g the girls and the boys who lived in the cabins.

"I think," said the priest, "that the play would have been very fairly
acted, and I think that, with a little practice we might have done as
well as they did at Oberammergau."

But he was more willing to discuss the play that he had chosen than the
talents of those who were going to perform it, and he told me that it
had been written in the fourteenth century in Latin, and that he
himself had translated it into Irish.

"I wonder if it would have been possible to organise an excursion from
Dublin. If the performance had been judiciously
advertised--'Oberammergau in the West.'"

"I used to think," said he, "it is eight miles from Rathowen, and the
road is a bad one, and when they got here there would be no place for
them to stay; they would have to go all the way back again, and that
would be sixteen miles."

"Yet it was as well to build this playhouse as to make a useless
road--a road leading nowhere. While they were building this playhouse
they thought they were accomplishing something. Never before did the
poor people do anything, except for bare life. Do you know, Father
MacTurnan, your playhouse touches me to the heart?" and I turned and
looked.

"Once Pleasure hovered over your parish, but the bird did not alight!
Let me start a subscription for you in Dublin!"

"I don't think," said the priest, "that it would be possible--"

"Not for me to get fifty pounds?"

"Yes," he said, "you might get the money, but I don't think we could
ever get up a performance of the play."

"And why not?" I said.

"You see, the wind came and blew down the wall, and I think they look
upon that wind as a manifestation of God's disapproval. The people are
very pious, and looking back I think they felt that the time they spent
in rehearsing might have been better spent. The idea of amusement
shocks those who are not accustomed to the idea. The playhouse
disturbed them in their ideas. They hear Mass on Sundays, and there are
the Sacraments, and they remember that they have to die. It used to
seem to me a very sad thing to see all the people going to America; it
seemed to me the saddest thing in the world to see the poor Celt
disappear in America, leaving his own country, leaving his language,
and very often his religion."

"And does it no longer seem to you sad that such a thing should happen?"

"No, not if it is the will of God. God has specially chosen the Irish
race to conv