oung
to embrace the earth that had borne their ancestors. But the young
looked gloomily on, and said 'There is no earth, only stone.' You will
see by looking round you why they said that: the fields here are of
stone: the hills are capped with granite. They all left for England next
day; and no Irishman ever again confessed to being Irish, even to his
own children; so that when that generation passed away the Irish race
vanished from human knowledge. And the dispersed Jews did the same lest
they should be sent back to Palestine. Since then the world, bereft of
its Jews and its Irish, has been a tame dull place. Is there no pathos
for you in this story? Can you not understand now why I am come to visit
the scene of this tragic effacement of a race of heroes and poets?

ZOO. We still tell our little children stories like that, to help them
to understand. But such things do not happen really. That scene of the
Irish landing here and kissing the ground might have happened to a
hundred people. It couldn't have happened to a hundred thousand: you
know that as well as I do. And what a ridiculous thing to call people
Irish because they live in Ireland! you might as well call them Airish
because they live in air. They must be just the same as other people.
Why do you shortlivers persist in making up silly stories about the
world and trying to act as if they were true? Contact with truth hurts
and frightens you: you escape from it into an imaginary vacuum in which
you can indulge your desires and hopes and loves and hates without any
obstruction from the solid facts of life. You love to throw dust in your
own eyes.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. It is my turn now, madam, to inform you that I do
not understand a single word you are saying. I should have thought that
the use of a vacuum for removing dust was a mark of civilization rather
than of savagery.

ZOO [_giving him up as hopeless_] Oh, Daddy, Daddy: I can hardly believe
that you are human, you are so stupid. It was well said of your people
in the olden days, 'Dust thou art; and to dust thou shalt return.'

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_nobly_] My body is dust, madam: not my soul.
What does it matter what my body is made of? the dust of the ground,
the particles of the air, or even the slime of the ditch? The important
thing is that when my Creator took it, whatever it was, He breathed into
its nostrils the breath of life; and Man became a living soul. Yes,
madam, a living soul. I am