have been obtained otherwise.  But other ways would have been found; for Nature is full of resource, and if Eliza had not been by to fire the idea hidden in him, something else would.  She was the means, but only the means, for no man escapes his vocation, and the priesthood was his.  A vocation always finds a way out.  But was he sure if it hadn’t been for Eliza that he wouldn’t have married Annie McGrath?  He didn’t think he would have married Annie, but he might have married another.  All the same, Annie was a good, comfortable girl, a girl that everybody was sure would make a good wife for any man, and at that time many people were thinking that he should marry Annie.  On looking back he couldn’t honestly say that a stray thought of Annie hadn’t found its way into his mind; but not into his heart—­there is a difference.

At that time he was what is known as a growing lad; he was seventeen.  His father was then dead two years, and his mother looked to him, he being the eldest, to take charge of the shop, for at that time it was almost settled that James was to go to America.  They had two or three nice grass farms just beyond the town:  Patsy was going to have them; and his sisters’ fortunes were in the bank, and very good fortunes they were.  They had a hundred pounds apiece and should have married well.  Eliza could have married whomever she pleased.  Mary could have married, too, and to this day he couldn’t tell why she hadn’t married.

The chances his sister Mary had missed rose up in his mind—­why, he did not know; and a little bored by these memories, he suddenly became absorbed in the little bleat of a blackcap perched on a bush, the only one amid a bed of flags and rushes; ‘an alder-bush,’ he said.  ’His mate is sitting on her eggs, and there are some wood-gatherers about; that’s what’s worrying the little fellow.’  The bird continued to utter its troubled bleat, and the priest walked on, thinking how different was its evensong.  He meditated an excursion to hear it, and then, without his being aware of any transition, his thoughts returned to his sister Mary, and to the time when he had once indulged in hopes that the mills along the river-side might be rebuilt and Tinnick restored to its former commercial prosperity.  He was not certain if he had ever really believed that he might set these mills going, or if he had, he encouraged an illusion, knowing it to be one.  He was only certain of this, that when he was a boy and saw no life ahead of him except that of a Tinnick shopman, he used to feel that if he remained at home he must have the excitement of adventure.  The beautiful river, with its lime-trees, appealed to his imagination; the rebuilding of the mills and the reorganization of trade, if he succeeded in reorganizing trade, would mean spending his mornings on the wharves by the river-side, and in those days his one desire was to escape from the shop.  He looked upon the shop as a prison.  In those days he liked dreaming,