Long ago we used all to be pagans, and the saints used to be coming to teach us about God and the creation of the world.  The people on the middle island were the last to keep a hold on the fire-worshipping, or whatever it was they had in those days, but in the long run a saint got in among them and they began listening to him, though they would often say in the evening they believed, and then say the morning after that they did not believe.  In the end the saint gained them over and they began building a church, and the saint had tools that were in use with them for working with the stones.  When the church was halfway up the people held a kind of meeting one night among themselves, when the saint was asleep in his bed, to see if they did really believe and no mistake in it.

The leading man got up, and this is what he said:  that they should go down and throw their tools over the cliff, for if there was such a man as God, and if the saint was as well known to Him as he said, then he would be as well able to bring up the tools out of the sea as they were to throw them in.

They went then and threw their tools over the cliff.

When the saint came down to the church in the morning the workmen were all sitting on the stones and no work doing.

‘For what cause are you idle?’ asked the saint.

‘We have no tools,’ said the men, and then they told him the story of what they had done.

He kneeled down and prayed God that the tools might come up out of the sea, and after that he prayed that no other people might ever be as great fools as the people on the middle island, and that God might preserve theft dark minds of folly to them fill the end of the world.  And that is why no man out of that island can tell you a whole story without stammering, or bring any work to end without a fault in it.

I asked him if he had known old Pat Dirane on the middle island, and heard the fine stories he used to tell.

‘No one knew him better than I did,’ he said; ’for I do often be in that island making curaghs for the people.  One day old Pat came down to me when I was after tarring a new curagh, and he asked me to put a little tar on the knees of his breeches the way the rain wouldn’t come through on him.

’I took the brush in my hand, and I had him tarred down to his feet before he knew what I was at.  “Turn round the other side now,” I said, “and you’ll be able to sit where you like.”  Then he felt the tar coming in hot against his skin and he began cursing my soul, and I was sorry for the trick I’d played on him.’

This old man was the same type as the genial, whimsical old men one meets all through Ireland, and had none of the local characteristics that are so marked on lnishmaan.