“Tell them,” he said, “that they are cut-stone tracery windows to fit in with the carved doors.”  These cut-stone windows and carved doors cost Martin Cosgrave such a length of time that they provoked the patience of the people.  Out of big slabs of stone he had worked them, and sometimes he would ask the neighbours to give him a hand in the shifting of these slabs.  But he was quick to resent any interference.  One day a stone-cutter from the quarry went up on the scaffold, and when Martin Cosgrave saw him he went white to the lips and cursed so bitterly that those standing about walked away.

When the shell of the building had been finished Martin Cosgrave hired a carpenter to do all the woodwork.  The woodwork cost money.  Martin Cosgrave did not hesitate.  He sold some of his sheep, sold them hurriedly, and as all men who sell their sheep hurriedly, he sold them badly.  When the carpentry had been finished, the roofing cost more money.  One day the neighbours discovered that all the sheep had been sold.  “He’s beggared now,” they said.

The farmer who turned the sod a few fields away laboured in the damp atmosphere of growing things, his mind filled with thoughts of bursting seeds and teeming barns.  He shook his head at sight of Martin Cosgrave above on the hill bent all day over hard stones; whenever he looked up he only caught the glint of a trowel, or heard the harsh grind of a chisel.  But Martin Cosgrave took no stock of the men reddening the soil beneath him.  Whenever his eyes travelled down the hillside he only saw the flock of crows that hung over the head of the digger.  The study of the veins of limestone that he turned in his hands, the slow moulding of the crude shapes to their place in the building, the rhythm and swing of the mallet in his arm, the zest with which he felt the impact of the chisel on the stone, the ring of forging steel, the consciousness of mastery over the work that lay to his hands—­these were the things that seemed to him to give life a purpose and man a destiny.  He would whistle a tune as he mixed the mortar with the broad shovel, for it gave him a feeling of the knitting of the building with the ages.  He pitied the farmer who looked helplessly upon his corn as it was beaten to the ground by the first storm that blew from the sea; he was upon a work that would withstand the storms of centuries.  The scent of lime and mortar greeted his nostrils.  When he moved about the splinters crunched under his feet.  Everything around him was hard and stubborn, but he was the master of it all.  In his dreams in the night he would reach out his hands for the feel of the hard stone, a burning desire in his breast to put it into shape, to give it nobility in the scheme of a building.

It was while Martin Cosgrave walked through the building that Ellen Miscal came to him with the second letter from America.  The carpenter was hammering at something below.  The letter said that Rose Dempsey and her sister, Sheela, would be home in the late harvest.  “With all I saw since I left Kilbeg,” Rose Dempsey wrote, “I never saw one that I thought as much of as Martin Cosgrave.”