“Ah, it won’t be long now, Major Lynch,” he said, consolingly. “An’ have ye much more to state in your book?” “All the translatin’ was finished long since, but _‘t_ is comparin’ the various books together I am, an’ that takes a dale o’ time. There’s the psalter o’ Timoleague Abbey, an’ the psalter o’ Sherkin, an’ the book o’ St. Kian o’ Cape Clear, besides all the riccords of Muirisc that lay loose in the chest. Yet I’m far from complainin’. God knows what I’d a’ done without ’em.” There are many marvels in Irish archaeology. Perhaps the most wonderful of all is the controlling and consuming spell it had cast over Linksy, making it not only possible for him to live twelve years in an underground dungeon, fairly contented, and undoubtedly occupied, but lifting him bodily out of his former mental state and up into an atmosphere of scholarly absorption and exclusively intellectual exertion. He had entered upon this long imprisonment with only an ordinary high-school education, and no special interest in or bent toward books. By the merest chance he happened to have learned to speak Irish, as a boy, and, later, to have been taught the written alphabet of the language. His first days of solitude in the subterranean chamber, after his recovery from the terrible blow on the head, had been whiled away by glancing over the curious parchment writings and volumes in the chest. Then, to kill time, he had essayed to translate one of the manuscripts, and Jerry had obligingly furnished him with paper, pens and ink. To have laboriously traced out the doubtful thread of continuity running through the confused and legendary pedigrees of the fierce Eugenian septs, to have lived for twelve long years buried in ancient Munster genealogies, wearing the eyesight out in waking hours upon archaic manuscripts, and dreaming by night of still more undecipherable parchment chronicles, may well seem to us, who are out in the busy noonday of the world, a colossal waste of time. No publisher alive would have thought for a moment of printing Linsky’s compilations at his own risk, and probably not more than twenty people would have regretted his refusal the whole world over. But this consideration has never operated yet to prevent archaeologists from devoting their time and energies and fortunes to works which nobody on earth is going to read, much less publish; Jerry was still contemplating Linsky with a grave new interest. “Ye’ve changed that much since--since ye came down here for your health. ’Tis my belafe not a mother’s son of ’em ’u’d recognize ye up above,” he said, reflectively. Linsky spoke with eagerness: “Man alive! I’m jist dyin’ to make the attimpt!” “What--an’ turn yer back on all these foine riccords an’ statements that _ye’ve_ kept yer hand to so long?” The other’s face fell. “Sure, I c’u’d come down ag’in,” Linsky said, hesitatingly.