e alien rosaries she would
say, praying for his safe return from the almighty waters.... And never
a dog on his travels but would get a pat and a whistle, and he thinking
of the grizzled terrier in Louth that guarded the threshold of quiet
beauty....

And so he would have been content to live all his days, so he thought he
would live, going down to the dangers of the sea, trading in strange
ports, and transmuting hard, untiring effort into gain for her at home
and her children, and he would grow old and grizzled, until he could no
longer brace to a heeling plank or stand the responsibility of a ship's
mastery, and then they would buy a little house on some harbor, while
their sons went rolling down to Rio or fought the typhoon in the China
Seas, and he could sit there with his telescope, watching the ships go
by, or come in and out hauling up mainsail or making their mooring, and
grumbling pleasantly at how good seamanship fades and dies....

All this he had thought out in the loneliness of foreign ports, in the
night watches aboard ship, in the inhospitality of his mother's house,
and on the jaunting-car to Dundalk. All this he had thought out, and on
its basis gone into marriage. And it would just have been as well for
him, better perhaps, had he thrown a coin into the air to find out
whether he should marry or no.

And that was what human thought was worth--a brown penny thrown into the
empty air!

"_Gloir do'n Athair, agas do'n Mhac, agas do'n Spiorad Naomh_," went the
drone of the rosary within. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and
to the Holy Ghost, Amen!"

Section 10

And the house that he had known in a dream was no more in reality than a
cold strange dwelling; all was there, the whitewash, the thatch, the
delft on the dresser, but as a home it was stillborn. The turf did not
burn well and the swallows shunned the eaves, feeling, in nature's
occult way, that the essential rhythm was wanting. Nor would bees be
happy in the skips, but must swarm otherward. One would have said the
house was built on some tragic rock....

Only the old dog was faithful, and stayed where his master put him.

And the face he had dreamed would not look toward him over the
illimitable ocean. Seek as he would, it was never there, with warm
gravity. His eyes might strive, but all they would see was the oily
swell of the Dogger Bank, and the great plowed field of Biscay Bay, and
the smash of foam against the Hebrides. Ne