not forbear a hope that their voices
might be convincingly in favour of giving Nicholas his chances; still
his strongest feeling was that it would be a relief to get the matter
settled one way or the other.

Very different in its degree of intensity was the interest with which
his grandson Nicholas looked forward to the issue. The question to be
decided seemed to him of almost as vital importance as if it were:
Whether or no the sun should rise again next morning. For him at least,
it depended upon that whether his world should loom back again in a
dreary blankness, or waken lit with new and wondrous gleams. Nicholas's
thirst for knowledge and love of learning were much more essentially
part and parcel of him than his hands and eyes, and had so far found
little except dreams and desires to thrive upon. Even before the
memorable summer evening when the gaunt old man in the curious big hat
had asked for the night's lodging, which lengthened into a season's
sojourn, he had often wandered among visions of places where there were
as many books as anybody could read--a dozen maybe--and some people in
it with a power of book-learning--as much perhaps as his Reverence or
the Doctor--only neither priest nor quality, but just neighbours whom he
could question about anything that came into his head, as he used to
question his grandfather, and Paddy Ryan, and Terence Kilfoyle, until he
got tired of being asked, in reply: "Musha good gracious, and who could
be tellin' you that?" an answer which had repeatedly left him a
discouraged atom of bewilderment, symbolically environed by our
wide-spreading bog. Since Mr. Polymathers's visit, these visions had
grown clearer, but not under any rays of hope. His initiation into the
elements of mathematics had pointed out the road along which he should
travel, but had simultaneously revealed all its obstacles,
insurmountable for him solitary and unequipped. In those days his mind
was constantly fumbling at some insoluble problem with the sense of
frustration that one has who gropes vainly in the dark, well knowing how
a single unattainable match-flare would put what he is seeking into his
hands. And no brighter prospect seemed to lie before him anywhere in his
future.

So when he suddenly learned that Mr. Polymathers had left all his
money--sums and sums--to be spent on "getting schooling for Nicholas
O'Beirne;" and when the sums and sums were actually counted out on the
table, he felt as if a