nd South in Ireland ... and on
the whole, I think the Civil War did a lot of good!"

"It's a damned queer country, Henry!" he went on, lying down and drawing
the bedclothes up about his neck. "Damned queer!"

"I suppose they all know what they're up to," he continued, looking
intently at the ceiling. "But I don't!"

"Are you comfortable, father?" Henry asked, bending anxiously over Mr.
Quinn who had a grey, tired look on his face.

"Yes, thank you, Henry, I'm ... I'm comfortable enough!" He turned his
head slightly and gazed at Henry for a few moments without speaking.
Then he smiled at him. "I tried hard to make an Irishman out of you,
Henry," he said.

"I am an Irishman, father!"

"Aye, but a _very_ Irishman. Many's a time I wonder what you are. What
are you, Henry? You're not English an' you're not Irish. What are you?"

"I don't know, father. I'm very Irish when I'm in England, and I'm very
English when I'm here!"

"That's no good, Henry. All you do is to make both sides angry. You
should be something all the time!"

"I try to be fair," said Henry.

"That'll not lead you very far. Well, well, the world's the world, and
there's an end of it!"

9

Sitting in the garden that evening, looking towards the hazy hills,
Henry wondered, too, what he was. Indeed, he told himself, he loved
Ireland, but then he loved England, also. Once, when he was in Trinity,
he had trudged up into the mountains, and had sat on a stone and gazed
down on the city and, beyond it, to the sea, and while he had sat there,
a great love of his country had come into his heart, and he had found
himself irrationally loving the earth about him, just because it was
Irish earth. He had tried to check this love which was conquering him,
and he had scraped up a handful of earth and rubbed his fingers in it.
"Soil," he had murmured aloud. "Just soil ... like any other soil!" and
then, suddenly, overpoweringly, irresistibly, something had quickened in
him, and while he was murmuring that the earth he had scraped up was
"just soil," he had raised it to his lips and had kissed it.... And as
quickly as the impulse to kiss the earth came to him, came also
revulsion. "That was a sloppy thing to do," he said to himself, and he
flung the earth away from him.

He had stayed there until the evening, lulled by the warm wind that blew
about the mountains, and soothed by the soft, kindly smell of burning
turf. There was an odour of smouldering furze ne