tently a rotten ploughman, a fair fence-mender and a skillful
whitewasher. My amazing facility there I attribute to an
apprenticeship in sunsets. Once, during a period of rain, I lived in a
corncrib for three days at an average of seven cents a day. I've
reduced my need of kitchen equipment to a can-opener. A can of
anything, I've discovered, provides food as well as a combination
saucepan and coffee pot.

"I miss Kenny but I dare not write to him. Garry, you know how it is.
Unless I brace myself with a lot of temper, he can twist me around his
finger. Even his letters are dangerous. I can't--I won't go back to
sunsets.

"I often think these days of Kenny's wood-fire tales of the shrine of
Black Gartan where St. Columba was born. Colomcille, old Kenny called
him around the wood-fire, didn't he? Colomcille, Kenny said, having
been in exile, knew the homesick pangs himself and therefore could give
the good Irishmen who journeyed to his shrine strength to bear them.
I'm not in exile but there are times when I should be journeyin' off,
as Kenny says when the brogue is on him, to Black Gartan. The curse of
the Celt! Kenny swears there's no homesickness in the world like an
Irishman's passionate longing for home and kin. Not that I long for
the studio. God forbid! Kenny's the symbol for it all.

"I've had some black minutes of remorse. After all I had no earthly
right to blaze out so about the shotgun. And you can't imagine how the
statuette upset me.

"Say hello to Kenny for me, won't you? Tell him I'm brown and lean
already, and that I like the fortunes of the road."

It hurt of course that the letter was Garry's. Nettled at first, Kenny
had half a mind not to read it. Later, why it was Garry's, gave him a
sense of power. Brian was homesick and repentant. And with the fire
of his temper spent he was always manageable. Kenny cursed the miles
between them.

He read the letter again and the poetry of the open road filled his
veins with the fire of inspiration. Tavern of Stars! Old Gaffer Moon,
full-faced and silver! Tree-walls and Dame Wind a-sweeping! Why, the
lad was a poet--a poet like his father. And the big-hearted kindness
of him, thrashing the runaway into sense. Irish temper there! Kenny
felt a passionate thrill of pride in his offspring. Yes, Brian was
like his father, thank God, even to the Celtic curse of homesickness.

"But to think of him," he marveled in a wave of tendernes