nth neither followed nor
questioned him. Sometimes on winter nights when the wind howled more
fiercely than usual round the house, the old man would close the book
they read together, and repeat aloud long passages from the Apocalypse.
His voice, weak and wavering at first, would gather strength as he
proceeded, and the young man listened, stirred to vague emotion over the
fall of Babylon the Great.

For the most part Hyacinth's time was his own. Even the hours of study
were uncertain. He read when he liked, and his father seemed content
with long days of idleness followed by others of application. It was,
indeed, only owing to his love of what he read that the boy learned at
all. Often while he tramped from his home to the village at midday his
heart was hot within him with some great thought which had sprung to him
from a hastily construed chorus of Euripides. Sometimes he startled the
fishermen when he went with them at night by chanting Homer's rolling
hexameters through the darkness while the boat lay waiting, borne
gunwale down to the black water with the drag of the net that had been
shot.

There was a tacit understanding that Hyacinth, like his father, was
to take Holy Orders. He matriculated in Trinity College when he was
eighteen, and, as is often done by poorer students, remained at home,
merely passing the required examinations, until he took his degree,
and the time came for his entering the divinity school. Then it became
necessary for him to reside in Dublin, and the first great change in his
life took place.

The night before he left home he and his father sat together in the
kitchen after they had finished their evening meal. For a long time
neither of them spoke. Hyacinth held a book in his hand, but scarcely
attempted to read it. His thoughts wandered from hopeful expectation of
what the future was to bring him and the new life was to mean, to vague
regrets, weighted with misgivings, which would take no certain shape.
There crowded upon him recollections of busy autumn days when the grain
harvest overtook the belated hay-making, and men toiled till late in
the fields; of long nights in the springtime when he tugged at the
fishing-nets, and felt the mackerel slipping and flapping past his
feet in the darkness; of the longer winter nights when he joined the
gatherings of the boys and girls to dance jigs and reels on the earthen
floor of some kitchen. It seemed now that all this was past and over for