d gravitate toward the Church. It has seemed
also that it was just as inevitable that the best thought of which the
Church has been the custodian should be crystallized into a creed. I was
promoted to the "big house." There, of course, I was overhauled and put
in touch with the fittings and furniture. As a flunkey I had my first
dose of boiled linen and I liked it.

I was enabled now to attend church and Sunday School. Indeed, I would
have gone there, religion or no religion, for where else could I have
sported a white shirt and collar? With my boiled linen and my brain
stuffed with texts I gradually drew away from the chimney-corner and
never again did I help Willie Withero to carry his hammers. Ah, if one
could only go back over life and correct the mistakes.

Gradually I lost the warm human feeling and substituted for it a
theology. I began to look upon my mother as one about whose salvation
there was some doubt. I urged her to attend church. Forms and ceremonies
became the all-important things and the life and the spirit were
proportionately unimportant. I became mildewed with the blight of
respectability. I became the possessor of a hard hat that I might ape
the respectables. I walked home every night from Ballycraigie with Jamie
Wallace, and Jamie was the best-dressed working man in the town. I was
treading a well-worn pathway. I was "getting on." A good slice of my new
religion consisted in excellency of service to my employers--my
"betters." Preacher, priest and peasant thought alike on these topics.
Anna was pleased to see me in a new garb, but she noticed and I noticed
that I had grown away from the corner. In the light of my new adjustment
I saw _duties_ plainer, but duty may become a hammer by which affection
may be beaten to death.

I imagined the plow was going nicely in the furrow, for I wasn't
conscious of striking any snags or stones, but Anna said:

"A plowman who skims th' surface of th' sod strikes no stones, dear, but
it's because he isn't plowin' _deep_!"

I have plowed deep enough since, but too late to go back and compare
notes.

She was pained, but tried to hide it. If she was on the point of tears
she would tell a funny story.

"Acushla," she said to me one night after a theological discussion,
"sure ye remind me of a ducklin' hatched by a hen."

"Why?"

"We're at home in conthrary elements. Ye use texts t' fight with an' I
use thim to get pace of heart!"

"Are you wiser nor Mr. Ho