Next day I visited the scene of my boyhood’s vision—­I went through the woods where I had my first full meal.  I visited the old church; but the good Rector was gathered to his fathers.  It was all a day-dream; it was like going back to a former incarnation.  Along the road on my way home I discovered the most intimate friend of my boyhood—­the boy with whom I had gathered faggots, played “shinney” and gone bird-nesting.  He was “nappin’” stones.  He did not recognize my voice but his curiosity was large enough to make him throw down his hammer, take off the glasses that protected his eyes and stare at me.

“Maan, yer changed,” he said, “aren’t you?”

“And you?”

“Och, shure, I’m th’ same ould sixpence!”

“Except that you’re older!” There was a look of disappointment on his face.

“Maan,” he said, “ye talk like quality—­d’ye live among thim?”

I explained something of my changed life; I told of my work and what I had tried to do and I closed with an account of the vision in the fields not far from where we sat.

“Aye,” he would say occasionally, “aye, ’deed it’s quare how things turn out.”

When I ended the story of the vision he said:  “Ye haaven’t forgot how t’ tell a feery story—­ye wor i’ good at that!”

“Bob” hadn’t read a book, or a newspaper in all those years.  He got his news from the men who stopped at his stone pile to light their pipes—­what he didn’t get there he got at the cobbler’s while his brogues were being patched or at the barber’s when he went for his weekly shave.  We talked each other out in half an hour.  A wide gulf was between us:  it was a gulf in the realm of mind.

As I moved away toward the town, I wondered why I was not breaking stones on the roadside, and I muttered Bob’s well-worn phrase:  “How quare!”

It became so difficult to talk to my father without gathering a crowd at the door that I shortened my stay and took him to Belfast where we could spend a few days together and alone.  We had our meals at first in a quiet little restaurant on a side street.  He had never been in a restaurant.  As the waiter went around the table, the old man watched him with curious eyes.  I have explained that my father never swore.  He was mightily unfortunate in his selection of phrases and when irritated by the attention of the waiter to the point of explosion he said, in what he supposed was a whisper:  “What th’ hell is he dancin’ around us like an Indian fur?” I explained.  Everybody in the place heard the explanation; they also heard his reply:  “Send him t’ blazes—­he takes m’ appetite away!”

We moved into the house of a friend after that.

One afternoon I took him for a walk in the suburbs of the city.

He rested on a rustic bench on the lawn of a beautiful villa while I made a call.

“Twenty-five years ago,” I said to the gentleman of the house, “I had a great inspiration from the life of a young lady who lived in this house, and I just called to say ‘thank you.’”