take the bark from the edge of an oak
board you'd have building a door.... God forgive me, Michael Dara,
we'll all be getting old, but it's a queer thing surely.

_Michael_. It's too lonesome you are from living a long time with
an old man, Nora, and you're talking again like a herd that would
be coming down from the thick mist (_he puts his arm round her_),
but it's a fine life you'll have now with a young man--a fine life,
surely.

(_Dan sneezes violently. Michael tries to get to the door, but
before he can do so Dan jumps out of the bed in queer white
clothes, with the stick in his hand, and goes over and puts his
back against it._)

_Michael_. Son of God deliver us!

Equal extravagance and equal grotesquerie, and irony biting beyond any
in any other of his plays, you will find in "The Well of the Saints."
This, too, is built up out of Synge's experience of life in Aran and
Wicklow. Old Mourteen, a "dark man," who taught him Gaelic on Aranmor,
suggested Martin Doul, the chief character of the play, and it was
Mourteen told him, too, the story of the well whose water would give
sight to blind eyes. A story told Synge on Inishere supplied the saint,
and a tramp in Wicklow the thoughts of Martin Doul and Mary Doul as to
the glory their hair would be to them in age. As you read his travel
sketches, in fact, you are always coming on passages that very evidently
are the suggestions for situations in this play or that, and sometimes
more than suggestions--stories and situations and very phrases that you
remember as on the lips of the peasants in his plays. In these travel
sketches, too, you find the background of the plays. There is but the
germ of "The Playboy of the Western World" in the story told Synge in
Inishmaan of the hiding there from the police of the man that killed his
father, but there is old Mourteen's comparison of an unmarried man to
"an old jackass straying in the rocks," which later we find transferred
to Michael James Flaherty almost as Synge heard it--"an old braying
jackass straying upon the rocks."

It may be, too, that the famous Lynchehaun case confirmed Synge in
taking the Aran story of the man who killed his father as the basis of
"The Playboy," but it is little he got for his plays from his reading of
"the fearful crimes of Ireland," and little that he got for them from
any of his reading. There are situations in "The Tinker's Weddi