"Why not?"

"Faith, they'd owe me for the job of ut for the rest of their lives."

"Are they very poor?"

"Is ut poor?" he exclaimed. "Shure, they haven't got what 'ud cover the palm of me wan hand with silver, an' they dhrive to Lady O'Shea's at the house on the cliff over, the way ye'd think the money was dhropping out av a sack with a hole in ut."

"Is it a crime to be poor, then?" I asked.

"It is not," said he; "but 'tis a crime to hide ut, the way ye can be ashamed of others who are."

To meet fatalism and philosophy all in one day! I had not done as much in London in a year. But in Ireland, if Nature has not given you the one, a divine Providence invests you with the other. My friend Townshend, whom I have not met since our days together at Oxford, I find is a philosopher to his finger-tips. But his is a philosophy of the beauty of Nature, whereby he closes Her hand that she may not present him with the gift of fatalism too.

It was this morning when, finding the sun laughing in at my windows, shaming my laziness, I jumped out of bed, dressed and went down into the garden. There was Townshend already before me, visiting his rose trees with an open pruning knife in his hand.

"I thought March—" I began.

He laughed.

"You're quite right," said he. "March for pruning—but all the rest of the year for love."

I stole a glance at him as he moved to another tree. This was the first swift insight I had received into his philosophy. Had he really got the secret of it—had he found Dandy's unassailable circle of contentment? One asks one's self these questions in a breath. If in the next breath they are not answered, they are gone. Now, in the next breath, the name of Dandy having but recently come into my mind, I lost sight of the spirit of his philosophy and began wondering where he was in the flesh. From wondering, I asked.

"On a morning like this," said Townshend, "where else would you expect?"

I shook my head.

"Out on the cliffs with Bellwattle?"

I stared at him.

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