What are you talking of? What has happened? THOMAS. Come along, I say, it must be put a stop to. We must call to every decent man. It is as if the devil himself had gone through the town on a blast and set every drinking-house open! MARTIN. I wonder how that has happened. Can it have anything to do with Andrew’s plan? THOMAS. Are you giving no heed to what I’m saying? There is not a man, I tell you, in the parish and beyond the parish but has left the work he was doing whether in the field or in the mill. MARTIN. Then all work has come to an end? Perhaps that was a good thought of Andrew’s. THOMAS. There is not a man has come to sensible years that is not drunk or drinking! My own labourers and my own serving-men are sitting on counters and on barrels! I give you my word, the smell of the spirits and the porter and the shouting and the cheering within, made the hair to rise up on my scalp. MARTIN. And yet there is not one of them that does not feel that he could bridle the four winds. THOMAS [_sitting down in despair_]. You are drunk too. I never thought you had a fancy for it. MARTIN. It is hard for you to understand. You have worked all your life. You have said to yourself every morning, ‘What is to be done to-day?’ and when you are tired out you have thought of the next day’s work. If you gave yourself an hour’s idleness, it was but that you might work the better. Yet it is only when one has put work away that one begins to live. THOMAS. It is those French wines that did it. MARTIN. I have been beyond the earth. In Paradise, in that happy townland, I have seen the shining people. They were all doing one thing or another, but not one of them was at work. All that they did was but the overflowing of their idleness, and their days were a dance bred of the secret frenzy of their hearts, or a battle where the sword made a sound that was like laughter. THOMAS. You went away sober from out of my hands; they had a right to have minded you better. MARTIN. No man can be alive, and what is paradise but fulness of life, if whatever he sets his hand to in the daylight cannot carry him from exaltation to exaltation, and if he does not rise into the frenzy of contemplation in the night silence. Events that are not begotten in joy are misbegotten and darken the world, and nothing is begotten in joy if the joy of a thousand years has not been crushed into a moment. THOMAS. And I offered to let you go to Dublin in the coach! MARTIN [_giving banner to PAUDEEN_]. Give me the lamp. The lamp has not yet been lighted and the world is to be consumed! [_Goes into inner room._ THOMAS [_seeing ANDREW_]. Is it here you are, Andrew? What are these beggars doing? Was this door thrown open too? Why did you not keep order? I will go for the constables to help us! ANDREW. You will not find them to help you. They were scattering themselves through the drinking-houses of the town, and why wouldn’t they? THOMAS.