indow, cut off at the middle, fell aslant upon rows of clean and
seemingly happy children. The nuns, who show in their own convents,
where they can put what they like, a love of what is mean and pretty,
make beautiful rooms where the regulations compel them to do all with a
few colours and a few flowers. I think it was that day, but am not sure,
that I had lunch at a convent and told fairy stories to a couple of
nuns, and I hope it was not mere politeness that made them seem to have
a child's interest in such things.

A good many of our audience, when the curtain went up in the old
ball-room, were drunk, but all were attentive for they had a great deal
of respect for my friend and there were other priests there. Presently
the man at the door opposite to the stage strayed off somewhere and I
took his place and when boys came up offering two or three pence and
asking to be let into the sixpenny seats I let them join the melancholy
crowd. The play professed to tell of the heroic life of ancient Ireland
but was really full of sedentary refinement and the spirituality of
cities. Every emotion was made as dainty footed and dainty fingered as
might be, and a love and pathos where passion had faded into sentiment,
emotions of pensive and harmless people, drove shadowy young men through
the shadows of death and battle. I watched it with growing rage. It was
not my own work, but I have sometimes watched my own work with a rage
made all the more salt in the mouth from being half despair. Why should
we make so much noise about ourselves and yet have nothing to say that
was not better said in that work-house dormitory, where a few flowers
and a few coloured counterpanes and the coloured walls had made a severe
and gracious beauty? Presently the play was changed and our comedian
began to act a little farce, and when I saw him struggle to wake into
laughter an audience, out of whom the life had run as if it were water,
I rejoiced, as I had over that broken window-pane. Here was something
secular, abounding, even a little vulgar, for he was gagging horribly,
condescending to his audience, though not without contempt.

We had our supper in the priest's house, and a government official who
had come down from Dublin, partly out of interest in this attempt 'to
educate the people,' and partly because it was his holiday and it was
necessary to go somewhere, entertained us with little jokes. Somebody,
not I think a priest, talked of the spiri