He liked to see the young mountain ponies that the farmers brought into the fair to sell: they would lie on the road as if they were at home on the top of their mountain; their eyes were large and mild and their manes and tails were long. Across the street was the blacksmith's forge: a horse or a donkey was always standing inside, and dogs were moving about. The blacksmith kept a tame jackdaw in the forge and it would often fly up on the horse's back while the horse was being shod. Michael Staunton, whose father was in prison with Finn's, worked in the forge: it was not long since Michael had left school and Finn used to wonder when he saw him holding with a pair of pincers a red-hot horse-shoe while the bearded blacksmith hammered it. Sometimes when he saw his young friend looking on, Michael would take up a hammer and swing it for pride. Often fine hunting horses would be led out of the forge by grooms, each horse with a rich cloth across his shining skin. As soon as they were on the street the grooms would mount and the horses would gallop away.

There was a shop beside where Finn waited, and behind its big window a tailor was seated on his board; he was always there and he saw everything that happened in the street. Finn never spoke to him, but he thought that the tailor knew how often he had passed that way late for school. Opposite there was a little house where three shoemakers worked behind a window; they were brothers, but they never spoke to each other and they never looked to see what was happening in the street. One hammered a sole, another stitched a side, and another rubbed the ball on a heel. Finn was sure that these three shoemakers understood what the hens said and knew where the Danes had hidden their treasures.

Before the shoemakers' house there was a standing where a little old woman sold apples, gingerbread and sweets; her standing was an ass-cart shaded over with a stretch of canvas. Nancy Ann was her name and she knit stockings while she waited for the boys and girls. Sometimes in the day his uncle Bartley would give Finn a penny, and then he and his cousins would debate whether they would take something from the jars of sweets, or the piles of apples or the heaps of gingerbread. Finn generally bought two pieces of gingerbread.

Finn would spend a whole day in the town when the market was on Saturday, a day when there was no school. After the market he would stay with his cousins in the house in Cross Street. At the back there were sheds where his uncle kept the skins he bought—the skins of kids and the hides of cattle—and these sheds were good for playing hide-and-seek around. Finn was rather afraid of being in one of the sheds. A closed box was there and ferrets were kept in it. Finn disliked these little beasts that were always running up and down in their darkness. Sometimes his uncle would take one out of the box and hold it in his hand. The ferrets had lean little bodies with sharp noses, and whether in the box or out of it they were always sniffing. His uncle used them for hunting rabbits: he would put a net at one end of a burrow and let a ferret in at the other end. The poor rabbits, fearful of the dreadful lean ferret would come into the net.

A stream ran past the back-garden; the children had made stepping stones across it and they would go over them and round to the little house where old Brian Magarry sat making besoms out of the heather he had pulled in the bog or weaving baskets out of the willows he had cut by the river. When the children entered they got the smell of peeled willow rods. Heather was in heaps in one corner of the little kitchen and finished besoms were in another corner. Against the walls there were bundles of willow rods. The house was full of crickets; they chirruped even from the thatch of the roof.

Finn often met Brian Magarry in the bog. When he saw the white ass standing patiently on the pass with panniers across its back he knew that the old man was somewhere in the unworked bog. Then he would run past where the men were working and soon he would have only the heather around him and the big clouds above his head. When he found Brian the two would sit together on a little clearing, with the hum of bees around them. Brian spent all his day alone, pulling heather in the bog, cutting willows and making baskets and besoms outside his house. The old man pulled the long fibres of heather and twisted them together, making the besom that one held by the strong stalks and swept with the soft tops; Finn had worn out many a one sweeping the kitchen floor and tidying the ashes on the hearth.

When Finn and Brian Magarry sat together they had much to talk about. Where the bogs are now, there were once great forests, Brian told the boy. There are no forests in Ireland now, but forest on top of forest is buried where the bogs are. Curious things were found in the bogs—the horns of a great deer, the iron helmet of some fighting man, the sword of a king or perhaps a collar of gold. Finn asked Brian Magarry did he ever hear that the Danes' treasures were hidden in the bogs? Brian told him that he would rather find out the secret of making the Heather Ale than find out where the Danes had hidden their treasures. It was the Danes, too, that had that secret. Out of the blossoms of the heather they could make the sweetest ale that ever was drunk. But the Danes were put out of the country and no one in Ireland knew the secret of making the good ale out of the heather.

They often had a long discussion as to how the eels came into the bog-holes. The men cutting peat made holes in the bog; the holes became filled with water and then after a while there would be eels in them. How did the eels cross from one hole to another when no water ran between? Brian Magarry thought they crawled across the ground like snakes. How long would it take the hairs pulled out of a horse's tail to turn into eels? Finn had pulled such hairs and had put them into water. Brian Magarry thought they would become little eels in a fortnight.

Brian Magarry, whether in the bog or on the road, remained so quiet that the birds went into their nests while he stood by. He showed Finn the lark's nest on the ground with its four brown eggs, and the hedge-sparrow's in which the eggs were blue and beautiful, and the wren's nest set in a mossy bank, a roofed-in habitation of moss full of down and tiny birds. It was not difficult to find the blackbird's, hardly concealed in the thornbush or the ivy, or the thrush's, on which the bird sat with her speckled breast showing above the brim. None of the nests which Brian showed him did Finn show to any other boy, nor did he take even an egg out of them, for Brian told him so much about the birds that he had it not in his heart to make any trouble for them.