah, John darlin', if you'd only find my skin for me that I lost when I found you, see the beautiful fish I'd bring you from the bottom of the sea, and the fine things. Oh! John, it's you then could drive a carriage through Newport, if there were but roads to drive it on.'
"But he'd stand out that he knew nothing of the skin; and it's a wonder he was heart-proof against her soft, deludering, soothering ways; you'd have thought she'd been a right woman all her life, to hear her working away at the 'Ah, do,' and 'Ah, don't'; and then, if she didn't exactly get what she wanted, she'd pout a bit; and if that didn't do, she'd bring him the youngest baby; and if he was hardened entirely, she'd sit down in a corner and cry; that never failed, except when she'd talk of the skin--and out and out, she never got any good of him about it--at all! But there's no end of female wit; they'll sit putting that and that together, and looking as soft and as fair-faced all the while as if they had no more care than a blind piper's dog, that has nothing to do but to catch the halfpence. 'I may as well give up watching her' said John to himself; 'for even if she did find it, and that's not likely, she might leave me (though that's not easy), but she'd never leave the children'; and so he gave her a parting kiss, and set off to the fair of Castlebar. He was away four days, longer certainly than there was any call to have been, and his mind reproached him on his way home for leaving her so long; for he was very tender about her, seeing that though she was only a seal's daughter, that seal was a king, and he made up his mind he'd never quit her so long again. And when he came to the door, it did not fly open, as it used, and show him his pretty wife, his little children, and a sparkling turf fire--he had to knock at his own door.