A constant source of temptation is the sight of the returned emigrant with flash jewellery, superior airs and stories of boasted wealth. [Side note: Activity IV] When summer brings these returned swallows, a spirit of discontent with their social surroundings seizes the youth. The priest's duty is to impress upon them that the bright side of the picture alone is presented to them: there is another side of awful darkness. The successful one they see, but the fate of the submerged ninety-nine is hidden from their eyes. Our people emigrate without a knowledge of skilled labour; they have to take the lowest occupations and bring up their children in vile surroundings: they are lost in shoals. Had the youth of this country the writer's experience: did they see hundreds of their countrymen sleeping in the parks of Sydney, without the shelter of a roof and without knowing where to turn in the morning for a bit: could they hear the thirty-two accents of Ireland in the low streets of dens where souls and bodies rot, they would try their hands at a dozen means of winning honest bread before turning their faces towards the emigrant ship. Could we but take the twenty-two thousand Irish-born convicts out of the jails of one city--New York--with their clanking fetters and arrow-branded jackets, and march them through the length and breadth of Ireland, and show the youth, that, if some wear bangles, others wear handcuffs, it would go far to cure the microbe of unrest. Every tale of distress, failure and hardship abroad should be repeated in the Irish provincial journals. No effort should be spared to show the people, not one but both sides of the picture. [Side note: Activity V Amusements] One of the most important problems facing the young priest of to-day is:--How to organise healthy and sinless amusements for the people. Our skies are gloomy, our climate depressing, and the very dreariness of country life causes thousands to fly. Look at the groups of young men at the village corners, where is the hope or contentment in their looks? [Side note: Goldsmith's Days] I think you may challenge the world's literature for more wholesome pictures of rural pleasures than those mirrored in the "Deserted Village." They are not creations of the poet's fancy, but chronicles of facts that lived before his eyes. In them, you have the image of Ireland as she lived before the black shadow of '47 fell upon her. All went on in the open daylight, under the eyes of parents and friends. "The young contended while the old surveyed." Virtue was safe, tired hearts were cheered, and, whilst these sports flourished, few Irish boys or girls wanted to know the road to the emigrant ship. Would it be possible to re-create the Ireland of Goldsmith's days? [Side note: The Winter's Night]