Flannery:  That’s a great thought, if it is but a vanity or a dream.

Rock:  (Sneeringly.) Well now and what would you do?

Flannery:  I would wish a great lake of milk, the same as blessed St. Bridget, to be sharing with the family of Heaven.  I would wish vessels full of alms that would save every sorrowful man.  Do that now, Conan, and you’ll have the world of prayers down on you!

Rock:  It’s what I’d do, to turn the whole of Galway Bay to dry land, and I to have it for myself, the red land, the green land, the fallow and the lea!  The want of land is a great stoppage to a man having means to lay out in stock.

(Sings.) (Air, “I wish I had the shepherd’s lamb.")

  “I wish I had both mill and kiln,
  I wish I had of land my fill;
  I wish I had both mill and kiln,
  And all would follow after!”

Flannery:  Ah, the land, the land, the rotten land, and what will you have in the end but the breadth of your back of it?  Let you now soften the heart in that one (points to Rock) till he would restore to me the thing he is aware of.

Conan:  It was not for that the spell was promised, to be changing a few neighbours or a thing of the kind, or to be doing wonders in this broken little place.  A town of dead factions!  To change any of the dwellers in this place would be to make it better, for it would be impossible to make it worse.  The time you wouldn’t be meddling with them you wouldn’t know them to be bad, but the time you’d have to do business with them that’s the time you’d know it!

Rock:  I suppose it is what you are asking to do, to make yourself rich?

Conan:  I do not!  I would be loth take any profit, and Aristotle after laying down that to pleasure or to profit every wealthy man is a slave!

Flannery:  What would you do, so?

Conan:  I will change all into the similitude of ancient Greece!  There is no man at all can understand argument but it is from Greece he is.  I know well what I’m doing.  I’m not like a potato having eyes this way and that.  People were harmless long ago and why wouldn’t they be made harmless again?  Aristotle said, “Fair play is more beautiful than the morning and the evening star!”

“Be friendly with one another,” he said, “and let the lawyers starve!” I’ll turn the captains of soldiers to be as peaceable as children picking strawberries in the grass.  I’ve a mind to change the tongue of the people to the language of the Greeks, that no farmer will be grumbling over a halfpenny Independent, but be following the plough in full content, giving out Homer and the praises of the ancient world!

Flannery:  If you make the farmers content you will make the world content.

Rock:  You will, when you’ll bring the sun from Greece to ripen our little lock of oats!