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no place to live, no job. He was starting out in the world naked as a newborn babe.
    Unaccommodated man.
    He was newly afloat on the sea of the world, the sea of the world as it is, whether monstrous or beatific, as the Druid put it. He looked around at the end of all men represented all around him, slabs and monuments of stone marking their final resting places.
    Full fathom five my father lies.
    He did have his faith in God to assuage his fears about this naked launch. But even aside from that, he felt that all was well, the face of the earth to walk on was good. Even the darkness of wilderness was good, he felt sure, when walked in the right spirit. This was not a conscious thought but an unstated experience, probably the euphoric result of the sun on his skin, and the songs of the robins in his ears.
    Came a voice,
    “Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs.”
    Dylan jumped.
    The Druid clapped his shoulder cheerfully. He recited resonantly,
    “Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.”
    “You scared me,” Dylan said.
    “Graveyards scare all of us,” the Druid replied. “Old graveyards even more.” Winking his one green eye and smiling, he sat down next to Dylan. He offered him a piece of pemmican. Dylan wondered if the aquamarine eye could blink, or if it always shone, like a lighthouse lamp.
    Dylan took the pemmican and started chewing. “What was that drivel you were spouting as you came up?”
    Dru turned the one eye baleful. “The bard of Avon, laddo. God created him British to balance a little all the poetry He gave to the Welsh, there is justice there is.” His friend looked as much like the beaver hunters as Dylan feared—a bandeau of fur around the head, knee leggings, moccasins, and a gage d’amour with a white clay pipe around the neck. A white man reduced to a barbarian, Ian Campbell would have said.
    “How did you find me?”
    Dru shrugged. “You said you were going to ask to become a priest this morning. I know Father Quesnel is your family’s friend. Who else would you ask? Half an hour ago he went out the back door of the rectory, by the way.”
    Dylan scowled.
    “He just came back in. You could probably see him now, for the good it will do you.”
    Dylan jumped up. “The good it will do me? I told you—”
    “Go on with you, laddo, and do what ’ee must. When you’re finished, meet me here. I have an idea. A grand idea.”
    After the bright spring sunshine outdoors, the room was dark, and it smelled of snuff. Father Quesnel often joked that snuff, fine snuff, was the final, irrefutable proof of God’s fundamental goodness.
    Father Quesnel sat behind his desk regarding his godson solemnly. He didn’t offer his hand. He nodded toward the ladder-backed chair in front of the desk, and Dylan sat down. It was a hard, uncomfortable chair.
    Until now Dylan had never been struck with the realization that Father Quesnel looked like his own father. Not in form or feature—his godfather was painfully thin and had features too large for his face—but in demeanor, in style. In owlishness. In superior attitude toward him, perhaps.
    The young man fidgeted in the hard chair.
    Father Quesnel regarded Dylan. The silence was getting oppressive.
    Finally: “I have a note from Peche this morning.”
    “Peche” was his pet name for Ian Campbell. Dylan had never known why.
    “Your father says you want to be a priest.”
    “Yes, Father.”
    Quesnel looked at Dylan. He scooted his chair forward and looked more. It seemed to Dylan that his face became more kindly.
    “I’m your godfather, Dylan, and I think you would make an excellent priest. You’re a young man of high ideals and a certain nobility of spirit. You’d be a credit to the seminary. I think you have a grand future before you, no matter how you serve man and God.”
    Dylan’s heart sank. So I am to be turned down. Why? screeched through his mind. Why?
    Father Quesnel opened a desk drawer,