—­Let us try, therefore, to make this retreat in honour of saint Francis with our whole heart and our whole mind.  God’s blessing will then be upon all your year’s studies.  But, above and beyond all, let this retreat be one to which you can look back in after years when maybe you are far from this college and among very different surroundings, to which you can look back with joy and thankfulness and give thanks to God for having granted you this occasion of laying the first foundation of a pious honourable zealous christian life.  And if, as may so happen, there be at this moment in these benches any poor soul who has had the unutterable misfortune to lose God’s holy grace and to fall into grievous sin, I fervently trust and pray that this retreat may be the turning point in the life of that soul.  I pray to God through the merits of His zealous servant Francis Xavier, that such a soul may be led to sincere repentance and that the holy communion on saint Francis’s day of this year may be a lasting covenant between God and that soul.  For just and unjust, for saint and sinner alike, may this retreat be a memorable one.

—­Help me, my dear little brothers in Christ.  Help me by your pious attention, by your own devotion, by your outward demeanour.  Banish from your minds all worldly thoughts and think only of the last things, death, judgement, hell, and heaven.  He who remembers these things, says Ecclesiastes, shall not sin for ever.  He who remembers the last things will act and think with them always before his eyes.  He will live a good life and die a good death, believing and knowing that, if he has sacrificed much in this earthly life, it will be given to him a hundredfold and a thousandfold more in the life to come, in the kingdom without end—­a blessing, my dear boys, which I wish you from my heart, one and all, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen!

As he walked home with silent companions, a thick fog seemed to compass his mind.  He waited in stupor of mind till it should lift and reveal what it had hidden.  He ate his dinner with surly appetite and when the meal was over and the grease-strewn plates lay abandoned on the table, he rose and went to the window, clearing the thick scum from his mouth with his tongue and licking it from his lips.  So he had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat.  This was the end; and a faint glimmer of fear began to pierce the fog of his mind.  He pressed his face against the pane of the window and gazed out into the darkening street.  Forms passed this way and that through the dull light.  And that was life.  The letters of the name of Dublin lay heavily upon his mind, pushing one another surlily hither and thither with slow boorish insistence.  His soul was fattening and congealing into a gross grease, plunging ever deeper in its dull fear into a sombre threatening dusk while the body that was his stood, listless and dishonoured, gazing out of darkened eyes, helpless, perturbed, and human for a bovine god to stare upon.