RTIN. I wonder how that has happened. Can it have anything to do with
Andrew's plan?

THOMAS. Are you giving no heed to what I'm saying? There is not a man,
I tell you, in the parish, and beyond the parish, but has left the work
he was doing, whether in the field or in the mill.

MARTIN. Then all work has come to an end? Perhaps that was a good
thought of Andrew's.

THOMAS. There is not a man has come to sensible years that is not drunk
or drinking! My own labourers and my own serving-man are sitting on
counters and on barrels! I give you my word the smell of the spirits
and the porter and the shouting and the cheering within made the hair
to rise up on my scalp.

MARTIN. And there is not one of them that does not feel that he could
bridle the four winds.

THOMAS [_sitting down in despair_]. You are drunk, too. I never
thought you had a fancy for it.

MARTIN. It is hard for you to understand. You have worked all your
life. You have said to yourself every morning, "What is to be done
to-day?" and when you are tired out you have thought of the next day's
work. If you gave yourself an hour's idleness, it was but that you
might work the better. Yet it is only when one has put work away that
one begins to live.

THOMAS. It is those French wines that did it.

MARTIN. I have been beyond the earth, in paradise, in that happy
townland. I have seen the shining people. They were all doing one thing
or another, but not one of them was at work. All that they did was but
the overflowing of their idleness, and their days were a dance bred of
the secret frenzy of their hearts, or a battle where the sword made a
sound that was like laughter.

THOMAS. You went away sober from out of my hands; they had a right to
have minded you better.

MARTIN. No man can be alive, and what is paradise but fulness of life,
if whatever he sets his hand to in the daylight cannot carry him from
exaltation to exaltation, and if he does not rise into the frenzy of
contemplation in the night silence. Events that are not begotten in joy
are misbegotten and darken the world, and nothing is begotten in joy if
the joy of a thousand years has not been crushed into a moment.

THOMAS. And I offered to let you go to Dublin in the coach! [ANDREW
_and the beggars have returned cautiously._]

MARTIN [_giving banner to_ PAUDEEN]. Give me the lamp. The lamp has
not yet been lighted, and the world is to be consumed! [_Goes into
inner room._]

THOMAS [_seei