“The Dead” is the final short story in the 1914 collection Dubliners by James Joyce. It is the longest story in the collection. The action takes place in Dublin in 1904 at an Epiphany party held by two elderly sisters. The story focuses attention on the academic Gabriel Conroy and his discovery of his wife Gretta's memory of a deceased lover.
It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness:
`The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.'
Gabriel coloured, as if he felt he had made a mistake, and, without looking at her, kicked off his goloshes and flicked actively with his muffler at his patent-leather shoes.
`The late lamented Patrick Morkan, our grandfather, that is,' explained Gabriel, `commonly known in his later years as the old gentleman, was a glue-boiler.'
