off his balance?"

"I'm a schoolmaster," Galway answered, "and I know what schoolmasters
can do!" His voice changed, deepening, as he spoke. "I know what the
young teachers in Ireland mean to do!"

"What do they mean to do?" Henry had asked jokingly.

"Make Irishmen," Galway answered.

"If only Trinity would make Irishmen," he went on, "we'd all be saved a
deal of trouble. But it won't, and when a man of family, like Plunkett,
is born with good will for Ireland, he has to go to England to be
educated. And he ought to be educated in Ireland, and he would be if
Trinity were worth a damn. I wish I were Provost, I'd teach Irishmen to
be proud of their birth!"

"Well, when we've made Ireland a nation," said Henry, chaffing him,
"we'll make you Provost of Trinity!" and Galway, though he knew that
Henry was jesting, smiled with pleasure.

"When Ireland is a nation!" Marsh murmured dreamily.

2

It was extraordinary, Henry thought, how little at home he had felt in
Dublin. He had the feel of Ballymartin in his bones. He had kinship with
the people in Belfast. At Rumpell's and at Boveyhayne he had had no
sensation of alien origin. He had stepped into the life of the school as
naturally as Gilbert Farlow had done, and at Boveyhayne, even when he
still had difficulty in catching the dialect of the fishermen, he had
felt at home. But in Dublin, he had an uneasy feeling that after all, he
was a stranger. In his first year at Trinity, he had been brutally
contemptuous of the city and its inhabitants. "They can't even put up
the names of the streets so that people can read them," he said to John
Marsh soon after he arrived in Dublin. "They're so _damned_
incompetent!" And Marsh had told him to control his Ulster blood.
"You're right to be proud of Ulster," he had said, "but you oughtn't to
go about talking as if the rest of Ireland were inhabited by fools!"

"I know I oughtn't," Henry replied, "but I can't help it when I see the
way these asses are letting Dublin down!"

That was how he felt about Dublin and the Dublin people, that Dublin was
being "let down" by her citizens. His first impression of the city was
that it was noble, even beautiful, in spite of its untidiness, its
distress. He would wander about the streets, gazing at the fine old
Georgian houses, tumbling into decay, and feel so much anger against the
indifferent citizens that sometimes he felt like hitting the first
Dublin man he met ... hitting him hard