"He's asleep now under my blanket, catching his breath at intervals
like a youngster who's carried heartbreak into his sleep. Poor kid! I
suppose he has. I've promised him to be on the road before daybreak.

"He'll have to work his way, but that, of course, will be good for him.
What pennies I have I'm obliged to count with a provident eye. I've
added to 'em from time to time along the road. So far I've been
intermittently a rotten ploughman, a fair fence-mender and a skillful
whitewasher. My amazing facility there I attribute to an
apprenticeship in sunsets. Once, during a period of rain, I lived in a
corncrib for three days at an average of seven cents a day. I've
reduced my need of kitchen equipment to a can-opener. A can of
anything, I've discovered, provides food as well as a combination
saucepan and coffee pot.

"I miss Kenny but I dare not write to him. Garry, you know how it is.
Unless I brace myself with a lot of temper, he can twist me around his
finger. Even his letters are dangerous. I can't--I won't go back to
sunsets.

"I often think these days of Kenny's wood-fire tales of the shrine of
Black Gartan where St. Columba was born. Colomcille, old Kenny called
him around the wood-fire, didn't he? Colomcille, Kenny said, having
been in exile, knew the homesick pangs himself and therefore could give
the good Irishmen who journeyed to his shrine strength to bear them.
I'm not in exile but there are times when I should be journeyin' off,
as Kenny says when the brogue is on him, to Black Gartan. The curse of
the Celt! Kenny swears there's no homesickness in the world like an
Irishman's passionate longing for home and kin. Not that I long for