e hovel, and a man appeared
with a horn, and he blew the horn, running to the brow of the hill. I
asked the driver the reason of their alarm, and he told me that we had
been mistaken for the bailiff. This was true, for I saw two little
sheep hardly bigger than geese driven away. There was a pool of green
water about this hovel, and all the hovels in the district were the
same,--one-roomed hovels, full of peat smoke, and on the hearth a black
iron pot, with traces of some yellow meal stirabout in it. The dying
man or woman would be lying in a corner on some straw, and the priest
would speak a little Irish to these outcast Celts, "to those dim people
who wander like animals through the waste," I said.

The grey sky has blown over these people for so many generations that
it has left them bare as the hills. A playhouse for these people! What
defiance of nature's law! And watching the shapely sods of turf melting
into white ash I thought of the dim people building the playhouse,
obedient to the priest, unsuspicious of a new idea. A playhouse must
have seemed to them as useless as a road that leads nowhere. The priest
told them that people would come to see the play; but the idea of
pleasure did not find a way into their minds. The playhouse had fallen!

I piled more turf on the fire; the priest did not return, and the
moaning of the wind put strange fancies into my head. My driver had
spoken of a small white thing gliding along the road, and I regretted I
had not asked him more about the apparition, if it were an apparition.
A little later I wondered why the priest knitted. "His room is lined
with books. He does not read, he knits,--a strange occupation. He never
talks about books."

I crossed the room to investigate the mystery, and I discovered a heap
of woollen stockings. "All these he has knitted. But some strange story
hangs about him," I said; and I lay awake a long while thinking of the
people I should met on the morrow.

And never shall I forget the spectacle. There are degrees in poverty,
and I remember two men: their feet were bare, and their shirts were so
torn that the curling breast hair was uncovered. They wore brown
beards, and their skin was yellow with famine, and one of them cried
out: "The white sun of heaven does not shine upon two poorer men than
upon this man and myself." After the meeting they followed us, and the
poor people seemed to me strangely anxious to tell of their condition.
There were so