he
deliberately set up an optimistic Deity in opposition to the pessimistic
Deity of the Rector? The Rector hitched up the white cuffs under his
dark sleeves, swung his umbrella, and resumed his way, his lips
puckered, a little feverish agitation seizing him.

"A strange, down-hearted kind of a man," the stonebreaker said to
himself, as he reached out for a lump of lime-stone and raised his
hammer. A redbreast, perched on an old thorn bush, looking out on the
scene with curious eyes, stretched his wing and his leg, as much as to
say, "Ah, well," sharpened his beak on a twig, and dropped into the
ditch to pick up such gifts as the good earth yielded.

The Rector walked along the road pensive, but steadfast, his eyes upon
the alien hills, his mind travelling over ridges of problems that never
afforded the gleam of solution. He heard a shout of a laugh. Above the
local accents that held a cadence of the Gaelic speech he heard the
sharp clipping Northern accent of his own gardener and general factotum.
He had brought the man with him when he first came to Connacht, half as
a mild form of colonisation, half through a suspicion of local honesty.
He now saw the man's shaggy head over the Rectory garden wall, and
outside it were the peasants.

How was it that the gardener got on with the local people? How was it
that they stood on the road to speak with him, shouting their
extravagant laughter at his keen, dry Northern humour?

When he first came the gardener had been more grimly hostile to the
place than the Rector himself. There had been an ugly row on the road,
and blows had been struck. But that was some years ago. The gardener now
appeared very much merged in the life of the place; the gathering
outside the Rectory garden was friendly, almost a family party. How was
it to be accounted for? Once or twice the Rector found himself
suspecting that at the bottom of the phenomenon there might be all
unconscious among these people a spirit of common country, of a common
democracy, a common humanity, that forced itself to the surface in
course of time. The Rector stood, his lips working, his nicely-shaped
little head quivering with a sudden agitation. For he found himself
thinking along unusual lines, and for that very reason dangerous
lines--frightfully dangerous lines, he told himself, as an ugly
enlightenment broke across his mind, warming it up for a few moments and
no more. As he turned in the gate at the Rectory it was a