last letter my mind was occupied by other things, and there was no reason why I should have mentioned it, for it seemed at the time merely a curious accident—­no more curious than the hundred and one accidents that happen every day.  I believe these things are called coincidences.  But to the story.  The day I went out skating there was a shooting-party in Derrinrush, and at the close of day, in the dusk, a bird got up from the sedge, and one of the shooters, mistaking it for a woodcock, fired, wounding the bird.

’We watched it till we saw it fall on the shore of Castle Island, and, thinking that it would linger there for days, dying by inches, I started off with the intention of saving it from a lingering death, but a shot had done that.  One pellet would have been enough, for the bird was but a heap of skin and feathers, not to be wondered at, its legs being tied together with a piece of stout string, twisted and tied so that it would last for years.  And this strangely ill-fated curlew set me thinking if it were a tame bird escaped from captivity, but tame birds lose quickly their instinct of finding food.  “It must have been freed yesterday or the day before,” I said to myself, and in pondering how far a bird might fly in the night, this curlew came to occupy a sort of symbolic relation towards my past and my future life, and it was in thinking of it that the idea occurred to me that, if I could cross the lake on the ice, I might swim it in the summer-time when the weather was warm, having, of course, hidden a bundle of clothes amid the rocks on the Joycetown side.  My clerical clothes will be found on this side, and the assumption will be, of course, that I swam out too far.

’This way of escape seemed at first fantastic and unreal, but it has come to seem to me the only practical way out of my difficulty.  In no other way can I leave the parish without giving pain to the poor people, who have been very good to me.  And you, who appreciated my scruples on this point, will, I am sure, understand the great pain it would give my sisters if I were to leave the Church.  It would give them so much pain that I shrink from trying to imagine it.  They would look upon themselves as disgraced, and the whole family.  My disappearance from the parish would ever do them harm—­Eliza’s school would suffer for sure.  This may seem an exaggeration, but certainly Eliza would never quite get over it.  If this way of escape had not been revealed to me, I don’t think I ever should have found courage to leave, and if I didn’t leave I should die.  Life is so ordered that a trace remains of every act, but the trace is not always discovered, and I trust you implicitly.  You will never show this letter to anyone; you will never tell anyone.