n and Abel, and I
can imagine a woman in the Combe crooning it to her child!..." The Combe
was a tract of slum in Dublin. "It's universal and everlasting. You
can't kill that!"

"Then why has it got lost?"

"It isn't lost--it's only covered up. Our task is to dig it out. It's
worth digging out, isn't it? The people in the West still sing songs
like that. Isn't it worth while to try and get all our people to sing
them instead of singing English music-hall stuff?..."

2

It was in that spirit that Marsh started the Gaelic class in
Ballymartin. "And the Gaelic games," he said to Henry, "we'll revive
them too!" Twice a week, he taught the rudiments of the Irish language
to a mixed class of boys and girls, and every Saturday he led the
Ballymartin hurley team into one of Mr. Quinn's fields....

There had been difficulty in establishing the mixed classes. The farmers
and the villagers, having first declared that Gaelic was useless to
them--"they'd be a lot better learnin' shorthand!" said John
McCracken--then declared that they did not care to have their daughters
"trapesin' about the loanies, lettin' on to be learnin' Irish, an' them
only up to devilment with the lads!" But Marsh overcame that difficulty,
as he overcame most of his difficulties, by persistent attack; and in
the end, the Gaelic class was established, and the Ballymartin boys and
girls were set to the study of O'Growney's primer. Henry was employed as
Marsh's monitor. His duty was to supervise the elementary pupils,
leaving the more advanced ones to the care of Marsh. It was while he was
teaching the Gaelic alphabet to his class, that Henry first met Sheila
Morgan.

She came into the schoolroom one night out of a drift of rain, and as
she stood in the doorway, laughing because the wind had caught her
umbrella and almost torn it out of her hands, he could see the
raindrops glistening on her cheeks. She put the umbrella in a corner of
the room, leaving it open so that it might dry more quickly, and then
she shook her long dark hair back and wiped the rain from her face. He
waited until she had taken off her mackintosh and hung it up in the
cloakroom, and then he went forward to her.

"Have you come to join the class?" he asked, and she smiled and nodded
her head. "It's a coarse sort of a night," she added, coming into the
classroom.

He did not know her name, and he wondered where her home was. He knew
everybody in Ballymartin, and many of the peopl