would keep them warm and dry,
and Hyacinth often returned well satisfied from a tour of the country
shops. Sometimes he doubted whether he ought to trust the people with
more than a few pounds' worth of goods, but he gradually learnt that,
unlike the patriotic Mr. Dowling, they were universally honest. He
discovered, too, that these people, with their imperfect English and
little knowledge of the world, were exceedingly shrewd. They had very
little real confidence in oratorical politicians, and their interest
in public affairs went no further than voting consistently for the
man their priest recommended. But they quickly understood Hyacinth's
arguments when he told them that the support of Irish manufactures would
help to save their sons and daughters from the curse of emigration.

'Faith, sir,' said a shopkeeper who kept a few blankets and tweeds among
his flour-sacks and porter-barrels, 'since you were talking to the boys
last month, I couldn't induce one of them to take the foreign stuff if I
was to offer him a shilling along with it.'

CHAPTER XVI

When he returned to Ballymoy after his interview with Mr. Dowling,
Hyacinth set himself to fulfil his threat of writing to the _Croppy_.
He spent Saturday afternoon and evening in his lodgings with the paper
containing the blatant speech spread out before him. He blew his anger
to a white heat by going over the evidence of the man's grotesque
hypocrisy. He wrote and rewrote his article. It was his first attempt
at expressing thought on paper since the days when he sought to satisfy
examiners with disquisitions on Dryden's dramatic talent and other
topics suited to the undergraduate mind. This was a different business.
It was no longer a question of filling a sheet of foolscap with
grammatical sentences, discovering synonyms for words hard to spell. Now
thoughts were hot in him, and the art lay in finding words which would
blister and scorch. Time after time he tore up a page of bombast or
erased ridiculous flamboyancies. Late at night, with a burning head and
ice-cold feet, he made his last copy, folded it up, and, distrusting the
cooler criticism of the morning, went out and posted it to the _Croppy_.

A letter from Miss Goold overtook him the following Thursday in the
hotel at Clogher.

'I was delighted to hear from you again,' she wrote. 'I was afraid
you had cut me altogether, gone over to the respectable people, and
forgotten poor Ireland. Captain Quinn to