Items related to The Rat-Pit
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VIII THE TRAGEDY OFTEN a youth leaves Donegal and goes out into the world, does well for a time, writes frequently home to his own people, sends them a sum of money in every letter (which shows that he is not a spendthrift), asking them for a little gift in return, a scapular blessed by the priest, or a bottle of water from the holy well (which shows that he has not forgotten the faith in which he was born); but in the end he ceases to write, drops out of the ken of his people and disappears. The father mourns the son for a while, regrets that the usual money-order is not forthcoming, weeps little, for too much sentiment is foreign to the hardened sensibilities of the poor; the mother tells her beads and does not fail to say one extra decade for the boy or to give a hardearned guinea to the priest for masses for the gasair's soul. Time rapidly dries their tears of regret, their sorrow disappears and the more pressing problems of their lives take up their whole interests again. In later years they may learn that their boy died of fever in a hospital, or was killed by a broken derrick-jib, or done to death by a railway train. "Them foreign parts were always bad," they may say. "Black luck be with the big boat, for it's few it takes back of the many it takes away!" A year had passed by since James Ryan last heard from Fergus his son. No word came of the youth, and none of the Prosses people, great travellers though the young of Frosses were, had ever come across him in any corner of the world. "We are missing the blue pieces of paper," Mary Ryan said to her husband one evening in the late autumn, fully three years after Fergus's departure. She now spent her days sitting at the fire, and though her health was not the best it had...
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Review:
A restrained poetic vision overshadowed only by MacGill's passionate hatred of the gombeen men and the grasping Catholic clergy who people its pages. --Sunday Express
Penned with chilling realism, a heartrending transcript from life. --Cork Examiner
About the Author:
Penned with chilling realism, a heartrending transcript from life. --Cork Examiner
Patrick MacGill was born in Glenties, Co. Donegal and was a prolific journalist, poet and novelist. During World War I he fought with the London Irish Rifles and was later recruited by MI7. MacGill died in 1963. An annual literary MacGill Summer School is held in Glenties in mid July each year in his honour.
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- PublisherTheClassics.us
- Publication date2013
- ISBN 10 1230302336
- ISBN 13 9781230302331
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages84
- Rating
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