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footsteps. They had great days in Mossgrove then before Ned married Martha and she had moved in and tried to wrong-foot them all. But Nellie would not hear a word against her and bent over backwards not to rock the boat. It had made him sad that after all her years of dedication to Mossgrove shehad finished up like a shadow in her own house. It had annoyed Kate as well, but, of course, by then Kate had left Mossgrove and gone to England where she had trained as a nurse. When she came back as district nurse to Kilmeen, she bought her own house in the village.
    But at least at the end of her days Nellie had the joy of her two grandchildren, Peter and Nora. The irony of the whole thing was that even though Martha had resented Nellie, she had now in Nora a daughter who was a carbon copy of Nellie. Life had a tendency to level things out as it went along. But the one thing that he felt it could never level out was Ned’s accident. That had been a crippling blow. He had loved Ned like a son, and his death had been an earthquake in the midst of them all.
    But in time things had settled down again, and now Martha and Peter were doing a great job, with occasional fireworks between them. Matt Conway’s death last year had made things easier. He did not like to write off a death as a blessing, but in this case he had to be honest with himself and admit that it was hard to view it as anything else. That fellow had been a thorn in the side of Mossgrove for years. As long as it had been the land and animals that he threatened, it was in some way bearable, but when he had attacked Nora last year it was too much. Matt Conway had been worse than his father Rory, for whom old Edward Phelan had guaranteed the bank loan. But, of course, Conway did the devil when he would not pay it back though he had enough money to do so. Instead he had bought extra fields near the village with the money. That had driven Edward Phelan mad. He had felt betrayed. So he had hauled Rory Conway to court and beaten him and got the two riverfields off him which were judged to be the equivalent of the two that he had bought. By God, but those two fields had caused trouble down through the years!
    All water under the bridge now, he thought as he put a few extra sods on the fire. The February evening was turning chilly. He had spent too much time thinking and let the fire run down. Now as the flames licked up between the sods, he stretched out his stockinged feet beside the warmth. Toby shifted himself to become more comfortable and curled up again beside the soft socks and was soon shivering in his sleep as he chased imaginary rabbits. While he had been sitting lost in thought, dusk had crept into the cottage, and now the fire sent leaping shadows dancing up the walls. The lustre jugs on his mother’s dresser glinted gold in the glow of the fire, and the only sound apart from the crackling of the logs was the soothing tick-tock of the clock. The clock was older than himself and had hung above the fire since he was a child. Every Saturday night after the ten o’clock news on Radio Éireann, just as the Hospital Sweepstakes programme began, his mother had wound that clock. She had waited until Bart Bastable began, “Makes no difference where you are, you can wish upon a star,” and then she had reached into the clock for the key. For years after her sudden death, he sometimes thought that he could hear the sound of the clock being wound.
    He loved his kitchen with its door opening straight out into the garden and narrow window looking down over Nolan’s fields. At night the lights of Kilmeen twinkled in the distance. At the northern side by the road, he had planted trees giving complete shelter to the cottage. But behind those trees, he kept his hedges cut low so that he could enjoy the rollingcountryside and see the cows in the fields around the cottage. The surrounding view was a wide backdrop to his garden. My garden, he thought, is as far as my eye can see. It