the dish before Mr. Hennessey and removed the cover, disclosing a cod’s “head and shoulders” 21 whilst a female servant appeared with a dish of potatoes boiled in their jackets and a tureen of oyster sauce. 21 Now a cod’s head and shoulders served up like this in the good old Irish way is, honestly, a ghastly sight. The thing has a countenance and an expression most forbidding and all its own. The appearance of the old dish cover, clapped on by the cook in a hurry in default of the proper one, had given Phyl a turn and now she was wondering what Mr. Pinckney was thinking of the fish and the manner of its serving. All at once and as if stimulated into life by the presence of the new guest, all sorts of qualms awoke in her mind. The dining arrangements of the better class Irish are, and always have been, rather primitive, haphazard, and lacking in small refinements. Phyl was conscious of the fact that Byrne had placed several terrible old knives on the table, knives that properly belonged to the kitchen, and when the second course, consisting of a boiled chicken, faced by a piece of bacon reposing on a mat of boiled cabbage, appeared, the fact that one of the dishes was cracked confronted her with the equally obvious fact that the cook in her large-hearted way had sent up the chicken with the black legs unremoved. It seemed to Phyl’s vision—now thoroughly distorted—that the eyes of the stranger were everywhere, cool, critical, and amused; so obsessed was her mind with this idea that it could take no hold upon the conversation. Pinckney was talking of the States; he might just as well have been talking about 22 Timbuctoo for all the impression he made on her with her unfortunate head filled with cracked dishes, chickens’ black legs, Byrne’s awkwardness and the suddenly remembered crumb-brush. 22 It was twenty years old and it had lost half of its bristles in the service of the Berknowles who had clung to it with a warm-hearted tenacity purely Irish. “Sure, that old brush is a disgrace to the table,” was the comment Phyl’s father had made on it once, just as though he were casually referring to some form of the Inevitable such as the state of the weather. The disgrace had not been removed and it was coming to the table, now, in the hand of Byrne. Phyl watched the crumbs being swept up, she watched the cloth being taken off and the wine and
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