le, and a glory of gold and crimson hung above
it on the motionless streaks of cloud. Slowly the splendour faded, the
purple turned gray, and a faint breeze fluttered across the lake.

The day was the first of many which Hyacinth gave to such expeditions.
The work of Mr. Quinn's office was not so pressing as to necessitate
his spending every day there when he was in Ballymoy, and a holiday
was always obtainable. The lake scenery remained vivid in his memory in
after-years, and had its influence upon him even while he enjoyed it,
unconscious of anything except the present pleasure. There was something
besides the innocent gaiety of the girls and the simple sincerity of the
Canon's platitudes, something about the lake itself, which removed him
to a spiritual region utterly remote from the fiery atmosphere of Miss
Goold's patriotism. Many things which once loomed very large before him
sank to insignificance as he drank to the full of the desolation around
him. The past, in which no doubt men strove and hoped, hated and loved
and feared, had left the just recognisable ruins of some castles and the
causeway built by an unknown hermit or the prehistoric lake-dwellers.
A few thatched cabins, faintly smoking, and here and there a cairn of
stones gathered laboriously off the wretched fields, were the evidences
of present activity. Now and then a man hooted to his dog as it barked
at the sheep on the hillside, or a girl drove a turf-laden donkey inland
from the boggy shore. Otherwise there were no signs of human life. A
deep sense of monotony and inevitableness settled down upon Hyacinth. He
came for the first time under the great enchantment which paralyzes
the spirit and energy of the Celt. He knew himself to be, as his people
were, capable of spasms of enthusiasm, the victim of transitory burnings
of soul. But the curse was upon him--the inevitable curse of feeling too
keenly and seeing too clearly to be strenuous and constant. The flame
would die down, the enthusiasm would vanish--it was vanishing from him,
as he knew well--and leave him, not indeed content with common life, but
patient of it, and to the very end sad with the sense of possibilities
unrealized.

Yet it was not without many struggles and periods of return to the older
emotions that Hyacinth surrendered his enthusiasm. There still recurred
to him memories of his father's vision of an Armageddon and the
conception of his own part in it. Sometimes, waking very ear