Father Clare's curiosity carried him away, and he became for a moment as a talkative parrot. 'You're sure Stephen Macarthy is your guardian?... I thought it was Father Muldoon. . . . But it's Stephen Macarthy.... To be sure, to be sure, Stephen Macarthy, your guardian-well, well.' He looked at Adam very hard: 'Why, now I come to think of it, you're the living image of him.' He broke off, and crushed his biretta down on his nose. 'Never mind now, never mind; good-bye, good-bye, God bless you.' He heaved a deep sigh. 'Stephen Macarthy, Stephen Macarthy, we were boys here together.' He dropped his voice mysteriously. 'I'll tell you a little secret, Adam: Stephen Macarthy was a great loss to the Church, and I wonder now if God in His Providence has not sent you here to take his place.' He shook his hand once more. 'Good-bye, Adam Macarthy; God bless you.'

Adam had reached the door to the school house when he called him back hurriedly. 'Adam,' he cried, 'Adam !'

'Yes, sir,' said Adam, turning back, and finding him in great confusion.

'Did I say Macarthy just now? I meant, of course, Macfadden,' he chattered, and added what seemed to Adam the astounding sentence: 'You need not tell anyone what I said to you about Mr Macfadden being a great loss to the Church.'

Chapter Fourteen

ADAM IS ADVISED NOT TO DISCUSS HIS MOTHER

ADAM had not been a week at Clongowes ere he forgot the hardness of his bed; he had not been there a fortnight before he ceased to struggle with the difficulties in washing himself, and was content to be as Isabelcoloured with regard to those parts of him not exposed to the air, as were the other boys. . . that cleanliness is next to godliness has never been an article of faith in the Catholic Church . . . perhaps it is a pagan virtue. . . perhaps, when all is said and done, there is no virtue in it. . . . Anyhow, Adam was content to do as Rome does: he was as tidy as any other boy, perhaps the tidiest of those with whom he came in contact. Other things there were at Clongowes to which he easily accommodated himself, but there was one which, twice a day, roused him to physical and mental revolt . . . The tea. The thought of that tea haunted his sleep, and one morning in the third week he was at the school he thought of it at morning prayer, and that thought, on an empty stomach so early in the morning, chased him out of chapel. . He had barely cleared the sacred precincts when it seemed to him that all the tea he had tried to drink since he left Dublin was up in arms against him, determined to make a sight of him before the world. He was not quite clear what happened, but he heard a lay-brother say, 'Dear, dear, what's that now; what's that?' and he was marched down the breezy covered way dividing the school house from the infirmary.

In the infirmary, a lady bearing an astounding resemblance to Attracta grown rather elderly, in spectacles, looked at his tongue and prescribed for him. He understood her to say that she didn't think him bilious, and that she was asking him if he suffered from nerves, and Adam politely answered that perhaps he suffered a little from nerves, but he thought he suffered much more from the tea. The lady smiled sympathetically. I wouldn't drink that tea,' said she, ‘if I was never so. Would you like a cup of my own??

Adam said he would, and it was given him; and this kind lady, confident in her diagnosis that he was not bilious, added several rounds of buttered toast, which he consumed with greater gusto than anything he had touched for some weeks. Then the two of them talked about literature in which they were equally interested, although it did not appear that she was acquainted with any of the works in which he was interested, nor he with any which interested her; still, their conversation was very friendly; for she told him many of the best passages from Handy Andy, laughing over them the while, and he for his part recited to her the Ode to a Grecian Urn, to be rewarded by the observation that she would have liked it better if it had been an Irish urn.

'Are there Irish urns?' Adam asked, glad to find someone acquainted with the question of urns.

'Of course there are,' said she; 'the country's full of them. My sister was housekeeper to Canon Fricker at Killinaman, and his reverence had three and more he never used.'

'What are urns really used for?' Adam asked.

She looked at him surprisedly. 'Wasn't I telling you his reverence never used them at all?' she said, and would have been for dropping the subject if Adam had not clung to it.

'Were they at all like Grecian urns?' he asked.

A.C.

H

105

'What's a Grecian urn like?' asked she, and he was still undecided whether to give it up or repeat the poem over again very slowly so that she could question him on any point that she thought needed clearing up, when the kitchen door opened and Father Denver came in. Father Denver was the minister, a portly priest and not very young, but with a quick and joyful step and a round and jovial voice, in no way resembling the Jesuit of the Evangelical or even the Benedictine tradition, a man incapable of crooked thoughts or cruel acts. So far Adam had seen little of him, but he stretched out his arms as if they were the oldest friends and roared with a benevolent laugh: 'Well, well, just look at him! To see the poor sick fellow filling his rum-tum with buttered toast. Run for the doctor, run for the doctor.' This exhortation was addressed to empty air. The lady in charge of the infirmary said she did not think there was much the matter with Adam.

Father Denver gravely waggled his head from side to side: Tut, tut,' he said, 'a dreadful case, a dreadful case. Buttered toast on the brain and visibly working downwards. Whatever shall we do?' 'I think,' said the lady, 'he might go back to the school now.'

But Father Denver still shook his head. 'Oh, no, no, no,' said he, 'never do. Smelling of buttered toast like that, he'd corrupt an angel. We'd have the whole school coming in here to eat buttered toast.' Then he came down to business. 'I hear you don't like our tea,' said he.

Adam confessed that he did not.

'Very well, then,' said Father Denver, 'we'll compromise over it. In future you shall come to second breakfast, where they bring you a fresh pot of tea all to yourself; but in the evening, if you want to drink tea at all, I'm afraid you'll have to drink what's good enough for the boys. How's that now?'

Adam thanked him very heartily, as indeed he had reason to be grateful, for second breakfast with the select half-dozen proved to be a very cosy meal, quite unlike any other. You had unstinted rolls and butter and what seemed to him, after the past few weeks, the most exquisitely fragrant freshly-made tea. Could he have had the same thing at night, the cup of his physical happiness had been full to overflowing. as it was, he consoled himself at supper by the thought of how much he would enjoy his breakfast.

Also, second breakfast was to be enjoyed for the reason that he found among the little company there the pleasant boy who had driven with him on the car from Sallins station; his name was Dominic Cahill. He was in the Lower Line, and two classes higher than Adam in the school, but condescended to him without any show of arrogance. Soon he came into Adam's prayers for those he loved.

Dominic Cahill, it took Adam a little time to realise, was one of the brightest lights of the school: he had an extraordinary capacity for learning what he was taught while shutting his apprehension and locking it against the possibility of any casual knowledge. Give him the dullest school book and he would faithfully commit it to memory . . . but he could read the newspaper through without understanding a word of it. In him Adam felt that he had found his intellectual complement; for they had no common knowledge but much common kindliness.

Adam opened their conversation by introducing himself as the boy whom Master Cahill had helped on to the outside car at Sallins station some weeks before, and he had the kindly answer, 'I remember you. How's your ankle?'

Adam thanked him and said his ankle was quite all right. I only had a bit of a kick on it,' he explained. . . . Dominic said kicks could be very sore, and Adam, quite forgetful of the one that he himself