"There must be a fine view from the hill-top, and no doubt you often go there to read your breviary." "During the building of the playhouse I often used to be up here, and during the rehearsals I was here every day." I noticed that the tone of his voice never altered. A grey, shallow sea had slowly eaten away the rotten land, and the embay was formed by two low headlands hardly showing above the water at high tide. "I thought once," said the priest, "that if the play were a great success a line of flat-bottomed steamers might be built." "Pleasant dreams," I said to myself, "and he sitting here in the quiet evenings, reading his breviary, dreaming of a line of steamships crowded with visitors. He has been reading about the Oberammergau performances." And I spoke about these performances, agreeing with him that no one would have dared to predict that visitors would come from all sides of Europe to see a few peasants performing a miracle play in the Tyrol. "Come," I said, "into the playhouse. Let me see how you built it." The building was finished! The walls and the roof were finished, and a stage had been erected at the end of the building. But half a wall and some of the roof had fallen upon it, and the rubble had not been cleared away. "It would not cost many pounds to repair the damage," I said. "And having gone so far, you should give the play a chance." I was anxious to hear if he had discovered any aptitude for acting among the girls and the boys who lived in the cabins. "I think," said the priest, "that the play would have been very fairly acted, and I think that, with a little practice we might have done as well as they did at Oberammergau." But he was more willing to discuss the play that he had chosen than the talents of those who were going to perform it, and he told me that it had been written in the fourteenth century in Latin, and that he himself had translated it into Irish. "I wonder if it would have been possible to organise an excursion from Dublin. If the performance had been judiciously advertised--'Oberammergau in the West.'" "I used to think," said he, "it is eight miles from Rathowen, and the road is a bad one, and when they got here there would be no place for them to stay; they would have to go all the way back again, and that would be sixteen miles." "Yet it was as well to build this playhouse as to make a useless road--a road leading nowhere. While they were building this playhouse they thought they were accomplishing something. Never before did the poor people do anything, except for bare life. Do you know, Father MacTurnan, your playhouse touches me to the heart?" and I turned and looked. "Once Pleasure hovered over your parish, but the bird did not alight! Let me start a subscription for you in Dublin!" "I don't think," said the priest, "that it would be possible--" "Not for me to get fifty pounds?"