ate of the building.

The faint sweep of the drive lay before him. It led his eyes up to the
crest of the hill. There it was standing shadowy against the sky, every
delicate outline clear to his vision. The beech trees were swaying
beside it, reaching out like great shapeless arms in the night, blurred
and beckoning and ghostly. A little vein of their music sounded in his
ears. How often had he listened to that music and the things it had sung
to him! It made him conscious of all the emotion he had felt while he
had put up the building on the hill.

The joy of the builder swept over him like a wave. He was within the
rising walls again, his hands among the grey-blue shapes, the measured
stroke of the mallet swinging for the shifting chisel, the throb of
steel going through his arms, the grind of stone was under his hands,
the stone dust dry upon his lips, his eyes quick and keen, his arms
bared, the shirt at his breast open, his whole body tense, tuned, to the
desire of the conscious builder.... Once more he moved about the carpet
of splinters, the grateful crunch beneath his feet, his world a world of
stubborn things, rejoicing in his power of direction and mastery over it
all. And always at the back of his mind and blending itself with the
work was the thought of a ship forging through the water at the harvest,
a ship with white sails spread to the winds. Had not thought for the
building come into his mind when dead things sprang to life in the
resurrection of his hopes?

Martin Cosgrave turned away from the gate. He walked down where the
shadow of the mearing was faint upon the road. He turned up the boreen
closed in by the still hedges. He stumbled over the ruts. He stood at
the cabin door and looked up at the sky with soulless eyes. The
animation, the inspiration, that had vivified his face since the
building had been begun had died. The face no longer expressed the
idealist, the visionary. His eyes swept the sky for a purpose. It was
the look of the man of the fields, the man who had thought for his
crops, who was near to the soil.

He had not looked a final and anxious, a peasant look, at the sky from
his cabin-door in the night since he had embarked upon the building. He
was conscious of that fact after a little. He wondered if it was a vague
stirring in his heart that made him do it, a vague craving for the old
companionship of the fields this night of bitterness. They were the
fields, the sod, the territor