Page:Shiana - Peadar Ua Laoghaire.djvu/295

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SHIANA
281

soundly a man might sleep, when he would wake out of that sleep he would have some notion of the length or shortness of the time he had spent in sleep, even though he might not remember anything that had happened to him during the time. It was not so with Shiana. It was not alone that everything that had happened to him had gone clean out of his remembrance, but that the time itself had clean gone from him. He felt quite sure that it was three hours, or thereabouts, since he had been out on the hill, talking to the barefooted woman, and he felt in his mind that it was impossible for any more time to have passed. Where had the three weeks come from? That was the question.

The time was completely gone out of his remembrance and out of his mind. He would swear that it was not more than three hours or so since he was on the moss-plot, on the mountain, speaking with the barefooted woman. He had no remembrance whatever of all that had happened to him from the moment he parted from her, until the moment he recovered his senses on his bed. That time, and all that had happened to him during that time, and that portion of his sense and of his memory which belonged to that time, were as clean gone out of his mind as if they had been cut out of his head with a knife. He had not a particle of recollection of the fine day he had had on the mountain, nor of the beautiful view, nor of the fine tracts of country, nor of his climbing the mountains, nor of his picking the monadauns, nor of the treat that Nance had given him, nor of how he had returned home, nor of the strain that was on his mind while he was waiting for the