The Surree at Mahon's by Jane Barlow

Few people, I think, can ever have been impressed by the liveliness of little Killymeen, set in its nook among the lonesome mountain and moorland, its one humble street forming the nucleus of a sparse cabin-sprinkling, which strews white flecks on the far sweeping green folds hardly plentier than hailstones on a grass plot half a sunny hour after a July thunderstorm. Yet to Bridget Doran, the girl who had lately taken service with the Caseys up at the Quarry Farm, it seemed a centre of fashion and gaiety, being, indeed, the most considerable place she had seen in all her seventeen years. For they had been spent up at Loughdrumesk, a hamlet fully ten miles deeper among the wildest townlands, with only a rough cart-track threading a black bog, and climbing endless shaggy slopes, and dropping over a purple mountain shoulder to connect it with Killymeen. She had left behind there, three months ago, her feeble old grandfather and alert old grandmother, in a tiny, high-perched cabin, which felt a world too wide for its other indwellers when this third of their lives had gone. And since then there had been much travelling of thoughts to and fro between it and the Casey's prim whitewashed farmhouse at the foot of Slieve Glasarna. At first Bridget's had made the journey as constantly as her grandmother's, but she was young and busy and in a new place, and as the weeks went on she became more engrossed with what lay immediately before her.

The Surree at Mahon's, fixed for a day in Christmas week, was the most exciting of the fresh prospects that unfolded themselves, and was looked forward to with much pleased interest by Killymeen at large. There had been no Surrees in the neighbourhood during a long spell of bad times, but this year matters were looking brighter, and old Barney Mahon, who had a thrifty turn and a commodious kitchen, was encouraged to make a venture which promised fair profits at a small risk. For a Surree, which has with quaint effect borrowed its name from polite French, is a sort of subscription dance, little more elaborate in its arrangements than are the kaleys, or conversazioni, that beguile so many wintry hours in Donegal homes, when all the dark out-of-doors hurtles and splashes with wind and rain, and the neighbours drift into their places round some appointed hearth as promiscuously as a wreath of dry leaves swept rustling together by an aerial eddy. At a Surree each couple pay a shilling, but no refreshment is expected save frugally-dispensed tea; and the fiddler is content to scrape for a modest fee and his chances of small coins from the dancers. Dark Hugh M‘Evoy, being Barney's cousin, was willing to supply the music for this occasion on specially easy terms; and, in short, circumstances conspired to make it seem desirable that Barney should meet the often-expressed wish of his younger friends by announcing the first Surree of the season.