then seem to him desirable to choose such a way, or to have such attainment thrust on him.

Next morning the autumn sunlight chased the recollection of his emotion from his mind. The fishermen stopped his car as he drove through the street to shake hands with him. Their wives shouted familiar blessings from the cabin doors. Father Moran came bare-headed to the gate of his presbytery garden and waved a farewell.

CHAPTER II

There is that about the material fabric, the actual stone and mortar, of Trinity College, Dublin, which makes a vivid appeal to the imagination of the common man. The cultured sentimentalist will not indeed be able to lave his soul in tepid emotion while he walks through these quadrangles, as he may among the cloisters and chapels of the Oxford colleges. The amateur of the past cannot here stand at gaze before any single building as he does before the weather-beaten front of Oriel, tracing in imagination the footsteps of Newman or Arnold. Yet to the average man, and far more to the newly emancipated schoolboy, Trinity College, Dublin, makes an appeal which can hardly be ignored. In Oxford and Cambridge town and University are mixed together; shops jostle and elbow colleges in the streets. In Dublin a man leaves the city behind him when he enters the college, passes completely out of the atmosphere of the University when he steps on to the pavement. The physical contrast is striking enough, appealing to the ear and the eye. The rattle of the traffic, the jangling of cart bells, the inarticulate babel of voices, suddenly cease when the archway of the great entrance-gate is passed.

An immense silence takes their place. There is no longer any need for watchfulness, nor risk of being hustled by the hurrying crowds. Instead of footway and street crossing there are broad walks, untrodden stretches of smooth grass. The heavy campanile is in front, and heights of gray building frown down on each side. It needs no education, not even any imagination, to appreciate the change. It is not necessary to know that great scholars inhabited the place, to recall any name or any man's career. The appeal is not to a recollected impression of the Middle Ages, or indeed of any past, remote or near. It is the spirit of scholarship itself, abstract, intangible, which creates this atmosphere. Knowledge, a severe goddess, awes while she beckons.

Hyacinth Conneally had submitted himself to such emotions time after time when, fresh from the wilds of Connemara, he made his way to the examination-hall, an outside student in a borrowed cap and gown. Now, when for the first time he entered into the actual life of the college, could look up at windows of rooms that were his own, and reckon on his privilege of fingering tomes from the shelves of the huge library, the spirit of the place awed him anew. He neither analyzed nor attempted an expression of what he felt, but his first night within the walls was restless because of the inspiration which filled him.

Yet this college does not fail to make an appeal also to the thinking mind, only it is a strange appeal, tending to sadness. The sudden silence after the tumult of the streets has come for some minds to be the symbol of a divorce between the knowledge within and the life without. And this is not the separation which must always exist between thought and action, the gulf fixed between the student and the merchant. It is a real divorce between the nation and the University, between the two kinds of life which ought, like man and woman, to complete each other through their very diversity, but here have gone hopelessly apart. Never once through all the centuries of Ireland's struggle to express herself has the University felt the throb of her life. It is true that Ireland's greatest patriots, from Swift to Davis, have been her children; but she has never understood their spirit, never looked on them as anything but strangers to her family. They have been to her stray robber wasps, to be driven from the hive; while to the others they have seemed cygnets among her duckling brood. It is very wonderful that the University alone has been able to resist the glamour of Ireland's past, and has failed to admire the persistency of her nationality. There has surely been enough in every century that has passed since the college was founded to win it over from alien thought and the ideals of the foreigner.

All this Hyacinth came to feel afterwards, and learnt in bitterness of spirit to be angry at the University's isolation from Irish life. At first quite other thoughts crowded upon his mind. He felt a rebellion against his father's estimate of what he was to learn. It seemed to him that he had come into vital touch with the greatest life of all. He was to join the ranks of those who besieged the ears of God for knowledge, and left behind them to successors yet unborn great traditions of the enigmas they had guessed. In entering upon the study of theology he seemed to become a soldier in the sacred band, the élite of the army which won and guarded truth. Already he was convinced that there could be no greater science than the Divine one, no more inspiring moment in life than this one when he took his first step towards the knowledge of God.

He crossed the quadrangle with his mind full of such thoughts, and joined a group of students round the door of one of the examination-halls. It did not shock his sense of fitness that some of his fellow-students in the great science wore shabby clothes, or that others scorned the use of a razor. Bred as he had been at home, he felt no incongruity between dirty collars and the study of divinity. It was not until he caught scraps of conversation that he experienced an awakening from his dream. One eager group surrounded a foreseeing youth who had written the dates of the first four General Councils of the Church upon his shirt-cuff.

'Read them out, like a good man,' said one.

'Hold on a minute,' said another, 'till I see if I have got them right. I ground them up specially this morning. Nicæa, 318—no, hang it! that's the number of Bishops who were present; 325 was the date, wasn't it?'

'What was the row about at Chalcedon?' asked a tall, pale youth. 'Didn't some monk or other go for Cyril of Alexandria?'

'You'll be stuck anyhow, Tommy,' said a neat, dapper little man with a very ragged gown.

Hyacinth slipped past the group, and approached two better dressed students who stood apart from the others.

'Is this,' he asked, 'where the entrance examination to the divinity school is to be held?'

For answer he received a curt 'Yes' and a stare. Apparently his suit of brown Connemara homespun did not commend him to these aristocrats. They turned their backs on him, and resumed their conversation.

'She was walking up and down the pier listening to the band with two of the rankest outsiders you ever set eyes on—medicals out of Paddy Dunn's. Of course I could do nothing else but break it off.'

'Oh, you were engaged to her, then? I didn't know.'

'Well, I was and I wasn't. Anyhow, I thought it better to have a clear understanding. She came up to me outside the door of Patrick's on Sunday afternoon just as if nothing had happened. "Hullo, Bob," says she; "I haven't seen you for ages." "My name," said I, "is Mr. Banks"—just like that, as cool as you please. I could see she felt it. "I've called you Bob," says she, very red in the face, "and you've called me Maimie ever since we went to Sunday-school together, and I'm not going to begin calling you Mr. Banks now, my boy-o! so don't you think it!"'

It was a relief to Hyacinth when he was tapped on the arm by a boy with a very pimply face, who thrust a paper into his hand, and distracted his attention from the final discomfiture of Maimie, which Mr. Banks was recounting in a clear, high-pitched voice, as if he wished everyone in the neighbourhood to hear it.

'I hope you'll come,' said the