gripping the lapels of his coat,
a cloud settling upon his brow. In the centre of the field he stood, his
eyes still upon the cabin. What a mean, pokey, ugly little dirty hovel
it was! The thatch was getting scraggy over the gables and sagging at
the back. In the front it was sodden. A rainy brown streak reached down
to the little window looking like the claw of a great bird upon the
walls. He had been letting everything go to the bad. That might not
signify in the past. But now--

"Rose Dempsey would never stand the like," he said to himself. "She will
be used to grand big houses."

He turned his back upon the cabin near the boreen and looked up to the
belt of beech trees swaying in the wind on the crest of the hill. How
did he live there most of his life and never see that it was a place
fashioned by the hand of Nature for a house? Was it not the height of
nonsense to have trees there making music all the long hours of the
night without a house beside them and people sleeping within it? In a
few minutes the thought had taken hold of his mind. Limestone--beautiful
limestone--ready at hand in the quarry not a quarter of a mile down the
road. Sand from the pit at the back of his own cabin. Lime from the kiln
beyond the road. And his own two hands! He ran his fingers along the
muscles of his arms. Then he walked up the hill.

Martin Cosgrave, as he walked up the hill, felt himself wondering for
the first time in his life if he had really been foolish to have run
away from his father's cabin when he had been young. Up to this he had
always accepted the verdict of the people about him that he had been a
foolish boy "to go wandering in strange places." He had walked along the
roads to many far towns. Then he had struck his friend, the building
contractor. He had been a useful worker about a building house. At first
he had carried hods of mortar and cement up ladders to the masons. The
business of the masons he had mastered quickly. But he had always had a
longing to hold a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other at work
upon stone. He had drifted into a quarry, thence to a stone-cutting
yard. After a little while he could not conceal his impatience with the
mere dressing of coping stones or the chiselling out of tombstones to a
pattern. Then he saw the man killed in the quarry. He was standing
quite near to him. The chain of the windlass went and the poor man had
no escape. Martin Cosgrave had heard the crunch of the