I took a mouthful of her tea out of her cup; she reciprocated. We were like children. Maybe we were. Love tipped our tongues, winged our feet, opened our hearts and hands and permeated every thought and act. She stood at the mouth of the entry until I disappeared at the town head. While I was yet within sight I looked back half a dozen times and we waved our hands.

It was nearly a year before a dark line entered this spiritual spectrum. It was inevitable that such a mental condition—ever in search of a larger expression—should gravitate toward the Church. It has seemed also that it was just as inevitable that the best thought of which the Church has been the custodian should be crystallized into a creed. I was promoted to the "big house." There, of course, I was overhauled and put in touch with the fittings and furniture. As a flunkey I had my first dose of boiled linen and I liked it.

I was enabled now to attend church and Sunday School. Indeed, I would have gone there, religion or no religion, for where else could I have sported a white shirt and collar? With my boiled linen and my brain stuffed with texts I gradually drew away from the chimney-corner and never again did I help Willie Withero to carry his hammers. Ah, if one could only go back over life and correct the mistakes.

Gradually I lost the warm human feeling and substituted for it a theology. I began to look upon my mother as one about whose salvation there was some doubt. I urged her to attend church. Forms and ceremonies became the all-important things and the life and the spirit were proportionately unimportant. I became mildewed with the blight of respectability. I became the possessor of a hard hat that I might ape the respectables. I walked home every night from Ballycraigie with Jamie Wallace, and Jamie was the best-dressed working man in the town. I was treading a well-worn pathway. I was "getting on." A good slice of my new religion consisted in excellency of service to my employers—my "betters." Preacher, priest and peasant thought alike on these topics. Anna was pleased to see me in a new garb, but she noticed and I noticed that I had grown away from the corner. In the light of my new adjustment I saw duties plainer, but duty may become a hammer by which affection may be beaten to death.

I imagined the plow was going nicely in the furrow, for I wasn't conscious of striking any snags or stones, but Anna said:

"A plowman who skims th' surface of th' sod strikes no stones, dear, but it's because he isn't plowin' deep!"

I have plowed deep enough since, but too late to go back and compare notes.

She was pained, but tried to hide it. If she was on the point of tears she would tell a funny story.

"Acushla," she said to me one night after a theological discussion, "sure ye remind me of a ducklin' hatched by a hen."

"Why?"