‘Often as he sat in Davin's rooms in Grantham Street, wondering at his friend's well made boots that flanked the wall pair by pair, and repeating for his friend's simple ear the verses and cadences of others which with the veils of his own longing dejection, the rude pheoboric mind of his listener had drawn his mind towards it and flung it back again, drawing it by a quiet inbred courtesy of attention, or by a quaint turn of Old English speech, or by the force of its delight in rude bodily skills, for Davin had sat at the feet of Michael Cussack the game, repelling it swiftly and suddenly by a grossness of intelligence, or by a bluntness of feeling, or by a dull stare of terror in the eyes, the terror of sole of starving Irish village in which the curfew was still a nightly fear.