"Maan, yer changed," he said, "aren't you?"
"And you?"
"Och, shure, I'm th' same ould sixpence!"
"Except that you're older!" There was a look of disappointment on his face.
"Maan," he said, "ye talk like quality—d'ye live among thim?"
I explained something of my changed life; I told of my work and what I had tried to do and I closed with an account of the vision in the fields not far from where we sat.
"Aye," he would say occasionally, "aye, 'deed it's quare how things turn out."
When I ended the story of the vision he said: "Ye haaven't forgot how t' tell a feery story—ye wor i' good at that!"
"Bob" hadn't read a book, or a newspaper in all those years. He got his news from the men who stopped at his stone pile to light their pipes—what he didn't get there he got at the cobbler's while his brogues were being patched or at the barber's when he went for his weekly shave. We talked each other out in half an hour. A wide gulf was between us: it was a gulf in the realm of mind.