y of his forefathers, the inheritance of
his blood. Who was he that he should put up a great building on the
hill? What if he had risen for a little on his wings above the common
flock?

The night air was heavy with the scent of the late dry harvest and all
that the late dry harvest meant to the man nurtured on the side of a wet
hill. The sheaves of corn were stooked in his neighbour's fields.
Yesterday he had sacrificed the land to the building; to-morrow he would
sacrifice the building to the land. Martin Cosgrave knew, the stars
seemed to know, that a message, a voice, a command, would come like a
wave through the generations of his blood sweeping him back to a common
tradition. The cry for service on the land was beginning to stir
somewhere. It would come to him in a word, a word sanctified upon the
land by the memory of a thousand sacrifices and a thousand struggles,
the only word that held magic for his race, the one word--Redemption! He
looked up at the building, made a vague motion of his hand that was like
an act of renunciation, and laughed a laugh of terrible bitterness.

"Look," he cried, "at the building Martin Cosgrave put up on the hill!"

He moved to the cabin-door, his feet heavy upon the uneven ground as the
feet of any of the generations of men who had ever gone that way before.
He pressed the cabin-door with his fist. With a groan it went back
shakily over the worn stone threshold, sticking when it was only a
little way open. All was quiet, black, damp, terrible as chaos, inside.
Martin Cosgrave hitched forward his left shoulder, went in sideways, and
closed the crazy door against the pale world of moonlight outside.

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