"To confess, Dr. Hegan, it does not. Is it?" "My child," the old priest smiled--it was so queer to be called "my child" at forty-seven--"all knowledge is important. All details of knowledge. We come we know not whence, and we go we hope we know whither. Our history, our motives, our all, is vague. All we have is faith, a great broad river, but knowledge is the little piers ..." They had all been significant: Alan Donn, his father, even Uncle Robin, whom he had thought only a bookworm in the fading sunshine. The world was better, more mature, for their having lived.... And he had nothing. Here he was, drawing on to fifty, close on forty-eight. And he had done, achieved nothing. He had no wife, no child; had achieved no valorous unselfish deed. Had not--not even--not even a little song.... Section 3 And then he said to himself: "I am too sensitive. I have always been too sensitive. The stature of my family has dwarfed me in my own esteem. Haven't I got as much right as others to the quiet of the glens?" And again he said: "I sit here and I think. And my thought grows into a maze. And I wander in it, as a man might wander through some old gardener's fancy, having stumbled on it inadvertently, and now being in it, now knowing the secret of exit." But a maze was nonexistent, did a person regard it so, and if one were to walk on nonchalantly a little turn would come, and he find himself in the wide sunshine and smiling flowers. And he said: "Damn the subtleties! A person is born, lives, dies. And what he does is a matter for himself alone." But some inner antagonist said: "You are wrong." And he said: "Look at the people around me. What more right have they than I to this quiet Ulster dusk?" And the antagonist smiled: "Well, look." First were the farmers and the fisherfolk. Well, they didn't count. They were natural to the soil, as grass was. They grew there, as the white bog flower grew. An institution of God, like rain. And then there were the summer visitors, honest folk from the cities. Well, they had a right. They spent their winters and autumns and springs in mills and counting-houses, clearing away the commercial garbage of the world. And when the graciousness of summer came, they emerged, blind as moles, peak-faced. And before them stretched the Moyle, a blue miracle. The crisp heather, the thick rushes, the yellow of the buttercups, the black bog waters. And when clouds came before the sun the mountains drew great purple cloths over them. And in the twilight the cricket chirruped. And at night the plover cried out against the vast silence of the moon. And the hearts of the selling people turned from thoughts of who owed them money and who was harrying them for money. And the tight souls opened, just a little perhaps, but even that--Poor garbage men of the world, who would begrudge them a little beauty?