." And behind imported Palestinian supernature, if I may be
permitted to drop into Mr. Poole's style, or what I imagine to be his
style, there is the home belief in fairies, spirits, and ghosts, and the
reading of omens. Who amongst us does not remember the old nurse who
told him stories of magic and witchcraft? Nor can it be denied that
things happen that seem in contradiction to all we know of Nature's
laws. Moreover, these unusual occurrences have a knack of happening to
men at the moment of their setting out on some irrevocable enterprise.

'You who are so sympathetic will understand how my will has been
affected by Father Moran's visit. Had you heard him tell how he was
propelled, as it were, out of his house towards me, you, too, would
believe that he was a messenger. He stopped on his threshold to try to
find a reason for coming to see me; he couldn't find any, and he walked
on, feeling that something had happened. He must have thought himself a
fool when he found me sitting here in the thick flesh. But what he said
did not seem nonsense to me; it seemed like some immortal wisdom come
from another world. Remember that I was on the point of going. Nor is
this all. If nothing else had happened, I might have looked upon Father
Moran's visit as a coincidence. But why should the wind rise? So far as
I can make out, it began to rise between eleven and twelve, at the very
time I should have been swimming between Castle Island and the Joycetown
shore. I know that belief in signs and omens and prognostics can be
laughed at; nothing is more ridiculous than the belief that man's fate
is governed by the flight of birds, yet men have believed in bird augury
from the beginning of the world.

'I wrote to you about a curlew (I can still see it in the air, its
beautifully shapen body and wings, its long beak, and its trailing legs;
it staggered a little in its flight when the shot was fired, but it had
strength enough to reach Castle Island: it then toppled over, falling
dead on the shore); and I ask you if it is wonderful that I should have
been impressed? Such a thing was never heard of before--a wild bird with
its legs tied together!

'At first I believed that this bird was sent to warn me from going, but
it was that bird that put the idea into my head how I might escape from
the parish without giving scandal. Life is so strange that one doesn't
know what to think. Of what use are signs and omens if the
interpretation is alw