y old, in spite of
the musicians' gallery over the stage. It had been built by some
romantic or philanthropic landlord some three or four generations ago,
and was a memory of we knew not what unfinished scheme.

From there I went to look for the players, and called for information on
a young priest, who had invited them and taken upon himself the finding
of an audience. He lived in a high house with other priests, and as I
went in I noticed with a whimsical pleasure a broken pane of glass in
the fanlight over the door, for he had once told me the story of an old
woman who a good many years ago quarrelled with the bishop, got drunk
and hurled a stone through the painted glass. He was a clever man who
read Meredith and Ibsen, but some of his books had been packed in the
fire-grate by his housekeeper, instead of the customary view of an
Italian lake or the coloured tissue-paper. The players, who had been
giving a performance in a neighbouring town, had not yet come, or were
unpacking their costumes and properties at the hotel he had recommended
them. We should have time, he said, to go through the half-ruined town
and to visit the convent schools and the cathedral, where, owing to his
influence, two of our young Irish sculptors had been set to carve an
altar and the heads of pillars. I had only heard of this work, and I
found its strangeness and simplicity--one of them had been Rodin's
pupil--could not make me forget the meretriciousness of the architecture
and the commercial commonplace of the inlaid pavement. The new movement
had seized on the cathedral midway in its growth, and the worst of the
old and the best of the new were side by side without any sign of
transition. The convent school was, as other like places have been to
me,--a long room in a workhouse hospital at Portumna, in particular,--a
delight to the imagination and the eyes. A new floor had been put into
some ecclesiastical building and the light from a great mullioned
window, 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