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haunches watching the slow fumbling movements of her master.
    He was a small grasshopper of a man, withered and worn, and cold to look at. His clothes were patched and tattered, and round the loose soles of his knobbly boots he had lapped coils of wire which now and again rasped on the stone floor. As he lifted a can from a nail in the wall the dog jumped around him and ran towards the door. Old Jamesy paid no heed to her, and went on wrapping hen-eggs carefully in paper and placing them in the can. He had only seven eggs this evening: the frost must have put the hens off their laying. He’d have another look outside; maybe there’d be one or two more.
    An icy wind blew into the cottage as the collie crushed out in front of him, sending panic into the fluttering hens. Jamesy yelled at her in a voice that broke sharp on the lean hollows. He crossed to the hen-shed; it was a rickety place patched with the coloured lids of tin-boxes. Near it was an ash tree trodden bare round the trunk where the hens and goat lay of a hot summer day under the quivering shade from its little leaves. Now it was deserted, a red flannel rag caught on the black twigs, making a leafy sound as the wind strummed the branches. Jamesy shrugged his shoulders as he looked at the frost on the rag and at the misty vapour that smothered the nearby sea; the devil take it for frost, good hot male given to the hens – and no eggs. When he came out from the shed they began clustering at his feet and he whished them away from him
    â€˜It’s the last yellow male ye’ll get for awhile, me ladies. Content yerselves on the nest or go and scrape and fend for yourselves. Be off now!’
    The black tin was spluttering and hissing on the fire when he came inside. He gripped the handle with his coat and snuggled the tin on top of a hot, crushed turf.
    Jamesy lived alone and made his own meals. He was the last of the Heaneys left on the island. Sitting now with the mug between bony hands, his grey beard on his chest and his long hair fringing his coat collar, he looked like an ancient prophet. The dog nuzzled under his arm and awakened him from a dream, whereupon he threw the dregs of tea at the back of the fire and lifted his can and stick.
    He turned the key in the door, tried the latch a few times, and clattered across to the road. From the first crest on the road he would stop and look back at his cottage. From there he would see the smoke tearing itself from the stump of a chimney; the loose black thatch with the eaves as ragged as an old brush; and the tree near the gable where he himself sat in the cool of a summer’s evening enjoying the hush around him and the sleepy stir of the sea. And from these his gaze would slowly turn to the potato patch, black and bare now with withered stalks strewn about.
    It filled him with pride to look down at the closed cottage impersonally, as if the house belonged to someone else and he envying the owner as he passed on the road. It was a wild, draughty place surely, but it was far from the villagers with their taunts and jibes; and he loved it, loved every stone of it. And then it was his own; there was sweet comfort in that thought.
    Gripping his stick he turned his back reluctantly. His old goat, shrunken with cold, me-eh-eh-ed as she saw him disappear over the hill. Jamesy walked firmly on his heels, knees slightly bent, his stick jabbing the road. The air was keen and blue, long streamers of cloud frozen to the sky, the scattered bushes naked and empty of birds. A frost-fringed stream trickled darkly at the side of the road, and now and then the ice that patched the hoofmarks splintered under Jamesy’s stick. He wore no overcoat and as he walked along his shoulder blades knuckled under his jacket. He kept an even pace. Once the dog thudded after a rabbit, and returning licked Jamesy’s hand, and trotted proudly in front.
    At the top of the graveyard hill he stopped for the second time, his