Martin Cosgrave, as he walked up the hill, felt himself wondering for the first time in his life if he had really been foolish to have run away from his father’s cabin when he had been young.  Up to this he had always accepted the verdict of the people about him that he had been a foolish boy “to go wandering in strange places.”  He had walked along the roads to many far towns.  Then he had struck his friend, the building contractor.  He had been a useful worker about a building house.  At first he had carried hods of mortar and cement up ladders to the masons.  The business of the masons he had mastered quickly.  But he had always had a longing to hold a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other at work upon stone.  He had drifted into a quarry, thence to a stone-cutting yard.  After a little while he could not conceal his impatience with the mere dressing of coping stones or the chiselling out of tombstones to a pattern.  Then he saw the man killed in the quarry.  He was standing quite near to him.  The chain of the windlass went and the poor man had no escape.  Martin Cosgrave had heard the crunch of the skull on the boulder, and some of the blood was spattered upon his boots.  He was a man of tense nerves.  The sight of blood sickened him.  He put on his coat, left the quarry, and went walking along the road.

It was while he walked along the road that the longing for his home came upon him.  He tramped back to his home above Kilbeg.  His father had been long dead, but by his return he had glorified the closing days of his mother’s life.  He took up the little farm and cut himself off from his wandering life when he had fetched the tools from his lodgings in the town beside the quarries.

By the time Martin Cosgrave had reached the top of the hill he had concluded that he had not, after all, been a foolish boy to work in far places.  “The hand of God was in it,” he said reverently with his eyes on the beech trees that made music on the crest of the hill.

He made a rapid survey of the place with his keen eyes.  Then he mapped out the foundation of the building by driving the heel of his boot into the green sod.  He stepped back among the beech trees and looked out at the outlined site of the building.  He saw it all growing up in his mind’s eye, at first a rough block, a mere shell, a little uncertain and unsatisfactory.  Then the uncertainties were lopped off, the building took shape, touch after touch was added.  Long shadows spread out from the trees and wrapped the fields.  Stars came out in the sky.  But Martin Cosgrave never noticed these things.  The building was growing all the time.  There was a firm grasp of the general scheme, a realisation of what the building would evolve that no other building ever evolved, what it would proclaim for all time.  The passing of the day and the stealth of the night could not claim attention from a man who was living over a dream that was fashioning itself in his mind, abandoning himself to the joy or his creation, dwelling longingly upon the details of the building, going over and, as it were, feeling it in every fibre, jealous of the effect of every stone, tracing the trend and subtlety of every curve, seeing how one touch fitted in and enhanced the other and how all carried on the meaning of the whole.