Donovan, our parish priest, told me all about it. I was born in October.
It had been raining heavily all day long. The rain was beating hard
against the front of our house and running in rivers down the
window-panes. Towards four in the afternoon the wind rose and then the
yellow leaves of the chestnuts in the long drive rustled noisily, and
the sea, which is a mile away, moaned like a dog in pain.

In my father's room, on the ground floor, Father Dan sat by the fire,
fingering his beads and listening to every sound that came from my
mother's room, which was immediately overhead. My father himself, with
his heavy step that made the house tremble, was tramping to and fro,
from the window to the ingle, from the ingle to the opposite wall.
Sometimes Aunt Bridget came down to say that everything was going on
well, and at intervals of half an hour Doctor Conrad entered in his
noiseless way and sat in silence by the fire, took a few puffs from a
long clay pipe and then returned to his charge upstairs.

My father's impatience was consuming him.

"It's long," he said, searching the doctor's face.

"Don't worry--above all don't worry," said Father Dan.

"There's no need," said Doctor Conrad.

"Then hustle back and get it over," said my father. "It will be five
hundred dollars to you if this comes off all right."

I think my father was a great man at that time. I think he is still a
great man. Hard and cruel as he may have been to me, I feel bound to