g better. She used to say so often, 'It's nice
to be nice.'"

"Aye, I mind that," he said.

"Then," I continued, "on Sundays when she was dressed and her nice
tallied cap on her head, I thought she was the purtiest woman I ever
saw!"

"'Deed, maan, she was that!"

When bed time came I took a small lap-robe from my suit case, spread
it on the hard mud floor, rolled some other clothes as a pillow and
lay down to rest. Sleep came slowly but as I lay I was not alone, for
around me were the forms and faces of other days.

Next day I visited the scene of my boyhood's vision--I went through
the woods where I had my first full meal. I visited the old church;
but the good Rector was gathered to his fathers. It was all a
day-dream; it was like going back to a former incarnation. Along the
road on my way home I discovered the most intimate friend of my
boyhood--the boy with whom I had gathered faggots, played "shinney"
and gone bird-nesting. He was "nappin'" stones. He did not recognize
my voice but his curiosity was large enough to make him throw down his
hammer, take off the glasses that protected his eyes and stare at me.

"Maan, yer changed," he said, "aren't you?"

"And you?"

"Och, shure, I'm th' same ould sixpence!"

"Except that you're older!" There was a look of disappointment on his
face.

"Maan," he said, "ye talk like quality--d'ye live among thim?"

I explained something of my changed life; I told of my work and what I
had tried to do and I closed with an account of the vision in the
fields not far from where we sat.

"Aye," he would say occasionally, "aye, 'deed it's quare how things
turn out."

When I ended the story of the vision he said: "Ye haaven't forgot how
t' tell a feery story--ye wor i' good at that!"

"Bob" hadn't read a book, or a newspaper in all those years. He got
his news from the men who stopped at his stone pile to light their
pipes--what he didn't get there he got at the cobbler's while his
brogues were being patched or at the barber's when he went for his
weekly shave. We talked each other out in half an hour. A wide gulf
was between us: it was a gulf in the realm of mind.

As I moved away toward the town, I wondered why I was not breaking
stones on the roadside, and I muttered Bob's well-worn phrase: "How
quare!"

It became so difficult to talk to my father without gathering a crowd
at the door that I shortened my stay and took him to Belfast where we
could spend a few days