Aristotle’s Bellows

by Lady Gregory

Genre: Comedy, Drama
Setting: England
Format of Original Source: Play
Recommended Adaptation Length:

Candidate for Adaptation? Promising

EXCERPT:

Mother: There has strange things come to pass.

Timothy: That’s what we’ve all been praying for this long time!

Mother: Ah, can’t you give attention and strive to listen to me. It is all coming back to my mind. All the things I am remembering have my mind tattered and tossed.

Timothy: (Who has been trying to hear the music, sings a verse.)

“You haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg, Hurroo! Hurroo! You’re a yellow noseless chickenless egg, You’ll have to put up with a bowl to beg. O Johnny, I hardly knew you!

(Music ceases.)

Mother: Will you give attention, I say! It will be worth while for you to go chat with me now I can be telling you all that happened in my years gone by. What was it Conan was questioning me about a while ago? What was it now….

“Aristotle in the hour He left Ireland left a power!”…

Timothy: That now is a very nice sort of a little prayer.

Mother: (Calling out.) That’s it! Aristotle’s Bellows! I know now what has happened. This that is in my hand has in it the power to make changes. Changes! Didn’t great changes come in the house to-day! (Shouts.) Did you see any great change in Celia?

Timothy: Why wouldn’t I, and she at this minute fighting and barging at some poor travelling man, saying he laid a finger mark of bacon-grease upon the lintel of the door. Driving him off with a broken-toothed rake she is, she that was so gentle that she wouldn’t hardly pluck the feathers of a dead duck!

Mother: It was surely a blast of this worked that change in her, as the blast she blew upon me worked a change in myself.

VIEW SOURCE DOCUMENT

BACK TO LISTINGS