rson like Shaun O'Grady, who lives in a little
whitewashed cabin, and who has, like Mr. Yeats's Gleeman, 'the whole
Middle Ages under his frieze coat.' The longer and more intimately we
know these peasants, the more we realise how much in imagination, or in
the clouds, if you will, they live. The ragged man of leisure you meet
on the road may be a philosopher, and is still more likely to be a poet;
but unless you have something of each in yourself, you may mistake him
for a mere beggar.

"The practical ones have all emigrated," a Dublin novelist told us,
"and the dreamers are left. The heads of the older ones are filled with
poetry and legends; they see nothing as it is, but always through some
iridescent-tinted medium. Their waking moments, when not tormented by
hunger, are spent in heaven, and they all live in a dream, whether it
be of the next world or of a revolution. Effort is to them useless,
submission to everybody and everything the only safe course; in a word,
fatalism expresses their attitude to life."

Much of this submission to the inevitable is a product of past poverty,
misfortune, and famine, and the rest is undoubtedly a trace of the same
spirit that we find in the lives and writings of the saints, and which
is an integral part of the mystery and the traditions of Romanism. We
who live in the bright (and sometimes staring) sunlight of common-sense
can hardly hope to penetrate the dim, mysterious world of the Catholic
peasant, with his unworldliness and sense of failure.

Dr. Douglas Hyde, an Irish scholar and staunch Protestant, says: "A
pious race is the Gaelic race. The Irish Gael is pious by nature. There
is not an Irishman in a hundred in whom is the making of an unbeliever.
The spirit, and the things of the spirit, affect him more powerfully
than the body, and the things of the body... What is invisible for other
people is visible for him... He feels invisible powers before him, and
by his side, and at his back, throughout the day and throughout the
night... His mind on the subject may be summed up in the two sayings:
that of the early Church, 'Let ancient things prevail,' and that of St.
Augustine, 'Credo quia impossibile.' Nature did not form him to be an
unbeliever; unbelief is alien to his mind and contrary to his feelings."

Here, only a few miles away, is the Slemish mountain where St. Patrick,
then a captive of the rich cattle-owner Milcho, herded his sheep and
swine. Here, when his flocks