PERSONS [Sidenote:  ALL SANE]
  Shawn Early
  Bartley Fallon
  Peter Tannian
  Hyacinth Halvey
  Mrs. Broderick
  Miss Joyce
  Cracked Mary
  Davideen,
    HER BROTHER, AN INNOCENT

THE FULL MOON

   Scene:  A shed close to Cloon Station; Bartley Fallon is sitting
   gloomily on a box; Hyacinth Halvey and Shawn Early are coming in at
   door.

Shawn Early: It is likely the train will not be up to its time, and cattle being on it for the fair.  It’s best wait in the shed.  Is that Bartley Fallon?  What way are you, Bartley?

Bartley Fallon: Faith, no way at all.  On the drag, on the drag; striving to put the bad times over me.

Shawn Early: Is it business with the nine o’clock you have?

Bartley Fallon: The wife that is gone visiting to Tubber, and that has the door locked till such time as she will come back on the train.  And I thought this shed a place where no bad thing would be apt to happen me, and not to be going through the streets, and the darkness falling.

Shawn Early: It is not long till the full moon will be rising.

Bartley Fallon: Everything that is bad, the falling sickness—­God save the mark—­or the like, should be at its worst at the full moon.  I suppose because it is the leader of the stars.

Shawn Early: Ah, what could happen any person in the street of Cloon?

Bartley Fallon: There might.  Look at Matt Finn, the coffin-maker, put his hand on a cage the circus brought, and the lion took and tore it till they stuck him with a fork you’d rise dung with, and at that he let it drop.  And that was a man had never quitted Cloon.

Shawn Early: I thought you might be sending something to the fair.

Bartley Fallon: It isn’t to the train I would be trusting anything I would have to sell, where it might be thrown off the track.  And where would be the use sending the couple of little lambs I have?  It is likely there is no one would ask me where was I going.  When the weight is not in them, they won’t carry the price.  Sure, the grass I have is no good, but seven times worse than the road.

Shawn Early: They are saying there’ll be good demand at the fair of Carrow to-morrow.

Hyacinth Halvey: To-morrow the fair day of Carrow?  I was not remembering that.

Bartley Fallon: Ah, there won’t be many in it, I’m thinking.  There isn’t a hungrier village in Connacht, they were telling me, and it’s poor the look of it as well.

Hyacinth Halvey: To-morrow the fair day.  There will be all sorts in the streets to-night.

Bartley Fallon: The sort that will be in it will be a bad sort—­sievemakers and tramps and neuks.