At half-past seven he was thinking that life is gained by escaping from the past rather than by trying to retain it; he had begun to feel more and more sure that tradition is but dead flesh which we must cut off if we would live....  But just at this spot, an hour ago, he had acquiesced in the belief that if a priest continued to administer the Sacraments faith would return to him; and no doubt the Sacraments would bring about some sort of religious stupor, but not that sensible, passionate faith which he had once possessed, and which did not meet with the approval of his superiors at Maynooth.  He had said that in flying from the monotony of tradition he would find only another monotony, and a worse one—­that of adventure; and no doubt the journalist’s life is made up of fugitive interests.  But every man has, or should have, an intimate life as well as an external life; and in losing interest in religion he had lost the intimate life which the priesthood had once given him.  The Mass was a mere Latin formula, and the vestments and the chalice, the Host itself, a sort of fetishism—­that is to say, a symbolism from which life had departed, shells retaining hardly a murmur of the ancient ecstasy.  It was therefore his fate to go in quest of—­what?  Not of adventure.  He liked better to think that his quest was the personal life—­that intimate exaltation that comes to him who has striven to be himself, and nothing but himself.  The life he was going to might lead him even to a new faith.  Religious forms arise and die.  The Catholic Church had come to the end of its thread; the spool seemed pretty well empty, and he sat down so that he might think better what the new faith might be.  What would be its first principle? he asked himself, and not finding any answer to this question, he began to think of his life in America.  He would begin as a mere recorder of passing events.  But why should he assume that he would not rise higher?  And if he remained to the end of his day a humble reporter, he would still have the supreme satisfaction of knowing that he had not resigned himself body and soul to the life of the pool, to a frog-like acquiescence in the stagnant pool.

His hand held back a hazel-branch, and he stood staring at the lake.  The wild ducks rose in great flocks out of the reeds and went away to feed in the fields, and their departure was followed by a long interval, during which no single thought crossed his mind—­at least, none that he could remember.  No doubt his tired mind had fallen into lethargy, from which a sudden fear had roughly awakened him.  What if some countryman, seeking his goats among the rocks, had come upon the bundle and taken it home!  And at once he imagined himself climbing up the rocks naked.  Pat Kearney’s cabin was close by, but Pat had no clothes except those on his back, and would have to go round the lake to Garranard; and the priest thought how he would sit naked in Kearney’s cottage hour after hour.