n with a grain of salt.

Mangan shows you the old Dublin as it was in those glorious times, and in
the new Dublin of to-day the shade of Mangan seems still to walk arm in
arm with the shade of Mathurin. Gloomy ghosts addicted to melancholy,
noting with satisfaction that the streets are as dirty as ever, the old
Public Houses still standing, that, despite the tramways--those
extraordinary new modern inventions--the tide of life runs pretty much the
same as of old. The ghosts of Mangan and Mathurin have never seen a taxi
cab.

Dublin at the present day is a splendid city for old ghosts to wander in
without having their corns trodden on or their susceptibilities injured.
Phyl had come to Dublin to live with the Hennesseys in Merrion Square.

"Never shall my door be shut on you except behind your back," Hennessey
had said, and he meant it.

The girl was worth several thousand a year; had she been penniless it
would have been just the same.

You may meet many geniuses in your journey through life, many brilliant
people, many beautiful people, many fascinating people, but you will not
meet many friends. Hennessey belonged to the society of Friends, his wife
was a member of the same community, and he would have been ruined only for
his partner Niven, who was an ordinary lowdown human creature who believed
in no one and kept the business together.

On the day of her arrival at Merrion Square and during her first interview
with Mrs. Hennessey in the large, cheerless drawing-room where
decalcomanied flower pots lingered like relics of the Palaeolithic age of
Art, Phyl kept herself above tears, just as a swimmer keeps his head above
water in a choppy sea.

It was all so gloomy, yet so friendly, that the mind could not openly
revolt at the gloom; it was all so different from the wind and trees and
freedom of Kilgobbin, and Mrs. Hennessey, whom she had only seen once
before, was so different, on closer acquaintance, from any of the people
she had hitherto met in her little world.

Mrs. Hennessey, with a soul above dust and housekeeping, a faded woman,
not very tidy, with an exalted air, pouring out tea from a Britannia metal
ware teapot and talking all the time about Willy Yeates, the Irish Players
and Lady Gregory's last play, fascinated the girl, who did not know who
Willy Yeates was and who had never seen the Irish Players.

Nor could she learn from Mrs. Hennessey. It was impossible to get a word
in edgeways with that l