I sometimes think the two scolding paupers are a symbol of ourselves in Ireland—[Gaelic script and words]—“it is better to be quarrelling than to be lonesome.” The Rajputs, that great fighting race, when they were told they had been brought under the Pax Britannica and must give up war, gave themselves to opium in its place, but Connacht has not yet planted its poppy gardens. THE TRAVELLING MAN An old woman living in a cabin by a bog road on Slieve Echtge told me the legend on which this play is founded, and which I have already published in “Poets and Dreamers.” “There was a poor girl walking the road one night with no place to stop, and the Saviour met her on the road, and He said—’Go up to the house you see a light in; there’s a woman dead there, and they’ll let you in.’ So she went, and she found the woman laid out, and the husband and other people; but she worked harder than they all, and she stopped in the house after; and after two quarters the man married her. And one day she was sitting outside the door, picking over a bag of wheat, and the Saviour came again, with the appearance of a poor man, and He asked her for a few grains of the wheat. And she said—’Wouldn’t potatoes be good enough for you?’ And she called to the girl within to bring out a few potatoes. But He took nine grains of the wheat in His hand and went away; and there wasn’t a grain of wheat left in the bag, but all gone. So she ran after Him then to ask Him to forgive her; and she overtook Him on the road, and she asked forgiveness. And He said—’Don’t you remember the time you had no house to go to, and I met you on the road, and sent you to a house where you’d live in plenty? And now you wouldn’t give Me a few grains of wheat.’ And she said—’But why didn’t you give me a heart that would like to divide it?’ That is how she came round on Him. And He said—’From this out, whenever you have plenty in your hands, divide it freely for My sake.’” And an old woman who sold sweets in a little shop in Galway, and whose son became a great Dominican preacher, used to say—“Refuse not any, for one may be the Christ.” I owe the Rider’s Song, and some of the rest, to W. B. Yeats. THE GAOL GATE I was told a story some one had heard, of a man who had gone to welcome his brother coming out of gaol, and heard he had died there before the gates had been opened for him. I was going to Galway, and at the Gort station I met two cloaked and shawled countrywomen from the slopes of Slieve Echtge, who were obliged to go and see some law official in Galway because of some money left them by a kinsman in Australia. They had never been in a train or to any place farther than a few miles from their own village, and they felt astray and terrified “like blind beasts in a bog” they said, and I took care of them through the day.