“Your grandmother used to watch for me,” the Bishop said, “and the minute I came around the last turn she would appear out at the door and stand there waiting for me. I could feel her smiling as I came along down the lane. God bless her kind heart, she was never ashamed to show you that you were welcome, never ashamed, never afraid. She was very gentle. I could see that people with no sense and who did not know her very well might think little of her … My first leave home from the missions — my first and my last, because I never came home after that until now — I used to say Mass in the chapel in Oylegate every morning, and then I would walk down the lane to Poulbwee, and your grandmother would have breakfast waiting for me. I had been out of Ireland fourteen years. I went out to the missions after I was ordained and I didn’t see Ireland again for fourteen years. My mother was dead and there was only my brother at home. He never married, and I suppose the loneliness got in on his mind. He lost heart. All the time I was there he kept talking about how he was going to sell up the place and go to America. He had already sold off all the stock and all the furniture out of the parlor, furniture that had belonged to our great-grandmother, and before that. I tried to persuade him to get a hold of himself, and he said it was easy for me. I was always considered to be the scholar in the family, and he minded that. He said I was the favorite with my mother, and he may have been right, but she always intended the farm for him, although he was the younger. He was in a terrible way, catching a rabbit now and again for his dinner. He slept most of the day and most of the night. He was ashamed of sleeping so much and he didn’t like anybody coming near the place, and gradually they all began to stay away. I never knew a place could go down as fast as Cooldearg had gone down the last time I saw it. I had no warning. After the fourteen years away I made for Cooldearg as fast as my legs could carry me, and it was a great shock, to see it. A great shock and a great lesson to me, to curb my vanity that I did not know I had. The Devil is always waiting to catch us in our weak moments. My brother came out of the house, and it was all I could do to keep myself from knocking him down. And yet the day I left he walked as far as Oylegate with me, where I got a lift into Wexford, and when we said goodbye I turned around and walked a bit back down the lane with him, and we shook hands and said goodbye again, and the tears were running down his face, and down my face, too. I watched him go. He never turned around until he reached the first turn and then he turned and lifted up his arm to me and then he was gone. I never saw him again. He sold up the place as he said he would and went to America. I never heard from him. But while I was there, that last time, I said Mass in Oylegate every morning and then I walked down the lane to have breakfast at Poulbwee. I could draw a map of that lane for you. I used to play a game with the children at the mission. ‘Going to Poulbwee,’ we called it. They got to know the lane nearly as well as I did, and every field along the way, and they were never tired of hearing about the house.”