the suggestion.  They landed here:  here in Galway Bay, on this very ground.  When they reached the shore the older men and women flung themselves down and passionately kissed the soil of Ireland, calling on the young to embrace the earth that had borne their ancestors.  But the young looked gloomily on, and said ‘There is no earth, only stone.’  You will see by looking round you why they said that:  the fields here are of stone:  the hills are capped with granite.  They all left for England next day; and no Irishman ever again confessed to being Irish, even to his own children; so that when that generation passed away the Irish race vanished from human knowledge.  And the dispersed Jews did the same lest they should be sent back to Palestine.  Since then the world, bereft of its Jews and its Irish, has been a tame dull place.  Is there no pathos for you in this story?  Can you not understand now why I am come to visit the scene of this tragic effacement of a race of heroes and poets?

ZOO.  We still tell our little children stories like that, to help them to understand.  But such things do not happen really.  That scene of the Irish landing here and kissing the ground might have happened to a hundred people.  It couldn’t have happened to a hundred thousand:  you know that as well as I do.  And what a ridiculous thing to call people Irish because they live in Ireland! you might as well call them Airish because they live in air.  They must be just the same as other people.  Why do you shortlivers persist in making up silly stories about the world and trying to act as if they were true?  Contact with truth hurts and frightens you:  you escape from it into an imaginary vacuum in which you can indulge your desires and hopes and loves and hates without any obstruction from the solid facts of life.  You love to throw dust in your own eyes.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN.  It is my turn now, madam, to inform you that I do not understand a single word you are saying.  I should have thought that the use of a vacuum for removing dust was a mark of civilization rather than of savagery.

ZOO [giving him up as hopeless] Oh, Daddy, Daddy:  I can hardly believe that you are human, you are so stupid.  It was well said of your people in the olden days, ‘Dust thou art; and to dust thou shalt return.’

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [nobly] My body is dust, madam:  not my soul.  What does it matter what my body is made of? the dust of the ground, the particles of the air, or even the slime of the ditch?  The important thing is that when my Creator took it, whatever it was, He breathed into its nostrils the breath of life; and Man became a living soul.  Yes, madam, a living soul.  I am not the dust of the ground:  I am a living soul.  That is an exalting, a magnificent thought.  It is also a great scientific fact.  I am not interested in the chemicals and the microbes:  I leave them to the chumps and noodles, to the blockheads and the