The four cautions: Beware a woman in front of you, beware a horse behind of you, beware a cart beside of you, and beware a priest every which way.

I’m just thinking that would be pleasant. To be reading, say, out of a book, and you to come up and touch me – my neck, say, or my knee – and I’d carry on reading, I might let a smile, no more, wouldn’t lose my place on the page. It would be pleasant to come to that. We’d come so close, do you see, that I wouldn’t be surprised out of myself every time you touched.

It was true what Jim said, this wasn’t the end but the beginning. But the wars would end one day and Jim would come then, to the island they would share. One day surely the wars would end, and Jim would come home, if only to lie broken in MacMurrough’s arms, he would come to his island home. And MacMurrough would have it built for him, brick by brick, washed by the rain and the reckless sea. In the living stream they’d swim a season. For maybe it was true that no man is an island: but he believed that two very well might be.

The four cautions: Beware a woman in front of you, beware a horse behind of you, beware a cart beside of you, and beware a priest every which way.

He slept that night thinking of loves and lighthouses. That one love might shine to bring all loves home.

It was far too absurd to die of a Tuesday

The people shall further be graded according to wealth, and—humorous touch this—the more obviously a man labor, the more stinting shall be his reward; the more he work in the out-of-doors, the thinner his clothing shall be; the more his labor filthy him, the less water shall he have to wash