'
'Would you, then, confess?'
' By sun and moon, not I; I ask but to be let eat the food I carry in
my wallet. I carry food in my wallet whenever I go upon a journey,
but I do not taste of it unless I am well-nigh starved. I have not
eaten now these two days.'
'You may eat, then,' says the abbot, and he turned to help the friars
dig the hole.
The gleeman took a loaf and some strips of cold fried bacon out of
his wallet and laid them upon the ground. 'I will give a tithe to the
poor,' says he, and he cut a tenth part from the loaf and the bacon.
'Who among you is the poorest?' And thereupon was a great clamour,
for the beggars began the history of their sorrows and their poverty,
and their yellow faces swayed like Gara Lough when the floods have
filled it with water from the bogs.
He listened for a little, and, says he, 'I am myself the poorest, for
I have travelled the bare road, and by the edges of the sea; and the
tattered doublet of particoloured cloth upon my back and the torn
pointed shoes upon my feet have ever irked me, because of the towered
city full of noble raiment which was in my heart. And I have been the
more alone upon the roads and by the sea because I heard in my heart
the rustling of the rose-bordered dress of her who is more subtle
than Aengus, the Subtle-hearted, and more full of the beauty of
laughter than Conan the Bald, and more full of the wisdom of tears
than White-breasted Deirdre, and more lovely than a bursting dawn to
them that are lost in the darkness.
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