Chapter VII

It was she who was most particular about the dyeing of his Easter eggs and the ritual of hanging up his stocking on Christmas Eve. She had wanted to go on dyeing eggs for him at Easter and hanging up his stocking on Christmas Eve, even when he was twelve years of age and could not be expected to tolerate such things any longer. He liked the Easter ceremonial better, perhaps, than that of Christmas. His mother would bid Uncle Matthew take him out of the town to the fields to gather whin-blossoms so that she could dye the eggs to a pretty brown colour. Tea-leaves could be used to dye the eggs to a deeper brown than that of the whin-blossoms, but there was not so much pleasure in taking tea-leaves from the caddy as there was in plucking whin-blossoms from the furze-bushes. The Logans bought their Easter eggs, already dyed, from old Mrs. Dobbs, the dulce-woman, but John disliked the look of her eggs, apart from the fact that his mother would not permit him to buy them. Mrs. Dobbs used some artificial dyes which stained the eggshells a horrible purple or a less horrible red, and John had a feeling of sickness when he looked at them. Mrs. MacDermott said that if the eggs were to crack during the process of boiling, the dye would penetrate the meat and might poison anyone who ate it; and even if the shells remained uncracked, the dye would soil the fingers and perhaps soil the clothes. She wondered at Mrs. Logan!...

And on Easter Monday, she and Uncle Matthew and Uncle William would go to Bryson's field where there was a low mound covered with short grass, and from the top of this mound, he would trundle his Easter egg down the slope to the level ground until the shell was broken. Then he would sit beside his mother and uncles, and eat the hard-boiled meat of the egg while Uncle Matthew explained to him that he was celebrating an ancient Druidical rite.