“Very well.  Listen now.  When you are across the river with the shingly bottom draw up on the back meadow.  You will see a light shining to the north.  Let one bawl out of you and Patch Keetly will be at hand to take the mare by the head.  He will bring you to the house where Kevin Hooban is lying in his trouble.  And God grant, Father, that you will be able to reach out a helping hand to him, and to put your strength in holy words between him and them that has a hold of him; he is a fine young man without fault or blemish, and the grandest maker of music that ever put a lip to the fideog.  Keep an eye out for the poplar trees.”

“Very good.  God be with you.”

“God speed you kindly.”

We drove on.  As we did so we tried to piece the directions together.  The two poplar trees appeared to touch some curious strain of humour in the Spanish Friar.  But it all came to pass as the prophet had spoken.  We came to the ivy wall, to the stream, the gullet, the road that clipped into the hills to the right, and a long way beyond it the two poplar trees, tall, shadowy, great in their loneliness on the hills, sentinels that appeared to guard some mountain frontier.  The light had rapidly gone.  The whole landscape had swooned away into a vague, dark chaos.  Overhead the stars began to show, the air was cutting; it bit with frost.  And then we turned down the dark boreen, the mare venturing into it with some misgiving.  I think the Friar was praying in an undertone in his native Basque as we passed through the narrow mountain boreen.  At the end of it we came to the shallow river with the shingly bottom.  Again the mare required some persuasion before she ventured in, the wheels crunching on the gravel, her fetlocks splashing the slow-moving, chocolate-coloured water.  On the opposite bank we reached a sort of plateau, seen vaguely in the light.  I “let a bawl out of me.”  It was like the cry of some lonely, lost bird on the wing.  The Friar shook with laughter.  I could feel the little rock of his body on the springs of the car.  A figure came suddenly out of the darkness and silently took the mare by the head.  The car moved on across the vague back meadow.  Patch Keetly was piloting us to a light that shone in the north.

People were standing about the front of the long, low-thatched house.  Lights shone in all the windows, the door stood open.  The people did not speak or draw near as we got down from the car.  There was a fearful silence about the place.  The grouping of the people expressed mystery.  They eyed us from their curiously aloof angles.  They seemed as much a part of the atmosphere of the hills, as fixed in the landscape as the little clumps of furze or the two lonely poplars that mounted guard over the mouth of the boreen.

“Won’t the holy Father be going into the house?” Patch Keetly asked.  “I will unyoke the mare and give her a share of oats in the stable.”

The Friar spoke to me in an undertone, and we crossed to the open door of the house.