e. His children married, lonesomeness began to
creep about him; in the evening, when he looked into the fire-light, a
vague, tender reverie floated up, and Margaret's soft eyes and name
vivified the dusk. His wife and children passed out of mind, and it
seemed to him that a memory was the only real thing he possessed, and
the desire to see Margaret again grew intense. But she was an old
woman, she had married, maybe she was dead. Well, he would like to be
buried in the village where he was born.

There is an unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows
but himself, and his unchanging, silent life was his memory of Margaret
Dirken. The bar-room was forgotten and all that concerned it, and the
things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake
and the rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and
behind it the blue lines of wandering hills.

CHAPTER V

A LETTER TO ROME

One morning the priest's housekeeper mentioned as she gathered up the
breakfast things, that Mike Mulhare had refused to let his daughter
Catherine marry James Murdoch until he had earned the price of a pig.

"This is bad news," said the priest, and he laid down the newspaper.

"And he waited for her all the summer! Wasn't it in February last that
he came out of the poor-house? And the fine cabin he has built for her!
He'll be that lonesome, he'll be going to America."

"To America!" said the priest.

"Maybe it will be going back to the poor-house he'll be, for he'll
never earn the price of his passage at the relief works."

The priest looked at her for a moment as if he did not catch her
meaning, and then a knock came at the door, and he said:--

"The inspector is here, and there are people waiting for me."

And while he was distributing the clothes he had received from
Manchester, he argued with the inspector as to the direction the new
road should take; and when he came back from the relief works, there
was his dinner. He was busy writing letters all the afternoon; it was
not until he had handed them to the post-mistress that his mind was
free to think of poor James Murdoch, who had built a cabin at the end
of one of the famine roads in a hollow out of the way of the wind. From
a long way off the priest could see him digging his patch of bog.

And when he caught sight of the priest he stuck his spade in the ground
and came to meet him. He wore a pair of torn corduroy trousers out of
which