An Account Settled by Jane Barlow

One wet autumn evening, Mr Natty Grogan was taking stock and making up his books with the assistance of his family. When thus occupied, the young Grogans were wont to complain that he would be trotting after them with dogs' abuse from Billy to Jock, till you couldn't tell where to have him; while he used to declare that the lot of them all together were more different kinds of fools than you'd find anywhere else in the breadth of Ireland, and so was their mother before them. She had died many years since and her husband was reported to have remarked that the event would save him a couple of shillings a week, anyway, for milk and chicken-broth. But it is fair to observe that unfeeling speeches were likely enough to be put into his mouth on this occasion-such was his character among his neighbours. They said that his wife had been "a very dacint poor woman, and a dale too good for any such an ould slieveen, and it was a pity all the childer, except, maybe, Andy, took after himself."

For the present, however, popular disapproval of the Grogans was in abeyance, as almost everybody else had gone to bed and to sleep, so that Athcrum's one wide street lay deserted and blank. It was a very wet evening, and the whitewashed house-fronts had an ample dado of mud splashes about their doors and lower windows, but they were all now muffled up in darkness. The Grogans' late sitting threw no light on the outer gloom, for the battered shop-shutters were up, and business proceeded in the little back room, whence old Natty lit himself every now and then with a sweeling dip, to grope among his stock-in-trade in the adjoining shop. He accompanied these researches with dissatisfied grunts, rising occasionally into requests wrathfully shouted to his family, for an explanation of what he found or missed. They grimaced at one another, and sometimes whispered together before they complied with his demands-Nannie and Tom and Stevie, seated round the table, where the strong lamp-light flared in their faces. Their father, peering in at them from murky recesses behind the counter, half saw and half surmised these signals, which did not soothe his irritation.