“Well, perhaps it is Tony,” said Maradick, laughing. “I am fonder of him than I can say; but, whatever the cause, the dreams are there.” Lester took out a book from under his arm. It was long and thin and bound in grey parchment. “Here,” he said, “is a book that perhaps you know. It is one of the most beautiful comedies in our language. This man was a dreamer too, and his dreams are amongst the most precious things that we have. I may write to the end of time, but I shall never reach that exquisite beauty.” Maradick took the book; it was Synge’s “Play-boy of the Western World.” He had never heard of the man or of the play. He turned its pages curiously. “I am afraid,” he said, “that I’ve never heard of it. It is Irish, I see. I think I do remember vaguely when the Dublin players were in London last year hearing something. The man has died, hasn’t he?” “Yes, and he didn’t leave very much behind him, but what there is is of the purest gold. See, listen to this, one of the greatest love-scenes in our language. It is a boy and a girl in a lonely inn on an Irish moor.” He read:— The Girl.—“What call have you to be that lonesome when there’s poor girls walking Mayo in their thousands now?” The Boy.—“It’s well you know what call I have. It’s well you know it’s a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange places with a dog noising before you and a dog noising behind, or drawn to the cities where you’d hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty stomach failing from your heart.” Maradick listened to the beautiful words and his eyes glowed. The dusk was falling in the room, and half-lights of gold and purple hovered over the fireplace and the gallery. The leaves of the tree had changed from green to dark grey, and, above them, where there had been two stars there were now a million. “And again,” said Lester, “listen to this.” The Boy.—“When the airs is warming in four months or five, it’s then yourself and me should be pacing Neifin in the dews of night, the time sweet smells do be rising, and you’d see a little shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on the hills.” The Girl. (playfully).—“And it’s that kind of a poacher’s love you’d make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin, when the night is down?” The Boy.—“It’s little you’ll think if my love’s a poacher’s or an earl’s itself, when you’ll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I’d feel a kind of pity for the Lord God in all ages sitting lonesome in his golden chair.” The Girl.—“That’ll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any girl would walk her heart out before she’d meet a young man was your like for eloquence or talk at all.”