Daniel Flynn was a man whose brain was too finely balanced not to see fairly, but whose sympathies were so passionately partisan they were for ever swaying action to one side or other of the true point of equity.  On this evening the Parson found him in fine fettle for a talk, and if necessary for a fight.  He was sitting in the parlour with Vassie, but his whole soul was with a letter he had had from Ireland telling of a disastrous case where the new Irish Land Act, of which even Dan had hoped great things, had failed more signally than usual.

“Listen to this,” he burst forth almost as soon as Boase was seated, “and tell me if that fool Government doesn’t want hanging as high as those poor Fenians!  Here’s a man in my own country, where the little cabin is that saw me born, before ever me father took me to the new country; and his landlord has told him he’ll not give him a penny piece for the shed and the new wall and the garden patch he’s made out of the bare earth with his own hands.  And him going to America, and the money the scoundrel ought to pay him for them would take his family across in comfort, and his wife with child at the blessed moment!”

Boase held his head in comic bewilderment, and Dan laughed a little and calmed down.

“And why can’t he make the landlord pay, you’d ask?  Because the spalpeen had it in writing from him when the Bill was passed that if he put on a new roof to keep the wet off a dying child he should never enforce the terms of the Act against him....  Didn’t I vote against the Act because of the very clause allowing that?  I knew the landlords and the devil’s tricks they’d be up to....  Saving your presence, Ishmael, old fellow, landlords are the scum of the earth!”

“At least you can’t accuse me of being an absentee landlord,” said Ishmael, smiling.

“No, indeed,” chimed in Vassie almost indignantly.  “If you knew all he’s done here, Dan, it’s like a miracle.  I don’t believe wages or the standard of living could be lower in Ireland than they were here when Ishmael took the place in hand.”

“I believe you,” said Flynn.  “It’s myself thinks Ishmael has it in him to be a grand reformer; that’s why I can’t bear to see him wasting himself over morals and manure when he could be working away at the bettering of the world.”

Ishmael laughed, but the Parson took up the suggestion seriously.

“The world’s a large order,” he said, “but this particular corner of it, perhaps....  There’s several matters down here would be the better for the gentry taking more interest in them.  These new school boards, for instance—­”

“Ah, the children...!” cried Flynn, the light of the enthusiast springing into his fine eyes.  “They’re what matter, when all’s said and done.  If we get the children we get the world.  Every generation has in it the millennium, the seeds of Utopia.”

“The phantom cities of Fata Morgana ...” said the Parson with a sigh.  “But we’re all the better for sighting them, even so.  What d’you think of the suggestion, Ishmael?”