, for except the Bible and the Prayer-Book Hyacinth was
taught to read no English books. He learned Latin after a fashion, not
with nice attention to complexities of syntax, but as a language meant
to be used, read, and even spoken now and then to Father Moran.

Meanwhile the passage of the years brought changes to Carrowkeel.
The Admiralty established a coastguard station near the village, and
arranged, for the greater security of the Empire, that men in blue-serge
clothes should take it in turns to look at the Atlantic through a
telescope. Then the unquiet spirit of the Congested Districts Board
possessed the place for a while. A young engineer designed a new pier to
shelter fishing-boats. He galvanized the people into unwonted activity,
and, though sceptical of good results, they earned a weekly wage by
building it. Boats came, great able boats, which fought the Atlantic,
and the old curraghs were left to blister in the sun far up on the
beach. Instructors from the Isle of Man taught new ways of catching
mackerel. Green patches between the cottages and the sea, once the
playground of pigs and children, or the marine parade of solemn lines
of geese, were spread with brown nets. On May mornings, if the take was
good, long lines of carts rattled down the road carrying the fish to
the railway at Clifden, and the place bore for a while the appearance
of vitality. A vagrant Englishman discovered that lobsters could be had
almost for the asking in Carrowkeel. The commercial instincts of his
race were aroused in him.

He established a trade between the villagers and the fishmongers of
Manchester. The price of lobsters rose to the unprecedented figure of
four shillings a dozen, and it was supposed that even so the promoter of
the scheme secured a profit.

To AEneas Conneally, growing quietly old, the changes meant very little.
The coastguards, being bound by one of the articles of the British
Constitution, came to church on Sunday mornings with exemplary
regularity, and each man at fixed intervals brought a baby to be
christened and a woman to be churched. Otherwise they hardly affected
Mr. Conneally's life. The great officials who visited Carrowkeel to
survey the benignant activities of the Congested Districts Board
were men whose magnificent intellectual powers raised them above any
recognised form of Christianity. Neither Father Moran's ministrations
nor Mr. Conneally's appealed to them.

The London committee of the mi