ry wrong doers as well as with turbulent mobs. Ornament
of every kind is rigorously excluded from these rooms. It is all very
well to aim at the development of the aesthetic faculty for children by
putting pictures and scraggy geraniums in pots into schoolrooms. No one
wants a policeman to be artistic. But the love of the beautiful breaks
out occasionally, even in policemen who live in barracks. Constable
Moriarty, for instance, had a passion for music. He whistled better
than any man in Ballymoy, and spent much of his leisure in working up
thrilling variations of popular tunes.

Being confined by the call of duty to the living-room of the barrack in
Ballymoy for a whole morning, he had accomplished a series of runs and
trills through which the air of "The Minstrel Boy" seemed to struggle
for expression. His attention was fixed on this composition, and not at
all on the newspaper which lay across his knees.

At twelve o'clock he rose from the bench on which he was sitting and
allowed the newspaper to fall in a crumpled heap on the floor at
his feet. He stretched himself and yawned. Then he glanced round the
barrack-room with an air of weariness. Sergeant Colgan, his tunic
unbuttoned, his grey flannel shirt open at the neck, dozed uncomfortably
in a corner. Moriarty looked at him enviously. The sergeant was much
the older man of the two, and was besides of portly figure. Sleep came
easily to him under the most unpromising circumstances. Moriarty was not
more than twenty four years of age. He was mentally and physically an
active man. Before he went to work on "The Minstrel Boy" he had wooed
sleep in vain. Even a three days' old copy of the Weekly Freeman had
brought him no more than a series of stupefying yawns. If a man cannot
go to sleep over a back number of a weekly paper there is no use his
trying to go to sleep at all. He may as well whistle tunes.

Moriarty left the living-room in which the sergeant slept and went out
to the door of the barrack. He stared across the market square. The sun
shone pitilessly. Except for a fat white dog, which lay asleep in the
gutter opposite the shop of Kerrigan, the butcher, no living thing
was to be seen. Hot days are so rare in west of Ireland towns that the
people succumb to them at once. Business, unless it happens to be market
day, absolutely ceases in a town like Ballymoy when the thermometer
registers anything over eighty degrees. Moriarty stretched himself again
and yawne