'You might show us how you do that,' said the voice of Columba O'Meagher as he helped him to arise. 'Perhaps you wouldn't mind doing it again,' said Patrick O'Meagher; 'I didn't rightly see it.' Adam pretended to be amused, but he was not. Nevertheless, he condescended to accompany them to Capua Terrace, where Patrick oiled the bicycle and blew up the tyres, while Mrs O'Meagher entertained him with tea and buns. He would have preferred bread and butter, and he thought she ought to have remembered that he preferred bread and butter, but there it was: she gave him buns. He ate them with a sense of injury, reflecting that if Josephine had been there she would have remembered that he preferred bread and butter. . . A tear welled in his eye to think of Josephine away preparing to be a nun and he there eating buns.

Presently he left them to return home. He started off gaily, answering, when Mrs O'Meagher asked him if it were not a long way, that he would be home in a jiffy and, in fact, he was home pretty soon; for at Sandycove Station he dismounted or was dismounted. by the bicycle and so back to Westland Row by train. There, assisted by the downward gradient, he swept from the platform to the roadway with a rush, and sustained a concussion with one of Mr Murphy's trams, which decided him to walk the rest of the way home. But when he had climbed the hill from Lower Gardiner Street into Mountjoy Square, he somehow achieved the saddle once again and remained in it until he collided with Attracta outside the domicile they shared.

Her apron torn, but suffering, apparently, no internal injury, Attracta said that bicycles were dangerous things, as you never knew where they would have you, and asked him where he had been. 'Somewhere between Kingstown and Bray,' said Adam carelessly. 'And did yez ride all the way?' Attracta gaped.

'What do you think?' cried Adam, and Attracta, of course, thought he did. She thought even more; for she told Miss Gannon and Mr Gannon and Mr Murphy that Master Adam had ridden his bicycle she didn't know how far into Wicklow.

Herr Behre also heard rumours of this remarkable exploit, and mentioned it to Mr Macarthy, who looked puzzled. 'There's nothing out of the way in the distance,' he said; 'supposing he went to Bray and back, that would be well under thirty miles of fairly easy road. I did it myself at his age on a solid tyred Premier; but, somehow, I don't see Adam doing it, and I'm anxious about his doing it on a machine which I think is too heavy for him, though he won't admit it.'

'I have never bicycled,' said Herr Behre, but I think the boy does not walk so springily since he had that bicycle.' Their eyes met.

'By God,' said Mr Macarthy, and his face fell. He lost no opportunity in cross-examining Adam as to the famous ride. And Adam made no difficulty in telling him the truth.

'I only rode to Sandycove and came back by train,' he blurted; 'it's the truth, I'm no good on a bicycle at all; I'd never get up on it if I wasn't thinking of the money I let you spend on it.'

Mr Macarthy laid his hand on his shoulder. 'Come,' he said, 'if I make a fool of myself that's not altogether your fault, even though you did encourage me in my folly. I suspected the bicycle didn't really suit you, and I ought to have been with you when you were learning to ride it.' He shrugged his shoulders. 'Fond as I am of you, Adam, I can't attend to everything at once.'

Then Adam's head bowed over sideways on his guardian's hand and a tear trickled down his cheek. 'It's all I'm a silly, vain Billy,' he whispered. Mr Macarthy laughed softly. 'Better that than a Robina-Bobin a big belly Ben,' said he.

In his repentance Adam would have relinquished bicycling altogether, but Mr Macarthy would not hear of this; and so, a fortnight later, Adam was in possession of another bicycle, less spick and span than the first; for it was second-hand: but it had the merit of being of a suitable size and weight. Then the real joy of cycling commenced. And it proved to be almost as real a joy as the cycling in his dreams, except that he never really came to like getting on or getting off, or mounting any but the gentlest gradient.

But it did open a new world to him. It did make him think that it was worth while to leave his bed ere inquisitive milkmen had commenced their rounds, and there were only dusty Dublin sparrows to watch him mount under the shadow of St George's Church, and trundle off over the Drumcondra tram lines up Eccles Street, past the Mater Misericordiæ Hospital, where not so many years ago Father Innocent and a never-to-be-forgotten Sister of Mercy had saved his life from the Slough of Despond in which cruel fools had sought to smother it, and on, following the tram lines, over the canal bridge at Phibsborough, and again by the brewery near Glasnevin, the road the funerals go to the cemetery, past the cemetery itself, lifting his cap (at the risk of falling of) to the memory of Father Innocent, most beloved of all friends and teachers, to Miss or Mrs Robinson, still prayed for as one who had been good to a little child, and even to Malachy Macfadden, said to have been his father. He placed his cap back upon his head, and then lifted it again, this time saluting Caroline Brady, who might or might not be lying there. . . Had he not really seen her in Grafton Street?

And so he would make a circuit by Finglas and the Botanic Garden, and home to breakfast with a hearty appetite.

Chapter Four

THE NAKED TRUTH

IN after years it seemed to Adam that he had known no happier summer than this when his bicycle carried him first from the muggy streets in which his infancy had been passed into the high air of the country that lay around Dublin. As a child he had not even lifted his eyes to note the fairy rim of mountains that looked down upon the city. If he saw them at all, he thought them clouds, and was surprised when Mr Macarthy told him that the line which broke upon the sky above the houses at the other side of Mountjoy Square were the hills that overhung Bray. It has been said that he would rather ride his bicycle on level ground than seek to climb a hill with it, and so, commonly, he took the easy roads lying inland on the line of the railways and canals to west and north, not those leading to the higher ground that lay seaward to the south and east.

But one day there came into his head a recollection of the book called Canon Schmidt's Tales which Sister had lent him at the hospital to read. He had not cared much for the book, but he had cared very much for Sister, and he recalled that this book had been given her as a prize for something, he could not remember what, at the Loretto Convent at Rathfarnham . . . he was seized with a desire to look with his eyes upon that educational establishment where Sister had been rewarded in some distant period for her, by him forgotten, achievement. So, it being a fine Sunday when Mr Macarthy was not expecting

him, he mounted his bicycle and proceeded in the direction of Rathfarnham. So far he had not studied maps, and was uncertain of the way, so he followed the tram which professed to go there. He picked up this tram by the statue of the pious and immortal King William III., once the butt of patriotic humorists, but, since the end of the nineteenth century, revered as a Boer general who had conquered Britain.

The route pursued by this tram was little known to him, and for the first mile or two scarcely more agreeable than the neighbourhood in which he had first tasted the bitter cup of life. That cup was growing sweet to him now, but his present road recalled to him its earlier flavour. Dame Street was all right, but South Great George's Street was worse than the worst part of North Great George's Street, and worse than that again was Aungier Street, though he remembered vaguely that Tommy Moore was born there, and Clanbrassil Street was worse again. But, the canal bridges passed, there was a slight improvement, and past Harold's Cross a marked one. Beyond the terminus of the Rathmines tram he had the first feeling that he was getting near the country, over a bridge crossing a stream the air became fresher, and Rathfarnham village was a village and not a mere thatched slum. Here, too, he noticed that there were no more Metropolitan Police to destroy the peace, that duty being now entrusted to the Royal Irish Constabulary. Asking of one of them the way to the convent, he was given, in a surly northern accent, a wrong direction, and presently lost himself, having taken the first instead of the second turning to the right. He crossed another bridge, a very agreeable bridge over an agreeable stream, and came on to a mysteriously constructed village, the main street of which led nowhere: but, by circumventing it, as Mr Byron O'Toole was fond of saying, and riding boldly forward, he was presently conscious of an increasingly difficult