Section 3

And then he said to himself: "I am too sensitive. I have always been too
sensitive. The stature of my family has dwarfed me in my own esteem.
Haven't I got as much right as others to the quiet of the glens?" And
again he said: "I sit here and I think. And my thought grows into a
maze. And I wander in it, as a man might wander through some old
gardener's fancy, having stumbled on it inadvertently, and now being in
it, now knowing the secret of exit." But a maze was nonexistent, did a
person regard it so, and if one were to walk on nonchalantly a little
turn would come, and he find himself in the wide sunshine and smiling
flowers. And he said: "Damn the subtleties! A person is born, lives,
dies. And what he does is a matter for himself alone." But some inner
antagonist said: "You are wrong."

And he said: "Look at the people around me. What more right have they
than I to this quiet Ulster dusk?" And the antagonist smiled: "Well,
look."

First were the farmers and the fisherfolk. Well, they didn't count. They
were natural to the soil, as grass was. They grew there, as the white
bog flower grew. An institution of God, like rain. And then there were
the summer visitors, honest folk from the cities. Well, they had a
right. They spent their winters and autumns and springs in mills and
counting-houses, clearing away the commercial garbage of the world. And
when the graciousness of summer came, they emerged, blind as moles,
peak-faced. And before them stretched the Moyle, a blue miracle. The
crisp heather, the thick rushes, the yellow of the buttercups, the black
bog waters. And when clouds came before the sun the mountains drew great
purple cloths over them. And in the twilight the cricket chirruped. And
at night the plover cried out against the vast silence of the moon. And
the hearts of the selling people turned from thoughts of who owed them
money and who was harrying them for money. And the tight souls opened,
just a little perhaps, but even that--Poor garbage men of the world, who
would begrudge them a little beauty?

Then there were the country people, the landlords, the owners of the
soil. Red-faced, sportsmen, connoisseurs of cattle, a sort of
super-farmer, they were as natural to the soil as the fisherfolk or the
tillers. Their stock remained from ancient tides of battle, centuries
before. The founders of the families had been Norman barons, Highland
chiefs, English squires; but the blood had adapted