There is an unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows but himself, and his unchanging, silent life was his memory of Margaret Dirken. The bar-room was forgotten and all that concerned it, and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue lines of wandering hills. CHAPTER V A LETTER TO ROME One morning the priest's housekeeper mentioned as she gathered up the breakfast things, that Mike Mulhare had refused to let his daughter Catherine marry James Murdoch until he had earned the price of a pig. "This is bad news," said the priest, and he laid down the newspaper. "And he waited for her all the summer! Wasn't it in February last that he came out of the poor-house? And the fine cabin he has built for her! He'll be that lonesome, he'll be going to America." "To America!" said the priest. "Maybe it will be going back to the poor-house he'll be, for he'll never earn the price of his passage at the relief works." The priest looked at her for a moment as if he did not catch her meaning, and then a knock came at the door, and he said:-- "The inspector is here, and there are people waiting for me." And while he was distributing the clothes he had received from Manchester, he argued with the inspector as to the direction the new road should take; and when he came back from the relief works, there was his dinner. He was busy writing letters all the afternoon; it was not until he had handed them to the post-mistress that his mind was free to think of poor James Murdoch, who had built a cabin at the end of one of the famine roads in a hollow out of the way of the wind. From a long way off the priest could see him digging his patch of bog. And when he caught sight of the priest he stuck his spade in the ground and came to meet him. He wore a pair of torn corduroy trousers out of which two long naked feet appeared; and there was a shirt, but it was torn, the wind thrilled in a naked breast, and the priest thought his housekeeper was right, that James must go back to the poor-house. There was a wild look in his eyes, and he seemed to the priest like some lonely animal just come out of its burrow. His mud cabin was full of peat smoke, there were pools of green water about it, but it had been dry, he said, all the summer; and he had intended to make a drain. "It's hard luck, your reverence, and after building this house for her. There's a bit of smoke in the house now, but if I got Catherine I wouldn't be long making a chimney. I told Mike he should give Catherine a pig for her fortune, but he said he would give her a calf when I bought the pig, and I said, 'Haven't I built a fine house and wouldn't it be a fine one to rear him in.'" And they walked through the bog, James talking to the priest all the way, for it was seldom he had anyone to talk to. "Now I must not take you any further from your digging."