No More Learning

Why should we be patient? To live seventy years, and others to come
after us and live seventy years it may be; and so from age to age, and
all the while the old splendour dying more and more.

[_A noise of shouting. ANDREW, who has been standing at
the door, comes in. _

ANDREW.

Martin says truth, and he says it well. Planing the side of a cart or
a shaft, is that life? It is not. Sitting at a desk writing letters to
the man that wants a coach, or to the man that won't pay for the one he
has got, is that life, I ask you? Thomas arguing at you and putting
you down--'Andrew, dear Andrew, did you put the tyre on that wheel yet? '
Is that life? Not, it is not. I ask you all, what do you remember
when you are dead? It's the sweet cup in the corner of the widow's
drinking-house that you remember. Ha, ha, listen to that shouting!
That
is what the lads in the village will remember to the last day they live.

MARTIN.

Why are they shouting? What have you told them?

ANDREW.

Never you mind; you left that to me. You bade me to lift their hearts
and I did lift them. There is not one among them but will have his head
like a blazing tar-barrel before morning. What did your friend the
beggar say? The juice of the grey barley, he said.

FATHER JOHN.

You accursed villain! You have made them drunk!

ANDREW.

Not at all, but lifting them to the stars. That is what Martin bade me
to do, and there is no one can say I did not do it.