rning, and he saying that twenty odd
miles lay before me, and my first stopping place would be
Ballygliesane. I could hear Mass there at Father Madden's chapel, and
after Mass I could call upon him, and that when I had explained the
objects of our Society I could drive to Rathowen, where there was a
great gathering of the clergy. All the priests within ten miles round
would be there for the consecration of the new church.

On an outside car one divides one's time in moralising on the state of
the country or in chatting with the driver, and as the driver seemed
somewhat taciturn I examined the fields as we passed them. They were
scanty fields, drifting from thin grass into bog, and from bog into
thin grass again, and in the distance there was a rim of melancholy
mountains, and the peasants I saw along the road seemed a counterpart
of the landscape. "The land has made them," I said, "according to its
own image and likeness," and I tried to find words to define the
yearning that I read in their eyes as we drove past. But I could find
no words that satisfied me.

"Only music can express their yearning, and they have written it
themselves in their folk tunes."

My driver's eyes were the eyes that one meets everywhere in Ireland,
pale, wandering eyes that the land seems to create, and I wondered if
his character corresponded to his eyes; and with a view to finding if
it did I asked him some questions about Father Madden. He seemed
unwilling to talk, but I soon began to see that his silence was the
result of shyness rather than dislike of conversation. He was a gentle,
shy lad, and I told him that Father O'Hara had said I would see the
loneliest parish in Ireland.

"It's true for him," he answered, and again there was silence. At the
end of a mile I asked him if the land in Father Madden's parish was
poor, and he said no, it was the best land in the country, and then I
was certain that there was some mystery attached to Father Madden.

"The road over there is the mearing."

And soon after passing this road I noticed that although the land was
certainly better than the land about Culloch, there seemed to be very
few people on it; and what was more significant than the untilled
fields were the ruins, for they were not the cold ruins of twenty, or
thirty, or forty years ago when the people were evicted and their
tillage turned into pasture, but the ruins of cabins that had been
lately abandoned. Some of the roof trees were