gin their real un-understood life. At times it
seemed impossible that it was the same world. Surely the sun that struck
like a hammer in Jamaica could not be the gracious warm planet that
gilded the gorse of the Antrim glens. And up the Baltic in mid-winter it
was bleak as a candle, and even then in Antrim it had a great
kindliness. Nor were the winds the same. The hot puffs of the Indian
Ocean, the drunken, lurching flaws of Biscay Bay, the trades that worked
steadily as ants, had not the human quality of the winds of the Nine
Glens, that were now angry as an angry man, now gentle as a gentle
woman.

Only one thing was constant, and that was the women whom sailors know in
ports. And they wore masks. The same easily forced laughter, the same
crude flattery, the complacent arms, the eternal eager hand....

And then one day the new port palled, like a book one has read too
often, or a picture one has looked at over-long. And it was sheet home
the royals and off to a new port, where there were new strange people,
and streets laid another way, and other things in the merchants' booths,
and a new language to pick up a phrase or two of.

But in the end all palled for a time, the aphrodisiac tropic smell; the
coral waters, clear as well water at home; the white houses with the
green jalousies; the lush, coarse green. And the melancholic drums of
the East palled. And palled the grimness of the North. And the unceasing
processional of strange secret faces wearied the eye and the mind. And
the angular spiritual edges of shipmates wore toward one through the
uniform of flesh, became annoying, sometimes unbearable.

And then an immense yearning would come over young Shane for the beloved
faces in the lamplight, for the white road over the purple heather, for
the garden where the greened sun-dial was, with its long motto in the
Irish letter:

_Is mairg a baidhtear in am an anaithe
Na tig an ghrian in dhiaidh na fearthainne_--

as if anybody didn't know that, that it was a pity to be drowned in time
of storm, for the sun shines brightly when the rain goes!

But the sun-dial was mirrored in his heart, and the purple mountain and
the great dun house. The winds he sniffed as a hunting dog does, and
each tack to port or starboard either thrilled or cast him down.... When
would he get there? Would it be cool of the evening, when the bats were
out? Or would it be in the sunshine of the morning, when a great smell
was from the h