re not reputable.... And old maids purse
their thin-blooded lips.... But when the little money of the bankers was
scattered through the world, and even their little chapels had forgotten
them, and the stiff bones of old maids were crumbling into an
unnecessary dust, his father's songs would be sung in Ireland, in Man,
in the Scottish Highlands, in the battered Hebrides. So long as sweet
Gaelic was spoken and men's hearts surged with feeling, there would be a
song of his father's to translate the effervescence into words of
cadenced beauty.... He had an irreverent vision of God smiling and
talking comfortably to his father while the bald-headed bankers cooled
their fat heels and glared at one another outside the picket-gates of
heaven.... The world had gained something with the last Gaelic bard....

And he had found out, too, that his other uncle, Robin More, had a great
importance in a certain circle. In Dublin he met an old professor, a
Jesuit priest, who seemed intensely excited that a nephew of Robin More
Campbell's should be present.

"Do you know, by any chance, what your uncle was working on when he
died?"

"I'm afraid I do not, sir."

"You know his manuscripts."

"Just casually, sentimentally."

"You don't know much about your uncle's work, then?"

"Not very much."

"Did you know," the old priest said--and his urbanity disappeared; there
was pique in his tones--"that your uncle was the man who definitely
decided for us that the Highlanders of Scotland migrated from Ireland to
Scotland? Did you know that?"

"No, sir, I did not."

"I don't suppose," the old man was sarcastic, "that seems important to
you."

"To confess, Dr. Hegan, it does not. Is it?"

"My child," the old priest smiled--it was so queer to be called "my
child" at forty-seven--"all knowledge is important. All details of
knowledge. We come we know not whence, and we go we hope we know
whither. Our history, our motives, our all, is vague. All we have is
faith, a great broad river, but knowledge is the little piers ..."

They had all been significant: Alan Donn, his father, even Uncle Robin,
whom he had thought only a bookworm in the fading sunshine. The world
was better, more mature, for their having lived....

And he had nothing. Here he was, drawing on to fifty, close on
forty-eight. And he had done, achieved nothing. He had no wife, no
child; had achieved no valorous unselfish deed. Had not--not even--not
even a little song....