Billy because I want to get a bar of chocolate to go with my Cleeves’ toffee and I’m having a great time till there’s a terrible pain in my jaw and it’s a tooth out of my gum stuck in my toffee and the pain is killing me. Still, I can’t waste the toffee so I pull out the tooth and put it in my pocket and chew the toffee on the other side of my mouth blood and all. There’s pain on one side and delicious toffee on the other and I remember what my uncle Pa Keating would say,There are times when you wouldn’t know whether to shit or go blind. I have to go home now and worry because you can’t go through the world short a tooth without your mother knowing. Mothers know everything and she’s always looking into our mouths to see if there’s any class of disease. She’s there by the fire and Dad is there and they’re ask- ing me the same old questions, the dance and the name of the dance. I  tell  them  I  learned “The Walls  of  Cork”  and  I  dance  around  the kitchen trying to hum a made-up tune and dying with the pain of my tooth. Mam says, “Walls o’ Cork,” my eye, there’s no such dance, and Dad says, Come over here. Stand there before me.Tell us the truth, Did you go to your dancing classes today? I can’t tell a lie anymore because my gum is killing me and there’s blood in my mouth. Besides, I know they know everything and that’s what they’re telling me now. Some snake of a boy from the dancing school saw me going to the Lyric Cinema and told and Mrs. O’Con- nor sent a note to say she hadn’t seen me in ages and was I all right because I had great promise and could follow in the footsteps of the great Cyril Benson. Dad doesn’t care about my tooth or anything. He says I’m going to confession and drags me over to the Redemptorist church because it’s Saturday and confessions go on all day. He tells me I’m a bad boy, he’s ashamed of me that I went to the pictures instead of learning Ireland’s  national  dances,  the  jig,  the  reel,  the  dances  that  men  and women fought and died for down those sad centuries. He says there’s many a young man that was hanged and now moldering in a lime pit that would be glad to rise up and dance the Irish dance. The priest is old and I have to yell my sins at him and he tells me I’m a hooligan for going to the pictures instead of my dancing lessons although he thinks himself that dancing is a dangerous thing almost as bad as the films, that it stirs up thoughts sinful in themselves, but even if dancing is an abomination I sinned by taking my mother’s sixpence 144